10 Webcomics To Add To Your Week

Undoubtedly one of the greatest developments to come out of the internet age is the unprecedented creative freedom currently enjoyed by the world's artists and audiences alike. And while maybe the medium hasn't achieved the mainstream acceptance of, say, webisodes or podcasts, webcomics are no exception when it comes to diversity of talent and content. Yes, gone are the days where your weekly comics reading was forcibly limited to Dilbert, Hagar the Horrible and those pointless daily Phantom strips in which all the Ghost Who Walks ever seems to do is just be the Ghost Who Does Everything Painfully Slowly; instead, we can revel in a pictorially fictive playground the likes of which we've never seen before, filled to the brim with the likes of…

Garfield Minus Garfield

To ease you through the transition from your everyday funny pages to the comic strips of tomorrow, Irishman Dan Walsh's inspired Garfield Minus Garfield seems as good a place as any to start. I first plugged this strip for a uni assignment back in 2008 and it turns out that, even five years later, the premise of removing the titular feline from Jim Davis' almost 40-year-old strip to reveal the harrowing existence of a lonely, severely unhinged and probably at-risk grown-ass man is one of the most subtly brilliant moves of creative re-imagination we've seen in recent times. And it remains unbelievably funny.

For Lack of a Better Comic

Atlanta-based Jacob Andrews' strip is an outlet for the struggling artist's frequently jaded, often hilarious and mostly observational impressions of life, influenced by his experiences as a twentysomething who still lives with his parents and can barely pay his rent. Naturally, there's a fair degree of self-deprecating humour woven throughout his comics, but it's not without wackiness, the end result as likely to be a lamentation on helping your elders with technology as it is about being hit on by a septuagenarian fortune-teller.

Infinite Nap

Claire Jarvis' comic “for the young, the confused, and the unconventionally witty” is an amusing cavalcade of human awkwardness, but it is also frequently poignant, insightful, honest and painful and everything else that springs from being an aspiring artistic type coming to terms with the realities and shittitudes of responsible adulthood while learning to embrace and understand your own creative and emotional limitations. Yeah, finding yourself is a dick of a ride, but some pretty great work has come out of it.

Wondermark

Wondermark is an “illustrated jocularity” by David Malki that, I think, qualifies as part of the steampunk movement, maybe, being that it is made up of old-timey illustrations juxtaposed with modern language to create comedy. It's a deceptively simple trick, but one that works so well that Wondermark recently celebrated its 10th year of publication, no small feat for any online comic., much less one that, at face value, suffers from kind of niche appeal. It deserves much better.

JL8

With his unofficial, unsanctioned take on some of the world's most recognisable superheroes in their pre-adolescent stages, American artist Yale Stewart has effectively managed to beat DC Comics at their own game. In the comic strip formerly known as Little League, Stewart has created a heartfelt, amusing, classical story free from heavy-handedness and pretension that outshines so much of what the company has in its catalogue proper. It's a miracle he hasn't been shut down, so revel in it while you can.

Owl Turd Comix

Mononymous self-described “unprofessional comic artist” Shenanigansen is an infamous name among certain cyber circles, having cut his trolling teeth upon the unsuspecting user-base of British indie game developer Facepunch's forums in a way that would probably only make sense to that specific community but is nonetheless still Google-able (forums, amirite?) – but his Owl Turd strip, darkly tinged, brutally honest and skeweringly sharp as it is, stands to make his name for real as an internet personality, picking up a dedicated fan base in only a relatively short period of publication, for very good reason.

Hark! A Vagrant

Canadian comics artist Kate Beaton pours her encyclopaedic knowledge of history and Western literature into one of the most intelligent, consistently funny and offbeat strips to have emerged in the past decade. Updates these days aren't as frequent as some of us might like, but thankfully Beaton's strip archive is large enough to keep you entertained for a little while, at least. Therein, she tackles the big questions, like what if Edgar Allen Poe and Jules Verne were pen pals? and what if Batman was distractingly sexy? Hey, I never said things wouldn't get weird.

Explodingdog

Sure, the pictures are crude enough to have been drawn by a six-year-old with Parkinson's, but that's undeniably part of what makes the art of Adam Culbert, aka Sam Brown, so engaging. Not a webcomic in the most traditional sense of the word, the works in explodingdog are (largely) one-panel depictions Culbert has based on title suggestions from readers. Recurring themes and characters nonetheless appear throughout the comic's 13 thoughtful years, giving the whole project at least a partially unified aesthetic when taken as a whole. It's simple, it's beautiful, and it's great on T-shirts. Trust me, I have like six of them.

Poorly Drawn Lines

Another recent shining example in the online comics realm, Reza Farazmand's Poorly Drawn Lines embraces the artistically minimal approach of contemporaries such as For Lack of a Better Comic and Owl Turd as well as their absurdist, non sequitur-laced style of juvenile but irrepressibly clever comedy and comes out with a consistently strong, thrice-weekly strip that has quickly become a hard favourite of those who have stumbled across it on their social media platform of choice. What a time to be alive. Speaking of which, finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention…

Dinosaur Comics

A forefather of modern webcomics and a mainstay of the medium, Dinosaur Comics turned 10 years old in February, but the curious, graphically unchanging strip by Canadian Ryan North about three dinosaurs – T-Rex, Dromiceiomimus and Utahraptor – and their apparently arbitrary conversations remains one of the purest, most wonderful examples of the artform, combining digital artwork, a recurring motif, surreal humour and motherfucking dinosaurs to create pretty much the ultimate webcomic. So if you really want to go on dealing with Blondie and Garfield with Garfield in it for your comic strip fix, be our guest – the rest of you have some reading to do.