Favorite comic site.

[Trenton.]

We have kxcd with their strips a many. Some including velociraptors. There is my personal favorite: Allie with her Hyperbole and a half. There must be thousands out there. Your favorite?

 

Xkcd*

[keira]

I only really follow xkcd and The Oatmeal. There were a couple others that I liked but lost track of. Anyone have 1920s gangster cats or futuristic space casinos?

[Andraste]

Gangster Cats

 

I like a bunch of web comics, but most of them are fairly popular.

[Enraged Slith]

Gunshow and Goblins.

[Triumph]

Darths and Droids is the best webcomic. In second place, I will mention Piled Higher and Deeper.

[Lauren CW]

Questionable Content. Followed by Girl Genius.

[Randomizer]

Knights of the Dinner Table used to have original content, but now it's reprints and previews. Still when they remember to post it's great.

 

Duncan and Mallory reprints the graphic novels while we wait for book 4.

[Cairo Jim]

Originally Posted By: !Pinkie Pie

There is my personal favorite: Allie with her Hyperbole and a half.

That's pretty good, although I've got bored with it. Also I find Cyanide and Happiness quite amusing.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Triumph

Darths and Droids is the best webcomic. In second place, I will mention Piled Higher and Deeper.

False. The two greatest webcomics are 8-Bit Theater and Men In Hats, though both have been completed.

The best currently updating webcomics that have not been mentioned are Dr. McNinja and Jesus and Mo. In addition, Dead Philosophers In Heaven is fantastic, although it updates on a monthly basis now.

[The Mystic]

The only webcomic I follow is Girl Genius.

 

I agree with Dantius, 8-Bit Theater is a great comic despite being finished. The YouTube videos based on it (

) are pretty cool, too.

[Men are from Slars]

So, the youtube version is basically the comic strip condensed into a slideshow with powerpoint style "effects" and really horrible voice acting?

 

8-Bit Theater has had some pretty amazing strips. It's also had some pretty lame strips. IMHO, there was more of the latter and less of the former as time went on.

[The Mystic]

In fairness, I didn't say the YouTube stuff was good. I'll readily admit that the first few videos do in fact suck, though they do get a bit better over time. I just like the fact that someone actually took the time to do such a project (they've made 56 videos thus far); the quality, or lack thereof, of the work is another matter. Compared with all the atrocities I've found on YouTube over the years, 8-Bit Theater Chaos isn't too bad, relatively speaking.

[Dintiradan]

If I had to pick a single page from a single webcomic as my favourite, I think it would be this.

[Callie]

The only one I visit regularly is XKCD.

[The Mystic]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

If I had to pick a single page from a single webcomic as my favourite, I think it would be this.

Yeah, that's a great page. The last frame looks like she's going to try to knock it away with her bat; therefore it gets a +5 from me for sheer cuteness.

[Aran]

No mention of Order of the Stick or Schlock Mercenary or El Goonish Shive yet? Also, Dresden Codak.

 

There are several others on my list, but most of them have been mentioned already.

[Erebus the Black]

My list contains Order Of The Stick, Looking For Group, Girl Genius, XKCD, Erfworld, PHD, Darths & Droids, goblins, A Modest Destiny (before it was abandoned), 8-bit theater and the three mangas One Piece, Naruto and Bleach.

My favorites are OOTS GG and XKCD + the mangas, 8bit kinda took time to grow on me, and, no offence, goblins have just turned out to be a real let down with what I feel is a shoddy schedule and fragmented story telling, but I'm still following because the story itself is solid.

[Alorael at Large]

Originally Posted By: The Mystic

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

If I had to pick a single page from a single webcomic as my favourite, I think it would be this.

Yeah, that's a great page. The last frame looks like she's going to try to knock it away with her bat; therefore it gets a +5 from me for sheer cuteness.

You don't understand Minus. She is going to knock it away with her bat. (There's a reasonable chance that it's only coming because she wants to hit a cosmic home run.)

My comics trawl has been pretty well listed, and I note again that Aran and I have scarily similar tastes. I think my favorite is Schlock Mercenary, which gets many points for ironclad daily schedule. I'll toss in Something Positive for consistent, long-running humor, Gunnerkrigg Court for weirdness (but many of its fans love it, and I merely like it). There are a few others that I could plug, but they're nothing special and I'd drop them if I didn't revel in my excess webcomics trawl.

