I hate when that happens!

Bother! I just wrote half of a long and hopefully interesting entry, then accidentally clicked on a link without opening a new tab in my browser, and lost everything. 🙁 I really hate it when that happens. When will I ever learn to write entries off-line first…

Oh well, I’ll just have to try and re-create what I wrote:


What I’d been writing about was the various web-comics that I’ve been reading lately. I’ve acquired quite a list of them in my favourites folder that I regularly read. They’re quite a diverse bunch, but what they all have in common is that each appealed to me in some way, whether because of its humour, its characters, its drawing style… The other thing many of them have in common, now that I come to think about it, is that they have on-going story lines, rather than having a self-contained joke in each strip – they’re more like little soap operas, really (some people watch Shortland Street*, I read webcomics…)

Anyway, here’s some of my favourites, in no particular order:

9 Chickweed Lane
This is the first webcomic I started regularly reading. It first attracted my attention because of the “Hallmarks of Felinity” strips that are an irregular feature (as the name implies, they’re about cats), but then I got drawn into the story (which when I first started reading was about a divorced woman and her teenage daughter, but now mostly follows the story of the daughter, who has left home to be a ballerina).

Unshelved
Set in a library, and the humour will appeal to anyone who’s ever worked in a library (who will probably recognise many of the staff, patrons, and situations), or even anyone who’s just spent some time in a library. For no apparent reason, the regular cast include a library mascot who refuses to remove his costume, and a patron who’s a nudist.

User Friendly
This one’s set in an IT company. Most of the humour revolves around the idiocy of the non-IT staff of the company, and of customers who call the helpdesk, though there’s also commentary on IT news from the real world, and a few long-term story arcs. Oh, and various evil beings and sentient dust-bunnies make an appearance from time to time.

Ctrl+Alt+Del
Gamer humour. Started off as a conscious imitator of the better-known Penny Arcade, but I think Ctrl+Alt+Del does a better job. Features a robot made out of an Xbox.

Questionable Content
I’ve only just started reading this one recently. It doesn’t really have a theme – it’s just about a group of friends (this is definitely one in the soap opera category). I like the drawing style and the humour, though.

Something Positive
Another one that’s just a soap opera about a group of friends, although it’s a lot weirder and darker than Questionable Content. Has a very disturbing pink hairless boneless cat as an occasional character.

Krakow
This one’s just weird. It’s about a succubus who falls in love with a human and comes to live on earth. Her father is the Devil, who wears reading glasses and whose wife tells him off for putting on his Dark Lord act at dinner.

Ask Dr Eldritch
A photo webcomic about an advice columnist who specialises in the supernatural and his unusual home (the fact that one of his flatmates is a troll is not the strangest thing about it!). The site also features an archive of his advice columns, which are worth reading in themselves.

Alien Loves Predator
Probably the ultimate photo webcomic. If the concept of a Friends-like sit-com about Alien and Predator living together in New York doesn’t make you giggle, you’ll never get it. The only bad thing about it is that it only updates once a week.

I’ve mostly discovered these comics by someone posting a particular strip that appealed to them in a forum or blog, and I’ve liked it enough to explore the comic further. Normally if a comic really appeals I go back through the archives and read it from the beginning – it’s always interesting to see how the characters and artwork develop over the years as the writers and artists get into them.

Actually, thinking about it, I do something similar when I’m reading diaries – someone comments on my diary, or I see an interesting-sounding title on the front page, and I usually go and read a couple of recent entries. If something about the diary catches my attention I’ll quite often go back to the first entry and read it all the way through – it’s a fascinating to see how writing styles (and lives) develop, plus it’s an interesting way to get a bit of “back story” on a potential new friend and get up to speed on what’s important to them and what’s going on in their life now. Or maybe I’m just incredibly nosey 🙂

*I suppose someone must watch it, otherwise they wouldn’t keep making it, but I can’t imagine who would be that desperate for entertainment.

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