Squiddy Awards

The Squiddy Awards, also known as The Squiddies, were the annual awards given by the participants in the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.comics through 2004. The awards are named after the humorous typo "Suicide Squid". The awards cover a wide variety of areas, including Best Writer, Penciller, Cartoonist, Inker, Painter, and Letterer, along with a number of more frivolous categories, such as "Worst Scientific Mistake" or "Character you'd like to make out with". The awards had been awarded yearly since the mid-1980s, when they were known as the Rec.Arts.Comics Awards, and claimed to be the longest-running online comic awards.

The award was renamed the Squiddies in 1992. The awards process consists of a single round of voting except for the 2003 awards, when a runoff round was conducted to break ties among the top vote-getters in certain categories. Normally, all eligible entries' vote totals are published in the official results; consequently, claims are sometimes made that a comic has been "nominated" for a Squiddy when it actually received a single vote.

A poll for 2005 material was conducted in early 2006, but the results were never posted. Apparently, no poll was conducted for 2006 material.

Origin of name
Suicide Squid is an in-joke character accidentally created in April 1991 when Mitsuhiro Sakai, intending to ask about recent occurrences in the comic Suicide Squad, accidentally substituted an i for an a in "Squad", resulting in the typo "Suicide Squid". Many regular posters comically responded with earnest and elaborate accounts of what was going on in the non-existent "Suicide Squid" comic.