Forty-odd webcomics

At the after-presentation dinner mission the other week, Gary Tyrrell of Fleen asked me the obvious question — what webcomics do I read? Me being the sad, silicon-dependent sod that I am, I was only able to recall four or five out of what I figured were a couple dozen webcomics. A few days back I got fed up with how badly Safari was performing and switched over to Firefox, and as part of that migration exported my Safari bookmarks, giving me an opportunity to pull the webcomics section out into a list. Turns out I read about 40 webcomics, though a few have stopped updating.

For those of you who are going to gloss over the whole list, let me just strongly recommend two comics right here: Templar, Arizona and Scary Go Round. These are the two that you’re most likely not to be already reading, but should be. Descriptions below.

OK, on to the list:

• A Softer World — A photo, cropped into three panels, with captions added. Been thinking of dropping this; it’s been a while since it made me laugh, or wince.
• Alien Loves Predator — Amazing comic built out of photos of posed action figures, NYC scenery, and Photoshop skill. Funny, too.
• Bang Barstal — Post-apocalyptic ass-kicking. It’s in the middle of its third story arc, “The Dead”, which is being posted in big chunks rather than one page at a time. I’d start with the second arc, “Racing Towards Home”.
• Bolt City — Kazu Kibuishi’s website, where he keeps a blog and posts updates to his various comics, like Copper, a beautifully drawn and colored comic where each story is a single page long.
• Bruno — Adventures of a depressed twenty-something woman, done as a (usually) single-panel strip. The cross-hatching can get pretty amazing when the artist gets ambitious, which he doesn’t often nowadays since he’s got several other comics going too.
• Bugsport — This comic set in a small New England town where space aliens have settled doesn’t update often, but it’s got gorgeous art. Check out the flying saucers that look like big-fin retro cars!
• Butterfly A superhero and his sidekick. How long since this thing’s updated?
• Cat and Girl — It was the “villanelle sandwich” strip that got me hooked.
• Desert Rocks — Um, actually I haven’t looked at this one in over a year. But I keep meaning to.
• Diesel Sweeties — Funny daily strip starring robots and hipsters. Distinctive pixel art.
• Dresden Codak — I found this one pretty recently, but I’m glad I did. Lovely artwork paired with weird intellectual humor. Check out the philosopher’s role-playing game.
• Flaky Pastry — Weekly extended-story humor strip set in a D&D-like fantasy world; pretty art.
• Girl Genius — Extended story comedy adventure from longtime comics pro Phil Foglio and his wife Kaja. You all read it already.
• Girls with Slingshots — Joke strip. Hazel is a cynical beanpole, Jamie is cheerful and zaftig, McPedro is a talking cactus. There’s lots of drinking.
• I am a rocket builder: An Old House — Actually a bunch of interlocking webcomics. Doesn’t update often.
• Mac Hall — Started as a college strip, currently on hiatus as the creators work on a new direction. Nice art, especially the use of color and blurred backgrounds.
• Miracle of Science — Extended-story SF comic about mad scientists and the cops who hunt them. Oh, and Martians.
• Naut-Cotic — Might delete this from my menu, since it hasn’t updated in forever. Long-form SF story with attractive art in a manga-derived, yet distinctive, style.
• Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life — Irregulary-updating philosophical humor strip about robots.
• No Pink Ponies — Joke strip about a woman who runs a comic store. Good art, but I’m starting to tire of the writing.
• No Rest For The Wicked — Long-form fantasy story using classic fairy-tale characters.
• Normal Life — Natasha Allegri’s LJ comic. Mostly exaggerated autobio humor.
• Ojingogo — Beautiful but surreal. I really wish this updated more often.
• Orneryboy — Sharp-looking, funny Flash comic. I don’t know why, but the main character reminds me of nihilistic_kid.
• Overcompensating — Autobio comic based on the daily life of a billionaire cowboy poet and webcomics magnate.
• Perry Bible Fellowship — Strange conceptual humor with a flexible, adept art style.
• Pibgorn — Another one I may drop. The adventures of a fairy, a succubus, and a pianist. Nice art, but the stories move very very slowly. He’s currently been doing an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that’s been going on for months.
• PowerPuff Girls Doujinshi — You’d be surprised how many characters from Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon cartoons can be squeezed into a single storyline. Well-drawn, too; the cartoonist does a great job redesigning the characters for an anime look. The second storyline started up a few months back, then stopped after just a few pages.
• PvP — Long-running popular joke strip set at a gaming magazine. Lots of geeky humor. Origin of the “Joss Whedon is my Master” line.
• Questionable Content — Romance, sarcasm, coffee, indie music, and little robots.
• Raymondo Person — Weird humor. Just updated this week, for the first time in months, as I was thinking of dropping it.
• Savage Chickens — Daily single-panel joke strip, starring talking chickens, drawn on Post-It notes.
• Scary Go Round — One of my favorite webcomics. Nice art, and consistently funny dialog. John Allison totally nails the difficult task of giving each daily page a joke so it’s satisfying on its own, while also building long story-lines out of them.
• Skullcano Island — Is that a great name or what? I think this is just whatever the artist feels like putting up, whenever he gets around to it. If you go back to the beginning of the archives there are a bunch of repeating Bizarro-like strips, and then eventually this island-based storyline shows up. I love this drawing style.
• Sordid City Blues — Wide-hipped women compete for the heart of a skinny cartoonist, while a rock musician wrestles with his faith. Currently on hiatus while mister_wolf works on a comic based around St John of the Cross’s “Dark Night of the Soul”.
• Space Pirate Apocalypse — Actually the home for whatever comics Ben Bittner makes. “Cooking with Anne” is about scraping together a meal after a nuclear war, “Pirate” is a pirates comic that petered out after a few strips, and “Apocalypse” is his latest, that hasn’t gotten past the first panel.
• Templar, Arizona — I rave about this one a lot. It’s set in a fictional Arizona town, I think maybe in a slightly alternate history, and shows a shy would-be writer trying to cope with overbearing neighbors and a strange neighborhood full of odd little counter-cultures. Spike’s dialog and art are just fantastic, and she’s got a real gift for both characterization and world-building.
• The Tenth Life of Pishio the Cat — Picked up a minicomic at MoCCA this year that started this story, and I was glad to see it continuing, but it hasn’t gotten very much farther. It’s a fantasy about a cat who’s used up his nine lives, and been given a tenth by the divine (and infernal) powers to perform a mission for them. Unlike most talking-animals strip, this one doesn’t gloss over what carnivore behavior is like; Pishio is an utterly believable vicious little brute.
• Wapsi Square — A slice-of-life comic that’s being swallowed by a supernatural storyline. At this point I’m just reading it for the drawings of sexy girls.
• Wigu — The hilarious adventures of a small boy, his family, a pastel space pony, and an talking potato made of poison.
• Zip and Li’L Bit — Well-drawn story about a boy who swaps places with an upside-down version of himself he finds walking around on his ceiling.

A poem by e e milne, recovered from a Making Light comment thread

why must itself up hundred of a wood
acre stuck some quote lunch unquote to
prove that a moose equals any bear
who was afraid to dare to answer “oh, bother”?