So Bad It's Horrible/Web Comics

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"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.

Important Note 2: Just because the webcomic has a page in the Bad Webcomic Wiki or was reviewed by some Caustic Critic doesn't mean that it automatically deserves a place here. There should be multiple sources agreeing in the low quality of said work (in which case the BWW can provide the correspondent review).

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.
  • Assigned Male is allegedly about a preteen transgender girl and her daily life with her gender-diverse friends and family, but in truth is more about the author putting her views on gender and sexuality in the mouth of her "precocious" main character and her sassy non-binary Best Friend who parrot concepts using language and phrasal structures too complicated for most real kids that age to use (which is more baffling as the author claims to have been an elementary school teacher). The main character is a sum of every bad stereotype of transgendered kids (namely, them being Spoiled Brats whose parents bent to their whims, and are constantly shoving their transgender status though the throats of everyone they meet), and her personality is very inconsistent, oscillating between ordinary kid and stereotypical adult feminist with no blending between those traits; nevertheless, the strip treats her as an angelic being who does no wrong and is as quirky and endearing as Mafalda or the Peanuts. The rest of the characters have only two personalities, strawperson and author mouthpiece, and are so flat they can be better identified by the gender identity (including non-binaries ones) they assume at the time than by any other possible trait. The art is incredibly lazy -- you could say that it has Only Six Faces but those faces are very inconsistent, the bodies' proportions are extremely inconsistent as well, and the author is extremely fond of use the same (wooden) four poses, of reusing art, and of depicting people "speaking" with their mouth closed. To make things worse, there are strips full of homophobic, sexist and gender essentialist content (ironically, most of them in arguments to defend trans people), and the writing is so bad some members of the LGBT community first thought this was a troll comic intended to make them look bad.
    • The Bad Webcomics Wiki analyzed it, with SmashLampjaw, the review's author, going out of their way to contact a transgender friend to ask what she thought of it. In her own words:

[The transgender] community's not gettin' far if we're gunna be THAT militant...

  • 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.
  • 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. It's authored 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 labeled 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 re-purposing 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, an alleged Continuation Fic for Avatar: The Last Airbender, is probably among the worst Fan Web Comics ever created. To begin with, all the art is blatantly traced from both the series and images found on the internet, leading to numerous moments of Uncanny Valley due to Off-Model galore; it also presents GIS Syndrome in backgrounds and details when not directly using pics lifted from Google Search as backgrounds. Second, the typo-infested plot drinks from your standard Soap Opera and every Romance Novel ever, to present us a Cliché Storm of romantic tropes out of Lifetime, where the author retorts to basically distorts everybody's personality to make the story work, most infamously by chickificating all the Action Girls in the cast, up to involving Easy Amnesia in Azula of all people so she can become a Purity Sue to being hook-up with Sokka. Because the comic is geared towards the Zuko/Katara pairing, Zuko's canonical girlfriend Mai is derailed into a bitch who sends Katara a Perfect Poison to make the latter miscarry her and Zuko's lovechild and then hide the letters a distressed Katara sends to Zuko for three consecutive years; meanwhile, Zuko is depicted as callously dumping Mai, dismissing her (in and off universe) reasons for her actions and shifting the blame of him cheating on her with Katara on Mai herself, while Katara (who is sueified to large levels on top of her chickification) kills Mai by bloodbending her (every person who watched A:TLA and The Legend of Korra will notice how utterly OOC for Katara is this), and yet the author insists that this pair of assholes "love" story is completely a Pure Sweet Love Legend for the Ages. Third, the comic ditches the Asian aesthetic that make A:TLA so popular in favor of being vaguely Renaissancetist or fairy-tailesque, with the female characters wearing gowns traced from prom dresses websites. Finally, the author suffers of delusions of authorial grandeur to the point that she actually placed this thing on her resume and tend to retreat into echo-chambers whenever any minimal criticism against the comic appears. The Bad Wecomics Wiki had a field day with it, as did The Webcomic Relief and Zelda_Queen from Das Sporking.
  • 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.
  • Lightbringer, a superhero comic authored by Linkara (he of Atop the Fourth Wall fame) back when he was younger. The main character is a superhero with light-based powers (which somehow also include flying because why not) who fights to free his city of a villain cell known as Slavers. The art is atrocious, due to Linkara having little artistic ability, and the story reads as a composite of every comic plot he liked. The dialogues tend to be Wall of Text of the preachy variety. Because it was written before he became a feminist, there is a lot of skeevyness in the treatment of female characters, particularly on the depiction of a 17 year old gal. Naturally, the thing hasn't been actualized in ages (a rewriting/redrawing by other artists were planned but never released), and Linkara considers it his very own Old Shame. The Bad Webcomics Wiki goes in detail on what makes this comic so awful.
  • 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.
  • Moon Over June is probably one of the most disgusting porn webcomics on the internet. The art is incredibly awful, with loose anatomy and extremely bizarre facial expressions that make the sex scenes borderline Fetish Retardant. The real infuriating part of the comic, however, is on the main characters: one of them, Hatsuki, is a Japanese porn actress that is into lesbian porn as revenge towards her family for "giving her a name with the wrong pronunciation"; the other, Summer, is a lesbian gynecologist with extreme misandry, that choose her line of job for the chance of looking all day into female genitalia, and outside her practice has a predatory and extremely promiscuous sex life. This couple gets together, gets pregnant at the same time and have a girl each (the titular Moon and June), but their relationship is portrayed as extremely hostile despite cohabitating in the same house and co-raising their children. Also, the reason Summer gets pregnant is because of wanting to satisfy a pregnancy fetish and, had her baby had born male, she would have given him in adoption immediately. While most of the comic is Porn Without Plot with badly drawn sex and off-putting expressions, the parts that do have plot only emphasize the psychopathy of the protagonists, and aligning with them. The Bad Webcomics Wiki explains it further.
  • 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. Fittingly, white supremacists are using the strips to justify their own racism towards East Asians.
    • 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 had 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. What can be said about the definitive worst webcomic of the internet? It 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, and has since devolved into a self-righteous, disturbing vanity project. The comic and its author's a target of Bile Fascination to the point where nearly anything on TV Tropes related to the author or his comic has either been locked or made a member of the Permanent Red Link Club.
    • On September 2015, after a pause of almost 6 years, the author revealed that he had drawn new pages. Given the numerous events that have gone on his life during the comic's hiatus, god knows what this resurrection will bring on us.
  • 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 (in hiatus since 2009) 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.
    • The author eventually managed to create another comic that doesn't repeat the formula (instead, is Fifty Shades of Grey in an Urban Fantasy setting), but is otherwise just as bad as its predecessors.
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