My favourite webcomic would be Oglaf, I think. According to the creators’ notes it “started out as an attempt to create pornography, but degenerated at once into sex comedy”. Which makes it very much not safe for work (nor anywhere else, really). But the reason I like it is that it features hilarious subversion, perversion, and parody of fantasy and FRPG clichés. (The link is to a beginning of an uncharateristically long strand of stories that brings together several of the characters for and epic tales of Howardesque fantasy, broad humour, and gratuitous sex.)
Another favourite would be xkcd, which is about maths, language, and sarcasm.
I stopped reading webcomics about two years back - used to keep up with probably 20. Just kinda stopped reading one day and didn’t look back. It’s weird to even see their names again. I was pretty early on the webcomic bandwagon, was reading Penny Arcade when it was hosted on Gamespy, and kept up with it until two years ago-ish. It’s actually a little depressing! It used to be super important to me, and now it’s not.
My all-time favorite webcomic is Homestuck. It’s pretty dang weird, funny and massive, and has my all-time favourite time travel usage, and the best use of Nick Cage (yes, better than his movies). Getting into it is pretty hard, it’s got about 500 pages of BS that feel like a horrific waste of time. Then it gets really really good, and then you go back and read from the beginning because a bunch of the BS makes sense now.
I used to keep up with a few but the only ones I actually remember are xkcd, Penny Arcade and 8-bit Theater.
I used to have a morning routine when I got to the office to do a sudoku puzzle and read a web-comic before reading any email or starting any task. Then I changed jobs and fell out of my routine.
I really should go back to at least the sudoku… I always found it to be a good way to get my brain working in the morning.
I like xkcd well enough, but my favorites have to be Dinosaur Comics and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Dinosaur Comics is literally the same six panels every single time just with the dialogue changed, and the amount of creativity and comedy wrung from that is pretty impressive to me. SMBC is my one true love, though; a lot of it is philosophical and scientific, like xkcd, but there’s a different tone that I like a lot better. Also, a lot of it is just silly and funny.
I feel like I read the webcomics I follow out of habit, more than enjoyment these days. A lot of them have been going on so long I don’t even know what is going on anymore.
One I enjoyed very much, even though there were definitely pacing problems, was Misfile. Following the upended life of two teenagers, one a boy who suddenly wakes up as a girl, the other a girl who loses the latest two years of her life as if they had never happened. The cause: a pot smoking angel who misplaced their files in the Celestial Filing Depot just before being exiled from Heaven. As such, reality has re-worked itself as if things had always been this way, and they are the only ones who know what’s wrong, and being exiled, the angel who comes to find them can’t fix it. It definitely falls into the gender bender category, but defies the usual trope of the bendee happily accepting their new gender after a little while. It ended last year, rather poorly in my opinion, but the journey there was worthwhile to me. The author has made a follow up which still seems to be struggling to present a main plot, and also has a steampunk fantasy called 6 Gun Mage which is enjoyable.
Darths and Droids is a very entertaining comic about if all the Star Wars movies were just a group’s RPG campaign. They just started The Force Awakens not too long ago. They have done some wonderful twists with the plot, too.
JL8 is a very well drawn comic taking the Justice League and placing them in kindergarten. Seemed ro start off as mostly one off comics, but a storyline has developed over time with some truly moving strips. Sadly it updates rather infrequently.
I also really like Atomic Robo.
Others I follow but do not really remember what all is going on anymore are Megatokyo, Looking for Group, Questionable Content, Sequential Art, and Grrl Power.
Manly Men Doing Manly Things appears to have been anandoned, as was Camp Weedonwantcha. Both really good.
Several that I like have already been mentioned. Those include SMBC, Darths and Droids, and Girl Genius.
My biggest favorites not already mentioned are:
Dungeons and Doggos: a D&D campaign with the players and their characters based on the artist’s actual dogs.
Good Tickle Brain: Stick figure Shakespeare comics, for the most part.
