So Bad It's Horrible/Webcomics

"These webcomics are terrible. By posting about them, I am warning people about how terrible they are. I am pointing out the specifics of their terribleness." —Your Webcomic is Bad and You Should Feel Bad (now defunct)

Webcomics offer a very low barrier of entry and instant feedback, but most humans will not continue to draw something if people hate it. How do you suppose these webcomics managed to continue onwards in spite of this? Someone out there has to like 'em, but we're still looking for those (other than the authors/artists themselves) who'll come forward and admit it.

Important Note: Merely being offensive in its subject matter is insufficient. Hard as it is to imagine at times, there is a market for all types of deviancy (no matter how small a niche it is). It has to fail to appeal even to that niche to qualify as this.

Examples (more-or-less in alphabetical order):

• Angel Warrior Comics is a good example of the reason Sprite Comics are so hated. It has the usual recolored sprites, illegible text, and clashing background. It began as a gag strip, but then created an incomprehensible story. It's no surprise that the author abandoned it in March 2003, although the last strip is the author vehemently saying the webcomic is not canned and will be updated in a month or so.
• Billy the Heretic is widely considered to be one of the worst webcomics on the internet. It's an allegedly-autobiographical work about a young boy who was adopted by a "rich international Jewish" family. The writing is identical to, if not dumber than, what you'd find sifting through Stormfront (quite fitting, as the webpage bears a link to it). The artwork is spectacularly awful — there's not a shred of color anywhere, backgrounds are never anything beyond blank white stretches, and every character is poorly drawn. Special mention goes to the strawmen, all of whom are overblown caricatures or stereotypes. And the sad thing is, the comic makes it clear we're supposed to like Billy, but makes no effort to portray him as anything but a spoiled brat with extremist political views.
  • In Cracked's 5 Circles of Baffling Webcomic Hell, this one gets a special mention at the bottom of the pit.
• D-Generation Sex. What, precisely, makes this so bad? Is it the "doodles in the notebook margins in fourth period"-level "art"? The relentlessly-juvenile nature of what passes for humor? The comic's base gimmick, shamelessly ripped from a WWE angle that's been dead for over a decade? The first (and so far only) storyline consisting of the three main characters defeating an alien invasion by superkicking the aliens' leader? All of the above?
  • Seems to be a Stealth Parody of what a middle-schooler might find funny. Speaking of the "doodles in the notebook margins" comment, the earlier strips were literally on a scholastic lined-paper background. Whether this is enough to redeem it is up to the reader.
• Faith Mouse is sort of a funny case. It's an evangelical Christian website that appears to be of the opinion that True Art Is Incomprehensible. Seriously, this probably sets a record when it comes to the sheer level of baffling. And yet while reading it, one gets the feeling that it would be entirely offensive if one actually could figure out what the hell it's talking about.
  • Faith Mouse is by Dan Lacey, who is now more famous for paintings of things like nude Obama on a unicorn, Obama in a Vault Boy outfit, and Sarah Palin (and various other political figures across the spectrum) with a pancake on their heads, often naked. Also, he was taken to court by Birther Orly Taitz for a painting of her giving birth to a pancake. So it's likely the baffling absurdity of Faith Mouse was at least partially deliberate.
  • Lacey had a most unlikely relationship with the debate and discussion subforum at Something Awful circa 2008. Against all expectations, given the content of Faith Mouse, he responded cordially and patiently to being called out as a Christian lunatic. He rapidly won over the forum and they became fans and customers, encouraging his more bizarre election-time work and not bugging him about his personal beliefs. He was, in the goons' view, a terrific artist and total madman — someone worthy of support rather than scorn.
• Gamer Chicks is only a comic in the vaguest sense of the word — yeah, it's about a girl who plays video games, but that's where the creativity ends. There are usually no jokes of any kind, there's no story, and often there doesn't seem to be a point to the strip. Most strips are two to four panels long. Typically, the main character Suiren — who is beautiful, supposedly highly-intelligent, and in her eyes the only sane woman there — is doing one of three things:
  1. "Assuring" the viewer that she "totally is a girl and totally plays video games deal with it you silly boy".
  2. Obsessing over homosexual pairings of video game characters, while assuming anyone who thinks she's strange for talking about it to complete strangers in public "must be crazy or stupid".
  3. Having to fend off silly boys who are only interested in her "boobies".
  • The ones that don't follow the above range from pointless to completely pointless, or else are recycling ancient jokes in a manner devoid of humor. The artwork, only slightly better than Christian Chandler's, showed almost no improvement — it started with this and ended with this (it hasn't been updated since). And it's autobiographical. The comic's notorious for summarizing the obnoxious "girl gamer" archetype perfectly.
