I like comics, I like free comics, and as a result, I like webcomics. I also like webcomics that really I shouldn’t admit that I like unless I’m paid to do so. So, in no particular order, here are the comics I hit up every day they’re scheduled.
- Penny Arcade and The Trenches. PA has, in the fourteen years it’s been running, been the model for webcomics. It also happens to be really damn funny; Gabe and Tycho may have gotten married and had kids off-panel, but they’re still awful people and I love them for it. Similarly, The Trenches is a hilariously brutal workplace strip that frankly shows video game QA is all too much like the temp life I left behind not so long ago.
- Battlepug, because it sits on two of my key interests: fantasy fiction about iron-thewed humorless barbarians and small googly-eyed dogs. I own a Shih Tzu that was nearly named Gurgi, I was doomed to love this comic. But it also shows that Mike Norton, the artist and writer, has a wonderful sense of the absurd and a taste for straight-faced comedy that frankly the Big Two don’t use nearly often enough.
- Eerie Cuties and its spin-off strip Magick Chicks, because honestly it’s what Buffy used to be before Joss Whedon started taking himself so incredibly seriously. I got into it for the art by Gisele Lagace and stuck with it because the plot usually makes me laugh. Also I’m apparently a teenage girl.
- Unshelved, solely because it’s workplace comedy at its best.
- And finally, Menage A 3 (link may or may not be NSFW: click at your own risk), also by Lagace, which is pretty much what happens when you stick Three’s Company, Carry On, The L Word, and Queer As Folk into a Pokeball and make ’em breed for several generations. It’s sex comedy that isn’t self-conscious or preening about how edgy it is, and you feel genuinely bad for the main character, Gary, at certain points.
So, let’s hear it: what webcomics do you regularly follow and why?