TheSquiddies
 The Squiddy Awards for 2003
 

What's a Squiddy?
The Squiddies are the annual awards given by the participants in rec.arts.comics. They recognize excellence in the field of comics, from a perspective that no other comics-industry awards can match. They are open and democratic, but don't just ratify whatever tops the sales charts. They attract the input of interested experts, from creators to fans, but don't fall prey to snobbish anti-commercialism. Everything from small-press alternative books to mainstream superheroes bump elbows as they jostle for rankings here. In short, the Squiddies exemplify thinking populism. What the Squiddies may lack in profile, they make up in perseverance; except for the CBG awards, no still-existing industry award in North America is older. They are indisputably the longest-running online awards for comics; known originally as "the Great Usenet Comics Poll", the Squiddies have been awarded every year since the mid-1980's.

[Suicide Squid] Yeah, but... "Squiddy"?
The formal name is "The Rec.Arts.Comics Awards", but like the Academy Awards, they're better known by their mascot. They're nicknamed after Suicide Squid, a hypothetical comicbook character whose extensive publishing history exists entirely as an exercise in imagination and fabrication on the part of rec.arts.comics participants. Suicide Squid was accidentally created in April 1991 when Mitsuhiro Sakai wanted to ask about developments in the series Suicide Squad, but typed "i" instead of "a" in "Squad". Many r.a.c regulars responded with earnest and elaborate accounts of what was going on in the Suicide Squid comic... which didn't really exist. The r.a.c awards (already several years running by that time) were nicknamed in his honor, and to this day his exploits are still brought up from time to time. Squiddy's visual design was created by cartoonist Ty Templeton, whose illustration of the self-destructive cephalopod has often been spotted on official r.a.c t-shirts at conventions.

OK, but what's Rec.Arts.Comics?
rec.arts.comics (names on the internet are traditionally all lowercase, and it's often shortened to just "r.a.c") is a set of discussion groups that are part of the global hierarchy of newsgroups known as Usenet. Its roots go back nearly a decade before the World Wide Web was started, to the primordial internet of the early 1980's, undergoing several transformations as the net evolved and grew. It's the oldest surviving online forum dedicated to comics. (See a pattern here?) It now includes about a dozen subgroups dedicated to particular topic areas, including DC Universe (plus Vertigo and LSH) and Marvel Universe (plus X-Men) groups, reviews, a marketplace group for buying and selling, a few other specialised groups, and a "misc" group for everything else. Its (often) spirited and (usually) literate discussions among participants around the world are legendary. Check in rec.arts.comics.info for introductory information.

The Squiddy Winners
First-Place Winners over the years

Complete Results for each Year:

Further Information Updates announced at Digital Webbing
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This site is © copyright 2000-2001, www.squiddies.org.
The Squiddies logo is © copyright 2000, Carl Henderson.
The likeness of Suicide Squid is © copyright 1991, Ty Templeton.
The character of Suicide Squid is © copyright 1991, Mitsuhiro Sakai et al.
"The Squiddies", "Squiddy", "Suicide Squid", and the accompanying graphics and likeness are trademarks of www.squiddies.org.
All other characters, titles, and other names mentioned in this site are trademarks of their respective owners.