Happy Holidays! Hard to believe we’re at the end of 2023 already—feels like yesterday that we released the massive “oral history” article about PHWOnline, but here we are.

That said, we didn’t want to end 2023 without giving you something more, so I’m very proud to announce that we will be doing the first ever Metrocop Awards in early 2024!

Poster for the first Metrocop Awards, featuring a golden award in the shape of a Combine Civil Protection officer from Half-Life 2 holding a stun stick, with a reference to the date early 2024.

These are basically meant to be the Oscars for comics created with the Source engine, recognizing the best works our incredibly dedicated community has put out in the past year. However, given that Metrocop only relaunched at the tail end of August 2022, we will also be considering comics released from Metrocop’s relaunch to the end of 2022.

More importantly, the Metrocop Awards won’t be up to some jury to pick out—it’ll be the community selecting the winners through a vote. Only registered members of the Metrocop forums will be able to vote, so if you don’t have an account yet, I recommend you create one right now and save your spot.

Only comics released in the Metrocop forums or directly added to the Metrocop archive from August 2022 to December 2023, excluding re-releases of content older than 2022, will be considered for these first Metrocop Awards; therefore, if you want one of your comics to be eligible for consideration in the first Metrocop Awards, you must post them on the forums until no later than December 31, 2023. (For Metrocop Discord members: yes, this applies to comics released on the Metrocop Discord as well—you’ll have to post them on the forums as well if you haven’t yet, otherwise, they won’t be up for consideration)

We will be revealing more details on how this will work, the exact dates it will run and the award categories later on, but now you know the bright, golden, shiny future ahead of Metrocop in 2024. In the meantime, the Metrocop team wishes you happy holidays and a happy New Year!