I’ve updated several pages on my website over the last few days, which included adding links to some webcomics that I hadn’t linked to before.  I’ve also added links to these in the blog sidebar (over there on the left and scroll down a bit), but I thought it would be good to give them some explicit recommendations in an entry.

First up, I’ve had Shaenon Garrity’s comic Narbonic listed on my comics recommendation page for quite a while, but haven’t had her in the sidebar.  She has several strips that she’s done online, som in collaboration with others.  This seems like a good time to list her, as she has a new strip that started 2 weeks ago, called Skin Horse.  I’d give a description of the strip here, but it’s a bit hard to categorize as yet.  There’s certainly a sci-fi element, and it’s humorous like all her work, and this one is rather surreal so far as well.

Next, I had heard about Questionable Content for a while, but just started reading it about 4 months ago.  It took about a month to get through the 1000 strips.  Jeph Jacques (pronounced ‘jacks’) is the writer/artist, and he lives in Easthampton, an adjacent town to me.  The strip is sort of romantic-comedy-slice-of-life-indie-music-fan type stuff, if that makes any sense.   It also seems to take place in a world just a little different from our own, as there exist little sentient robots known as AnthroPCs.  The strip has well-written characters and is often really funny.  The strip also spawns various T-shirt designs, which Jeph sells on the site.

Last, but not least, is Templar, Arizona.   Spike is the name of the artist, and she is wildly hilarious.  This strips cracks me up to no end much of the time.  The setting of the strip is a fictional city in a sort of alternate history Arizona.  The rest of that world might resemble ours, but not so much Templar.  This is another comic with excellent characters, whose personalities contrast with  each other greatly, but where details of the city and backgrounds are very important as well (so don’t just pay attention to the people).  I actually discovered Spike a few years ago when she had a different strip running on Girlamatic, and have been following Templar almost since it began.  Besides her wonderful writing, I love her art style – lots of heavy lines and subtle sepia tones over grayscale.