Webcomics are a difficult phenomenon to get into, not the least because googling “webcomics” turns up a tidal wave of poorly drawn manga and comics that can be described as “adult” solely because they feature naked people. Scraping the surface reveals some material worth showing your friends for a chuckle, but if you’re interested in comics in general, there’s a lot of life to be found online, and usually completely free. Webcomics are built on community with other artists, and they tend to have a bunch of links to artists they like and want to support on their site. There’s a level of experimentation and freedom available online that just isn’t possible in print, and while this can often lead to disgusting or unreadable places, there is gold to be found. (Even so, somehow a lot of really great webcomics still stick to pretty traditional styles.) All that and you won’t have to spend a dime, so put down your electric horn and get out of your horseless carriage! The ones I chose are simply ones I like and have read a lot. They aren’t necessarily better than other good ones, and this tiny list tends almost entirely toward humor. (Don’t get me wrong–there are good dramatic comics, but these are a few I’ve been reading for a long time and helped to fuel my interest in webcomics in general. It’s a personal list.)

(I rewrote this a few times, and I alternated between spelling “webcomic” as one word or two. I think it should be one. Go fly a kite, spell check.)

Dinosaur Comics — this one’s been around for about seven years, which is an epoch in web comic time. If web comic time was parallel to real history, 2003 was when those monkeys in 2001: A Space Odyssey yelled at a big black box and killed each other. Apparently ignoring all of Scott McCloud’s optimism about the “infinite canvas”, Ryan North’s comic features strips that never change, except the dialogue between T-Rex, two other dinosaurs, God, and Satan (off-panel). The parallels between this and traditional newspaper comics are begging to be made, but I doubt most newspapers would carry a strip evidently drawn in Microsoft Paint where a tyrannosaurus talks about basically anything, including but not limited to philosophy, language, comics, and sex. But the drawing power isn’t the narrative (which is virtually non-existent) or the artwork, but the frequently intelligent and funny dialogue. I’ve included links to a few strips I think are especially good, which I hope will be helpful, given that there are over a thousand DC strips. Then again, since there are so many, and there’s no reason to start in any given place (except, as per usual for web comics, the first ones tend to be the weakest). But anyway, you could try this one, or maybe this one, or one of these. (A helpful hint to even more fun times: if you hold your cursor over the strip, a lot of comics, including this one, will have some hidden text (alt-text) that’s usually pretty damn funny.)

Achewood — This is one of the best web comics on the internet. It hasn’t been great the entirety of its run and it seems to be getting weaker as time goes on, but Chris Onstad has created one of the most interesting and original comics, online or no. He has a wildly diverse cast of characters, and while he often took them in surreal directions in the latter half of the strip (which I don’t consider a bad thing by any means) much of the humor and pathos of the comic comes from those characters’ detailed and richly realized histories. This is one that you absolutely must spend time with to appreciate. Achewood follows a core cast of about 6-10 anthropomorphic animals, with countless others coming in and out. The characters Onstad has spent the most time on are Roast Beef, a depressed computer programming cat, and Ray, his business-savvy and incredibly wealthy friend. There are gigantic story arcs that alter the course of the strip, but there are also plenty of one-off strips to start on. Again, the first year or so was shaky, but there are still a few gems hidden throughout as the strip found its footing and began to find a voice for each character. I think this is probably the best place to start, but eventually anyone interested in getting into Achewood should get around to the Great Outdoor Fight. Onstad elevates what had previously been a brilliant strip to a pitch-perfect blend of brilliant dialogue and a fascinating story. Check out the drop-down menu on the site, which conveniently puts you at the beginning of most of the best story arcs. I’d also recommend any of the three or four times Beef goes to Heaven. (James Kochalka did a guest strip once.)