Oh, but you should read A Girl and Her Fed. It's odd but excellent, if you can stomach the jerky switch from very nice updated art to crude, black and white in the archives and then back.

—Alorael, who isn't even sure what, exactly, has him so sold on AGaHF. Perhaps its the fact that the cute animal mascot is furry, adorable, and maliciously evil? But Bun-bun already has that covered, and yet he does not read Sluggy Freelance.

[Student of Trinity]

Mensch, there are a lot of these. This is sort of cool, you know? Over the past ten years or so, a new art form has appeared before our eyes. There are now going to be bazillions of webcomics.

 

It's a funny sort of art form. Why comics, exactly? Why not, for instance, just text? Why aren't we all reading serialized novels, the way Victorians read a lot of what is now classic literature, except online and for free, instead of on newsprint at pennies an issue?

 

If you're going to have pictures, why not go all the way and make movies? Well, gee: I've heard there's this thing called YouTube. But somehow webcomics do co-exist with YouTube, though I suppose that for all their proliferation they are actually a much rarer form than YouTube channels. Are there also lots of serialized online novels, and I'm just missing them?

 

And what about those pennies per issue? What's with the economics of webcomics? Is this whole art form going to be conducted solely as a hobby, or are ads in the margins and subscriptions somehow going to become a reliable source of income for the creators, to the point where anybody with enough talent can take up webcomics as a career?

 

I think there is a problem with this, actually, in that the way webcomics are currently produced seems to encourage them to go on and on, with plots that slow to a crawl, instead of reaching a climax and concluding. Just as the comic costs nothing to read, it also costs essentially nothing to produce, and so there is nothing to tell an author, Okay, time to wrap this thing up before it goes downhill.

 

I think it would be nice if we could somehow find a way to fix that.

[Randomizer]

There isn't the incentive of a deadline when you are working for free to produce content. Most webcomics probably started out as a way to express a story without a thought to making money off of them. Now with the commercialization of them, there is that demand for where's the next issue.

[Dintiradan]

Originally Posted By: Alorael

(There's a reasonable chance that it's only coming because she wants to hit a cosmic home run.)

I've... never thought of this before. But it totally makes sense for the character.

@SoT: I have no idea how webcomic artists make money. I mean, I get it on a conceptual level that the full-time ones make money through a combination of advertising (sometimes in-comic), merchandising, and donations. And supposedly Girl Genius sells more dead tree copies now compared to when it hadn't been put online yet.

But, at some fundamental level, I just don't understand how it works. I block advertising when possible, and when an ad slips through, I never pay attention to it. I prefer my t-shirts to be monochromatic and devoid of text. And why buy a book when what's online is not only free but much more convenient to read? I understand the 1,000 True Fans concept, but I still get the feeling that one of these days, the goose is going to realize that I'm not paying her for her golden eggs, and is going to just fly away.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

Are there also lots of serialized online novels, and I'm just missing them?

Pretty much, yeah. Fiction blogs and websites (some just collections of short stories, others with ongoing continuity) are definitely a thing, even if they're not as high-profile as webcomics. John Dies at the End is an example of one that got popular enough to end up being published as a printed book (and made into a feature film, even).

If there are fewer fiction blogs than webcomics, probably it's partly the barrier to entry and partly the different business models of book publishing and print comics publishing. Anyone can draw a terrible comic and put it online, and somebody will read it. Producing even a bad novel takes a lot of effort, and if you're going to go to that much effort you might as well put in the extra work to make it good enough to find a publisher. The entire print comics industry, on the other hand, is a dysfunctional monstrosity, so if you're good at making comics and want creative independence, then looking for a publisher may actually be a worse moneymaking plan than starting a webcomic.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

But, at some fundamental level, I just don't understand how it works. I block advertising when possible, and when an ad slips through, I never pay attention to it. I prefer my t-shirts to be monochromatic and devoid of text. And why buy a book when what's online is not only free but much more convenient to read? I understand the 1,000 True Fans concept, but I still get the feeling that one of these days, the goose is going to realize that I'm not paying her for her golden eggs, and is going to just fly away.

