The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Webcomics. Who reads waht, anything you care to recommend. I tend to browse few quite a lot, but my favourite ones would be

Sluggy Freelance
VG Cats
8-Bit Theater
Something Positive
Radioactive Panda
Least I Could Do
Sinfest
A Modest Destiny

Those are the ones that genuienly make me chuckle. Anyone want to add some good comics to my list?

These're the webcomics I check on a regular basis:

PvP
Megatokyo
Penny Arcade
Real Life
Nekobox
Underpower
8-Bit Theatre
Bob and George and it's various subcomics (Dysfunction being a favorite)
CTRL-ALT-DEL
Krakow
Krakow 2.0
Crash and Bass
Sinfest
Mac Hall
Diesel Sweeties

Once I get through catching up I'll add Sluggy to this list as well.

Recognize most of them, read them on a semi-weekly kind of basis. But there are a few new ones in there, I shall have to check them out.

I recently got my webspace (early beta, don't judge yet) live. My Link page (http://www.weblayouts.net/teacherjoe/links.htm) is mostly web comics. This is pretty much my list.

Most of mine have already been mentioned, with the exception of this one.

User Friendly

http://ars.userfriendly.org/

Uh ... lessee

8-bit Theatre
Lizard
Faux Pas
Freefall
Hackles
Kivaa! (it's in finnish, and it's crappy too, but that's the point!)
Loikan Vuoksi (finnish too)
Misty the Mouse (...eh?)
Nip and Tuck
NPC
Ozy and Millie
Penny Arcade
RPG World
Sabrina-Online (...another eh?)
Sinfest
Staccato
Under the Lemon Tree
VG Cats
Zebra Girl
Fur Will Fly (...yet another eh?)

I ought to start reading Nodwick, Dork Tower and PvP online frequently.

All marked with "eh" are those that have a crappy plot, but I read them anyways.

Tsk.  Nobody's mentioned CRFH yet.  Or Avalon, but it's been on hiatus for a very long time...

The only comic I regularly read online these days is Calvin and Hobbes (http://www.ucomics.com/calvinandhobbes/), though I can imagine that many people's definition of "webcomic" doesn't include electronic reproductions of originally paper comics.

calvin and hobbes are awsome!

No one's mentioned It's Walky! or Goats or El Goonish Shive or General Protection Fault or Real Life? Hmr.

Ahem...


You were saying?

Okay, my mistake. But the other three still stand.

Sluggy Freelance! (every day)
WIGU (every week day)
8bt (t-th-s)
Adventurers! (t-th-s)
Antihero for Hire (m-w-f)
Freefall (m-w-f)
Captain SNES (a sprite comic with some brain! However, we are on a non-canon vacation break)

Then, the comics I do not check frequently...

Triangle and Robert (apparently defunct)
1/0 (definitely defunct)
Megatokyo ( Dead Piro Day, Confusing multiple plotline day, dead piro day, confusing multiple plotline day, oooh, nifty. Check in once a month)
Goats (usually funny, check in occasionally)
Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki (updates biweekly)
sinfest (.net, NOT .com)
Bob and George (a week's comics at once tends to have something funny)

Even though I mentioned it already, and it has been mentioned by others as well, I'd like to make plug Sluggy Freelance once more. It is the single greatest comic on the net. And the current storyline is absolutely insane...

Ah, I used to read StarSomething (I would rate it as the best in it's comedy value). It hasn't been updated for ... 6 months. Sad.

Look what you made me do! I changed my signature to be more fitting. :|

Mark Shallow's other comics are fun, too.  I've read Adventurers! for quite some time.

Sage: You need to go find the elemental crystals.

Ardam: ok, so we get the four crystals of earth, air...

Sage: four? Those aren't the elements. You need to get the crystals of Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, Carbon...

I can't stand SF's artwork. If I can't look at it I can't read it. It may be the best written piece of crud on the interweb, but I just can't read it.

If you're looking at the first few weeks, then yeah. He used to be incredibly meticulous before he started, then he realized it was taking two weeks to do a panel. So he intentionally let everything slip to the level where he basically wasn't worrying about the art; he was worrying about the jokes and the story.

Then once he got that down he began to ratched up the art level a bit, though it's still clearly cartoony.

But if you think that's anywhere close to the worst art on the web, you have been leading an exceptionally sheltered existence. Try going to sluggy.keenspace.com instead. OW.

And if you looka at the newer SF comics, you'd be amazed. They are absolutely gorgeous.

mine are:

Sluggy Freelance (best story line here! Although i wonder what will become of the DOP, or Overlord Bun-Bun)
Calvin and Hobbes
Garfield
Foxtrot
Ziggy

stopped reading the rest regularly, due to missing time.

Enjoy!

Yeah, i remember that one, i liked it!

