Many of us have memories of reading the Sunday morning cartoons in the newspaper, but few of us still get a daily rag on the doorstep anymore. That doesn't mean we've stopped enjoying a few strips of well-timed puns or goofy antics, though; webcomics are our new addiction. And on the Internet, every day can be Sunday cartoons day. Here are a dozen of our absolute favorites.
Goats/Scenes from a Multiverse
I first encountered Jon Rosenberg at Small Press Expo a few years ago while tagging along with my wife the librarian, picking up a copy of Infinite Typewriters, a compilation of the Goats webcomic. Rosenberg started Goats in 1997 as a pseudo-autobiographical cartoon strip about Jon and Philip, two guys who were somehow vaguely in the tech business. And then it was blasted with cosmic radiation and became something much...stranger, incorporating science, quantum theory, and metaphysics in a way that was constantly hilarious, with a cast that includes demonic chickens, cybernetic goldfish, and an overclocked lemon. When I read the plot thread where Phillip and Jon hijack an alien spacecraft, fly to the center of the galaxy, meet God in the guise of a pirate, convince him to prove himself by changing form into a pork chop, and then eat him, I was hooked. And then Rosenberg took a break from Goats in 2010, leaving the story midstream.
Fortunately, he didn't abandon the world he created—instead, he shifted his focus to Scenes from a Multiverse—a daily webcomic based in the same collection of alternate realities that draws on pop and geek culture, science fiction, and just about everything else for the absurd. Until recently, Rosenberg allowed readers to vote on which plotlines to continue in the next strip; he has since abandoned that for a benevolent dictatorship approach (which hasn't upset many of his fans). He finds a way to reframe current events (like Superstorm Sandy) and make philisophical and politically-laced statements that make me laugh and think at the same time. It's a guilty pleasure that isn't so guilty after all. ~Sean Gallagher
When I went to New York ComicCon with my 10-year old daughter in 2010, she had just finished reading the Scott Pilgrim series (she went dressed as Ramona Flowers). Little did I know at the time that she would suck me down a very different rabbit hole, when we met Tom Siddell, an English webcomic author and artist. Imagine if Neal Gaiman and William Gibson had co-written Harry Potter, and you've got Gunnerkrigg Court, the story of a boarding school that sits quite literally at the boundaries of myth and science.
Siddell illustrates the complex story beautifully with techniques that draw on the stylistic approach of anime, but with rich and detailed scenery. And there's nothing juvenile about the plotline, which revolves around the mysterious origins of the school and the inhabitants of the Gillitie wood across the bridge—many of whom are drawn from Celtic and Native American mythology. Published every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Gunnerkrigg has become something I'd never have expected—a father-daughter readalong that both of us have been sucked into. The first thing my daughter often asks when she gets home from school is, "Have you read the new Gunnerkrigg?" ~Sean + Zoe Gallagher
Limitations are often said to boost creativity, and there's no premise more limited than that of Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics. Nearly every one of the 2,300+ (and counting) comics uses the exact same pictures—six panels of hokey dinosaur clip art—and just changes the words. T-Rex, Utahraptor, and Dromiceiomimus have discussed everything from dating to literary techniques to erotic fiction to board games to the heat death of the universe. Despite the comic's limited art, North has developed an extensive roster of unseen secondary characters including God (who, it turns out, is usually just trolling everyone), the Devil (who just wants to talk about old school video games), and William Shakespeare (forsooth!).
The comic itself is great, but another part of the fun is the various side-projects that North gets into. His fanbase is large enough and enthusiastic enough that things he invents for his comic—a machine that tells people how they will die, or a mashup of Eric Clapton's "Layla" and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit"—often become real things. The first comic has now spawned not one but two books of (often excellent) reader-penned short fiction, and the second has spawned a mashup that's only sin is being too short. ~Andrew Cunningham
Hark! A Vagrant
Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant has bestowed the Internet with many a gift: “aww yiss.” “I had fun once, and it was awful.” “Ooh, Mister X.” The comic was born from Beaton’s contributions to her university newspaper and her ever-increasing expertise in historical events of varying levels of obscurity. Hark! manages to make retellings of historical and literary events indelibly hilarious, often by basing their characters off modern stereotypes. Young Ada Lovelace is the hapless victim of a helicopter parent, Cinderella as a gorilla juicehead, Jefferson as the straight-edge foil to the silly and childish Ben Franklin, Ben Franklin as the straight-edge foil to the class clown John Adams.
In the context of the Internet, Beaton's art style is old school: pencil drawings among a webcomic sea of vector art, which gives it a lot of charm. Her hand-drawn thousand-yard stare on almost any character gives me a bout of the giggles. But Beaton’s work is unparalleled for the strength of her voice and good comedic timing, which set Hark! A cut above the rest. ~Casey Johnston
Pokey the Penguin
Pokey the Penguin has always been "the original online cartoon" to me. Although its creator is a mystery (well, Wikipedia attributes Web Developer Steve Havelka of Portland, Oregon. But Pokey never had a byline), and the series has been long discontinued, the vast library of archived works is a treasure trove of absurdist situations and nonsensical punchlines. It is the anti-comic, created back in the days when the Internet embodied the opposite of all the wholesome, capitalist, social things you were supposed to engage in.
Pokey and friends—the "Little Girl" (also a penguin), Mr. Nutty (a snowman), Chicken Delicious (a penguin), among others—hang out in the Arctic Circle and have zany adventures, narrated through a jarring hodgepodge of all-caps and strike-throughs. Sometimes the illustrator has an unexplained conniption fit and scribbles all over the cell. Often, punctuation is gratuitous. Mostly, Pokey's comedic anarchy make it a perfect fill-in-the-gap cartoon that can apply to any situation. So memorize some of the bizarre lines and, as they say in Ancient Scotland, Bon Voyage! ~Megan Geuss
I have been given an impossible task: write why I like Penny Arcade and then supply a single example comic. Just one? I only get one? How can I summarize fourteen years of irreverent and hilariously insightful gaming cultural satire and commentary? Shall I discuss their breakdown of the effect of anonymity on civility, or recap the Cold War table tennis epic Paint the Line? Perhaps I should recount their treatises on heroism, multiculturalism, eschatology, dadaism, or the pitfalls of Wikipedia and fallacious arguments from authority?
No, honestly, out of the entire Penny Arcade oeuvre, the one strip that still makes me laugh the hardest is the one about the claw shrimp. ~Lee Hutchinson