Elite Eight of Mix March Madness 2012 Webcomics Tournament–Vote Now!
UPDATE: Round 5 voting is over… Vote in the Final Four Now!
Round 5… and we’re down to the Elite 8!
Even heavier voting this time around, with the highest contestants getting nearly 12,000 votes. Voting has gotten so passionate that some folks are resorting to YouTube videos to spread the word.
In upset news, last year’s winner Erfworld got knocked out in Round 4, along with two contenders from Blind Ferret Entertainment. And with this being the deciding round to see who wins the $50 gift card from Amazon for picking the Final Four, we expect even more passionate arguing this time around.
Round 5 starts right now, and ends this Saturday night, March 31, at 11:59 PM, Eastern Daylight Time. We’re down to four contests, and none of them get easier… we hear the howls of agony in the comments threads over who to choose starting already. Go vote!
To see the previous divisions and how they finished, click here, or look at our directory for all the nominated webcomics.
Mix March Madness Webcomics Tournament Elite Eight
| [poll id=”210″] | [poll id=”211″] | [poll id=”212″] | [poll id=”213″] |
Hat tip: BracketMaker.com
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- Predict the Mix March Madness Final Four and Win $50 Gift Card! (comicmix.com)
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Lets go MSPA/Homestuck, and Gunnerkrigg Court too!
All those voting against MSPA: please air your grievances so we can talk them over with you!
No grievances. I enjoy MSPA, I just enjoy Girl Genius more. I also think it would be awesome to see Goblins against Girl Genius in the final because Thunt cites Phil Foglio as one of his greatest influences.
Reasonable, good luck!
Well, since you asked, I gave up on Homestuck (somewhere around the beginning of Act 3) for a few reasons:
– It was obvious the writer had no idea what he was doing and was making up the story as he went along.
– I couldn’t stand the crappy art any longer. Being made in MSPaint is not a good thing, it looks incredibly ugly.
– Too many updates – it just wasn’t worth the effort to keep up to date with.
Mind you, points 1 and 3 of those also apply to Girl Genius, but it has vastly better art.
I personally really like the art style of homestuck, and after the very first pages of MSPA he actually switched to photoshop. He just kept the style.
And you’d be suprised how well the story actually is, but the thing is that plenty of people give up on it just because it can be confusing. Homestucks plot is pretty much like a puzzle actually.
And many of MSPAs pages are actually just a single panel, that’s why there’s plenty of pages each update, and there is the “save game” function on the comic for a reason. (oh god I wish that more webcomics had one of those)
I can understand how you feel about the third point, but not about the 2 first (though that could just be because you don’t know it).
– Andrew does not decide at the last moment what he does. There’s an intense amount of foreshadowing in the first hundreds of pages, which comes back to bite you thousands of pages later. He does sometimes decide to do something different, but that’s always a long time before he does it. Months usually.
– The comic is not made in MSPaint. Yes, that’s how the site is called, but in the entirety of mspaintadventures, only the very first page of the very first adventure was made in Paint. The rest has been made in Photoshop (normal images) or Flash (for videos and mini-games).
AGREE X2 COMBO
I love Girl Genius, but the art is one of my least favorite parts about it (that and the glacial pacing). The coloring is mediocre and while he does settings really well, the way he draws faces is not at all to my taste.