• Girlz 'n Games, much like Gamer Chicks, is a comic exploring the "comedy" that comes from girls liking geeky things and playing video games. The jokes are stale, poorly delivered, and unfunny (such as references to Portal's cake jokes about two years late), many jokes are misogynistic (keep in mind this is written by a woman), and the art's flat and underwhelming.
  • The comic was discovered by 4Chan and Something Awful, with the predictable result of several comments left on the website ranging from constructive criticism to outright insults. Most strikingly is how people have compared to Ctrl Alt Del due to the use of backgrounds copied from Google Images, lazy artwork which has seen no improvement since it began, the use of the same facial expressions, poor joke delivery and terrible dialogue, obvious sexism and also complaints about the author's ego getting in the way of real improvements and accepting any constructive criticism, resulting in her being labelled as Tim Buckley's Distaff Counterpart. Your Mileage May Vary on just how far things have gone.
• Hathor the Cow Goddess revolves around real-life naturalist feminist Heather Cushman-Dowdee in a cow mask and bottle-nipple hat preaching her views on child-rearing, healthcare, and public as well as long-term breastfeeding. The comic only shows tolerance for Hathor's own views and demonizes anyone that advocates modern medicine, formula feeding, or sending your kids to school as an abusive parent. The author, essentially a hippie helicopter mom crossed with a Bizarro liberal Jack Chick, is earning the enmity of all amateur Egyptologists for repurposing a cool goddess for her deranged views.
  • There's a parody comic in which she accidentally suffocates her infant son by letting him sleep in bed with her. Rumor has it that the parody was made by her older son, who she promptly disowned.
  • The comic's dead, replaced by a link to Mama Is..., which is just as bad.
• How I Became Yours is an Avatar: The Last Airbender Fan Webcomic that has gone down in infamy as the show's version of My Immortal. The typo-laden story reads like the kind of stereotypical estrogen-soaked schlock you'd find in a bad Romance Novel, cliched Soap Opera, or Lifetime Movie of the Week, with the characters defiled beyond belief to fit this sort of plot. Most infamously, Mai gets derailed into a vile, possessive bitch to justify Zuko cheating on her with Katara and hitting her, and Katara violently bloodbending her to death after a Perfect Poison-induced Convenient Miscarriage. Toph and Azula get reduced to demure Princess Classic wannabes to get shipped with Aang and Sokka, the latter becoming the most glaring Mary Sue in a cast full of them. The "artwork" is clearly traced from screencaps of the show and stock photography, some poses copy-pasted several times, resulting in hideous proportions and lifeless expressions. As if to complete the bad Romance Novel comparisons, the architecture and flowing ballgowns look like something from The Renaissance as opposed to the Far East-inspired Fantasy Counterpart Cultures the series is known for. What's really insane is that the author, Jackie Diaz, is proud enough of this trainwreck to put it on her resume and set up echo chambers to avoid the bevy of criticism sent her way. Of course, you can consult the Bad Webcomics Wiki for a better idea what this comic holds. You can also watch The Webcomic Relief talk about it here.
• Kansas O'Flaherty, Secret Agent was a weekly strip for four months on Salon.com. Every episode was greeted by a string of reader comments complaining about pretentious cultural references, bad artwork, inconsistent lettering, occasional misspelled words, non-sequiturs, and general lack of a coherent plot. The strip's few defenders generally explained it as an experiment in anti-humor designed to provoke strong reactions from readers.
• Lessons In Distraction, by the author of Gamer Chicks, is just as bad and possibly even worse — a blatant Self Insert comic where the main character falls in love with an obvious Expy of Sephiroth. The art's worse than Gamer Chicks since it's all black and white, muddling the actions even more. The main character's harassed brutally by the Alpha Bitch for no real reason, cheese is used as a lazy stand-in for crowds, and a confusing plot involving the two main characters turning into animal-things is introduced and dropped. It appears to be a desperate effort from the author to gain sympathy for her "dark and depressing" life. The comic stopped updating in August 2008, to the bereavement of nobody.
• Mandatory Fun Day, a comic The Daily WTF ran for several weeks. Season 1 featured poor artwork, cut-and-paste characters, anemic writing, and humor so thin you could see through it; it was even colored in an eye-searing MS-Paint style. Season 2 redeemed it somewhat, but the general distaste and endless mockery toward the comic led to it being removed.
  • The only humor to be found was usually the re-edited strips found in the comments. After some time, the comic's author started acknowledging the best-edited versions of the previous comic in each post. Not sure what that says about his attitude towards his own comic.
• Motherfuckin' Mario is considered by the few who actually read it to be the worst sprite comic in history... despite never passing seven comics. This could be attributed to the fact that it is one of the most disgusting things you will ever read. It's eye-searingly ugly even by the low standards of sprite comics, almost everyone is terminally out of character, the one character that isn't (Luigi) is frequently killed and tortured, and the whole experience just isn't funny. Seriously. There's no punchlines in sight. Just pure, condensed, unfiltered offensiveness from start to finish.
