Besides the aforementioned Wondermark, I have a whole bunch more webcomics accounting for roughly a quarter of the feeds I follow with Google Reader. I started reading them over a decade ago (oh and there go my old knees, again, get off my lawn you kids) when a friend in high school (hi, Kevin!) showed me Penny Arcade. I’m not sure when exactly I picked it up (I’m sure it wasn’t with the first one) but it would have been sometime in early 1999 and I have been a fan ever since. It is a very selectively targeted comic strip and you probably won’t find it funny if you don’t play games or at least know somebody who does. There are a few strips that are funny to a broader cross section of humanity. This one, for example, is funny to anybody who has ever tried to install any Windows product on anything, ever:
Please be aware, most of the strips have cussing, violence and World of Warcraft references. If these things offend you, read something different!
Via people that I ‘met’ through the Penny Arcade discussion forum, my eyes were opened to a vast world of comics that will almost certainly never appear in any paper anywhere near me. I mentioned Wondermark a while ago alongside Dinosaur Comics and Hark! A Vagrant, the creators of which I met at a comics convention in Toronto. Here are some more examples of various comics that I like to read:
Unshelved is all about things that happen in and around a library. This sounds very dull and might be, if you hate learning. It is updated just about every week day. I identify with the protagonist (and sometime anti-hero) Dewey, “the determinedly ironic young adult librarian who would rather read comic books or play games than work the reference desk, or indeed do any kind of work at all.” (from the primer).
I recently started reading Nedroid. It is the adventures of Reginald the bird and his best friend, Beartato. Sometimes it is the reverse! It is updated very infrequently but the artist updates his LiveJournal a bit more often and with a lot of additional content to the comic.
Anthony who draws Nedroid is also the current colourist for Dr. McNinja. Since the good doctor’s comics are all presented at episodic stories, it wouldn’t do much good to link just one image (though some of the individual comics are pretty funny). I had seen them posted around a couple places but didn’t really think it was funny until I read a couple whole storylines. They are about a doctor who is also a ninja. He’s sort of a ninja by heritage but has chosen to be a doctor (against his family’s wishes). Here is the most recent story arc’s beginning. The writing is pretty funny and the visuals often border on the amazing.
Here is a fun thing to know about a lot of webcomics (and about all the doodles I post): Very often there will be an additional joke or some sort of remark concealed in the picture’s alternate text. To read it, hover your mouse pointer over the picture for a little while without moving it too much. Most of the links I post have some kind of alternate text as well. Dinosaur Comics, Dr. McNinja, Wondermark and the most recent Nedroid comics have this (as well as almost all of Nedroid’s Livejournal drawings).
in the pouring rain (very strange)
