Yes, there is already a links page attached to the alumni site as a whole. This one is slightly different, as it provides links to the webcomics I read regularly. The comics range from venerable and popular to new and hungry; some I follow because I love them, some because I'm intrigued by them, and some because I think they have potential and am reserving judgement until they fulfil (or fail to fulfil) it. I may add more later on, but for the moment, these are all I have time for. You may notice that some of the Usual Suspects of the webcomic world are missing; well, this is because the Usual Suspects of the webcomic world tend to have enormous archives, and I haven't had a chance to tackle them yet.

Note: This list is now new and improved.

The comics are listed in alphabetical order, then described in a reasonable amount of detail, just because.

Beneath the comic links are some other random links, not all of them strictly related to WoB.

Enjoy...


Comics

The Adventures of Dr. McNinja

By: Chris Hastings (writer and penciler) and Kent Archer (inker)
Established: Autumn 2005 (though a sort of prequel storyline dates from 2004)
Updates: MWF
Format: Multi-paneled (full page); black and white
Archive: Respectable

Dr. McNinja tells the bizarre and more than a little bit surreal story of an Irish ninja doctor who seems to spend most of his time beating the living daylights out of pirates, zombies, velociraptors, other ninjas, and Ronald McDonald. He has also attempted to save the world with tennis. The comic isn't for everyone--some of my friends have described themselves as "not getting it at all"--but if surrealism makes you go all warm and gooshy, check this one out. It's funny, strange, very well-drawn (case in point: we never see the lower half of Dr. McNinja's face, but his eyebrows are so expressive that we don't really need to), and clever. The storylines are bundled together into reasonable-sized chunks.


College Roomies From Hell

By: Maritza Campos
Established: January 1, 1999
Updates: MWF, usually (used to run daily)
Format: Multi-paneled (variable); originally black and white, but now in quite detailed colour
Archive: Freaking enormous

College Roomies From Hell is a relative old-timer in the world of webcomics. It started out as a sloppily drawn comic about three frosh guys living next door to three frosh girls and evolved into a well-drawn comic about a werecoyote, a whiner with laser vision, and a rich, tentacled sociopath living next door to a survivalist who may eventually become the mother of Antichrist, a manipulative obsessive, and a stalker with wings. By turns funny (at first, at least) and disturbing, CRFH has followed a complex and sometimes baffling plot that may or may not be heading somewhere coherent. Satan has become a major player, and it's possible that someone is eventually going to trigger an Apocalypse of some sort, but at the moment, it's hard to tell. The comic drags a bit in its middle portions; lengthy crossovers and the tendency for action that lasts days in comic time to go on for years in real time (the characters are still frosh) will cause some readers to lose interest halfway through. Unfortunately, the comic has now completed its Cerebus-like slide from fluff to THE PUREST BLACK PIT OF TERRIBLE DESPAIR, and it no longer makes quite as much sense as it should. However, if you have several days to kill, the CRFH archives will provide you with some decent time-wasting opportunities.


Cooties

By: Nick Perkins
Established: June 23, 2006
Updates: Technically TF, albeit realistically whenever the creator feels like it; currently on hiatus
Format: Multi-paneled (originally two paneled rows; the creator is now running it row by row so that he can have a more frequent update schedule); colour
Archive: Small

Cooties is an irreverent little comic about a bunch of kids caught in the middle of an invasion by mind-controlling aliens. Because of the infrequent update schedule, the plot has been slow to unfold, and most of the characters are still relatively undeveloped. However, the comic is now beginning to pick up speed. The writing is good, and the art has a deliberate slapdash quality that fits right in with the story's lack of dependency on absolute verisimilitude. The strip relies on parody for quite a bit of its humour, but it handles this sort of thing well. The archive is not large and shouldn't take more than an hour or two to get through, so this comic is not a bad choice if you have a limited amount of spare time.


Darths and Droids

By: Andrew Coker, Andrew Shellshear, David Karlov, David McLeish, David Morgan-Mar, Ian Boreham, Loki Patrick, and Steven Irrgang
Established: 2007
Updates: TThSa
Format: Multi-paneled (full page); photo comic (using film stills)
Archive: Substantial

Darths and Droids, which its creators freely admit is inspired by DM of the Rings (see below), is a photo comic that portrays the Star Wars films (starting with The Phantom Menace and moving chronologically through the series) as a series of Dungeons and Dragons-style campaigns. It is derivative, yes, but it manages to carve out a niche of its own, as its tone differs substantially from that of DMotR. Instead of portraying hostile relations between the GM and the players, Darths and Droids introduces a much friendlier atmosphere in which emphasis is on the personality of each player and how that personality can serve as a logical explanation for George Lucas's most asinine decisions. An example of the success of this technique might be the fact that in the topsy-turvy world of Darths and Droids, the most appealing character in the first movie/campaign is--wait for it--Jar Jar Binks (it makes a world of difference to have him played by an imaginative, intelligent eight-year-old girl), whereas the most obnoxious character is R2-D2. The comic is now working on Attack of the Clones, so it is going to be around for a while yet;consider tackling the archive before it grows to monstrous size.


