Webcomics offer a very low barrier of entry, but most humans will not continue to draw something or at least try to improve if people hate it. How do you suppose these webcomics managed to continue onwards despite 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 Notes:
- 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.
- A webcomic isn't Horrible just because The Webcomic Relief, Your Webcomic Is Bad and You Should Feel Bad, or any other Caustic Critic reviewed it. There needs to be independent evidence that it's horrible, like an actual professional negative review. Though once it is listed, you're free to link to any detailed review of it.
- This page is not for horrible chapters of otherwise good webcomics. For those, see DethroningMoment.Webcomics.
- To ensure that the work is judged with a clear mind and the hatred isn't just a knee-jerk reaction, as well as to allow opinions to properly form and give the artist a chance to improve, examples should not be added until at least one month after release. This includes "sneaking" the entries onto the pages ahead of time by adding them and then just commenting them out.
Examples (more-or-less in alphabetical order):
- Angel Warrior Comics
is a good example of why people hate Sprite Comics so much. Like many other examples in the genre, its sprites are simple re-colors, its text is illegible, and its backgrounds clash. It began as a gag strip but then created an incomprehensible story. The author abandoned it in March 2003, to no one's surprise; funnily, the last strip features the author vehemently denying that the webcomic is over and claiming it would be updated in a month or so. - Billy the Heretic is about a young boy who gets adopted by a "rich international Jewish" family. As one might expect, it quickly devolves into the kind of thing you'd find on /pol/ or Stormfront (fittingly, the webpage links to the latter). Every character is an overblown caricature, even Billy, whom we're intended to like but just comes off as a bigoted, ungrateful, spoiled brat. The author claims it's autobiographical (it's not, the work was written by a white surpremacist from Michigan and drawn by an Irish white nationalist) and yet insists he's not a Neo-Nazi and doesn't support their ideology. The artwork is spectacularly awful — every character is poorly drawn, and there's no color or backgrounds, making it exceptionally dull to look at. It's considered one of the single worst webcomics on the Internet; in Cracked's 5 Circles of Baffling Webcomic Hell, this one gets a special mention at the bottom of the pit.
- The Easy Breather is an Author Tract against smoking. While a webcomic with an anti-smoking message is not a bad idea per se, the execution is really weird and off-putting. Amid Infodumps on the hazards of smoking that read more like a Public Service Announcement, you have a protagonist who has breath powers just because she doesn't smoke and paper-thin villains who force others to smoke. And that's when it remembers it's an anti-smoking tract; more often than not, all of this is sidelined in favor of the characters getting naked for no reason at all (the author is apparently a naturist). The art is done entirely in Poser with no external assets, dropping it deep into the Uncanny Valley. In Cracked's 5 Circles of Baffling Webcomic Hell, this one's #10.
- THe FReCKLeD FINGeR has a very good, professional art style. However, it is also 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. The comic is often described as "Cyanide and Happiness if it took itself dead seriously".
- Gamer Chicks is a webcomic starring Suiren, a hyperactive Yaoi Fangirl and Gamer Chick, and Kirei, her snarky level-headed roommate, who discuss video games and have wacky misadventures. Most strips involve Suiren doing three things: (1) reassuring the viewer that she's "totally a girl and totally plays video games"; (2) fending off boys who are only interested in her "boobies"; and (3) shipping video game characters of the same sex. That last one is particularly weird because she obsesses over it to the point of discussing it in casual conversation with complete strangers and shows little respect for or understanding of LGBT dynamics; anyone who brings up how strange this is "must be crazy or stupid". Outside of that, the plots range from pointless to completely pointless, or else dryly and humorlessly recite ancient jokes. The artwork is horrible; it's a horrific collision of MS Paint, empty white backgrounds, and figures and faces ripped straight out of a bargain-bin "How to Draw Manga" book. It's also frighteningly Off-Model, often leaving it unclear what an object is supposed to be — most infamously, a crowd of people is represented by a single block of Cartoon Cheese. And it showed little to no improvement in its three-year run, going from this to this.
- Girlz 'n Games, like Gamer Chicks, is a webcomic exploring the "comedy" that comes from girls liking geeky things like video games. The jokes are stale, poorly delivered, and unfunny (such as references to Portal's cake jokes about two years too late). Many jokes are misogynistic; usually, they evoke genre snobbery directed at women, but a few are Domestic Abuse jokes that fail to cross the line a second time. The dialogue is terrible, even when it's not a joke. The art is flat and underwhelming, suffers from GIS Syndrome, has Only Six Faces, and has seen no improvement since the comic first began.