(Like all these "traditional" christmas gifts).

Care for a beer?

I have a crate of german beer here, take a bottle and sit down...

(For thos of you who need to ask: It is Rothaus Tannenzäpfle)

The Orz wish to say that Sluggy Freelance is a very *happy camper*!

Okay, give me a link to the Sluggy freelance you're reading, because the one I've been trying it out now for a week (and reading some of the archives) I gotta say, I just don't get it. It does not interest me in the least. I'm really trying, guys. Is there more than one Sluggy out there, because the one I'm reading is not webcomic gold.

www.sluggy.com
not
sluggy.keenspace.com

The beginning is not extremely good. For one thing, it was early in the era of webcomics, so what was expected had yet to be defined. Look at the early stuff at www.goats.com and you'll see what I mean.
Also as I said earlier, to begin with, the art was intentionally made with low quality so the artist would not obsess (his earlier work had been meticulous... and way too time consuming).

What do you look for in a webcomic? What IS webcomic gold?

Well heck. I just made a long post with links to all my favorate web comics and accidently click on one of the links I was looking up in my favorates and wiped it all out.

Lemme start again.

But different this time.

Web Comic Gold are the web comics that win in every department. They need to

• An effort in the art work. Set your frame up so that it's easy to see what's going on. If two characters are talking, close up on them. If one is talking, head and shoulders shot. Save the long shots for action. Sluggy's problem is that every frame is a long shot which gives an overall "busy" look to a entirely too small format. They either need to simplify the artwork to clean up the frames, do less long shots, or make the frames bigger.
  
• Update every time they say they will, prompt and on time. I don't care that you have a cold or that your mother just died. If you don't update when you say you will, that is a major violation of my trust. This may be a free thing, but believe it or not, regular updaters get more long term visitors which turns into more fans which turns into more swag sold at the online store.
  
• Each comic should have a self contained gag. Inside jokes are okay, and while long time readers may laugh at the subtle nuances of a running gag, if you don't hit someone on the head with something at the same time (or some other simple little gag), you'll just annoy the newbs, who in turn won't stick around and who, in turn, won't become fans.

Well, that's about it. Sluggy, one out of three. PVP, three out of three. Penny-Arcade, three out of three. Sam and Fuzzy, three out of three.

I gotta go, but I may say more on this later.

THAT's your art issue???
???
Sure, the four-or-so panel format is a restriction. he tends not to change scope. But I don't get where this too-busy issue is coming from, unless both you're looking at the very early comics only, where backgrounds ended up being more prominent (especially http://www.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=970827 and http://www.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=971001), or an artistic purist who would probably disapprove of the very comics you said were gold.



I presume this is the "one out of three" that you say Sluggy has.



This is a bizarre constraint. Seriously. There is a medium, of serial cartoons distributed by web site. This is called 'webcomic'.
Not every comic needs to be a daily gag comic. Take, for example, the newspaper. Think of For Better or for Worse, or Funky Winkerbean, let alone Prince Valiant, or Mary Worth or Apartment 4-G or Mark Trail. Heck, even Calvin and Hobbes sometimes got quite serious and very unfunny, and in the dailies frequently required familiarity with the situation that could only have been earned by reading the previous days' strips.

On the web, this problem is solved by the ARCHIVES. If someone recommends a strip to me I never bother reading the present strip, I start from the beginning, read until I lose interest or I come to the end, and then stop. Having every day make sense out of context is completely irrelevant.
Furthermore, there is a "New Viewers click here to view the Sluggy Viewer Guide!" link prominently placed above the comic.

Sluggy at its best -- Gwynn turned around -- made NO SENSE to a noob. So what? if it hadn't done that, it would not have been a great comic.

Sometimes people link straight to a strip, but it invariably is one chosen to make sense out of context. If it doesn't, it's the poster's fault, not the comic's.

Should you not just link to the beginning strip and let the noobie read from there?

There's more to it than that. What was above was a knee jerk reaction due to time constraints. But that's a part of it.

Some webcomics have 2 people working on them. An artist who's concern is making the comic pretty, a big plus for the newbs, and a writer, important for keeping people around. Sluggy only has a writer who would benifit from an artist's help, in my opinion.



And don't get me wrong, it's a big, big one. Sluggy's done well so far not to appeal to the newbs, and yet still keep chugging.