Nedroid Picture Diary — When Nedroid (drawn by Anthony Clark, who also does the color for The Adventures of Dr. McNinja) started, it really was more of a picture diary, but when Beartato and Reginald came into being, it became mostly about them and a few others. Clark is a gifted cartoonist, and manages to achieve a lot with very minimal expressions. (He references this simplicity in this self-deprecating comic.) The “diary” aspect allows him to experiment with alternate versions of comics and other formats that wouldn’t normally be as possible if it was a more traditional webcomic. There are a few short arcs, but for the most part they’re one-shot jokes, so any place is good to start. Here are a few I like. (The last link in that chain is a good example of the freedom to do alternate versions of strips that are occasionally even funnier.) The alt-text is essential. Clark knows exactly how to use them to make a funny joke even better. His humor is unwaveringly silly and child-like, occasionally tempered with the surreal.

Hark! A Vagrant — Kate Beaton has stumbled upon an apparently bottomless well of humor: weird jokes about historical figures. She is a born historian, and can see the humor in fairly obscure events like Kierkegaard’s caricature in Danish papers and people’s responses to St. Francis. Her general tone can be described as sweet and goofy, even when she’s exposing negative characteristics of famous historical figures (like Edison and others’ theft of Tesla’s ideas). Her simple artwork belies a genuinely gifted artist, who has matured dramatically since she started.

K.C. Green — is prolific. His current project, gunshow, has been going on since September ’08, but he’s been making comics online since ’03 at both Bee Power and Horribleville. There are great comics buried in both of those, but unfortunately, (in the case of Bee Power) because they’re older projects, he hasn’t undertaken the task of organizing them beyond an unintelligible index. (Bee Power was worth the effort if for no other reason than to produce this comic.) His sense of humor reminds me of Brian Posehn. They’re both conscious of their geekiness and aren’t afraid to make incredibly juvenile jokes. They both also possess a self-deprecating streak, and weed-induced willingness to laugh at the dumbest things possible, tempered with the ability make it funny even if you aren’t high. There are striking similarities in his art to guys like R. Crumb, who would take earlier humor comic formats and take them in more shocking or profane directions. In the case of R. Crumb, another parallel is Horribleville, which was autobiographic and sometimes extremely honest. The only thing I would criticize about Green is his lack of organization. I’d love to see a “best of” archive that compiles his old projects onto one site. Regardless of quibbling web design problems, his work is fantastic. (He also has one of the funniest title pages to a story arc I’ve ever seen.) Here’s a good example. Read the four or five after it, too. Somehow pun after pun on the words “egg nog” starts out dumb and becomes painfully funny.

pictures for sad children — The title doesn’t even hint at the void-black humor of this strip. James Campbell says his comic is about “a bad feeling you get when you are feeling good, or a good feeling you get when you are feeling bad.” The artwork is extremely simple, using stick figures, black lines, and white and gray spaces. This is a fairly common style in webcomics, and its quality depends entirely on the artist. Campbell uses the style’s inherent repetition, uniformity, and simplicity to emphasize the bleak and oppressive world his characters inhabit. (K.C. Green, Kate Beaton, and many others have made pretty great guest comics, at PFSC, too.)

I couldn’t resist making a longer list, so here are some to take a risk on. And really, you’re risking nothing, except a second or two, and what were you going to do anyway?

Axe Cop

Dresden Codak

A Lesson is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible

Double Fine

demian5

Gunnerkrigg Court

Return to Sender (I can’t resist commenting on this one. The artist is Vera Brosgol, a shockingly gifted artist who started on RTS when she was in high school (as far as I can tell, she’s about 26 now). It’s a serial instead of a collection of one-shots like a lot of the ones I listed, and has no resolution. She’s said she won’t ever return to it, and understandably s0–think back to the projects you started when you were in high school, and how embarrassed you’d be if people saw them. It’s not incredible, and her work in the Flight anthologies outstrip it, but it’s still a fun read while it lasts.)

