MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
We simply can't include every webcomic in the world.
This is an unsupported assertion. We can include every hamlet and township in the US, every sportsperson to play professionally, every ship in the navy, and every music album published by a record label. Why not every webcomic? A few thousand articles will vanish like a drop into the sea of Wikipedia if you're not interested in the subject.
To avoid people using Wikipedia as a promotional vehicle we have to use inclusion guidelines to keep in stuff that deserves an article - highly popular (verifiably so) webcomics with a not so small run - and stuff that doesn't deserve an article - your average Joe site with 4 comics, a dead forum and no Google or Alexa rank because they don't have visitors.
You can include an article about a small, defunct comic without promoting it. It just depends on how the article's written.
Of course, Google and Alexa aren't everything, but if those can't be gauged to determine a comic's audience, we need the author to provide the information by other means. If the audience can't be verified it doesn't belong on Wikipedia.
Verifiability is indeed an important consideration, but separate and different from the "notability" one that's usually named instead in these cases.