On the internet, you can find self-published comics of any style—whether it be the strips of Sunday newspapers or the full pages of comic books. The internet offers a variety of genres, styles and tastes of comics. For every comic you find, there are 20 more starting. Some update every day, others go months without a single update. The creators are usually into social networking, so getting in contact with them is easy and sometimes rewarding.
Also? The majority of webcomics are free!
Here are some of the webcomics I follow. These are not the only webcomics I follow, nor are they the best webcomics on the internet, and I strongly encourage people to check out The Webcomic List to find some of your own favorites.
Sister Claire
Written and drawn by Elena Barbarich, it is one of my personal favorites. This is an example of comic book style rather than a strip, which is why I didn’t put up a sample page. That’s Barbarich in the picture, and she is one of the coolest people you’ll ever know. She became rather famous for her Lady Gaga and Beyonce Telephone poster.
Here’s the excerpt summary from the website:
Sister Claire is a novice nun, and all she ever wanted was to have a purpose. But when a beautiful blue businesswoman explodes out her toilet and tells her she’s pregnant with the new Messiah, Claire realizes she may be in for more than she bargained for: a kaleidoscopic adventure to protect her miraculous baby (and possibly the universe.)
Girls With Slingshots
A strip comic that’s slice-of-life and just plain awesome, created by Danielle Corsetto. The weekday isn’t complete for me without reading this strip. Here’s the Webcomic List synopsis:
The everyday adventures of Hazel, the cynical writer who hasn’t met a bottle she doesn’t like, Jamie, her volumptous and optimistic best friend, the men in her life, and the women in theirs.
Magical Game Time
This is the perfect example of using animation in your webcomic! Written and drawn by Zac Gorman. It’s a part of a blog, so there is art as well as comics.
Hark! A Vagrant!
A historical humor and satire webcomic. Humorous, witty, and educational! It also includes lovely retakes on literature and pop culture. Written and drawn by the brilliant Kate Beaton.
Surviving the World
This is a photo webcomic, which is according to webcomic purists to not be a real webcomic. Bah, I say! This is one of my favorites. Here’s their About blurb:
Surviving the World is a webcomic focusing on all shades of life, from science to literature, politics to sports, romance to religion, and everything else in between.
It’s written/taught by Dante Shepherd. We have one of his webcomics printed out and posted in the newsroom, this one to be precise:
Goblins
Another wonderfully written comic! It’s set in a fourth-wall-breaking fantasy realm that pulls heavily from Dungeons and Dragons. It’s well written and don’t let the early art fool you—it just gets better and better. It’s also in comic book style, I just put up a strip-sized section because a page of it is HUGE.
Penny Arcade
This is a behemoth amongst webcomics. It is one of the longest running webcomics, since it started in 1998, drawn by Mike Krahulik and written by Jerry Holkins.
Since then, it has become an entity that stretches out of the internet. This comic started a gaming convention, a children’s charity, a scholarship, and even spawned some video games. It’s main deal is video game culture. I didn’t include a sample comic because I couldn’t find a copyright policy on their site. Definitely check it out.
There are tons more of webcomics, but I think this is a good start. I might post more links later one, in my “Oh the Places You’ll Go! (On the Internet)” series.
Any other webcomic suggestions that I didn’t touch on please feel free to comment with a link!
I’d recommend xkcd, Order of the Stick, El Goonish Shive, Dominic Deegan Oracle for Hire, irregular Webcomic!, Hetalia Axis Powers, Scandinavia and the World, and Darths and Droids.
xkcd is a stick-figure webcomic of ‘ROmance, Sarcasm, Math and Language.’ Fun Fact: If you google search ‘Webcomic,’ it’s the very first link to pop up. The first 150 are a little different than the rest. I’d recommend using the ‘random’ button several times to get yourself addicted to it, and then start from the beginning.
Order of the Stick is a Webcomic set in a world governed by the rules of D&D. It started out as a bunch of one-shottish jokes about a group of people raiding a dungeon, but grew to have its own (awesome) storyline.