The short answer to this is that you're not the target demographic: whether you pay or not is irrelevant as long as other people do, and those other people really do exist. It's similar to the situation with free-to-play MMOs: 99% of regular players will never spend a cent, and the remaining 1% justify the running costs by spending hundreds of dollars.

[Aran]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

John Dies at the End is an example of one that got popular enough to end up being published as a printed book (and made into a feature film, even).

I heard about that... it's finished? I must see this. O_O

(I remember spending October 2004 reading the serial... likely linked to by someone here.)

I also guess that the film will look like it was inspired by Supernatural, which is funny since the story predates that show by far.

[Erebus the Black]

@SoT: how can they make money: 1,250,000$ + goblins get around 1K-50K$ every time he releases a new tempts fate, GG does a lot of merchandising. So you see the big ones do manage

[Randomizer]

Girl Genius started as print and then went to online as well as posting the older graphics novels.

[Aran]

They were in dire straits financially when they first went online, I remember. The big breakthrough came after that.

[Men are from Slars]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

It's a funny sort of art form... Just as the comic costs nothing to read, it also costs essentially nothing to produce, and so there is nothing to tell an author, Okay, time to wrap this thing up before it goes downhill.

I think this is a strange argument. Webcomic authors receive feedback about their work just like any other artist; but if you are really going to call them "art", are you saying financial pressure is a necessary, or even just a helpful force, in the creation of great art? Thinking about the classics among books, plays, paintings, music, and other art forms, I'm not sure that fits. I think rather that Dickens was the exception and not the rule.

[Student of Trinity]

Well, maybe I do think that financial pressure is a helpful force for creating great art. As Steve Jobs said, "Real artists ship."

 

Tying things up and finishing them is a major problem in any undertaking. It's notoriously problematic in science. Michael Faraday's succinct advice for establishing a scientific career was, "Work. Finish. Publish." It's the second step that is critical. You can always keep on refining and extending your work, with the vague hope that something obviously conclusive will leap up and smack you, but in fact it's a scientific insight on a par with any specific result, just to perceive when a project has finished.

 

It takes all kinds of pressure to force people to the unpleasantly difficult task of finishing. Feedback from fans may help some, but there's nothing like financial incentive to get people out of bed in the morning.

[Men are from Slars]

Financial pressure can be a helpful force for accomplishing and finishing things in general, sure. But it is neither sufficient nor necessary to get things done, and it can also get in the way.

 

I know a good chunk of people who either are or were pursuing a career in the sciences, and are or were at the critical juncture where they either begin to have an actual career, or are washed away by the tides. It seems to me that what the successful ones have in common is not the need to make ends meet, but an intrinsic, and genuine, motivation to pursue a career in science. Indeed, some of the most successful ones have an important asset: not having significant financial pressure because they come from wealthy families.

 

The anthropology of pastimes would seem to back this up: it is the existence of leisure time that is required for serious developments in art and science, not the need to survive or to make money.

 

This is not to say that great artists are never under financial pressure, but I think they are more likely to create art in spite of it rather than because of it. How much great art was actually tailored to its market the way Dickens' serials were? (I hate Dickens, BTW, but I'm accepting him as a classic here for the point of the argument.)

 

Jobs, by the way: not a real artist.

[Student of Trinity]

Maybe we just have different tastes in art. I abhor anything that seems to me to be self-indulgent, but I have only respect for doing the best job possible within the constraints of a difficult genre. I'd rather have something that is crudely but fully functional than something that is perfect in places, but fatally flawed.

 

Clearly you need a certain amount of security to be able to afford to invest any time at all in art, or in science or anything else. But I think it's good when there's more pressure than you can ignore, to kick stuff out the door at some point. Get it working, then ship. That's finishing. I think there ought to be more pressure on webcomics to finish. Too many good ones have started to drag.

[Men are from Slars]

Pressure can prevent dragging, but it can also distort the uniqueness and ambiguity that makes art art and turn it into something suitable for mass consumption.

 

EDIT: Different taste in art: maybe. What is your taste in art?

[Student of Trinity]

Well, I don't know art, of course; I just know what I like. But really I don't even know that, because I think that any definition of what I like that I could construct might be falsified at any moment by some odd thing. I expect that's normal.

