Meta/Media
My Webcomics Reading List
Comics are the most powerful medium always available to create in. At the peak of the industry in the US, one comic artist could reach readers in the tens of millions. Today, however, the whole of comics released by US publishers enjoys a readership of less than a million, perhaps ¼ of 1% of the population.
Cartoonists, consider making your reading-list an opportunity to inform the mildly-curious that comics have something to say to them.
All-ages
with stories centered on themes of creativity, play, and/or simple pleasure without themes of hard-principle to alienate the worldly:
with plotted chapters:
- Bad Machinery – school-grounds spin-off of Scary Go Round, where universal-catastrophe is often resolved by play
- Dawn of Time – a beasty-girl, dinosaurs, and time-travelers debating evolution, in a lost post-modern, stone-age era
- Gunnerkrigg Court – boarding-school fantasy in which mythologies reconcile, and reason and experience contrast
- The Surreal Adventures of Edgar Allan Poo – presented unironically
- The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage – control is vanity
gag-a-day:
Comedy
- Achewood* – Ray is the id to Dilbert's ego, and Snoopy's super-ego
- Alien Loves Predator* – in a New York sublease, no one can hear you scream
- Bugs – shows frat humor that works lets everyone in
- Dr McNinja – silliness that lives up to the title
- Hark! A Vagrant* – Kate Beaton mingles with the very human agendas that drive History
- Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life – robots as the surviving dramatic platform for the follies and pretenses of their legendary creators
- The Non-Adventures of Wonderella – why help isn't on its way
- Octopus Pie* – nerds and geeks surviving their own disappointment in the banality that emerges from progress
- Skin Horse* – the mayhem of a shadow-agency for the chimeras that evolve from progress
Melodrama
- Anders Loves Maria* – romance that demonstrates how the need for control can destroy relationships and lives
- Blip* – a girl who exists outside of fate and the invisible forces of seduction and control that make her personal life their battleground
- Dresden Codak – wonky, story-rich pages rarely dense in reading
- Freak Angels* – mutants rebuilding the civilization they destroyed as they came of age, by Ellis & Duffield
- Girl Genius – "gaslamp fantasy" of mayhem & romance by Studio Foglio
- Great – outrageous tragi-comedy of someone starving on his own narcissism @ Kiwis By Beat
- Rice Boy – otherworldly parable for the role gratification and sacrifice play in establishing wisdom and identity
*not always safe for work