Also, on the first point: don’t forget, Andrew WAS still taking reader suggestions for about the first year of Homestuck. In fact, a reason he cited for closing the suggestion box was “reducing the number of frivolous tangents”. So, I’m not surprised if the storytelling appeared haphazard to Alasdair for that reason. I’m of the camp that enjoyed Acts 1 and 2, but there are many fans who did not, perceiving those acts as “boring stuff” that you need to slog through to get to the “good stuff”. I’ve always taken it for granted that this was because of the fact that the first two acts relied so heavily on programming humor (something of a niche), but after speaking to non-programmers who enjoyed those acts, I suppose this idea needs reevaluation. Perhaps those who don’t like the first two acts perceive them much like Alasdair does, as a result of Andrew trying to reconcile his use of reader suggestions (as he always did in the past) with having his own plans from the start (something that only began with Homestuck). With that arrangement, the story couldn’t cascade complications in the way that Problem Sleuth did so hilariously, because Andrew already knew where he wanted the story to go. So, the only new things reader suggestions brought were the aformentioned “frivolous tangents”, making the story seem less cohesive, and lengthening the time for each bit of foreshadowing to pay off. Meanwhile, the stuff that’s actually relevant to the plot, like how SBURB works, gets only a cursory exposition, making it look unnecessarily complicated, because the reader doesn’t find out until much later how all the mechanics (building, exploring the lands, alchemy, the war between Prospit and Derse, sprites, the actual goal of the game, the Ultimate Riddle, etc.) are related and important to each other.
Oh god, that didn’t look like such a wall of text in the text box.
TL;DR: I understand Alasdair’s first point, because Andrew was still taking reader suggestions at that point, and I think he found it difficult to reconcile those with his own plans.
It’s Photoshop. It just looks like MS Paint. I believe that’s how Hussie’s style is. I believe it’s nice due to it being anti-cliche to all those smooth-looking pages.
*ahem*
So by quality, there are the
-Scribble Mode pages (self-explanatory)
-cartoon-styled pages (which, admittedly, is most of the comic),
-Hero Mode (drawn to scale, not uber-detailed) pages…
-and Hussnasty pages, which are rather rare but extremely detailed.
I’d love to see Gunnerkrigg Court vs Homestuck!
Grievances:
1) The art is painful. Simple like OOTS is one thing, MSPA hurts.
2) I have started reading and it is taking forever for anything to happen and I am not finding anything funny or interesting. Some people are saying you have to slog through this, but I cannot imagine the latter part is so amazing good to be worth it.
3) I saw the most recent updates. Are walls of l33t text-speak common? You could not pay me to keep reading it if I would have to mow through a lot of that.
Good grievances! The only one I really take issue with is the art, I guess people just get used to comic book style illustrations and that’s what they end up liking. I love the pixelly look to MSPA, in fact I cringe whenever I see an anti-aliased edge in it because it looks so fuzzy.
Also: try this flash animation on for size, it doesn’t spoil much and is one of my favorites:
http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=004748
That leet speak is a certain character’s ‘quirk’. There are many different kinds of quirks.
Also, that flash that Drillgorg linked is a good one, but if you’d rather have one with more action I suggest you look at this: http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=006472
This would give you a good idea.
How is this a webcomic? They should just make longer flash videos, that would be a lot cooler.
Are you shitting me?!? Watching that is like telling somebody who hasn’t read Harry Potter that Dumbledore dies in the 6th book!
@Cheese, the flash animations take several days of screwing around with flash to make. They’re fun to watch, but they generally take dozens of pages to make sense.
And if Homestuck were all flashes, I would be sad because we’d have even less character dialogue than in Problem Sleuth.
@benzrf No, that would be like showing them Descend. Or Cascade. :3
http://www.mspaintadventures.com/cascade.php?s=6&p=6009
This thing broke newgrounds. That’s how awesome it was.
Oh my, introducing new readers to the crotch walk AND D. Stri being a badass? How bold.
@Wesley: SPOILER ALERT TO ALL NON-MSPA READERS:
1. Derse
2. Red queen
3. DD
4. Dirk
5. Null session
6. Jake
7. Lusii on Earth
Enough for you?
That is a interesting video to try to show people who are new to Homestuck Drill.
If we’re listing our favorites, I’m still really fond of this one. Doesn’t spoil much.
There aren’t enough reprises of the Explore theme.
No. You are wrong.
That page has ALL THE SPOILERS. ALL OF THEM.
But I agree that that page is simply epic. It’s still my favorite behind [S] Cascade, and it was the first one that made me feel like continuing to read less than 20 minutes later would be sacrilege.
Have to second the spoiler fear.