DM of the Rings

By: Shamus Young
Established: September 7, 2006
Updates: Complete
Format: Multi-paneled (infinite canvas); photo comic (using film stills)
Archive: Substantial but manageable

Though photo comics generally bother me (I am a true follower of Scott McCloud and have a hard time accepting the "comic-ness" of photographs), I find DM of the Rings to be nicely handled. Quite simply, it takes the Lord of the Rings films and reimagines them as a roleplaying game(just like Darths and Droids, though DMotR came first). The enjoyment here lies in watching the struggle between a railroading GM and several players who utterly hate the campaign and are determined to screw it up in every way they can. The comic does a bizarrely good job of explaining some of the more confusing bits of the books and/or films via D&D logic. It is more mean-spirited than Darths and Droids and therefore leans more towards black humour (with a dash of parody). The archive is big enough but not soul-destroyingly so.


Get Medieval

By: Laura Chapple
Established: September 13, 2004
Updates: Complete; currently running old comics daily with commentary
Format: Multi-paneled (newspaper-style); black and white, with the occasional special coloured strip
Archive: Pretty darn big

Get Medieval spins a tale of five aliens, on the run from the intergalactic mob, who crash-land in medieval France and are forced to integrate into various societiesas they plot to escape both Earth and their criminal persecutors. The art is manga-style and thus not my cup of tea--all the characters look sort of the same to me--but it has grown on me, and besides, the writing makes up for it. Though the characters are all flat, it doesn't really matter; the situations in which they find themselves are inherently humorous, and the cartoonist does a good job of detailingboth the effects of the Middle Ages on people who have mastered space flight and the effects of such people on the Middle Ages. Geoffrey Chaucer has made a cameo appearance as an obnoxious dwarf who doesn't really listen to anything anybody says. Anyone bold enough to slander my beloved Chaucer so successfully wins my vote (ironically enough). Check this comic out if you have a great deal of spare time and like to snicker at all things medieval.


Knowledge is Power

By: Laura Chapple
Established: January 2, 2008
Updates: Generally MWF; currently TTh
Format: Multi-paneled (full page); black and white
Archive: Relatively small

Knowledge is Power is written and drawn by the creator of Get Medieval and in some ways has a similar tone and style. It revolves around a number of university students who inadvertently encounter a portal to another dimension and somehow catch superpowers from it. So far, the story is moving quite slowly; nearly two years in, the students are perhaps three days into the story, and relatively little has happened. However, the comic does have potential, and it may drag less when read all in one go. The main put-off is the author's habit of posting self-denigrating comments under every single page. I kind of wish she would stop pointing out every little flaw in her art; I rarely notice these flaws until I read the comments. Some of them are imaginary. The archive is quite manageable at the moment.


Marry Me

By: Bobby Crosby (writer) and Remy "Eisu" Mokhtar (artist)
Established: February 14, 2007
Updates: Complete
Format: Multi-paneled (full page); colour
Archive: Smallish

Marry Me is not actually the sort of thing I would generally read; it is a romantic comedy drawn in a mildly manga-ish sort of style, and its website is bright pink. However, the writing and art are both good, and the storyline contains enough snappy humour to make up for elements that would generally turn me right the hell off. The writer handles the genre well at first. Unfortunately, in its later pages, the story descends into unadulterated cliche. The archive is quite manageable.


The Order of the Stick

By: Rich Burlew
Established: 2003
Updates: Sporadically
Format: Multi-paneled (full page; occasionally employs infinite canvas); full colour
Archive: Where did that weekend go, anyway?

The Order of the Stick is the undisputed king of D&D comics (yes, this is actually a distinct genre). Unlike DM of the Rings and Darths and Droids, however, it does not assume that the characters are being "played" by real people; instead, it is simply set in a world in which the rules of Dungeons and Dragons apply to everything from fighting to character development, a fact that the characters themselves know perfectly well. The result is a supremely self-aware comic that makes fun of every trope ever invented. It moves from gag-a-day to Epic Quest of Doom, but it does manage to retain its sense of humour. The art is, as per the title, based on a slightly more complex version of the simple stick figure; nonetheless, the characters areeasy to differentiate and quite expressively rendered. When I first tackled the archive, I could simply not stop reading the damn thing...and I don't even play D&D. Beware, however: the archive is certainly hefty (two to three comics per week for six years), but on the surface, it doesn't look nearly as hefty as it actually is. Almost every page contains a Wall of Text, and some "pages" (in Internet terms) are themselves several pages long (in book terms).


