Read any online comics?  I read several every day, and another dozen or so occasionally, and enjoy them quite a bit.  There are literally thousands of strips available online, and if you look around some you are guaranteed to find one you'll enjoy.

 • Introduction
 • My Favorites
 • Second Tier Comics
 • Inexplicably Popular
 • Artistic Achievements
 • Online Comics Links

One of earliest ideas I had for content on this site (long before any work on it was actually begun) was to do an online comics review.  Back then (1998ish?) there didn't seem to be that many comics, and having a short review of most of them wasn't out of the question.  However by the time I actually got around to doing this site, and then starting on this comics review page, the concept of a comprehensive review of all online comics was laughable. (Yes, that's a pun.  You have to watch it around here, I leave them all over, like bear traps.)

There may be a site that's got nothing but links to online comics, with capsule reviews of them, but if so I've not seen it.  In any event, there are now hundreds, possibly even thousands of online comics, and just keeping accurate links for a majority of them would be impossible.  Much less doing any interesting discussion or review of them.

So this page will just have a few comics linked to and described in semi-brief fashion: well known comics, important comics, my favorite comics, or some combination of those types.

These are primarily online comics.  Not ones you can see in the newspaper every day, though some (likely ones I enjoy) may be seen weekly, but probably just in alternative press or small magazines. Also these tend to be offbeat or original concepts.  I wouldn't bother to discuss Garfield or Beetle Bailey or Dagwood, even if they weren't in the paper, just since they are so mainstream and commercialized.

The ratings are on a 1-10 scale and are totally subjective.  Often it's very difficult to rate art quality, since the artist's style will change.  Almost all strips, online and newspaper look very different 5 years after they start, with more refined characters, usually requiring fewer lines.  Most improve artistically, and often the artist will learn new skills, and start using more color or depth or shading.

• Color: Are the strips in color.  Many strips have Sundays in color, or spot color for special event comics. Objective.
• Frequency: How often a new strip goes up.  Objective.
• Art Quality: Is it well drawn, for what it is?  Some strips mean to be sloppy looking, or futuristic looking, or impressionistic, this isn't a comparison to a photograph contest. Somewhat subjective.
• Humor: Does it make me laugh, or at least seem that it would be funny to most readers.  Entirely subjective.
• Overall: How good is the whole package, art, plot, characters, humor, etc.  This may even include site features besides just the strip, for example if there are daily blogs.  Entirely subjective.

If you want to waste your time trying to sway my infallible judgment on a comic I like or dislike, or suggest others comics that are worthy of immortalization on this page, let me know.

He's also doing strips for Gamespy and a couple of other sites, as well as PVP comic books, and while I applaud him earning a living from the strip, it seems he's spread too thin.  Coming up with one good and funny strip a day is something that about 20 people on earth can do; when you throw in comic books, bonus strips, and more, there's just so many good, funny ideas about the same relatively limited characters, to go around.  It's not surprising he's so often stuck with nothing more than yet another unfunny Star Wars quote for a punch line.

This review has been amended in October 2002, since the last few months of PVP have been much improved.  It's still a bit too mainstream, but there have been a few week-long stories that have really packed a punch.  The whole Graphamaximo thing was brilliant, and Kurtz isn't unaware of the occasional critical sentiments.

There are extensive annotations and colored comics, and some other amusing site stuff as well, for bonus points. Check out the controversy pages with the absolute shit storms the artist weathered after enraging Christians, feminists, and just about every other easily-riled group. Antlers of the Damned, and the accompanying controversy page, are required reading.

He's relatively left wing, but not always.  Mostly he's got a very clever eye for comedy and absurdity in society and politics, and I enjoy reading his work.

Doonesbury -- No rating since virtually everyone can see it in the paper, but the website has some really nice features, including searchable archives for every Doonesbury strip ever, as well as early work by Trudeau from his college days, and lots of extras.  A brilliant political strip, usually, and it's quite interesting to read archived ones from 10 or 20 years ago, seeing the scandals and social satire from the time.

Dilbert -- I read it in the paper, not online, but if you don't see it in the newspaper then it's worth seeking out online, and you can even get the strip sent daily via email.  The site is well done, lots of extras, and Dilbert has had an internet presence and email newsletter for many years, since long before most of us were aware of such things.  The strip I think is very funny, I laugh at most of them, and it's got a lot of surreal elements, it's not just a parody of idiot bosses, as you might think if you were a casual reader.  Phil, Prince of Insufficient Light, the trolls that run accounting, Catbert "a typical cat, in the sense that he looks cute but he doesn't care if you live or die." is evil and furry, Elbonia land of pigs and perpetual waist-deep mud; all are very clever and funny.

