The state of webcomics criticism has always been a little baffling: an artform almost universally recognized by those not clever enough to ignore it altogether as having an outrageously high signal-to-noise ratio seems to have no dedicated bloggers willing to call out the shit that sucks or even capable of separating the wheat from the your-parakeet's-cage-after-you-leave-it-with-your-stoner-cousin-for-two-weeks-while-you-vacation-in-the-Upper-Peninsula volume of chaff. Of course, now that I write that out I realize it's not at all "baffling;" anyone who has ever suffered through an art or, God forbid, creative writing class where nobody wants to be the mean one during critiques knows that such a lack of serious criticism and shaky tracings of Cowboy Bebop screencaptures or rambling, boring, unfunny pirate epics go hand in hand.

Because of this I'm sure I'm not alone in appreciating the recent debut of webcomics blogosphere bad boy (a title the Intimidat-O-Meter 5000 measures as lying somewhere between "Rhode Island state senator" and "The dead one from 2Ge+her") Your Webcomic Is Bad and You Should Feel Bad. I've had my trust in an intelligently-written if 110% all-about-positivity comics blog shattered by the discovery of an archived post that takes Questionable Content or whatever shitty shit seriously one too many times so even if this one is pointlessly vitriolic and boiling over with frothy nerd rage it is just nice to see someone operating on the premise that It Is Okay To Criticize Webcomics And Indeed Most Of Them Are Shit.

Having said that, there's a reason nobody wanted to give constructive criticism to the quiet econ major in Drawing I whose final project was a labored, grease-stained pencil sketch of a battle between anthromorphic foxes in 18th century French military attire and the Transformers: there is a point where shit just isn't worth it. In a Web 2.0 world you know that same kid is serializing the story behind it all on Keenspace right now and Mr. John Solomon will probably have a graduate thesis-length evisceration of it that uses the delightful neologism "faggotry" more often than my parents have told me they love me posted on Your Webcomic Is Bad within a couple of weeks.

This is just unnecessary.

It's not always safe to trust snap judgements but with the vast majority of webcomics you can get away with it. Look at the comic that got the internet goin' nuts over Your Webcomic Is Bad, Dominic Deegan. Yes, this shit sucks, no, it shouldn't take a couple of essays longer than most world leaders' Wikipedia entries to tell you that. Dominic Deegan may feature plot inconsistencies, mutating crap art, and dodgy internet-weirdo storylines justifying rape, but you know what, take ten seconds to read the most recent strip and immediately note:

• The art looks like a 15-year-old drew it in geometry class or perhaps American Lit because he sure as shit didn't have a ruler on hand
  
• It's not funny or interesting and who cares what is going on
  
• This is some dumb shit about elves or something and there is an "ice princess"
  
• As a final insult there appears to be jpeg artifaction? or something in a black-and-white .gif
  

VERDICT: THIS IS BAD

And with that, you should never read or think about it again and thus be able to avoid everything else that no doubt sucks about this comic. It is really that simple. 99.98 percent of humanity is capable of taking a glance at some shitty-looking thing that makes no sense and realizing immediately it's not worth their time, but when you read a lot of webcomics your critical faculties dissipate so I am here to make the ten-second judgements you should be making on your own.

It is my hope that regular readers of this blog will find themselves slowly regaining the ability to tell that really bad things are really bad, because it does seem like reading more than a few webcomics regularly instills a system of thinking incomprehensible to outsiders that you need to be deprogrammed from before they find you dead with a belly full of cyanide applesauce and a Republicans for Voldemort shroud covering your head.

All posts hereafter will be reviews in the mold of the above, and I will never ever again write a post that is even a tenth as long as this one because who gives a fuck it's webcomics. If you read a webcomic which you think may suck, please tell me about it in a comment and I will make a 100% guaranteed accurate assessment of its merits based on its most recent installment. Spoiler alert: it's a webcomic so it probably sucks.