El Goonish Shive is a weird one. The name is just the spanish word for ‘the’ plus ‘Goonish’ + the author’s last name. They once hired a goon for one panel to put the ‘goonish’ in ‘El Goonish SHive.’ But enough of that-El goonish shive started out as a very random (science project goo came to life and slithered away), humorous webcomic, but grew more serious (though still hilarious) later on. To quote Tvtropes: It’s about a cast of characters and their relationships while in the middle of spellcasting, Shapeshifting (voluntary and otherwise), gender-bending, and blatantly disregarding the laws of physics. Or, alternately, it’s about a cast of characters who occasionally take time off from obsessing over their relationships to cast spells, change shape, and break the laws of physics. The gender-bending is pretty constant, though.
DOminic Deegan Oracle for hire is about Dominic Deegan, an oracle, and how..you know what? I’m quoting tvtropes again Dominic Deegan: Oracle For Hire is a webcomic started by Michael “Mookie” Terracciano in 2002. It follows the life and times of Dominic Deegan, a messianic yet pessimistic seer who travels about with Spark, his feline comic relief, and assorted companions. Originally a lighter strip based on puns and wordplay, it became a famous case of Cerebus Syndrome, arguably starting with the “Visions of Doom” arc, but certainly by “Storm of Souls”. Though some fans have bemoaned subsequent Moral Dissonance and the Flanderization of characters, Dominic Deegan has always maintained some level of its earlier whimsy.
That doesn’t do it full justice either, but it’s pretty interesting.
Irregular Webcomic is the most regularly updated webcomic on this list-it updates once per day.
I’m gonna take the tvtropes summary again: A webcomic done with LEGO figures and roleplaying miniatures, by David Morgan-Mar, an Australian physicist, who also perpetrates Darths & Droids. Full of deliberately bad puns and surprisingly erudite references; one can learn a great deal just by reading the annotations. Covers a number of ongoing motifs and topics, including:• Fantasy: A group of roleplayers guide their party through a quest that tips the hat to Tolkien… before laughing at him.
• Space: A Space Opera gone bad. Very, very bad. Like Fantasy, also intended to be chronicling the events of an RPG, rather than directly telling a story. With one of the same players, no less. They transpose rather neatly.
• Mythbusters: Adam and Jamie test somewhat more unusual myths than normal (this one crosses over with the Death one, below, a LOT).
• Steve and Terry: The adventures of a crocodile hunter (no, not THAT one), his long-suffering wife Terry, Dame Jane Goodall, and Cthulhu.
• Nigerian Finance Minister: The source of all those spam e-mails and his quest to raise money. Funnier than it sounds.
• William Shakespeare: Shakespeare is a Fanfic-writing office worker.
• Cliffhangers: an Indiana Jones spoof. In a few early strips, this is also an RPG campaign.
• Espionage: a spoof of James Bond, this time directly following the plot of the movies and with very few crossovers with other themes. Currently on From Russia with Love.
• Imperial Rome: Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• Scientific Revolution: An excuse for DMM to write heartfelt annotations about Newton, Halley, Pascal, Pasteur, Linnaeus and their contemporaries.
• Martians: The attempts of a group of Martians to take over the world, and their encounters with an Ordinary College Student and an overly zealous MIB.
• Pirates: Exactly What It Says on the Tin
• Supers: A hand-drawn theme featuring the adventures of some superhero RPG characters. Hasn’t been done in a while as DMM doesn’t draw those strips himself and the artist who did could only draw them in his spare time.
• Me: the ongoing adventures of the comic’s author. Who was dead for a long time. Specifically, murdered by himself from the future. He then went on the run from death, but now is on a mission to kill his past self….
• Star Wars and Harry Potter parodies. The former isn’t done much anymore, likely to leave some jokes for Darths & Droids, while the latter is often part of Shakespeare’s fanfics.
The themes Cross Over very, very often in combinations you would not expect.
Death is common in all the themes and has its own theme as well. There is not just one Death, but Deaths for different causes, who get moved around depending on job performance. One, Death Of Being Wrestled To Death By Steve, got wrestled to death by Steve. Twice. The favorite death is Insanely Overpowered Fireballs, who has been demoted and re-promoted several times.
Hetalia axis powers…started off as a webcomic and became so insanely popular that it became a manga and then an anime. It’s about personified countries and all the stuff they get up to. It will make history much more interesting, guaranteed. It does have the potential to be quite offensive, however.