- Hathor the Cow Goddess revolves around Real Life naturalist radical 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. This alone wouldn't necessarily make it a bad webcomic, but the comic only shows tolerance for the title character's own views. Anyone who advocates for formula feeding, modern medicine, or sending their kids to school is demonized as an abusive parent. Cushman-Dowdee later switched over to writing a strip called Mama Is..., which is the same thing without the main character wearing a cow mask. Like the previously mentioned Billy the Heretic and The Easy Breather, it was mentioned in Cracked's 5 Circles of Baffling Webcomic Hell, where it placed #9.
- 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 a 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. It's a blatant Self-Insert comic whose protagonist falls in love with an obvious Expy of Sephiroth. It appears to be a desperate effort by the author to garner sympathy for her "dark and depressing" life; this might be why the main character is brutally harassed by the Alpha Bitch for no reason. The plot is extremely confusing and hard to follow, with plot elements randomly introduced and then dropped just as quickly (like when the two main characters turn into animal things). The art style is the same as in Gamer Chicks, including the use of Cartoon Cheese as a stand-in for crowds, but manages to be even worse because it's not even in color; this muddles the actions considerably. The comic stopped updating in August 2008, to the bereavement of nobody.
- Lightbringer is a story by Lewis Lovhaug — indeed, the same one who became a Caustic Critic on his show Atop the Fourth Wall. He's very ashamed of it (to the point of putting the entire strip and its characters into the Public Domain), and with good reason. It's a Cliché Storm of comic book stories; the protagonist is an orphan whose parents were murdered, he can create solid constructs out of light, his powers sometimes spark when he's angry, and his costume looks suspiciously like Dr. Light's◊. The protagonist starts out as a straw pacifist who refuses to use his powers because it goes against his philosophy, but when his inaction leads to a woman being attacked, he does a complete 180, swears off pacifism entirely, and becomes a Blood Knight prone to huge, preachy monologues with stilted and ham-fisted dialogue. In the end, he's bland and Unintentionally Unsympathetic. The plot is poorly paced and paper-thin, with significant events happening out of nowhere without so much as a Hand Wave. The art is awful, with distractingly wonky perspectives and proportions and a bad MS Paint coloring job; it does improve over time but only reaches a decent level when the guest artists start coming in.
- The Loco Bandito, by none other than Cinemassacre's Mike Matei, is disgusting and downright racist. There's almost no attempt at humor; it's just graphic NSFW imagery, egregious language, Toilet Humor, and ethnic stereotypes. The best joke of this kind is the Bandito ejaculating on a series of ethnic stereotypes, only to realize he's an ethnic stereotype himself and defecate on his own face; anything that has even a chance at working is undone by its disgusting nature. While Cinemassacre productions are no stranger to gross-out humor, the good ones at least have a counterbalance of some kind (e.g., The Angry Video Game Nerd is mostly about reviewing video games). Matei apparently tried to get the comics published, but no one would take him up; he originally claimed that "no one had the balls" to do it but later realized that he just wasn't a good writer, admitting to being inspired by shock artists like Robert Crumb and Johnny Ryan.
- Mandatory Fun Day was a comic run on The Daily WTF 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. 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, which makes you question his attitude toward the whole thing. Season 2 redeemed it somewhat, but the general distaste and endless mockery toward the comic led to it being removed.
- Monster Lover (no relation to the comic by Dumok; this one was made by Albert-Aet) is a Hentai comic about a Cute Monster Girl, hosted on the Electronic Hentai Organisation. And among their massive archive of more than 300 comics, this was one of the very few that appealed to absolutely nobody, with a half-star out of five. It's easy to see why; its art style makes even the worst webcomics look like pure genius, and its storyline (such as it was) was very lame.
- Moon Over June is an NSFW Slice of Life webcomic about two lesbians who live together. They're both incredibly unlikeable and bizarrely militant: Summer is a nurse who hates men so much that she resolves to give her newborn up for adoption if it turns out to be male, and Hatsuki is a lesbian pornographer with a strange fixation on Japan-ness, getting into porn because her parents gave her name the wrong Japanese pronunciation (and not getting into straight porn because it's "too Japanese"). Both apparently chose to be lesbians and also exhibited some sexist, racist, and transphobic behavior. The comic's ostensibly named after the protagonists' daughters, but we never see much of them; instead, we see a lot of Summer and Hatsuki screwing other women. The art is terrible, with the facial expressions especially deep in the Uncanny Valley. This article summarizes a lot of the problems.
- My Little School (no connection with My Little Pony) would have remained in obscurity had it not been for the fact that the creator frequents the forums on DeviantArt, and it should have remained there because of how awful it is. The dialogue is poorly worded, the artwork is barely above elementary school-level, the characters are flat and unlikeable, and the comic tries to be dramatic but fails miserably.
