Webcomics I'm Reading, Part 2: The Pandemic Binges
As I mentioned in the my prior post, I've been binge reading a lot of different webcomics during the pandemic. This is either the main reaction to my loss of focus for reading, or perhaps the cause, who can say.
The comics I've read have been a mix of things that I've been meaning to read for a while. Others were linked from comics I already read, and others were ones I stumbled across on the way through the archives of the other web comics.
A note on that last category: many of the comics I read have blog entries with each strip. It is utterly staggering how many of the links they reference are now dead. Whether it's links to recommended webcomics, mainstream news sources, videos, random internet errata or something else altogether, a really large percentage of the links I thought were interesting enough to click were dead. In some cases, dead enough that squatters offered to sell me the domain, and in other cases just dead enough to 404 that specific page. This was obviously true more often for older links, but even items from a few years ago were often gone for good. There's nothing inherently wrong about this, of course. If you go back in time far enough most of the equivalent printed materials start to disappear, not to mention old television and movies. It's just less immediate of a loss, because I'm not reading old magazine columns and thinking "oh, I should go look up this article they reference." It illustrates the value of projects like the The Wayback Machine, or archivists in general, and it makes me glad that the vast majority of the links I've posted in this journal over the years have been to relatively stable websites like Wikipedia.
Anyway, on with the comics. These are in no particular order. If there's no wikipedia link, it doesn't have an article.
1. Dinosaur Comics has been around forever, and while I've read strips here and there and enjoyed them, I've never plowed through the backlog. Of course, in this case said backlog is 3600+ strips and counting, and as a (mostly) gag a day comic it's not something that's fun to sit and read 300 of them at a time, especially give that 99% of them use the exact same art. However, reading 5-10 a day is quite workable and worthwhile since it's very funny most of the time. I expect I'll keep knocking through them for a while yet. The links here are often sources of new comics to try, although as a strip going back 15+ years they are also one of the most frequent sources of dead link frustration. The author seems to be someone who ties the webcomics world together as he pops up everywhere.
2. Hark a Vagrant was recommended to me frequently throughout the years. I finally got around to it and knocked through the 400+ strips of the now defunct comic early in the pandemic. I understand why people like it. If I had read it back when it was new and not after I'd seen various spins on it, I'd probably have been pretty enthusiastic about it myself. It got a lot of press and awards for a comic that was comparatively rarely updated.
3. Wondermark was another oft-recommended comic. It's not quite defunct as of this writing, but is certainly updated less frequently than it was. It essentially tries to look like circa 1800s illustrations, mostly successfully, with a sardonic humor that appeals to me greatly. I've bookmarked it to check every few months for updates. It was even in The Onion back in the day, apparently.
4. Thinkin' Lincoln was not a good comic. To be perfectly frank, it's often terrible. For some reason, the floating heads of various presidents and historical figures was the right kind of terrible for my taste so I happily read the 900+ comics in its archive as well as the authors too shortlived successor comics Creep House and Karate Homework.
5. Daisy Owl was a short lived comic I had never heard about featuring two kids who were adopted by an Owl. The Owl's best friend, a bear, hangs out a lot. It's a little weird and very sweet.
6. Buttercup Festival is very surreal, but hits often enough that I was not surprised to learn that it's featured in some alternative newspapers. I'm still slowly working my way through the archives (I'm still on the second iteration of the strip) because it's weird enough that reading it straight through would miss the point, but I'm enjoying it.
7. Gunnerkrigg Court is excellent. The archive had 2400+ comics in it when I started and I cranked through it in a few weeks. It tells about the adventures of Antimony as a student at the titular boarding school at the intersection of magic and science, with a rich cohesive universe and plenty of interesting characters. It does occasionally rely a little too much on hand wavium technology or magic that can do apparently anything, but most the relationships are the real driving point. The chapters range from four pages to eighty pages and are beautifully drawn in a variety of styles, much like Sandman. I'll keep reading this every time a chapter completes, and if all the books weren't sold out right now I'd likely have bought some.
8. Sheldon is the original comic project by Dave Kellett of Drive. I think he may have originally started it as an attempt to get syndicated, as its early stories of a boy computer genius billionaire, his grandfather, his best friend and his talking duck sticks to the three panel format. It's mostly funny enough to keep reading, although I'm barely 1/4 of the way through the 20 year archive.
9. A long time ago I used to read a scifi comic called Fans, so when I ran across a link for a high school comic called Penny & Aggie involving the same author I checked it out. I stalled out around 2005 and am not sure that I'll continue through the rest of the archive, let alone the spin-off comics, but that's mostly because my tolerance for high school hijinks, even really well done high school hijinks, ended in high school. The author has a bunch of other stuff too.
