Fun Stuff: Comics

After getting out of Karate class tonight, I stopped over at Vault of Midnight, my favorite comic shop, to pick up this week's batch of books. It looks like a slow one this time, as I only walked out with two. One was the first of what looks to be a 4-part series in the world of "Squadron Supreme"™ and the other is the next issue of "Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man".

In case you were wondering, I love comics. After all, I am the international superhero known as "The Webmaster" -- rescuing people from their own websites!

More than just superhero comics, though, I love the pictorial story in a variety of forms. Isn't it cool that so many cartoons and comics are now showing up on the Web? Artists who might not otherwise have had an audience are able to get out their fun, dark, quirky, disturbing, hilarious, or whimsical fare for us all to see. In case you are interested, here is a list of some of my favorite online comics sites:

• Comics.com -- On the United Media site. They have a number of the "newspaper" strips with which you might be familiar, including "Arlo and Janis", "Dilbert", and "Get Fuzzy".
• GoComics.com -- More "newspaper" strips. Here you'll find "Foxtrot", "Garfield", and "Doonesbury", among others.
• "Order of the Stick" -- As a former Dungeons and Dragons player, this one really gets me. This one is more of a full page layout of a group of stick-figure adventurers.
• "MegaTokyo" -- This one is more of a manga style. It turns out that the artist, Fred Gallagher, lives at least relatively close to Ann Arbor.
• "User Friendly" -- Lots of techie-nerd fun with humorous commentary on the bizarreness of the tech world, including obligatory digs at whichever big tech company is making litigious idiots out of themselves this week.
• "Kevin & Kell" -- A touching story of an anthropomorphic rabbit who marries the she-wolf of his dreams and the lives of their oddball extended family and friends. I was turned on to this one by my lovely sister-in-law, JoAnn. She met the artist, Bill Holbrook, at DragonCon this year. She bought me his first book as a Christmas gift and I've been hooked ever since.

Now, just to warn you, many of these online comics have their entire history available for you to read. You can waste a lot of time reading five or six years of comics. Still, when you find something you really enjoy.... Oh, and if you want to share the love with one of your non-Internet friends, many of these folks have their books bundled up in dead-tree (paper) form, available at your favorite bookstore or definitely from their websites. Check them out!

So, do you read any online comics? Which ones?