Comics have been my staple bedtime reading with the Small(-ish) Boy for a couple of years now. Yes, he does read Real Books ™ on occasion, but not if I push him too hard. We have large amounts of Asterix, Tintin, Calvin and Hobbes, Farside and (sigh) WAY too much fsckin Garfield (ie >1), but the existence of an entire Internet’s worth of extra comic material has expanded our range considerably. However, since we tend to do half-hour chunks at a time, we run through things quite quickly.
Here’s what we’ve enjoyably sucked the marrow out of so far:
*
Sluggy Freelance (up till the site redesign, at which point I was very ready to move on. I’m so old I remember when Sluggy was good!)
Schlock Mercenary
Freefall
Lunar Baboon
Hyperbole and a Half (cherrypicked childhood anecdotes)
Pocket Princesses (I have no clue why he liked this. It’s about princesses! It was recommended by his sister! And yet…)
Lunacy*
Here’s what’s good in a comic:
Science
Cats
Whimsy
Weirdness
Not pointless enough to make my eyeballs bleed (I am NOT admitting to him that there’s fifty centuries of Garfield out there)
Not too much adult content (lunarbaboon was pushing it, but he did have the whimsy down pat…)
Got some suggestions? Hit me with 'em!
I kinda like Gunnerkrigg Court. Science fiction meets urban fantasy meets Harry Potterish academy meets other stuff. Central character is a teen( maybe starts as tween )girl just so you know. Artwork improves over the years.
Girl Genius is a personal fave. It’s got (mad) science, whimsy, weirdness in spades, an amazing long-form plot, and a very all-ages-appropriate approach to sex and nudity. I’ve been a fan of the creator since he was adapting Robert Aspirin’s Myth-Adventures books into comic form in the '80s, and this comic has a similar sensibility. It’s also where I got my avatar.
The Order of the Stick is great. Yes, the artwork looks simplistic and the strip starts out as just a joke-a-day format (and the jokes on based on a now defunct version of Dungeons & Dragons). But it grew far beyond its origins and now it’s a first-rate fantasy epic (albeit one still told with stick figures).
I read PvP for years; unless Scott’s changed the nature of the strip since I stopped reading it, it had a fair amount of adult-ish content, and might not be an ideal choice for the OP.
The only three I’ve ever reliably read are XKCD for the nerd factor, Axe Cop for the weirdness, and Cyanide and Happiness for the truly sick humor that makes me think they read my mind.
Pretty sure the Smallish Boy will love them. There will be duplicates, as the artist’s skill set evolved, and she went into syndication recently and began reusing old strips.
Thanks for all the great suggestions guys. I showed the boy a few of the options tonight, and he’s chosen Order of the Stick (I can’t believe I couldn’t think of that on my own! when there’s an ongoing thread here about it and everything!) for the first offering, with Breaking Cat News queued up after it (and this thread bookmarked for later reference…)
I gave up on Sluggy Freelance at the redesign too; the new design kept crashing my browser and frankly the ending of the story was so desperately overdue that I just gave up hope of it ever happening.
OotS, Girl Genius and Erfworldare my go-to webcomics; Erfworld is on an intermittent update schedule at the moment as Rob Balder’s wife is going through some rather serious cancer treatment.
Definitely worth a read, but it depends on how small the boy is. Likewise The Last Halloween may appeal to children with a ghoulish sense of humor - the protagonist is a ten-year-old girl in a world suddenly overrun by monsters - but children younger than 9 or 10 may find some of the content too violent and scary. (Also it updates like one comic every two months, but the entire first book is there to read.)
The whole storyline is rather adult in a sense beyond the usual (i.e. “ooo, bOObies!”) usage, what with the whole discordant combination of a superficially cutesy world grinding through an endless series of brutal wars.
Skin Horse (http://skin-horse.com/) has science, whimsy, weirdness, and an adorable talking dog; it’s the story of a ‘black ops social services’ government department that tries to help non-human sapients in need. Fans of Girl Genius will probably like it, although it does hew closer to the gag-a-day format.
The previous comic by the same artist, the now-complete Narbonic (http://narbonic.com/), is about a mad scientist and her hapless tech guy. Early art style is a little weird, but very much worth the effort. (My username is a Narbonic reference.)
Another now-completed classic, good for kids: Ozy and Millie (https://ozyandmillie.org/). The adventures of two philsophical young foxes. The artist now does a syndicated strip, ‘Phoebe and her Unicorn’, which has the same kind of humour.