[/quote](Concerning "a gag in every comic") This is a bizarre constraint. Seriously. There is a medium, of serial cartoons distributed by web site. This is called 'webcomic'.
Not every comic needs to be a daily gag comic. Take, for example, the newspaper. Think of For Better or for Worse, or Funky Winkerbean, let alone Prince Valiant, or Mary Worth or Apartment 4-G or Mark Trail. Heck, even Calvin and Hobbes sometimes got quite serious and very unfunny, and in the dailies frequently required familiarity with the situation that could only have been earned by reading the previous days' strips.[/quote]

So, your justification is that for a webcomic it's okay to be one part comic, three parts soap opera? It's still a comic. The syndicated comics you mentioned I for the most part don't frequent. I view them as dross. For Better or for Worse, for me, is an on again, off again sort of relationship. When they get all sappy, I kinda gloss over them until they go back to being "better" more than "worse." Calvin and Hobbes got sappy once in a while, but it eventually became a "Awww" moment, and they kept a gag in every strip. Even with a long running story line, there was something to giggle about without reading the back story.



Yeah, I thought I mentioned that. I tried to do the archives thing, which gave me my deep criticism of the artwork, and I had a hard time "getting" the gags. So that didn't help Sluggy's case much.

But as I said, I'm trying diligently not to dislike Sluggy. I mean, you all can't be wrong at once, right? And I have to admit that I don't hate it now. Still, not web comic gold IMHO, but not deplorable any more.

My whole issue, and this is the end of what I'll say on Sluggy, is that it fails entirely to attract newbs, which in my mind is a bad thing. Abviously Sluggy has compensated for this and has been managing the webcomic thing for a long time, so dispite my argument, they must be doing something right, even if I don't "get" it.

I know, I know. Double posting bad. I'm starting a new topic in this topic and don't want it associated with the above topic. Chill out.

I found a forum a bit back called the Bob and George Fan Game forum (http://forums.bobandgeorge.com/forum.php?forumid=12) and it astonished me. Here's a forum where people are actually making games, alot of games, some small, some huge, based on the MegaMan universe! I got to thinking, why don't we have that sort of thing for StarControl? I mean, what's StarControl lacking that MegaMan has?

Simple game play? No, SCs got that. Fan base? No, albiet SCs not as popular due to the publisher dumping the project. A web comic based on the game? YES! StarControl needs a webcomic!

However, how would it be done? Re-colored sprites? We'd basicly be limited to space ships talking to each other. Could we make that funny? Original artwork. Yukki would be my choice for an artist, if the bugger had the time. (Still don't know if Yukki's a guy or girl.)

What do you think? What would you want a StarControl webcomic be like?

Ok, it's fine if you subjectively don't like it.

I was just taking issue with what seemed like your objective appraisal ('webcomic gold') being your personal preference.

Also, if you think Sluggy is 'still just a comic', then would you call, say, Reign or Akira 'still just a cartoon'?



ALSO: on the subject of an SC webcomic...
There are several possibilities, depending on what permission we can get on the art.
For example, if we have permission to use all the in-game art for non-game purposes, we could start with that and expand it over time with the same characters doing different things or separated from their environment, or variations on the standard captain portraits for different characters. Others besides the comic's author(s) could add to this sprite base.

Furthermore, it doesn't need to be one person doing all the work. We could get several volunteers who each gaurantee a small but consistent degree of contribution (one 500x200 comic every two weeks, say). Each of them could maintain a separate storyline, or they could do gag comics. Depending on the number of people, we could update with some frequency despite having no one contributor upload frequently.

And they could share resources on the art front. It might be confusing if one artist steals a character portrait from another storyline, though.

</speculation type='wild' intensity='rampant'>

I have a problem understanding how ANYONE can critisize sluggy's art work... In my oppinion it has by far the best art work of ANY webcomic.

As for gags...  except for the filler strips I have yet to see a single sluggy strip which does not have a gag. You know this might all be explainable if guesst is just looking at one of the vacation weeks... say shirt guy stick figure week.

As for noobs... I just discovered sluggy about 6 months ago. As soon as I saw the strip with the borg and the aliens parody (OK men I'll make this short.... Chalmp! Damn that WAS short! Ok men... RUN!) I was hooked.

look at the first few months again.



000109, 000212, 010304, 010311, 010314, 010315, and much of Fire and Rain (the chapter, not the book)... For example.

My previous points about how this is irrelevant still stand (though the first few months issue may deter people starting at the beginning...)

Ahem... amendment... It apears that out of more than 2000 comics perhaps 15-20 don't have a gag... Sorry for the inaccuracy. Speaking of fire and rain I think that I've finaly figured out Oasis... Her imortality that is. She must have a device in her head that makes regular backups of her memories and transmits em back to the lab she was made at. Part of the lab must have survived the explosion and whenever she gets killed again it makes a new Oasis and downloads the memories into her. Thats why the H corperation is so interested in finding the lab even though Torg has already told em he blew it up.

That sounds like a great thing to post here:

http://www.sluggy.net/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewforum&f=27

But don't expect to be the first person to have presented that idea.

No one reads Dilbert, eh??  :o  Well, I do :)
http://www.dilbert.com


Mutts
On the Fastrack
The Piranha Club
Sherman's Lagoon

Above ones can be found
http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/mutts/about.htm

Very good.

