What are your favorite webcomics?

What webcomics do you love? Webcomics are defined as any comic that was born on the Internet (including comics like Doctor Fun, which was born on Usenet before Web access was at all common) regardless of what forms it later took (including comics like User Friendly, which has entered printed book form).

My list:
[ul]
[li]xkcd: Very geeky, very literate, and not afraid to make jokes even the majority of its core readership will not get. Let your mouse linger on each image: In most browsers, the alt text will pop up with a comment all its own.[/li][li]Questionable Content: A soaper that has enough gags it doesn’t feel like a soaper, a gag-a-day that has enough continuity to reward long-term readership. It’s the only soaper I follow.[/li][li]Medium Large: Surreal dark comedy, written by one of the authors of the long-running “Mary Worth” newspaper comic. Infrequently updated, but there are full archives.[/li][li]Able and Baker: Slightly geeky, very punny. Pure gag-a-day, except for when it isn’t. A newspaper-style strip better than the vast majority of real newspaper strips these days.[/li][/ul]

Honorable mention goes to The Parking Lot is Full, which is dead and in Hell with all of its friends. Very dark, very bizarre, and most certainly not for everyone.

Two Lumps - A strip about two Russian Blue cats.

That’s pretty much it, really.

I’d say my favorites are 8-Bit Theater, A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible, Alien Loves Predator, Dominic Deegan, Dr. McNinja, Hellbound, Orneryboy, Overcompensating, Partially Clips, Questionable Content, Rob and Elliot, Sam and Fuzzy, Scary Go Round, and White Ninja Comics. You should see my full list…

Regular basis:

Sluggy Freelance - I’ll ignore it for a week or a month then get a buncha pun-laden goofy goodness in a single sitting.

Schlock Mercenary - I was just introduced to this in Miller’s recent webcomic thread. I’m up to January 2001. The art is crap, and the writing isn’t much better, but I understand that both improve over time. What I really dig are the author’s side notes about physics and whatnot.

Not so regular:

PvP - I actually haven’t read this for about a year. It gets slow at times, but then it makes me bust a gut.

Penny Arcade - a lot of the game-specific humor escapes me, but the dialogue is usually pretty clever.

Dr. McNinja - I can’t begin to describe it. It’s a general practice M.D., who’s a ninja. He fights Ronald McDonald at one point.

Legostar Galactica - mashup of Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars, Star Trek, and other sci-fi goodness, using Legos.

Irregular Webcomic - more genre mashup using Legos, with emphasis on, jeez, everything - Cthulhu, Crocodile Hunter, Harry Potter, ninjas, Mythbusters, Shakespeare, etc.

Honorable mention: Gone With the Blast Wave, which sports some beautiful art but very sporadic updates. The website seems to be gone now, though. :frowning:

Honorable mention: Where the Buffalo Roam - one of the oldest webcomics, now defunct. It seems to have a shrine at Where the Buffalo Roam | The Internet's First Comic Strip | Today's Comic Strip

toothpaste for dinner - kind of “far side”-ish for lack of defined characters and occasional duds

married to the sea - by the same guy with his wife. basically gives funny captions to old drawings. frequently hilarious (at least to me!)

Player versus Player: started with mostly video game jokes, but also focuses a lot on character development (and some running jokes). here
User Friendly: lots of Linux and Windows jokes, some plot. here
Penny Arcade: hard to summarize. Some violence and cursing, not much plot. her
Sinfest: interaction between various people, the Devil, and God. Must be experienced. here
I Drew This: liberal political cartoon. ghere
Ozy and Millie: same author as above, anthropomorphic animals; some plot, some gags, some philosophy. her
Filibuster Cartoons: Canadian author, political cartoon with a liberal bent. Many cartoons are about Canada, but many are also US-related. here
Filthy Lies: very amusing, mostly plot (although the author is currently on moving hiatus); centers on roommates Damian, an atheist Jew, and Joel, a gay closeted Republican. Plus Beefsteak, a re-animated…well, figure it out. here
Multiplex: comic set in a movie theater. Thread about it recently. here
Something Positive: words fail me, plus I’m tired. Check it out.
Real Life Comic: the creator makes occasional in-strip remarks, which the characters are aware of, and in the past have had close relationships with him. here
Ctrl-alt-del: I just started it recently; it’s a bit of a mix of User Friendly/PvP and Penny Arcade, but not of masterful quality. Still worth a read.
VG Cats: mostly anthropomorphic cats and video game jokes, though it’s really all over the place. Updating sporadically lately. here.
Questionable Content and xkcd have been mentioned already, and with that I bid you good night.

