I absolutely love Cyanide and Happiness and The Perry Bible Fellowship (not religious in any way). I also visit The Whiteboard daily. It’s a paintball themed comic done by a former Doper Doc Nickel. He also reviews other webcomics in brief there as well.
My newest favorite has to be the lolcats themed hobo comic about Meowlin Q. Kitteh and his leaf-obsessed kitten sidekick, Pip. (link description courtesy of Miller).
Which ones are your favorites?
At present I have three that I visit regularly.
And of course no list would be complete without Penny Arcade, which I don’t visit regularly but always enjoy.
The Big Five, for me, are:
Alt-rock relationship comic Questionable Content.
King of Misanthropy, Something Positive.
Victoriana fantasy/sci-fi epic Girl Genius.
The superhero academy at Magellan.
Dungeons and Dragons parody Order of the Stick.
There are more (a lot more) but those are the five I read everyday, or at least, as close to everyday as their update schedules allow.
Drunken Debauchery + Pitworthy rants
D&D jokes
Indie Rock
xkcd: uncategorizable
Kinda like xkcd, but more conventional - read the annotations too
Well, shoot. Miller ninja’d two of mine
Partially Clips and PBF. Also Questionable Content.
Penny Arcade the most successfull, the most charitable (see Child’s Play), and imo, the best. The news post editorials and the rare podcasts are also excellent. Oh, and I’ll be going to their official convention (PAX-Penny Arcade eXpo) for the second time this year.
Questionable Content Great long-term story and character development, while also maintaining laugh out loud humor in nearly every strip.
8-Bit Theater Yeah, it’s a sprite comic, and the sprite editing isn’t very impressive. Yet the composition of the comics is quite artistic and well-thought out. Ultimately though, Brian C.'s a phenomenal writer, with a real talent for running gags and satire.
Misfile pretty funny, good relationships. A long-form manga style comic with gender-bending themes. I have no interest in cars, yet the heavy auto-racing theme has gotten me to learn quite a few things about the subject. Good all-around comic.
You’ll notice that I tend to veer towards niche-interest comics, and have a heavy bias for series that regularly update and maintain a consistent level of quality. One of my favorite lines from Penny Arcade’s Gabe was in a news post: “I spent the other day catching up on a bunch of other web comics, and I’ve realized that I don’t complain about making comics nearly enough.” (paraphrased)
Honorable Mentions: Dominic Deegan; If you like the new Doctor Who, you’ll probably like this. It’s a fantasy series, but think Harry Potter, rather than LotR. Lots of wordplay and puns. Author takes time off pretty often, and the story-arc style means occasionally waiting for it to “get good again.”
Errant Story; incredibly imaginative deep fantasy series. Think LotR+anime+fantasy rpgs+post-modern cynical sense of humor. Amazing artwork. Only problem is the unreliable updating. Yeah, the artist and his gf (fiancee?) have had a tough year, but when your new business plan f’s up and you have to beg your fans for a big donation drive to keep doing the comic, you don’t reward them by missing all 3 updates for two weeks in a row.
GU Comics; gamer humor single-panel gag-a-day strip. Manages to maintain the funny for something like 8 or 9 years, iirc. Curious mix of dedicated MMO-player jokes and very casual gamer humor. Occasional jokes about the industry or non-gamer stuff. Whether you’ll like the site is heavily dependent on your appreciation for Woody Hearn’s authorial voice. But, like any true gag-a-day, every now and then it just isn’t that great. Bonus points for being ultra-consistent about updating. As an aside, it’s got a good forum, heavily moderated, but kind of small.
Another Girl Genius fan here.
Goblins; a webcomic mostly from the viewpoint of a goblin band. Lots of D & D jokes, but it often goes into serious and/or bloody territory.
Looking For Group, a ( I think ) mostly WoW inspired comic. Very funny, and features Richard the Warlock, one of the most humerously over-the-top evil characters around.
Schlock Mercenary, mercenaries in spaaaaace ! What I took my username from.
8-bit Theatre, featuring the Light Warriors, who are incredibly incompetent, really nasty, and incredibly powerful.
Zebra Girl, about a girl turned demon.
Vexxarr, about really incompetent alien invaders.
“You people are psychopaths!”
“It’s funny 'cause it’s true.”
That character is pretty much the only reason I read that strip.
Here’re a few of the comics I regularly read, and would recommend… for safety’s sake, however, please assume that all of them contain mature content to some degree. VG Cats, Dueling Analogs, and Flipside are the main offenders that come to my mind, but I can’t honestly vouch for the safety of any others. So please be so advised. ^^
The early art is pretty tough to stomach, but Schlock Mercenary usually ranks among my top five; it’s wittty, the author’s science-y footnotes help add atmosphere, and most importantly the writing quality is very, very consistent. There’s a link on the first page recommending that you begin with a later arc, but I’d only advise skipping ahead if you need to assure yourself that the art gets better.