10. I have now read more Wonder Woman pastiche in the form of The Non-Adventures of Wonderella than I have actual Wonder Woman. The strip was mostly very cynical about the lives of superheroes, and by the end of the archive I was ready to be done with it.
11. If you can't draw and don't want to use the same comic graphics over and over like Dinosaur Comics, there's always the "take pictures of household objects as a comic" approach used by Terror Island. This short comic (just over 300 strips) is about the the adventures of two roommates who are fighting over who is going to go grocery shopping. I'm about half way through and enjoying it.
12. Jonny Crossbones is a Tintin style adventure comic featuring a young mechanic who inexplicably dresses like a skeleton. I got a lot of Tintin books from the library as a kid, and this was a nice throwback. The only problem is that as it neared the end of the final chapter, I caught up with the end of the archive and there hasn't been an update since! That's fair, since the author is doing it as a labor of love, but still.
13. A Lesson is Learned But the Damage is Irreversible is a very short (forty strips!) comic that got outsized attention when it was running. It's pretty and weird and even notable.
14. Bad Machine is a school boy mystery comic from John Allison, whose comics Bobbins and Scary Go Round I read back in the early 2000s. It seems like our world at first, but then things like ghosts and wendigos turn up and nobody bats an eye. I read the first two stories and have it bookmarked to return.
15. Subnormality is a comic I've checked in on occasionally for years. I took the opportunity to read the entire archive. There actually aren't that many strips in it, but the artist really stretches the bounds of what is feasible in a two dimensional electronic comic. You often have to scroll in all directions, and the amount of dialog in any one strip often rivals entire chapters of books. Of course, the strips are also quite capable of being very minimalist, with just a few panels. Usually wordy, sometimes quite profound, Subnormality claims it will be updated very occasionally. I hope this is true, but with only one update in the last couple of years, I'm not hopeful.
16. Moe follows a lovable bozo through weird hijinks, often involving his love life, which is cursed. Ended abruptly in 2012, with one final strip in 2014. Members of the fanbase continue to write haiku in the comments of the last comic posted.
17. We the Robots was a weird little comic making fun of daily suburban life using robots. Fun, with a short enough archive that I didn't get bored before it ended.
I'm sure I've read some other comics this year, but those are the ones that I remember off hand. In my next post I'll mention some defunct comics I've read in the past.
EDIT 12/30: Thought of two I forgot, while walking the dog of all things, so added them.
The comics I've read have been a mix of things that I've been meaning to read for a while. Others were linked from comics I already read, and others were ones I stumbled across on the way through the archives of the other web comics.
A note on that last category: many of the comics I read have blog entries with each strip. It is utterly staggering how many of the links they reference are now dead. Whether it's links to recommended webcomics, mainstream news sources, videos, random internet errata or something else altogether, a really large percentage of the links I thought were interesting enough to click were dead. In some cases, dead enough that squatters offered to sell me the domain, and in other cases just dead enough to 404 that specific page. This was obviously true more often for older links, but even items from a few years ago were often gone for good. There's nothing inherently wrong about this, of course. If you go back in time far enough most of the equivalent printed materials start to disappear, not to mention old television and movies. It's just less immediate of a loss, because I'm not reading old magazine columns and thinking "oh, I should go look up this article they reference." It illustrates the value of projects like the The Wayback Machine, or archivists in general, and it makes me glad that the vast majority of the links I've posted in this journal over the years have been to relatively stable websites like Wikipedia.
Anyway, on with the comics. These are in no particular order. If there's no wikipedia link, it doesn't have an article.
1. Dinosaur Comics has been around forever, and while I've read strips here and there and enjoyed them, I've never plowed through the backlog. Of course, in this case said backlog is 3600+ strips and counting, and as a (mostly) gag a day comic it's not something that's fun to sit and read 300 of them at a time, especially give that 99% of them use the exact same art. However, reading 5-10 a day is quite workable and worthwhile since it's very funny most of the time. I expect I'll keep knocking through them for a while yet. The links here are often sources of new comics to try, although as a strip going back 15+ years they are also one of the most frequent sources of dead link frustration. The author seems to be someone who ties the webcomics world together as he pops up everywhere.
2. Hark a Vagrant was recommended to me frequently throughout the years. I finally got around to it and knocked through the 400+ strips of the now defunct comic early in the pandemic. I understand why people like it. If I had read it back when it was new and not after I'd seen various spins on it, I'd probably have been pretty enthusiastic about it myself. It got a lot of press and awards for a comic that was comparatively rarely updated.
