So I’ve recently gone through Girl Genius and Order Of The Stick, and loved it! Any advice for other good webcomics out there?
Questionable Content is very good.
http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1215#
If you have any patience at all for structured absurdity, give Dr. McNinja a try. He’s a doctor, he’s a ninja, and he’s Irish. It only gets weirder from there.
Not the same kind of thing exactly (i.e, not the kind of webcoming with an ongoing story arc) but xkcd can not not be mentioned in a thread recommending webcomics.
-FrL-
Sam and Fuzzy, one of the best webcomics out there. It started out as a gag-a-day comic, but has developed one of the tightest story arcs I’ve ever seen while retaining all of the humor. This one really deserves your attention.
Shake Girl. I started this thread on it, and it received a favorable response.
I’ll toss out a recommendation for Sluggy Freelance. The caveat is that the quality has been uneven in the past several years. It’s excellent for the first 7 years worth of comics, though. It starts out as a joke-a-day kind of comic, and gradually gets more serious and develops longer storylines.
If you like Questionable Content(and I second the recommendation), you’ll probably also like Queen of Wands(I’ll track down a link tonight).
Queen of Wands. That link goes to the last strip in the series, but the main character, Kestrel, migrated over to RK Milholland’s Something Positive, which is one of the best webcomics out there. Meanwhile, QoW’s creator Aerie has started a sequel strip, Punch and Pie.
Oh, and thirded on Questionable Content.
My current favorite comic is Skin Horse, which is a spin-off from Shaenon Garrity’s first webcomic, Narbonic. Narbonic is about a mad scientist who creates unholy abominations and releases them on the general public. You know, for fun. Skin Horse is about the government agency formed to make sure said unholy abominations’ legal rights are respected. Both are fantastic, although Narbonic’s art was pretty amateurish for the first couple years, so Skin Horse might be a better place to start. The two strips occur in the same “world,” but there’s no direct cross-over of events or characters between the two strips, so you won’t miss anything by starting with the later strip.
Also notable is Ursula Vernon’s *Digger*, about a practical minded wombat who becomes embroiled in the intrigues of a dead god. It sounds goofier than it really is. Digger draws heavily from a wide variety of myths and legends, and Vernon has a deft hand at combining them in unexpected ways that make perfect sense. Plus, it has a field of vampiric squash.
If you like Order of the Stick, you’ll probably like DM of the Rings (completed) and its Star Wars cousin, Darths & Droids (ongoing).
I also recommend Nodwick , The Wotch , and of course PVP . For not-quite-so-geeky stuff, I like Unshelved , Out There , Punch an’ Pie (heir to the much-missed Queen of Wands) , Lulu Eightball , and PartiallyClips . And others.
Confession: I spend probably an hour each morning catching up on my webcomics.
It got much easier for me when I discovered Firefox’s ‘Open in Tabs’ feature. I created 7 folders, one for each day of the week. Monday has a list of comics that all update on Monday, for example. Whatever day it is, I go to that folder, hit Open in Tabs, and every webcomic opens at once. Keeps things organized and efficient.
Course, if your computer is old, that may not be such a hot idea. Still, it helps.
Some of the ones I read that haven’t been mentioned so far:
Breakfast of the Gods
Clockwork Game
Dork Tower
Erfworld
Full Frontal Nerdity
Geist Panik
Wonderella
Thanks for Dr. McNinja! Without that recommendation I wouldn’t now know there’s something called “Maple syrup urine disease!” For real!
The first thing I do every morning is check out 3 webcomics: xkcd (as has been mentioned), Misfile, and Cyanide and Happiness.
C & H is profane, irreverent, and surreal as hell - I love it. Look through a few (the randomizer is a good way to get a feel for the comic) and see if you like it. Something of note: there are four different writers, but I hardly ever notice because the various brands of humor blend together so well.
Misfile is a more serious comic with a story arc. Basically, it involves a pothead angel, a boy-turned-girl, and a 17-year-old girl who lost two years of her life (all this was caused by said pothead angel). The characters are rounded and I think it’d be hard not to care about them and the various predicaments they get into. Another fantastic feature is the artwork. I’ve been very impressed with the consistent quality. Very clear and detailed, realistic but not creepily so. Give it a look.
Schlock Mercenary, which I take my username from. A sci fi series about, yes, mercenaries. Lots of humor, very quotable, lots of cool technology. And the art does improve.
Looking For Group, a humorous fantasy comic.
8 Bit Theatre, another funny fantasy comic.
A Miracle of Science; completed sci-fi comic. A world infested with Mad Scientists, who have some similarities to GG’s Sparks. Also, one of the very few benevolent group minds in fiction. It starts out B&W but goes to color.
Goblins, a D & D based comic. Starts out funny, but gets more serious as time goes on.
Scary Go Round --an odd thing from a Brit’s subconscious. but very amusing.
Least I Could Do --about sex, grownups, insanity. Probably SFW.
Devil’s Panties –not Satanic Porn. Honestly. SFW.
Crossworlds --a fantasy comic, sans Elves/Dwarves/Orcs.
Between LICD and LFG, Sohmer is my goddamn hero. There are few people I actually want to be like, and he’s one of them.
LICD straddles the line between SFW and NSFW while wearing a cowboy hat, assless chaps, and nothing else. I’d err on the side of caution. There’s no actual nudity or swearing, but the situations are very very adult. It is a funny, funny comic though.
Well all my daily reads but one have been mentioned.
So…read Anders Loves Maria.
Not funny really at all, but great.
Wait a second, no one mentioned S*P yet? Ok read that too. Twisted but AWESOME!
The other ones I check daily (or so) are:
Questionable Content
xkcd
Skin Horse
Schock Mercenary
(Girl Genius and OOTS, but ignore those since you know them)
Dr. McNinja (NOW IN COLOR!)
Penny and Aggie (I am a sucker for teen angst)
and
Octopus Pie
These have all been mentioned, so consider these seconds.
And look up Narbonic like Miller suggested. Mad Science!
I keep meaning to read the archives for
The Phoenix Requiem
Templar, Arizona
andDicebox
but haven’t gotten around to them. So I can only say I hear they are good, but I don’t actually KNOW that they are good.
I used to also read Magellan and Sluggy Freelance, but they lost my interest a while back.
Beat ya to it, NAF. But it’s good enough it deserves to be linked twice. Heck, three times, even. It’s one of the few long-running comics out there whose first comic is still a completly accurate descriptor of what the current comic is like.