Web Comics - my substitute for established religion

I’m a whore for web comics. While some other office-bound workers might come in to work and check out the latest from ESPN or jump on Craigslist or link directly to facebook and start declaring “TGIF!” or “HUMP DAY!!” – I turn to penny arcade and PvP.

I can’t say why I have such a fascination for them. I could point out the potential for taking a story its full course over months or years with little distractions from the author’s vision (IE – Atland). That isn’t accurate though, because the majority of them seem to be just random one-offs (IE – Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal). The artwork is rarely of a superior quality (IE – XKCD, Cyanide & Happiness, Dinosaur Comics). You have a full range from your whimsical and in some cases straight up farces (IE - Order of the Stick) comics to the long-running social ‘drama’ comics (IE – Questionable Content). Some of those I keep reading with no idea why I read them, seeing no great redeeming value and finding no attachment to the characters or story (See the last one I referenced).

I think it is just ritual at this point. When the mornings promise to be slow…Or at least at a pace where I can afford to blow off twenty minutes as caffeine begins to coarse through my vascular system: it gives me something to meditate over. Small easily-digestible punch lines or attempts at philosophic insight to mull over while my brain is still in warm-up mode. It’s the same reason I used to do cross-word puzzles.

It’s like church without the proselytizing.

Of all those I enjoy, there are more then a few that slowly drift out of relevance or fall to the way side, but so far only one has been black-listed from my register. Ctrl+Alt+Del is a web comic I followed for some time, after a while I realized that it wasn’t funny and rarely did anything more then state the blaringly obvious. Adding insult to injury; the characters are just cut-and-paste personalities. There is the zany main character, his human-hating robot friend, his straight-faced best friend, and the uber-competitive and sometimes naggy girlfriend gamer. The icing on the shit cake though was when the author tried working in a sub-story at one point where the main character & his girlfriend get an abortion. It was a shitty story line that was just tacky and in incredibly poor taste.

To avoid giving that aforementioned piece of shit too much spot light (in case the adage "No such thing as bad press" is true) here is a listing of ten of my favorite web comics. (Top Three are in order, the rest are in whatever order they came to mind)

1) Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal – The king of web comics. It is always random and rarely anything short of hilarious. Sometimes they do video shorts too which are equally hilarious. This is the only one I have bookmarked & regularly check on my home computer.

2) Perry Bible Fellowship – Don’t let the name fool you. It rarely has anything to do with religion. I keep the complete almanac of this comic close at hand for an easy chuckle. It’s been discontinued but its hilarious archives are still intact.
3) Penny Arcade – I’ve been following this for the better part of six years now, my opinion may be jaded as I think my fandom is encroaching on fanaticsm.
4) XKCD – Stick figures at their best and most insightful/funny.
5) Cyanide and Happiness – I have a profoundly fucked-up sense of humor, and this feeds that sense of humor like an emaciated Ethiopian at Soup Plantation.
6) Realm of Atland – A beautifully colored web comic with a very long and entertaining story with some nice humor
7) Weapon Brown – A post-apocalyptic spoof of the world of newspaper comics. Weapon Brown roams the post-nuclear wastes with his loyal companion, Snoopy. Very over the top. Great artwork and anyone else who spent their teenage years reading as much ‘Heavy Metal’ magazine as I did will like this. It should also be noted that only the Weapon Brown strips on that sight seem to be any good.
8) Amazing Super-Powers – I fell in love with this after seeing their Monopoly strip. The slug at the pages heading changes every time you load the page. Never since Hamsterdance.com have animated gifs made me so gleeful.
9) Dumm Comics ‘Skadi’ – A Thursday segment of the daily web comics at Dumm comics. Skadi speaks to my love of old Conan stories and pulp fantasy…plus the artwork is reminiscent of Ren & Stimpy. So go! Follow Skadi on her world-wide quest to eat of every meat! (In a bacon way, not a sexy way).
10) Diesel Sweeties – Pixilated indie robot humor for the whole family.