• The Nice Guy only has one redeeming quality to its name--The main character is a Nice Guy. It's a shrine to the author's romantic frustrations and inability to get a date a women. When it's not milking this, it's pumping out large numbers of geek culture jokes which are either so obscure as to be completely opaque, or just completely devoid of all wit, delivery, and humor. The art is only slightly above Sonichu levels, with characters sometimes morphing and changing size while the coloring just screams MS-Paint. Proportion and perspective are on permanent vacation. The singular worst part is the dialogue, which is wooden and used as a soapbox for the author's arguments. It reads like the author just took some of his talking points and pasted them into speech bubbles. The main character is supposed to be sympathetic, but manages to come off as a whiny, pathetic, manipulative, immature, cowardly creep. It's loathed by nice guys for reaffirming all the bad stereotypes about them, and loathed by everybody else because it's crap.
• Single Asian Female. The dialogue is so badly written that it would be painful to read even if it wasn't overwhelmingly racist. The author stated that this was intentional, and was probably trying to portray racism against East Asians...but instead exposed himself as racist against non-Asians through ethnocentrism ("Asians should marry other Asians! White men are creepy and all have an Asian fetish!") and over-the-top invocations of minority entitlement.
  • Reading the comic makes it seem far less like an Anvilicious anti-racism screed gone wrong, and more like a racist complaining that he can't get a date because "all the good Asian sisters are dating white guys". The way the "married a white guy" friend of the main character refers to Asian guys as "abusive, sexist losers" seems an awful lot like the author had been on the receiving end of that comment himself.
  • Unsurprisingly, the webcomic was taken down. Encyclopedia Dramatica has an article on it, with many of the strips contained. Their analysis, when not blatantly false, is not particularly exaggerated.
  • Oh, Internet has an article on it as well, also with strips and with more serious analysis.
• Shredded Moose is, along with being irredeemably offensive, devoid of humor or any point behind its misogyny. The artwork is somewhat competent, though an obvious rip-off of Penny Arcade's style and often glaringly unrealistic where female anatomy is concerned. The comic made a poorly executed attempt at Cerebus Syndrome by dealing with a character's past, witnessing her mother being raped. It's honestly difficult to tell whether this story arc was supposed to be funny or not. This, combined with every other comic seeming to be a Filler strip of a nude girl (even in the middle of storylines!), made the comic even less readable toward the end. Mercifully, it seems to have finally died. The domain name expired, and the creators have made no effort to find a new site.
• Sonichu was written with neither creativity nor artistic talent nor sense of proportion and composition. Its reliance on hackneyed exposition reaches ridiculous levels, as sometimes entire pages are dominated by impenetrable walls of text that explain the events instead of showing them. Jokes, ideas, character concepts, and entire plotlines are all flagrantly plagiarized (all but a few of the characters are half-Sonic/half-Pokémon with Pikachu ears), and the primary antagonists are blatant expies of people the author feels have wronged him in the past (one villain's the physical embodiment of the author's high school graduation). It doesn't seem to know its target audience (it's allegedly for kids, but contains lots of graphic sex and violence, all rendered with the artistic skills of the average six-year-old), it's got pretty much no set schedule (currently going over a year since its last update), and has since devolved into a self-righteous, disturbing vanity project.. It's a target of Bile Fascination to the point where nearly anything here related to the author or his comic has either been locked or made a member of the Permanent Red Link Club.
• Stalag '99, authored by Kelly "STrRedWolf" Price, focuses on the adventures of a hermaphrodite wolf-skunk hybrid furry. Not only is it blatantly poorly-drawn, the dialogue's horrific and the site layout is very outdated. Despite copying and pasting panels constantly, the strip also suffers from frequent Schedule Slip.
• THe FReCKLeD FINGeR has a very good, professional art style. Too bad it's aggressively unfunny, needlessly offensive, and as spiteful as humanly possible. The bald-faced contempt for all that feels joy is clear in the writing, making every single strip a soul-crushing experience in and of itself.
• WarMage is an MS Paint-spawned harem porn monstrosity covered in a hash of superhero (in)action, Twenty Minutes Into the Future cyberpunk, and whatever Wicca and Hindu mysticism the author feels like tossing in. Bad enough on its own, but the author decided to clone it for different genres — Monster Lover (a mishmash of RPG Elements) and A Call To Destiny (a mishmash of RPG elements in space!).
  • For extra funtimes, the antagonists of WarMage tend to be assorted flavors of Judeo-Christian fundamentalists.