Favourite Webcomics

The Washington post is having a poll for best webcomic, which is not a new idea of course, but is still a nice bit of fun.

Amazingly enough Sluggy Freelance is not amongst the nominations, despite being the quintessential webcomic, I would have thought.  It's been going since August 1997, with a new comic almost every day, including many full colour multi-panel contributions (random link) that must take author and artist Pete Abrams hours to complete.  It has genuine humour, drama and pathos and, despite the incredibly complex and long-running plot lines, he still manages to get at least one punchline in every day.  I guess it's not an easy comic to get into if you haven't read the archive, but there are plenty of others that are even harder to follow, and reading the archive is worth it anyway!  It's a must-follow comic for any webcomic fan.

xkcd is an altogether different thing - a comic of romance, sarcasm, math and language.  Many of these are just plain inspired.  I confess I don't get every math related one, but who cannot fail to marvel at something like a map of Onlne Communities.  One thing that amazed me recently was that, despite the stick figure drawing, artist Randall Munroe still managed to get, to my eyes anyway, a real sense of dejection into the last panel of G-Spot, just by slightly changing a circle and a line.  I only recently found out that all the comics have an additional mouse-over text with an additional gag or aside.

My favourite of the moment though is Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques.  No comic has ever made me laugh out loud so much (and I mean "laugh out loud", not lol) even at the second and third reading.  It is clever and grown-up (read "adult situations") and quite simply very funny.  Not only that, but I find it is a goldmine for tips about interesting music in the post- and indy-rock arena.  I also love the art work.  Far too many web-comic artists would have just had 4 near identical, copy and paste, talking heads panels for this recent comic.  You can also follow the characters on Twitter for additional laughs, but be careful about clicking on any link posted by Pintsize (these are definitely not safe-for-work or to everyones taste).