Last month I attended the first ever New England Webcomics Weekend (NEWW). It was pretty fun. It was billed as the first comic convention (in the U.S anyway) that was all webcomic artists – nobody who works mainly or solely in the print realm. Given how popular webcomics have gotten this decade, it’s surprising that there hasn’t been an event like this before. What’s been interesting to me, in fact, is the way that webcomics have had a presence at various kinds of fan conventions. They’ve been at comic conventions, sci-fi cons, anime cons, and even some computer/software cons. They seem to appeal to a wider audience that comic books typically have reaching perhaps the kind of audience that newspaper comic strips have in the past (of course, as the newspaper industry seems to be dying a slow death, those strips’ audience is shrinking). Now a critical mass has been reached or passed, and webcomics fandom itself may spawn multiple gatherings (there’s already talk of doing something similar in the Pacific Northwest).
Check out the NEWW site to see who was there (it’s a long list). Don’t bother checking out the forum on the site – it was overrun by spammers just after the event happened.
I volunteered to videotape a few of the panels. Below are links to the stuff I recorded – 2 panels and the webcomics awards ceremony. Each video is broken into parts because of YouTube’s time limits. My apologies for the lighting in some cases – I had no control over it.
Panel: Print vs. Web vs. a Bear
Panel: Creative Partner Newlywed Game
Webcomics Awards Ceremony