this text when clicking or tapping on the comic image, for users on mobile phones and touchscreen devices, which lack a "hovering" function. In hardcopy versions, the extra text appeared under the comic. Reception In a 2004 review, Dani Atkinson wrote for Sequential Tart: "The strips read like the first lines of a novel, the kind of really good first lines that manage to evoke the whole novel. Or a sort of ... post-modern haiku. They're blackly funny, or oddly touching, or creepy." The website The Webcomics Examiner included A Softer World in its list of 25 "Best Webcomics of 2005", saying "the sly inferences in each Softer World strip are variously acidic, achingly funny, or casually disturbing." The comic won the first Web Cartoonists' Choice Award for photographic webcomic in 2007. A Softer World was profiled in the September 2007 issue of the Australian Rolling Stone. In a 2008 article for ComicMix, reviewer Rick Marshall said the strip "is always a gamble. One strip can prompt hysterical laughter, while the next can only make you shiver and wonder what the unholy hell was going on in its creators’ minds when that strip was conceived. ASW can explore complex social issues one moment and the depth of depravity in the next." Writing after the final strip, Gary Tyrrel of Fleen called the series "one thousand two hundred and forty-three perfect little pillows of hope/despair, melancholy/sanguinity, [and] sexiness/moresexiness". Other features of the site The website asofterworld.com was also used to host other creative works by Horne and Comeau: "i blame the sea" is Emily Horne's photo journal, added to the site in 2008 and updated weekly. "Overqualified" is a series of satirical cover letters for job applications. These cover letters are generally written so as to reveal a degree of insanity in the imagined author. For example, one is a letter from someone applying to be a mall Santa Claus, in which he explains that, as a foreman at Mattel, he fired all the middle aged men and hired midgets who he forced to wear green costumes, and that, after being fired, he broke into houses to steal milk and cookies. Overqualified was published in book form in 2009. "i am other people" is a series of interviews that Joey conducts with people. Lockpick Pornography, Comeau's first novel, was first serialized on the A Softer World website before publication. Collected editions