There goes another week of school down the drain while I read through their archives.

Sexy Losers (http://www.sexylosers.com), they have very explicit content, but it's funny if you can handle it

Bolt City (http://www.boltcity.com) very awesome style to his comics

8-bit Theater (http://www.nuklearpower.com)

Masters of the Art (http://www.MastersoftheArt.com)

Penny Arcade (http://www.Penny-Arcade.com)

PvP (http://www.pvponline.com)

I find this rather relevant to this forum's interests:

http://www.good-influence.com/strip20.php (http://www.good-influence.com/strip20.php)

http://www.hlcomic.com/index.php?date=2005-05-01

Hilarious if you have played Half life2 and understand the concept.

Hrm, I suppose the only two comics I regularly keep up with nowadays are User Friendly (which I found out about via the #starcontrol IRC channel) and The Order Of The Stick (http://www.giantitp.com/cgi-bin/GiantITP/ootscript), which I found out about via the PoNaF boards.  :)

Ahh, what would I do without Star Control eh?  ;D

I dunno, what would you do without starcontrol? Not post on a board once every 3 months or so? :)

You know, posting here =!= playing the game.

Irregular Webcomic (http://www.irregularwebcomic.net)
Simply the best.

I have to agree with Data, Irregular Webcomic is a damn fine read.  I also like Legostar Galactica, although I only check it every month or so....it seems to read better that way.

I read
The Order of the Sick
The Gods of Arr-Kelaan
Dominic Deegan
Comedity

 :o
I read Order of the Stick and Legostar Galactica too occasionly. How many other people read it?

The only webcomic I read on anything resembling a regular basis is Sexy Losers. Pity it won't be updated anymore. :(

I have a comic that debuted a few months ago. It's pretentiously titled, "Even in the deepest heart of chaos, a glimmer of order can be found"

It's a 'constrained comic'. The concept is pretty simply. I use a random image generator to pull six random photos off the internet. I don't control the photos or their order. My job as a creator is to add word balloons to these six photos to create a consistent story with a narrative theme. If I do my job correctly, you would swear that I specifically chose the photos, but I didn't, they are random. Get it? Read a few and it'll become clear, I hope.

It updates M-F Here's the URL:
http://www.foundcomics.net/ (http://www.foundcomics.net/)

Take a look. If you like it, tell your friends. If you don't like it, tell your enemies...

What is meant by 'web comic'? A standard 'joke a day' format like newspaper comics? (User Friendly, for example, is like that.) Or a 'graphic novel' type format with extended stories? I've read User Friendly and Sluggy Freelance (a slightly more 'story' oriented comic) and found them somewhat interesting. But the best story I've seen online is Girl Genius Online, a work by the famous and cool Phil Foglio:

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/

There are two parallel series. The first, called '101', is a recap of the stories published prior to going online. The second, called 'advanced class', is the current (new) story line as it happens. Three days a week a new page is posted to each. When they run out of the old stuff I guess it just stays there as background material. :)

The basic premise of the story is what most people would call 'Steampunk' -- a mostly pseudo-medieval world (Europe in some parallel universe) with 19th or at most early 20th century technology available to some degree. But also some 'technologies' that are just unknown in our world. The creation of Frankenstein-type artificial life forms, for example (stitches and all).

Technology in this world is pretty much like magic in a fantasy world. In fact, Foglio prefers to call this story 'Gas-lamp Fantasy' rather than 'Steampunk'. People who can 'invent' technological things are unique and special, refered to as 'sparks'. Ordinary people have to work months to accomplish what a 'spark' can do in a day, if they can do it at all. This makes 'sparks' very socially/politically important and powerful. They often end up as 'aristocratic' families ruling fiefdoms.

And the story itself is incredibly varied, involved, and absorbing. You won't find more turns, twists and subplots in Tolkien. The background is similarly huge, as well. I think it qualifies as a 'saga'. The main character, the 'Girl Genius' of the title, is descended from a mostly infamous family of very powerufl sparks. But her descent is a secret at the start of the story. The circumstances of why and how this came about are the heart of the story, so you'll have to read the comic to find out. :)

I follow PA very religously.  But beyond that, I don't follow any webcomics at all.

I used to read an old series called Kung Fool, but that went the way of the dodo.

http://www.startrekanimated.com/tas_comic08_main.html

This is from a great site for any Star Trek the animated series fans.

This is more of a sprite comic, but www.smbhq.com/nc has some hilarious comics. But there based on mario and a few RPGs, so a lot of people here won't get the jokes. Also this guy rarely updates his site anymore and hasn't had a good update in 2 years, but he's really busy with other things right now.

Also, the humor is very... um... odd.