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The story of Daniel Hasch’s rise from computer engineer to the wealthiest human being in history is as common as any American myth now. In fact, many of the stories regarding his early career are apocryphal at best, and destructive at worst. His success is attributed to luck bordering on divine intervention, but also, far less reputably, his development of a revolutionary program designed to make market predictions, on which he supposedly spent a significant portion of his wealth keeping hidden. The latter theory is denied most vehemently by other engineers who say that such serendipitous predictions would have been impossible without culling virtually every factor that could conceivably have affected economic trends.  To make matters more unbelievable, he did not make one fortunate investment, but many throughout his career. One expert was quoted as saying “a program like that is tantamount to getting financial advice from God”. The existence of such a program is also denied by the reclusive inheritors of his estate after his suicide.

Much has been written in an attempt to grapple with the mind-bending good fortune bestowed on one man, with no education or natural ability to recommend him. I believe I’ve come on an explanation, but I doubt it will satisfy.

His first wife, Julia Lynn Cost, was a librarian before they were married. It’s a sign of our friendship that she chose to divulge this to me as opposed to the long line of journalists, historians, and the curious who have come to her for answers or blessings on their financial endeavors, as if she were some kind of banker’s Holy Virgin. As far as I know, she didn’t tell her sons or her widower, either. I met her by chance at an art gallery, and we became close friends. (Not lovers, as the tabloids scurrilously suggested; that honor was bestowed on only one man after Daniel–and a dear friend–who understandably desires anonymity.)  I was careful not to broach the topic of her ex-husband. Some time after her brain cancer was diagnosed as terminal, she called me to ask that I write a story about the origins of Daniel’s wealth. I agreed, though now I think that promise will damage my reputation, or worse.

She told her story laboriously; at this point, she was heavily medicated. She was sickly, small, and weak. She looked aged to me for the first time. I worried at first that this might be some kind of narcotic dementia, but but her mind was clear. Or it was, until the last interview.

The computer lab at the library she worked at was being renovated, and one of the men clearing out the lab of equipment showed her an old laptop he had found under a desk, tucked in a corner. She thought it had been left by some unfortunate and forgetful patron years ago, and set it aside. It had nothing to identify it, not the manufacturer or any kind of serial number, just the letters “AXT” etched roughly on the bottom. It sat in the lost and found box for a few months, until she decided she didn’t like seeing it go to waste. She said (with a joyless laugh) that her then-boyfriend, Daniel, might have been able to at least make use of its parts. She took it home, and out of curiosity, opened it. It started up without delay to a white screen and a black cursor blinking in the corner. After trying unsuccessfully to get it to show her anything she was familiar with, she typed some gibberish, struck Enter, and it responded with “invalid question.” (At this point, she asked me to close the shades and the door to her room.) She typed the question “what is the capital of Portugal?” It responded: “Lisbon.”

“I thought it was some kind of silly game the owner was playing before he lost it,” she told me, “so I kept asking it questions, and it kept answering. I was surprised at how comprehensive it was at first, but I wasn’t afraid until I asked it my own name and it told me. I started asking it questions about myself, and it was right about everything, including some things that I had never told anyone. I asked it questions about Danny, too, and it knew all of them.” She stopped at this point, and looked at me. Maybe she was looking for signs of incredulity, but I didn’t speak. At the time I didn’t doubt her. I had known her too long at that point to think of her inventing something so fabulous. There was nothing to gain, but credibility and respect to lose. In the years I’ve known her, she’s been nothing if not level-headed and serious. She watched me, and I waited for her to continue.

“I called Danny to come over, and we stayed up late, asking it anything we could think of. It answered all of the questions we asked. It told us it was called the Index, and was a collection of all facts. We asked about history, science, people we knew, even silly things like… at one point I wrote down some numbers on a piece of paper, and it told us what I had written. We found out it wouldn’t predict the future, and we had to be specific with our questions, or else it would give error messages, but anything about what had already exists and has happened it knew, and knew every detail. Danny asked it what dark matter was, for example. It told us, and it was accurate, years before scientists had discovered its nature.”