Help Desk.

The Devil’s Panties.

Love 'em both.

~Tasha

I knew this would attract some new reading material for me. I have heard of some of them, and I especially like Partially Clips, toothpaste for dinner (which has become a book sold in Barnes & Noble, believe it or not), and Penny Arcade (I’m not a gamer, I’m a programmer and Internet nerd, but I do like gamer humor. I also watch X-Play.). Most of the others are completely new.

Have you been reading Erfworld? It’s one of Rob Balder’s side projects, and while it’s a little early to call it a favorite, it has potential.

Off! Off, I say, to Cafe Society!

My favorites right now are:
College Roomies From Hell
Shortpacked!
and
Dinosaur Comics.

Sally Forth, not Mary Worth. Mary Worth is the old meddling biddy. Sally Forth is the humor-so-understated-you’d-better-not-blink businesswoman married to the feckless manchild.

I have to say Sluggy Freelance because it is and I would lose my unpaid job there if I didn’t say it was my favorite. :wink:
I also like Queen of Wands and Something Positive but after over a year of using a crappy computer and now having a better computer and a crappy connection I got out of the habit of checking other webcomics.

Some good ones have been mentioned so far, but I have to post a link to my favorite, Dresden Codak. It’s an incredibly well drawn comic (which is why it only comes out once or twice a month), somewhat similar in tone to “A Lesson is Learned…”. There’s no real overarching plot so it’s hard to say what it’s about, but it includes science, philosophy, and psychology. Tiny Carl Jung is a recurring character. There are jokes about Heisenberg and Einstein-Rosen bridges, but it somehow manages to be much more than just a collection of physics gags. To me, it is the finest expression of how webcomics overcome the barriers in traditional syndication to make something truly unique and amazing.

For a more traditional, plot based comic, you can also check out Gunnerkrigg Court. It’s set in a mysterious English boarding school with supernatural / fantasy / sci fi elements. What keeps me reading are the intriguing, well conceived characters (particularly the female protagonist).

It should be noted that Queen of Wands has been over for about a year now, though that shouldn’t stop folks from checking out the archives. Kestrel for QoW now appears intermittently in Something Positive.

Kestrel from QoW…

I love Penny Arcade. The dialogue is fantastic.
I’m also a fan of the usually bizarre Name Removed.

Evil Inc. (LINK)
Evil Inc is the charming tale of a major corporation run by and for Supervillains.

It is a barrel of laughs, has multiple braided sub-polts running through it, & anybody who works with corporate suits or loves comics will get every gag.

It is very, very good. I give it 4 1/2 Stars. It would be 5 stars, but it’s a B&W strip.

Just trying to help out…

We did this thread just a few weeks ago

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=398176&highlight=comics

And here are some others

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=397974&highlight=comics

And now, a C&P of my post from the last thread on this topic:

If you’re at all D&D-style geeky, it doesn’t get any better than The Order of the Stick: Cast List (good starting point) and Strip #1.

The equally geeky, but in more of a computer gaming way, is PvP. Fricking hillarious. New Reader Page.

Sluggy Freelance is probably the best webcomic I’ve ever found, but it take some dedication. The storylines often meander off path for a few months before getting you to where they were going. Still, if you’ve got a few months to catch up, it’s definitely worth it. New Reader Guide.