- Natty Comics is an unholy combination of Protagonist-Centered Morality, Disproportionate Retribution, and Straw Characters. Nearly every comic follows the same basic pattern: someone does something Natty doesn't like, and Natty (or one of her associates) assaults, maims, or kills the man while he says how much he deserves it. Natty can be triggered by such things as being a little creepy, being kinda offensive, or liking the wrong football team. It sounds satirical, but the creator was adamant that it was meant to be serious; and said creator is not, as might be thought, a teenage girl with serious anger issues toward the male gender, but a 30-something grown man. This results in a comic with little appeal to anybody; it promotes progressive gender ideals, but does so by portraying the people who uphold those ideals as violent sociopaths. The creator eventually removed it, not from any Jerkass Realization, but from a belief in his own audacity.
- One-Frame Gags is a defunct webcomic that ran from September 2012 to July 2013 — and in that short period, it exhibited a decade's worth of terrible artwork, unfunny "gags", and terrible puns. The only thing it had going for it is that David Morgan-Mar actually wrote a guest strip for it. The creator became a Square Root of Minus Garfield and Lightning Made of Owls contributor after it ended and made some slightly better strips.
- Project 2nd is a webcomic inspired by TwoKinds. And by "inspired", we mean blatantly ripped off and traced from the source. The leads are an Author Avatar created to be the brother of Two Kinds character Flora (which has plenty of creepy overtones) and a tiger girl named Fauna (who is Flora in all but name). The artwork is poor despite the tracing, and what isn't traced is even worse — particularly the Big Bad, who has been likened to an "evil guitar pick". The writing is spotty, with many typos that were left unchecked (while English may not be the author's first language, he could've invested someone to proofread it). Riiser tackled this webcomic right here.
- Purity-R is a strange-looking comic about a boy being turned into a grey woman. Then the creators' fetish for everything lesbian-related kicks in, and extremely ugly and hard-to-follow hijinks ensue. The comic is made entirely by posing 3D models in Garry's Mod and then tracing them (he has another comic where he doesn't trace, and one can see why he resorts to tracing). He claims to be an "expert in English" in his profile, but this is not exhibited in any of his comics.
- Shredded Moose is devoid of humor, good taste, or any point behind its persistent misogyny. It's a Two Gamers on a Couch comic with two Gary Stu Self Inserts: Brew (representing the writer), a Totally Radical "Alpha Male" who wears his hat backwards, and Trip (representing the artist), a youngster Fratbro who looks up to Brew. Most comics are about how women suck, with Brew encountering a Straw Man to tear down, followed by sex with multiple women (or else just violence). Brew, in particular, is an unlikable Jerkass who epitomizes the worst of the "fratire" genre without any of its redeeming qualities. If any woman doesn't want to jump into bed with Brew, they're either a lesbian or a Straw Feminist (here portrayed as orcs). The comic's only redeeming features are that the art is okay, it ended many years ago, and its creator has since renounced and disowned it.
- Sore Thumbs has an okay art style, and at the very least, it tries to equally lambaste both sides of the political spectrum. But those are the only good things that can be said about it. The characters are all woefully unlikable, with the main character being a desperate attempt to pander to those seeking Fanservice. The attempts at humor fall horribly flat. The plotline is borderline nonsensical, and decisions made about the story are just outside the realm of human logic ("Let's make the love interest a eunuch for no reason!").
- Vegan Artbook is off-putting even by the standards of Author Tract comics. There is no nuance: the "heroes" are all cardboard mouthpieces who do nothing but spout the author's views and occasionally use violence against meat-eaters, which is apparently justified because they're meat-eaters and therefore "wrong". Non-vegans are reduced to blatant Straw Characters who are portrayed as either selfish monsters or ignorant clods who don't understand veganism. At one point◊, they're even compared to Hitler. Even people who are genuinely unable to pursue a vegan diet for medical or economic reasons are targeted. It also forgets to do its research and tends to reuse the same points in multiple strips. The closest it has to a redeeming quality is its cute Sanrio-esque artwork, and even that, according to various sources, is stolen or traced. In the end, you get a comic that doesn't really appeal to anyone: non-vegans find it too insulting to be readable, and vegans tend to find their treatment of non-vegans too extreme, even before the comic started bashing non-extreme vegans. This Honest Trailers homage should tell you everything you need to know.
- WarMage (on hiatus since 2009) is an MS Paint-spawned harem porn monstrosity covered in a hash of superhero (in)action, 20 Minutes into the Future cyberpunk, and whatever Wicca and Hindu mysticism the author feels like tossing in. The antagonists tend to be assorted flavors of Judeo-Christian fundamentalists because, apparently, monotheism equals evil. The webcomic is already bad 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!). The creator's fourth comic breaks the pattern but is otherwise just as bad: Shadow Root, which is basically Fifty Shades of Grey meets Urban Fantasy. The Webcomic Relief took a belated look at WarMage here.