 

Still, for what it's worth, I guess I have some kind of articulable aesthetic bias. I'm convinced that everything really good is both simple and obvious, and the only reason to cope with complexity and subtlety is to discover the simple and obvious good things that they conceal.

 

The most thoroughly concealed things are the ones buried under the thickest cover, so to discover new good things, the first phase may be to seek out the worst complexity and subtlety. But if there actually is anything there, then at some point you should get a glimpse of it, and switch over to pruning away subtlety and complexity as fast as you can. That's a transition that I think is easy to miss, because it's easy to get used to seeking out complexity and subtlety, and forget that your real purpose is to extract something simple and obvious.

 

You do need to have enough time to complete the first phase, of locating a new good thing. But then you need some kind of alarm clock to remind you to get on with phase two. That's where I think pressure helps.

[Alorael at Large]

Let's take some easy comparisons. Webcomics don't need pressure to ship something, because the individual installments are quick and easy. The schedule slip that plagues all of them has more to do with the fact that everyone takes vacations and sick days, no one objects, and for most artists it's just a hobby anyway. But there's content, regularly, for the most part.

 

The other question is when to end a comic. For many, there's no need to have an end in sight. Many syndicated newspaper comics could run forever. Those in it for the money can keep churning out Garfield like Jim Davis, and those with some artistic vision can quit like Bill Watterson did with Calvin and Hobbes. For the story-driven comics, well, compare the comic book industry. Marvel and DC have been going strong for decades and their flagship heroes show no signs of slowing down. Or look at the comics that do come to an intentional end. There are now a handful of webcomics artists who have completed a series of works. Online graphic novels, if you will. Or the Foglios, who divide Girl Genius into books even though online there are no real covers or volumes.

 

—Alorael, who thinks a fundamental problem with "get it working, then ship" is the way webcomics work. They run on fans, hardcore fans who buy everything they can. That kind of fan often requires intense author-audience interaction, and even more often requires frequent updates. Novels manage to keep fans when new releases are every few years, but in the comics world a week without updates causes a furor and a month missed will make your comic slip off the regularly checked sites list.

[Men are from Slars]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

The most thoroughly concealed things are the ones buried under the thickest cover

You keep saying all these things that appear to be truisms, but that I don't think are true at all.

[Student of Trinity]

I don't think they're truisms, but I do think they're true. I am most impressed when somebody unearths something simple and obvious from what appeared to be subtle and complex. That's what I want to see. So first I have to find something that seems really complex, and then show how it's really simple.

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: Fleeting Present

Novels manage to keep fans when new releases are every few years, but in the comics world a week without updates causes a furor and a month missed will make your comic slip off the regularly checked sites list.

This sounds as though it could be a big part of the problem, even though it's almost the opposite of what I've been suggesting. Maybe webcomics have too much pressure to keep putting out something, even if they have too little pressure to put out something really good. So they devote time to putting up fresh panels each week, that would in many cases have been better devoted to planning out the story. A story that updates more seldom, but progresses more quickly, might make me happier.

I don't necessarily demand that the whole comic end, though. Just that story arcs advance and then tie off more consistently, instead of sagging indefinitely.

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

I don't think they're truisms, but I do think they're true. I am most impressed when somebody unearths something simple and obvious from what appeared to be subtle and complex. That's what I want to see. So first I have to find something that seems really complex, and then show how it's really simple.

Confirmation bias much?

Dikiyoba.

[Aran]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

And why buy a book when what's online is not only free but much more convenient to read? I understand the 1,000 True Fans concept, but I still get the feeling that one of these days, the goose is going to realize that I'm not paying her for her golden eggs, and is going to just fly away.

The audience is just that big. My sites earn around $1 for every 3000 hits (so around $2 per month until the relaunch, after which I didn't put the ads back everywhere). Considering a popular webcomic might get millions of monthly visits, they could generate thousands, even without counting merchandise.

[nikki.]

SoT's truism/patterns in the complex idea actually reminds me of some Woolf I read a while ago, but I'm blanking on what it was (and whether it was Woolf herself, or a critic. Which is rather unhelpful).

[VCH]

Originally Posted By: Aʀᴀɴ

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

And why buy a book when what's online is not only free but much more convenient to read? I understand the 1,000 True Fans concept, but I still get the feeling that one of these days, the goose is going to realize that I'm not paying her for her golden eggs, and is going to just fly away.