Also, this is the flash that hooked me on Homestuck, full stop. It doesn’t have near that effect if you haven’t read up to that point, but if you have… once you reach that one, there’s no turning back.
^
THIS
Reunite with your loving wife and daughter. Best flash, no spoilers. Just stupid antics.
http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=003831
@Ash: This is 90% true, although I have to be afraid of paradox clone spoilers… :P
Even so, it might give people the wrong idea of what to expect from Homestuck.
Drill, that is just mean. :V For those who didn’t watch it or clicked away early, its basically the flash where a whole bunch of cosmic horrors make a pants-shittingly terrifying cameo that starts out as a rainbow-filled children’s show parody.
Also, because nobody likes the Squiddles album.
Wow, hey now, the Squiddles album is awesome. Get out.
Nobody likes it? Wut?
It’s a charm of Homestuck. XD
It takes forever to load, and it doesn’t work for all operating systems and browsers, but this works as a nice preview to the comic, and because the images flash by too quickly, they shouldn’t really spoil anything:
Fanmade intro screen.
This animation from the comic also gives a good impression of the style of the comic, but it contains spoilers for the first act and part of the second:
[S]: Enter.
To be honest, I wouldn’t worry too much about being spoiled by later animations, because if you haven’t read the comic, you won’t even know who is who, or what is going on (even reading the comic, it’s hard to keep up with some animations on the first view! Sometimes it takes reading a recapitulation and viewing the animation more times to finally understand just what happened).
As long as you don’t actually try to memorize and obsess over what character did what and what happened to whom in the animations, when you go read the story you’ll probably forget by the time you get to that part of the plot.
I still think that it’s best to read the story from the very beginning. I think that what impresses fans so much is that the comic starts with simple panels, some slightly animated, and some text, and it escalates bit by bit by incorporating more elaborated and eventually longer animations, interactive flashes, music, and so on.
It’s how every thing keeps surpassing the previous “innovation” to the story what makes it so-awe inspiring.
Niiiiiiiiice!
I wonder how long that took to make… 0_0
IT’LL TOTALLY RUIN THE PLANETS BLARGH I’M A WHINY ASSHOLE
Alterniabound. Cascade. [S]Seer: Descend. [S]John: Rise Up.
Art styles are not the worst thing about MSPA, thank you very much.
Homestuck/MSPA is simply exhausting. The plots are so heavy and convoluted, and the way that the single panels are connected by the hyperlinks is jarring. Especially in MSPA, those stupid acronyms made it so that eventually I stopped guessing who they were, and just pressed the next button to get on with it. I quit around the middle of the MSPA final (ha! final.) boss battle, but I wish I quit earlier. Things were so insufferably long and drawn out, and I lost that point-and-click adventure game feel that I was initially endearing.
To those who believe it is good simply because it has so many followers: so does Twilight. So that rule does not apply.
MSPA is not objectively bad, man. Well, that’s true of everything, I guess. But moreso here. :P
I agree that it’s polarizing, and I also agree that the acronyms can be annoying. But while you see the convolutedness as a bad thing, I enjoy it. It makes me think more than, say, xkcd or oots. And I like going on TVTropes and the wiki and so on and reading about all the little details and foreshadowing that I missed.
I can understand why you don’t like it, but keep in mind that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Alright, that’s trite. But in this case, shockingly appropriate.
Also, which boss battle are you talking about?!
I actually quit reading it for a while because I was too confused to enjoy it properly. When I was able to sit down and read it with someone who’d read it before and could explain the things that were confusing me it was a LOT more enjoyable.
I know! Personally, I used the wiki.
That was a bad choice though.
I ended up knowing exactly what the Scratch did before even hearing it referred to…
:/
I too found the numerous acronyms, zodiac signs and characters frustrating, so I ended up taking notes. Everything was much, much easier to follow then!
However, that felt a little too much like homework. Homestuck is the kind of thing where, if you just want to read the story and enough, it will frustrate you. If you don’t actually enjoy juggling all the plot-points and time-skips and characters and timelines and stuff inside your mind (or with notes :D) then I imagine it must be insufferable.