At this point she gave me the diary she had been keeping at the time, in which she recorded some of the questions she and Daniel had asked, as well as the answers they received.

“I distinctly remember one point where we realized it had been on for days without needing to be recharged. There was no power cord, and no place to plug one in if there was. Anyway, we spent days talking about what we could do with it, and that’s about when he had thought of designing a program to ask it questions and produce predictions about the market. That’s the infamous program everyone says he had. It took years, and he wasn’t finished with it until after we were married, but he did it.”

At this point I interjected. “So, you have a computer with everything on it, the first thing you two did was make money?”

She sighed and said “don’t think I haven’t been down this road, Mark. We really didn’t understand the implications at the time. We just wanted a good life. What would you have done?”

I felt foolish for asking.

She couldn’t talk for long without getting tired, so I ended the interview in favor of lighter conversation. When I returned the next day, she seemed a bit healthier. She was sitting up, and didn’t wince so often. I let myself hope, as I believe many do when a loved one is suffering. She began as soon as I set down the recorder.

“The only questions we couldn’t get answers to were about who had designed it, or who owned it before us,” she said.  “When I asked, it printed out a huge jumble of words and numbers and symbols I had never seen, and a few phrases in different languages. One in particular was in English…” she trailed off. “It was something about pyramids, or time… I can’t remember. Anyway, we couldn’t make heads or tails of the response. We also couldn’t tell how much it had printed, we couldn’t find the beginning. When we asked it, it said it had printed 10^30 lines, or something huge like that. Danny didn’t pay much attention, but I was curious, so I kept asking. But it almost seemed like it was trying to be confusing. For example, I asked it ‘what is the meaning of the response to the question “who designed the Index”?’ It would say something like ‘the meaning is the response to the question ‘who designed the Index?’. I had to let it go. Every time I got close to the answer, it would respond with that mess. I think about that most often. I wish we had recorded it.”

“What happened to the Index?” I asked.

“This was after our separation, but I think Danny tried to ship it to some mansion in Europe, where he wanted to retire. The plane went down in the ocean. I think that’s why he… you know. It became part of him. He was so protective of it. Near the end of our marriage, he wouldn’t even let me see it. Our boys still don’t know about it.”

We sat in silence for a while.

The next few days were simply visiting. She was losing her strength quickly. She said that no amount of research she conducted privately could unearth its origins, or the meaning of the letters “AXT”. The two of them told no one about the Index. I am the third person to have learned of it, barring the existence of any previous owners who, if they knew of it, did nothing with the knowledge. For what it’s worth, I believe her, even in lieu of our final conversation, which was to come about a week after the first interview. When I arrived at the hospital, one of the nurses stopped me, and warned me in a quiet voice that Julia had been feverish and troubled for the past 24 hours or so. When I walked in, she was covered in sweat. Her husband was there, who she asked to leave. She was difficult to hear, but I realized she was trying to tell me about a dream she had. Or rather, a dream she had experienced the night before she discovered the Index, and had only recently remembered. Her dream placed her on the edge of a ravine or a cliff, and she couldn’t see the bottom of it. The earth was dark red, rocky and deserted. There were rocks of varying sizes as far as she could see. Everything was dim, but the sun was red and much larger than a normal sun. She told me she felt as if she were on some other planet. She could see far to her right, on the edge of the cliff, was what she insisted–more than once, as if I refused to believe her–a temple. It was like a needle, tall and extremely thin, visible (though barely) against the darkening purple sky. It was made of black material “older and more imposing than stone,” she said. She had the impression that it went deep down under the earth. She said it was “like a tower breaking out from hell and penetrating the earth.” When she reached it, she looked through the arched entrance, which was many times taller than a person. Inside she saw a man, huge and thin, draped in torn cloth, twenty feet tall. He was writing on a scroll with extremely long, thin fingers. She started shaking as she told me. I told her to stop; begged her, really. I didn’t tape this conversation. I couldn’t calm her. All I could understand after that point was that this tall man looked at her, and said something, but she was too upset to speak clearly. Nurses came in and sedated her. She died that night.