The audience is just that big. My sites earn around $1 for every 3000 hits (so around $2 per month until the relaunch, after which I didn't put the ads back everywhere). Considering a popular webcomic might get millions of monthly visits, they could generate thousands, even without counting merchandise.

Seems to me that many of the best webcomics don't have ads.

[The Mystic]

Originally Posted By: Fleeting Present

Originally Posted By: The Mystic

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

If I had to pick a single page from a single webcomic as my favourite, I think it would be this.

Yeah, that's a great page. The last frame looks like she's going to try to knock it away with her bat; therefore it gets a +5 from me for sheer cuteness.

You don't understand Minus. She is going to knock it away with her bat. (There's a reasonable chance that it's only coming because she wants to hit a cosmic home run.)

Well, I was commenting on the page as art, and took it only at face value. Excuse me for a minute.

*reads Minus from page 1 up to that point*
I see. Well, regardless of how it's actually supposed to turn out, I still say it's a great page, and it still gets cuteness points from me.

[Men are from Slars]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

I don't think they're truisms, but I do think they're true. I am most impressed when somebody unearths something simple and obvious from what appeared to be subtle and complex. That's what I want to see. So first I have to find something that seems really complex, and then show how it's really simple.

I think I'm more impressed when someone unearths something actually quite complicated and subtle, from what appeared to be simple and obvious.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

I think I'm more impressed when someone unearths something actually quite complicated and subtle, from what appeared to be simple and obvious.

and that is why you are a linguist and sot is a physicist

[Men are from Slars]

A reduction/expansion dichotomy. Interesting.

[keira]

So what do y'all think of the whole newfangeled xkcd what-if thing? I find it to be quite interesting so far.

[Randomizer]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

I think I'm more impressed when someone unearths something actually quite complicated and subtle, from what appeared to be simple and obvious.

and that is why you are a linguist and sot is a physicist

I used to think when doing physics problems that I was working in the right direction if the result was simple and elegant. Now I'm not so sure.

[Alorael at Large]

Do the payments outstrip the costs of hosting a very successful comic? I assume they do, but I have (entirely unfounded) beliefs that as your traffic goes up, your costs go up more than linearly up to a point so you can avoid getting Slashdotted.

 

—Alorael, who would rather see someone unearth something simple and obvious from something simple and obvious but obviously leading somewhere else. But seriously, he's also a sucker for, well, getting sucked into endlessly layered complexity that never quite goes anywhere.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

I used to think when doing physics problems that I was working in the right direction if the result was simple and elegant. Now I'm not so sure.

My wheelhouse, of course, is biology, in which the correct level of complication is almost always "as much as you can get away with", since biological systems consist of an incredible number of interacting parts cobbled together more or less haphazardly, and so simplifying them to the point where they're comprehensible at all usually means you're already throwing away a lot of possibly important details.

[Dintiradan]

Quote:

So what do y'all think of the whole newfangeled xkcd what-if thing? I find it to be quite interesting so far.

It's been fine so far, and reminds me of stuff he used to put on his blag. People have said, and I somewhat agree, that xkcd would be better if rmonroe published once a week with more in-depth ideas. I guess now we're getting the best of both worlds.

[VCH]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

I used to think when doing physics problems that I was working in the right direction if the result was simple and elegant. Now I'm not so sure.

My wheelhouse, of course, is biology, in which the correct level of complication is almost always "as much as you can get away with", since biological systems consist of an incredible number of interacting parts cobbled together more or less haphazardly, and so simplifying them to the point where they're comprehensible at all usually means you're already throwing away a lot of possibly important details.

The paradigms and theories that are worth anything aren't complicated, at least not if you don't want them to be. Island biogeography, trophic-pyramids, trophic cascades, natural selection, metapopulation theory—all are pretty simple guiding paradigms (of course I'm biased as an ecologists, so maybe geneticists or biochem people have more complex thoughts). In my opinion it's not a question of incorporating as much as you can get away with, as much as it is getting away with incorporating as little as possible and still having the result sync up with real communities and ecosystems. But I agree that a lot is lost in simplifying an idea, however, a lot is gained too, like communication.