These you and everyone else might like more than me, but that's why it's my list.

It's hard to judge the art objectively, since there are about 5 characters, and they appear in the exact same pose every cartoon I've ever seen, with only their words changing.  It works well enough for what it does, I suppose, but it's not like anyone will ever look just for the graphics.

The animation is awful (it's an ugly Bloom County rip off; compare to SinFest, which is good Bloom County rip off art), two-dimensional, and in fact it's actively ugly.  Not just poorly-drawn, it's outright ugly, and extremely amateurish in appearance.  The writing is dire, there's maybe one semi-laugh bi-weekly, there's no sympathy for any of the idiot characters, it rips off other comics for ideas and characters... I could go on and on.  Most bad comics are just bad, you look once and forget them.  User Friendly somehow rises out of the tar pit of forgettable crap, and achieves a higher level of awfulness, where you don't just dislike it, but are actually angered and perplexed by it, especially by its apparently massive following.

Possibly it's the sort of thing you need to read a lot of to get into, which I think is true of Sluggy.com as well, however with that it looks like there's something worth getting into as you are getting into it.  I first visited User Friendly years ago, with every intention of liking it, since I'd heard of it, that it was funny and popular with computer geeks.  I read a few months of archives, and then hit it near-daily for weeks, wondering the whole time what I wasn't getting, and when it would become funny to me.  I could see the jokes that were trying to be made, and that the characters if better drawn (figuratively and literally) could be interesting or cute, but it just had such an overall vibe of sloppiness and amateurism, without any real feeling of driving talent behind it, that I gave up on acquiring that taste.

I'd put it as a second tier cartoon, but I hear people all the time say how much they like it, so it goes from mediocrity to inexplicably popular. This world is hard and cruel.

Demian 5 -- A very freaky story in comic form, with lots of weird sex, full frontal male nudity, penis size issues, and brilliant artwork and color. I can't really recommend it unless you have the time (an hour or so) to sit and read the whole thing, since there's no real strip by strip pay off, it's more of an, "I must see where the hell this acid trip ends up."  I don't regret spending the time to read it, since it's definitely given me some thoughts about it since then, but if you want a warm happy feeling and a light chuckle, seek elsewhere.

Leisure Town -- I want to like it, but it's usually just too weird and the individual stories just go on and on, without any humor or joy to leaven them, though there are usually pay offs as you go.  The art is composed of weird, bright shiny plastic models digitally inserted into real world photographs, and it's a very unsettling visual state, always seeming on the verge of action figure porn.

The Comic Journal -- It's what it sounds like, a site with lots of comics news.  (Okay, that's not exactly what it sounds like, but it's close enough.) Their 2001 Comics Review is good, much like this page but with a lot more obscure artistic type strips, and nothing so petty and qualitative as numerical ratings.  Not many of them are fun to read, but they do look pretty.

Keenspot -- This is the sort of page that makes you instantly realize how hopeless the concept of a comprehensive web comic overview is.  They host must be 50+ comics, most of them daily, and none of them any that I've ever read enough to get into.  I've looked at maybe 10 or 15 of them, and Pentasmal is one of them, but I liked it long before Keenspot hosting came along.

Gamespy Comics -- Much like Keenspot, but with less variety, and always dripping the slightly-rank oil that befouls all Gamespy properties.  It's mostly leftovers from PvP and PA, along with a few other semi-gaming related strips I've never taken any real notice of. It's perhaps fitting that the two least interesting characters in PvP had their own strip on Gamespy for a while.

WebComics.com -- Keenspot, only more so.  I don't know any of the comics they host, but my god there are a lot of them.  Nearly 200 by my quick count.  Some have to be good, but I certainly don't have the interest to slog through and find them.

Comics.com -- This is a commercial site, United Media, so everything here you'll see in the newspaper. Or not, being as there seem to be about 500 "professional" comics, and maybe 30 or 50 in the daily paper in most cities, and far fewer than that on Sundays.

Ucomics.com -- Another commercial syndicate site, with various cartoons you'll see in the newspaper.  Most of these commercial sites have limited archives, going back perhaps two weeks or a month, and they tend to only show the comics a week after newspaper publication, or at least a day late.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.