***

I think about the Index often. In the right hands, it could have propelled mankind to a perfect utopia. If it contained all knowledge about how the universe functions, there would have been no limit to what humanity could build or accomplish. We could have overcome every limit in every facet of life by asking the right question. We could have staved off the heat death of the universe. We could have become ten billion gods filling the sky with such light that has never been seen or could be seen in any other reality. What are the odds of such a device coming into existence, apparently spontaneously? If the chances of it existing are non-zero, then it had to have happened, in at least one of the infinite number of possible universes. It happened in ours, and it landed in the hands of a man whose best idea was to use it as a dowsing rod. No one must say that, presented with the apple in the garden, they would have done better. There is no fathoming unlimited gain and unlimited loss.

1. 2000
2. 2001
3. 2002
4. 2003
5. 2004
6. 2005
7. 2006
8. 2007
9. 2008
10. 2009

I realize #4 may be a controversial choice, but I couldn’t resist putting it on there. Criticize away!

A: If you want to let him know that he’s done something wrong, revenge is the only way. Start small, by torching his car. Then go bigger, by raping and murdering his wife, in front of him if you can. Make sure there’s lots of blood and yelling. Then torture him in some ironic way, maybe by grabbing his butt so hard that it falls off and maybe makes him fart a lot. Make sure you film all of this, so that before you kill him, you can make him watch it over and over (8 to 12 times, and don’t be afraid to do it even more than that) so that he gets it. Really gets exactly what’s wrong, and so that he can understand what he did wrong, so that he gets that you’re mad. He needs to understand why you don’t like that he did that, and you’re mad. You’re mad, right? He needs to get that. He needs to get it. Once this is done, you can fall asleep satisfied that justice has been done, and done in the cleverest way possible.

Q: I really have a hard time being social and talking to people I don’t know that well. I’m forcing myself to go to a party this weekend where I won’t know many people, and I need advice!
–Shy in Chicago

A: The best way to win people over is humor, and the best humor is the edgy stuff that makes people think AND laugh. Give racial humor a go. Single out a black person (other races will do in a pinch, but you’ll get the best results from a black person) and scream out as many racial epithets as you can. This will make people uncomfortable, which is always funny, and you’re demonstrating the inherent absurdity of racism. Maybe you’ll even get people to reevaluate their own ideas about race! Everyone will be laughing in no time, and you will have made important social commentary, which is really the main goal of comedy anyway. Keep in mind this only works if you’re white, and it only barely works if you’re another race other than black or white. If this simply isn’t an option, just shit yourself and make fart noises for half an hour straight, or give a detailed description of how you’d murder a baby. (If you’re lucky there will be a baby there you can pretend to murder.) It will be hilarious, and you’ll be getting laid in no time.

Q: I don’t know how to tell my wife that she’s gained some weight, and I’m concerned about her eating habits. She’s very sensitive about this stuff, and I don’t want to hurt her feelings. What should I say?
–Nervous

A: Fart shit poop fag butts fuck goddammit balls tranny gay pee pee Bush fart dead hooker butts abortion fuck God butts balls

That’s about it for this time. We’re going to go suck each other’s balls with a Bush mask on! Just kidding. That was a joke about how we’re gay, even though we’re not. It was funny because we stated our intent to perform an action incompatible with our identity, and because it involved a mask featuring former president Bush’s likeness, it was also political. Write this down, we’re geniuses, and if you don’t get it you should kill yourself.