A Miracle of Science was a really, really terrific comic. It was about mad scientists and the special investigators who go after them. The writing, story, and art were all of strictly average to above-average quality, but the creators seemed to enjoy the project, and that really shone through.They also seemed to have had most of the story written before they began, which gave it a very consistent feel. (It has since ended, since the writers basically wanted it to tell one complete story.)
Casey and Andy is, in the words of the author, a comic about mad scientist roommates who periodically die. It’s whole-hearted, nerdy fun, and when it’s good it’s really, really good. There are a few cold spots, and when it ended the author had (at his own admission) lost a lot of enthusiasm… but in general, it’s a great read.
Striptease is about comic artists and romance… it’s fluff, but amusing fluff.
Shortpacked! is a somewhat random satire about a toystore and its eccentric employees. The humor is of variable quality and often leans towards the bizarre, but it’s pretty amusing.
For the first few years of its run Sluggy Freelance was hilarious, engaging, and gripping. It’s since lost a lot of its steam, but I still like it enough to tune in regularly.
I’m not sure exactly what Gunnerkrigg Court is about, but I like it. It’s basically Wednesday Adams’ evil twin, an extremely cheerful (if somewhat sedate) young lady, and her adventures at a Hogwarts-type school which takes Gaimanesque fantasy and infuses it with steampunk trimmings and the occasionally hint of rock & roll.
The creators of the relatively recent Marry Me don’t seem to know where they’re going; they seem to be writing the comic exclusively for the purpose of getting it turned into a romance movie, and some of the obvious plotlines and transparent characters that grow out of that harm the overall product, but in general it’s well-written, well-drawn, and fun to read.
I don’t care for Templar, Arizona at all, but I know a lot of people who enjoy it and I’ll happily admit that the art and writing are both worthy of praise.
Crimson Dark is a rendered comic about pirates in space. Enough said.
Misfile is about a pothead angel, a street racer, and a introverted academic who are stuck with each other after the angel twists reality in a rather unfortunate manner.
VG Cats is a strange, often irreverant, always hilarious comic about video games.
Dueling Analogs is another videogame comic in the style of VG Cats, which is hilarious enough to easily warrant mention.
Speaking of knockoffs, Ctrl+Alt+Del seems a lot like a Penny Arcade clone, but it’s still pretty funny.
Antihero For Hire is about a sulky, working-class hero-for-hire and his antics stopping criminals and exploring his traumatic past. It’s angsty, but in a tongue-in-cheek way that gives the story a keen mix of comedy and (occasional) drama.
Finally comes Flipside. I was split over whether or not to include it, because I just can’t figure it out; in the very beginning it’s quite engrossing, but the bipolar quality of the plot and the occasional typo keep me wondering. It runs the gamute between Amusing Fluff good and Author Desperately Needs A Girlfriend bad, but in general it’s worth reading. Please be warned, however: the content is very decidedly mature, and occasionally disturbing; you can expect nudity, gratuitous violence, sexuality, and a few icky sections that I personally found highly unnecessary. (I would also recommend that you finish Chapter 2, and then go back and reading the prequel, Chapter 0 . It isn’t nearly as polished or well-drawn as what comes after Chapter 1, but it gives a fair amount of backstory.)
I discovered xkcd since the last time I posted to one of these threads. I never thought I could like a strip consisting of a bunch of stick figures, but the writing is more than enough to compensate. Smart, geeky, funny, and whimsical.
There’s a webcomic that I stumbled across about some archituctural interns. It was grand, but I’ve yet to find it again.
I like Married to The Sea.
Besides the ones mentioned already (Perry Bible Fellowship, Questionable Content, and Partially Clips) and Get Fuzzy, which is a paper strip I read online , the only webcomics I read are Dinosaur Comics, Sinfest, and Wondermark
This is my favorite Wondermark comic, I can’t think of any individually spectacular Sinfest comics offhand, and I have too many Dinosaur Comics favorites to list. Anything involving Shakespeare is golden, though.
The ones I like that have already been mentioned include Something Positive, Questionable Content, Schlock Mercenary (which has never missed a day or had guest strips AFAICT. Do you know how rare that is in a webcomic, never mind a 7-day-a-week webcomic? That guy is my favourite Mormon, even over Marie Osmond!), Sinfest, Sluggy, xkcd, Girl Genius, OOTS, Goblins and Dinosaur Comics.
Ones I like that I haven’t seen mentioned:
Scary-go-round - English craziness
Evil IncSuperheroes and villains
Starslip Crisis Space comedy - set on a flying museum.
Two Lumps Cats!
Digger Wombats! Hyenas! Ganesh! Not your regular furry comic, and the artwork is superb.
Penny & Aggie Teen angst - but so well done.
Sadly missed: Ghastly’s Ghastly Comic and Sexy Losers.