Scandinavia and the World is what happened when a Danish person sawHetalia Axis powers and disagreed with how the Scandinavian countries were portrayed. It’s potentially even more offensive than its source of inspiration, and covers a lot more adult topics. Still worth checking out, if you’re okay with that sort of thing.
Darths and Droids has a very basic premise: Star Wars as we know it does not exist. Instead, its plot is being made up by a GM and some players as they go along in a tabletop RPG (much like, but not quite, Dungeons and Dragons). Created using screencaps from the comic. If you’ve ever watched StarWars or have any experience with tabletop RPG’s like D&D, you’ll probably like this webcomic. If you have experience with both, you will like this webcomic.
These can all be found easily with Google search. have fun.
(Oh man, I forgot Exterminatus Now! Oh well).
Girl Genius. Lavish art and great fun. Sparks, intuitive masters of Mad Science, rule a Europe going through an magical-industrial revolution. (Starts in B&W, gradually transitions to full color.)
Gunnerkrig Court. Another magic/tech mix. Annie attends boarding school at the more or less technological Court, but finds friends across the river in the more or less magical Forest.
These are continuing stories, so start both at their beginnings.
I’ll heartily recommend “Narbonic” and “Skin Horse”, two excellent webcomics by Shaenon Garrity, both dealing with Mad Science.
“Schlock Mercenary” by Howard Tayler if you’re up for some humorous SF space opera.
Scott Meyer’s “Basic Instructions” is… well, it’s itself. Much like “Surviving the World”, except entirely different.
Try http://inkoutbreak.com for finding webcomics that how I read them
Whelp, I can’t just leave a “please share webcomics” request without mentioning http://mspaintadventures.com/
They’re all told in the form of a “choose your own adventure” story. And the scale and scope rapidly ramp up; if you think flashing health bars and rain are using animation in a webcomic perfectly, you obviously haven’t yet read either Problem Sleuth, or Homestuck.
The latter not only includes animated .gif panels, but full blown FLASH pages, complete with sound. The most recent update, the end of act 5, culminated with a 13 minute long cinematic that was two months in the making. I should also probably mention, despite only being 2 years old, its already the single longest webcomic on the entire internet. When you do the math, he posts roughly four pages a day on average.
I would strongly recommend reading through the completed Problem Sleuth to get a feel for the story telling format and to get used to the gradual increase of scope and scale. Detective locked in his office -> Fighting a gigantic demon kingpin with a quill pen that turns into a sword in the imaginary world. Story about a kid standing around in his bedroom waiting for a video game to be delivered -> Multiple universe spanning reality-warping game with a cast of dozens of teenagers with distinct personalities and voices. Something that can honestly be attributed the true literary definition of Epic.
Dude.
DUDE.
I didn’t notice this comment until this morning because it was in my spam box, so I apologize for the late reply.
Due to my tumblr obsession, I’ve known about Homestuck. I just started reading it last week. At first I wasn’t sure what to make of it then the wit got me and now….
God tier, dude, god tier.
We are just back from the Occupy Santa Maria rally. About 30 people showed up and we all had signs. With all the honking we felt like liberators. Occupy Arroyo Grande and Occupy Santa Maria are interested in setting up websites away from “big brother” facebook. If anyone is willing to offer help in setting up a website and knows of a local ISP (an ISP without multi-million dollar bonuses) Please write me at Darrelln99@aol.com
Mz. Sweigart,
May I commend Twisted Kaiju Theater to you?
http://neomonsterisland.com/
It has been put out since the turn of the century by a fanboy from Columbia, South Carolina, using stop action photos of his extensive collection of Japanese monster action figures … and is less off-putting than that sounds. I was concerned at first that the way it mines scatology and blasphemy in search of humor might offend you … but that was before I sought out the origin story on Sister Claire.
By the way, congratulations on your recent bylines in the Trib! Journalism isn’t as reliable a source of employment as it once was, but I am confident that your combination of curiosity, ambition, tech savvy, and talent will keep the wolf from your door. In the immortal words of Sherlock Holmes, I shall follow your career with interest.
Best wishes,
Mole