Catana Comics: slice of life/ rom com that the husband and I like and frequently see ourselves in
Strong Female Protagonist: a young woman superhero slowly realizing that super strength and punching bad guys doesn’t solve most of the world’s problems. Like JL8 mentioned above, this is unfortunately on hiatus and may be done.
I used to read loads of comics back in the day, including Misfile and stuff like it. I eventually got sick of keeping up with them all and dropped everything except Questionable Content. And xkcd when I remember it exists.
Newer stuff, I do also read Oglaf, as well as Up to 4 Players (appropriate to this forum).
John Allison’s current project is about all I follow regularly now. Currently that’s Steeple. I go back through the scary go round and bad machinery archives regularly though.
Ones I read that have not been mentioned so far: Schlock Mercenary, Skin Horse, Dumbing of Age, Something Positive, Freefall, Questionable Content, Girls with Slingshots, The Whiteboard, and Sandra and Woo.
I don’t read regular comics as they’re published because 32 pages (or whatever the standard is these days) is too little story for me at once. Trying to follow narrative webcomics at like, a couple pages a week (and not necessarily that fast, depending on creator) would drive me batty. So I poke at things like Oglaf and XKCD and (increasingly infrequently) Penny Arcade now and then, or as linked. And I buy collections of Gunnerkrigg Court and Order of the Stick. Well, I say I buy them like it’s ongoing. GC I’ve kept up with as the hardcovers release. Order of the Stick I went all-in on the 2012 Kickstarter and that’s been it. I’d assume he’d post to the Kickstarter if he did another one or had a new book out through other channels, but I’m gonna be honest, I have not checked in case he hasn’t.
I used to read a lot of them, but like others I just kinda dropped one day. I read Penny Arcade daily for years, along with PVP online, Real life comics and things like Perry Bible and Bad Machinery. I used to read Megatokyo too. I really don’t know why I stopped reading any of them, I guess it’s just a habit I inadvertently broke.
Before RSS feeds were widely used on comics sites (about 2004), I wrote a scraper that would grab the latest comic images and drop them into a nice simple HTML page for me. I’m still using it.
Many of the comics I’d recommend are on John’s list, but I’d add:
Scandinavia and the World (national clichés) Alex (has been going for over 30 years on one joke, “we set up an expectation and reverse it in the last panel”, but still manages to be mildly amusing) Three Panel Soul is mostly one-shots but interestingly drawn and I like the writer’s style. The Unspeakable Vault is very slow at the moment but has deep archives. Cthulhu-related shenanigans. A Miracle of Science (transhuman crime-solving on Earth and Venus) is complete and excellent. Subnormality is occasional, and huge, but excellent.
The main thing they have in common is being gorgeous as hell.
For silly one-off things not yet mentioned, I quite like:
Hark, A Vagrant (gonzo comedy, largely about history and older literature) False Knees (lovely illustrations of wildlife with frequently surreal verbiage) Chaos Life (lots of cats, few gender norms)
I used to read Sluggy Freelance and Megatokyo religiously… ages ago.
These days I only read Schlock Mercenary and the occasional XKCD (my partner reads it and shows me the best ones). I have a hard time keeping up with webcomics since my RSS reader died years ago and I couldn’t find a replacement I liked and now I just browse the web like a person who uses bookmarks, reddit and twitter (infrequently).
But I’ll have a look around this thread maybe I’ll find another one
Oh man, let me just time travel back to the early 2010s when I kept up to date with all these things. Oh, no I see all the ones I remember have been mentioned.
Except One! I’ll just check it still exists.
Gone With The Blastwave is very good. The world is war. Endless war. Snark. Moth hats. Look, it’s very good, in ways I struggle to explain. Start at the start though.
Will it update before this country drifts another couple of centimeters? Chances are 50/50.
@RogerBW, thanks for reminding me three panel soul is a thing. Love that guy.
