NVinNYC

One of the best things about the internet is that it allows anyone to publish their stuff for the whole world to see (for a cost of next to nothing). A lot of this stuff is only for a small, selective audience, but comics and cartoons seem to have found a wide audience on the internet. Before the internet, artists had to sign away the rights to their work to TV networks or publishing syndicates and only a select few ever saw their work published. Now days there are hundreds if not thousands of comics and cartoons that are self-published online. Not all of them are very good (many are quite bad in fact), but there are quite a few out there that are gems.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Webtoons

• Homestar Runner – The 800 pound gorilla of webtoons. This toon has been around for quite a few years and has hours and hours of content available for browsing. If you haven’t seen it before you probably won’t get it (e.g. why is Strong Bad such an ass?) but after checking out the First Timer page watching a few episodes of Strong Bad’s Emails (I recommend Japanese Cartoon & Dragon) you won’ t be able to stop.
• Making Fiends – A cartoon from a former animator on South Park, this comic tells the story of the hateful Vendetta and the always kind (but oblivious) Charlotte, who always manages to mess up Vendetta’s schemes. The paper-cutout art is probably my favorite thing about this comic.
• Space Tree – A rather new comic is totally off the wall. It’s about Space Tree, a tree, in space. It makes no sense but that’s okay, you’ll laugh anyway.

Webcomics

• Diesel Sweeties – A pixilated robot romance comic. This comic is about as ‘indie’ as it gets. You should probably start from Comic #1.
• Elephantitis of the Mind – A comic of random thoughts by Asher Sarlin, a fellow Oxy student. No plot line here, but you should check out some of my favorites.
• The Joy of Tech – A tech (and often Mac) related toon. It often parodies the newest dirt on Microsoft too. Hard to go wrong with that.
• Penny Arcade – This is a comic about video gaming that has been around for a long time. Gabe and Tycho don’t really hold back their opinions when something sucks, which is nice (in comparison to traditional gaming journalism). However, the comics are often accompanied with long posts linking to other articles which much be read in order to understand the comic. This sound like a bad thing but it actually makes the comic more interesting because it’s very specific humor (not bland vanilla stuff like in newspaper comics).
• PvP – This is about as close as a webcomic gets to a real newspaper comic, in fact, it’s author has started offering it to newspapers free of charge (inverting the traditional publishing model). Anyway, it’s about a small cast of characters who work at a videogame magazine.

A lot of these thrive on content that wouldn’t ever work for a family newspaper, so reader beware I guess. Let me know if I missed one of your favorites.