Well, as the World’s Fattest Man, I spend a lot of time sitting in an expensive, specially made bed to hold my 1200+ lb body, which has long since ceased to be functional. Really, I’ve stopped even resembling a human. I’m more like a pale, sweaty Jabba the Hutt without a propensity for crime or violence (but for danishes). My life expectancy is very low, so I doubt that I will be able to see what happens to your marriage. It’s gotten very difficult to write this column over the years, because my keyboard (which is four times the normal size to accomodate my large fingers) has been encrusted with ground beef. Please send a thank you note to me when you see your problem in print.

Dear WFM,
I’m beginning to wonder if I’m a lesbian. I haven’t told anyone. The problem is, I’m in a committed relationship, and worst of all, I think I might be pregnant with his child. What should I do?
–Secretive

Well, as the World’s Fattest Man, I’ve had a lot of time to “sit” at my computer (whose keyboard is, again, very large and covered in very old ground beef) and some of that time is spent watching pornography, provided I can keep my heavy eyelids up. If those particular films are any indication, I would say that the best way to find out your sexual orientation is to invite your female friends over and have sexual relations with all of them. I hope you will keep me updated.

Dear WFM,
I’m twenty-seven years old, female, single, and I’ve had a crush on a guy I work with for at least a month. I’ve been flirting with him a lot lately, and I thought I had won him over, but then I overheard him talking about me, and he called me a “cow”. I’m heartbroken and confused, since I’ve never really thought of myself as “fat”. Help!
–Confused over Weight

Well, as the World’s Fattest Man, I haven’t seen myself in a mirror in four years, since I have been unable to get out of my state-of-the-art weight distribution bed to look, but judging by people’s reactions when they see me, I don’t think I will be winning any beauty contests (unless the primary criterion are “very fat”). Given this, you probably are disgusting, even more so than a normal fat person because you are a woman. I’m afraid that if you came into my room, I would throw up an entire turkey.

You know, I’ve often been called calloused, and not simply because of old bed sores. I believe the chief duty of a advice columnist is to be honest, and sometimes that means telling my readers exactly what I think about things like homosexuality and danishes.

I first heard of this weird, obscure volume in Scott McCloud’s ingenious book Understanding Comics. At the time, if McCloud said it was good or used it as an example of anything, I wanted to read it, but for some reason it took me a while to get around to this one. Shame on me.

By all accounts, this is a weird book. It’s part ant farm epic, part funny book, and part mythology. It’s about “the affinity of life,” according to Marder, and the story centers on a population of creatures called beans. they change and evlolve along with their seemingly self-contained world, and when something upsets the order of their lives, they adapt to it. They have to deal with outsiders attacking their way of life, religious conflicts, how to respond to new religious experiences, and major social shifts, all with the utmost lightness of heart, drenched in joyful slang.

These stories have a tinge of something both alien and deeply familiar, some connection to a mythic sensibility, while on the surface exhibiting a hooting pleasure in simple play. He effortlessly mixes the strange sexual and social relationship the beans have with an underworld of creatures that provide them with food with goofy accents and simple narration, disarming the readers while drawing them in.

The beans also have a distinct spiritual life whose focal point is Gran’ma’pa, the tree that gives them life and sustains them on a daily basis. They look to it for guidance and meaning, and Marder handles this with supreme grace. I hardly stopped to think of how this could comment on preexisting religions while I was reading it because the invitation to care about and follow the beans had been so irresistible.

The artwork seems to suggest that the whole world occurs in 2 dimensions, more or less. There is nary a cube or a sphere in sight; the beans are collections of blobs and sticks, and their world is strictly up and down, although occasionally bits of y-axis perspective sneaks in. Couple this with the rich mythology built in and you’d think it was discovered on a cave wall or hieroglyphs on a temple if it didn’t have bear a distinct imprint from Krazy Cat creator George Herriman. The art is a cartoonish mosaic, iconic and constantly entertaining.

This work defies classification. It’s called an “eco-fantasy” on the back, so I guess that’ll do. As soon as I read the next volume, my thoughts on it will be here.