Epic Fail wins 3rd in TGT Tournament

Last year I went on the TGT Webcomics Podcast to talk about Epic Fail and as a result was put into their yearly Tournament: Episodic Battles, where all the episodes are put head-to-head and voted on to decide which is best. There’s a video of Kurt Sasso announcing the winners below and he does a good job of describing the contestants and the action so I recommend watching it.

I’m going to describe what the TGT Tournament was like for me and Epic Fail. As you’re probably be aware, due to me hassling you for votes over the month of August, there are four rounds. The first three are head-to-heads, one-on-one, mano-a-mano… you get the idea. One webcomic episode must knock out the other, halving the contestants each round. At the beginning there were 40.

Round One Epic Fail was up against Plus One, a webcomic about unexpected parenthood. I’ll be honest, we walked it and won that round with 58 votes (84% of the vote).

Round 2 was rather more difficult because we were up against Freakin’ Shadowbinders! Shadowbinders is a terrific Steampunk webcomic with lots of fans. Other contestants kept sending me messages saying how sorry they were for me and how they hoped the weren’t up against Shadowbinders next round BECAUSE THEY WERE EXPECTING MY IMMINENT DEFEAT! So I had to ask for help and fans of Epic Fail responded and we won by 251 votes to 233 – quite a narrow victory but we were through! And… now the other contestants were a little scared of me :s Shadowbinders still got a prize though, the Holiday War Book 1, awarded to the contestant with the most votes who failed to go through to the next round. (Kinda makes me feel less bad about beating them too!) 20 contestants had been whittled down to ten.

Round 3 or the Semi-Finals put Epic Fail up against Swiftriver which is a fantasy webcomic I personally really enjoy reading. It’s a bit like ‘Neverwhere‘ except in Boston, and there’s a magical world with magical creatures that exists next to the real world, but most people aren’t aware of it because it’s hidden by illusion or ‘glamour’. I’d actually forgotten it’s name and therefore ‘lost’ it so I was grateful to find it again. They tried hard but I think my fans had gotten into their stride from Round 2 and were voting consistently, so Epic Fail won by 282 votes to 111. Comparatively easy. Again I think my opponent won the Holiday Cookbook for being the highest scoring loser.

The Finals had 5 finalists and it was a race to the finish with all 5 competing against each other to get the most votes. The competition got a tad crazy here with – I suspect – more votes than there’d been in the entire contest so far!!! The contenders were: Epic Fail (obviously), Byron Wilkins (Webcomic Alliance), [Citation Needed], Adrastus and Meatshield. I know Byron because we used to be in the Webcomic Planet Collective together, Rob from Meatshield is a geeky gamer just like me (with a gamer comic), and Liz from Adrastus is my Wonder Twin across the sea in America – so called because we are spookily similar! This sort of meant that we were trying to beat each other whilst being terribly polite an apologising! LOL. Well, I was anyway.

The final round kinda blew me away because I could believe people would go so far to support me and Epic Fail, but the votes kept rolling in in incredible quantity! You should know this already (because I took every opportunity to tell you whilst spamming you for votes) but YOU ARE INCREDIBLE. I asked you to rally and you rallied. Okay so most of the Final [Citation Needed] was in the lead, but a few times Epic Fail managed to jump into that top position. Liz from Adrastus and I decided to tactically team up because it was like [Citation Needed] had thrown down the gauntlet by being so awesome, also I think we hated the idea of thumping a sibling! So we were voting for each other and encouraging our fans to do the same. We were determined that one of us should beat [Citation Needed].

But we failed. [Citation Needed] won 22 votes ahead of Adrastus when voting closed – not a lot considering votes were in the 8 and 9 hundreds. It was 4am in the UK at that point and my voting had dropped off rather when the UK went to sleep – damn you alternate time zones! Nah, I think we were just outclassed. But Epic Fail still won 3rd place and that means cool prizes. Plus it’s hard to be disappointed when you’ve just had more support than you’d ever dreamed possible! By all accounts this was the best TGT Tornament ever.

I’ll leave you with the Final Results:

1st [Citation Needed] – 906
2nd Adrastus – 884
3rd Epic Fail – 756
4th Meatshield – 351
5th Byron Wilkins – 135

Oh yes and click here to listen to Epic Fail’s winning episode!