Out There

By: R. C. Monroe
Established: June 12, 2006
Updates: Six days a week (excluding Sundays)
Format: Multi-paneled (newspaper-style); black and white
Archive: Getting pretty big

Out There starts as an almost Waiting for Godot-like story of two people travelling across the American desert, then eventually evolves into a bit of a sitcom...albeit in a pretty good way. The focus here is on the characters, especially the self-centred but charismatic Miriam and the Buddha-like John, whom she randomly picks up on the road one day as she is heading across the country to meet her online boyfriend for the first time. Monroe's most intriguing accomplishment is to turn Miriam into an interesting, likeable person while simultaneously making it clear that she really needs a good hearty shaking and maybe a slap or two upside the head. Alas, I have now stopped reading this comic, which plunged enthusiastically into self-indulgence about a year ago. You never know, however; it may be all better by now. The archive is fairly substantial.


Piled Higher and Deeper

By: Jorge Cham
Established: November 27, 1997
Updates: Technically MWF (often TThSa instead)
Format: Multi-paneled (newspaper-style); originally in black and white, but now in colour
Archive: Huge

Piled Higher and Deeper is one of the warhorses of webcomics (well, it didn't start out on the Web, but it has been around for over a decade now). It follows the adventures of four grad students--Mike Slackenerny (at first the perpetual student, now the perpetual postdoc), Cecilia (the chocolate-loving engineer), Tajel (the protest-happy humanities major), and Nameless Guy (the neurotic hero)--plus sundry secondary characters. It captures many of the more painful aspects of graduate school very, very well; readers frequently comment that they don't know whether to laugh or cry when they read through the archives. I am maybe a little bit disgruntled that Mr. Slackenerny beat me to graduation...'cause do you know how demoralising that is?...but ah well. The one problem with Ph.D. is that it's like crack; once you start reading through the archive, which is enormous, you won't be able to stop until you have spent two or three solid days mimicking Cham's characters by procrastinating steadily on your own work. Then you may spend a few weeks crying. Rarely has something so funny been simultaneously so damned depressing.


PS238

By: Aaron Williams
Established: November 2002 (print); December 2006 (Web)
Updates: MWF
Format: Multi-paneled (full page); black and white
Archive: Substantial

PS238 is actually a print comic; however, four years after the first issue was printed, the author began to post pages online three times a week (starting at the beginning; the web version is thus still behind the print version). I discovered it online and therefore can't help thinking of it as a webcomic. The plot follows several students attending the titular "school for metaprodigy children": in other words, fledgling superheroes. People noting a resemblance toDisney's film Sky High, especially seeing as each work focusses on the powerless son of well-known superheroes, should note that PS238 came first. It is imaginative, clever, and beautifully plotted; a time-travel thread is handled so well over multiple issues that it ought to be required reading for aspiring Hollywood sci-fi scriptwriters (the fact that it is somewhat confusing at first can easily be forgiven once all the pieces have fallen into chronological place). PS238 is also intriguing in its concentration on grade-school-aged heroes; the superpowers often come in second to typical childhood anxieties and conflicts (though there is plenty of heroic action, especially considering that almost every hero is a parody of a DC or Marvel property). The archive is large-ish and may tempt you to spend money on the print collections, which have taken the story quite a bit farther onwards.


xkcd: A Webcomic of Romance, Sarcasm, Math, and Language

By: Randall Munroe
Established: September 2005
Updates: MWF
Format: Variable; usually black-and-white, though colour is used sparingly
Archive: Pretty substantial

xkcd is that rarest of all beasties: a pure stick-figure comic (i.e., unlike in Order of the Stick, the characters here are without faces, bodies, clothes, and, in the case of the men, hair) that works. It probably helps that the cartoonist could clearly draw adequately if he felt like doing so; however, he doesn't, and so the focus is on the writing. The content of xkcd is almost impossible to describe without simply referring back to the comic's subtitle and going, "Yeah...what he said." It is clever, funny, occasionally surreal, frequently thoughtful, and full of beautiful, beautiful weirdness. Not every comic works, and some are clearly aimed at people with advanced degrees in physics, but the hits exceed the misses. I have actually not read through the entire archive, so I'm not sure how long it takes to do so, but the comic isworth exploring.


Other Random Links


WoB's Only Review Thus Far

Jack's Webcomic Reviews is a webcomic-review blog. Yes. Yes, it is. It is unfortunate that WoB's only review is sort of meh, but what can you do?


A Certain Essay-Writing Blog That I Shall Not Name Here for Fear of Google

I don't really mind being connected with this one, but I have an inherent mistrust of Google and often try to make things as difficult for it as humanly possibly. In this blog (which is only in the form of a blog because there are free blog templates all over the Internet, whereas domain names and server space generally cost money), I scream a lot and simultaneously impart practical advice on how not to write the kind of essay that will make your markers want to claw out their own eyes. The subject is serious, but the Ranting is probably quite fun to witness. As I am the one doing it, I couldn't say for sure.


An Article I Wrote on Graphic Novels

'Nuff said.