3. Wondermark was another oft-recommended comic. It's not quite defunct as of this writing, but is certainly updated less frequently than it was. It essentially tries to look like circa 1800s illustrations, mostly successfully, with a sardonic humor that appeals to me greatly. I've bookmarked it to check every few months for updates. It was even in The Onion back in the day, apparently.
4. Thinkin' Lincoln was not a good comic. To be perfectly frank, it's often terrible. For some reason, the floating heads of various presidents and historical figures was the right kind of terrible for my taste so I happily read the 900+ comics in its archive as well as the authors too shortlived successor comics Creep House and Karate Homework.
5. Daisy Owl was a short lived comic I had never heard about featuring two kids who were adopted by an Owl. The Owl's best friend, a bear, hangs out a lot. It's a little weird and very sweet.
6. Buttercup Festival is very surreal, but hits often enough that I was not surprised to learn that it's featured in some alternative newspapers. I'm still slowly working my way through the archives (I'm still on the second iteration of the strip) because it's weird enough that reading it straight through would miss the point, but I'm enjoying it.
7. Gunnerkrigg Court is excellent. The archive had 2400+ comics in it when I started and I cranked through it in a few weeks. It tells about the adventures of Antimony as a student at the titular boarding school at the intersection of magic and science, with a rich cohesive universe and plenty of interesting characters. It does occasionally rely a little too much on hand wavium technology or magic that can do apparently anything, but most the relationships are the real driving point. The chapters range from four pages to eighty pages and are beautifully drawn in a variety of styles, much like Sandman. I'll keep reading this every time a chapter completes, and if all the books weren't sold out right now I'd likely have bought some.
8. Sheldon is the original comic project by Dave Kellett of Drive. I think he may have originally started it as an attempt to get syndicated, as its early stories of a boy computer genius billionaire, his grandfather, his best friend and his talking duck sticks to the three panel format. It's mostly funny enough to keep reading, although I'm barely 1/4 of the way through the 20 year archive.
9. A long time ago I used to read a scifi comic called Fans, so when I ran across a link for a high school comic called Penny & Aggie involving the same author I checked it out. I stalled out around 2005 and am not sure that I'll continue through the rest of the archive, let alone the spin-off comics, but that's mostly because my tolerance for high school hijinks, even really well done high school hijinks, ended in high school. The author has a bunch of other stuff too.
10. I have now read more Wonder Woman pastiche in the form of The Non-Adventures of Wonderella than I have actual Wonder Woman. The strip was mostly very cynical about the lives of superheroes, and by the end of the archive I was ready to be done with it.
11. If you can't draw and don't want to use the same comic graphics over and over like Dinosaur Comics, there's always the "take pictures of household objects as a comic" approach used by Terror Island. This short comic (just over 300 strips) is about the the adventures of two roommates who are fighting over who is going to go grocery shopping. I'm about half way through and enjoying it.
12. Jonny Crossbones is a Tintin style adventure comic featuring a young mechanic who inexplicably dresses like a skeleton. I got a lot of Tintin books from the library as a kid, and this was a nice throwback. The only problem is that as it neared the end of the final chapter, I caught up with the end of the archive and there hasn't been an update since! That's fair, since the author is doing it as a labor of love, but still.
13. A Lesson is Learned But the Damage is Irreversible is a very short (forty strips!) comic that got outsized attention when it was running. It's pretty and weird and even notable.
14. Bad Machine is a school boy mystery comic from John Allison, whose comics Bobbins and Scary Go Round I read back in the early 2000s. It seems like our world at first, but then things like ghosts and wendigos turn up and nobody bats an eye. I read the first two stories and have it bookmarked to return.
15. Subnormality is a comic I've checked in on occasionally for years. I took the opportunity to read the entire archive. There actually aren't that many strips in it, but the artist really stretches the bounds of what is feasible in a two dimensional electronic comic. You often have to scroll in all directions, and the amount of dialog in any one strip often rivals entire chapters of books. Of course, the strips are also quite capable of being very minimalist, with just a few panels. Usually wordy, sometimes quite profound, Subnormality claims it will be updated very occasionally. I hope this is true, but with only one update in the last couple of years, I'm not hopeful.
16. Moe follows a lovable bozo through weird hijinks, often involving his love life, which is cursed. Ended abruptly in 2012, with one final strip in 2014. Members of the fanbase continue to write haiku in the comments of the last comic posted.
17. We the Robots was a weird little comic making fun of daily suburban life using robots. Fun, with a short enough archive that I didn't get bored before it ended.
I'm sure I've read some other comics this year, but those are the ones that I remember off hand. In my next post I'll mention some defunct comics I've read in the past.
EDIT 12/30: Thought of two I forgot, while walking the dog of all things, so added them.