What are some good (and free) webcomics?

LaunchesKayaks@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 90 points –

I'm laid up with a severely broken ankle and leg, and will be laid up for God knows how long. I wanna read webcomics, but I feel like I'm running out of good ones on Webtoon. Anyone have any recommendations or sites to look at?

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OGLAF

There aren't many.. any webcomics that make me come back and read the archives from time to time. Oglaf is the exception.

Sithrak! An insane god for an unjust world!

It reminds me of PLIF and SexyLosers. I may still have an archive of PLIF somewhere.

Every few years, I come back and binge re-read all of Oglaf to caught back up.

Kill Six Billion Demons is my favorite right now. Gorgeous, sprawling, complex artwork from start to finish, philosophically interesting, bordering on pretentious but I love it. I sometimes read this one while wearing my VR headset to properly examine certain pages close up.

Johnny Wander is the homepage for an incredible artist/writer duo. I've really been enjoying their latest story Barbarous, but their archives are a bit of a pain to navigate to find the starting point for each story. Worth the pain though.

Octopus Pie has been over for a few years but is always worth returning to. Woman lives in New York, people are weird, and New York has a lot of people. Reading this one will make you feel good, Do Not Skip.

Sleepless Domain is an interesting one, generally a cutesy story with an anime, leaning towards chibi art style but focused around a set of brutal murders that happen towards the front end of the story and the survivor's guilt that follows.

Gunnerkrigg Court is hard for me to describe but gets a re-read from me every few years. A surreal examination of why we tell stories and The Power Of Friendship? It's been going so long that I half suspect it's not going anywhere and is just an excuse to keep chugging for as many years as its author needs it to, and also half suspect it's imminently ending in the next few months. I don't think I really have a problem with it either way; it's written very well.

I also want to add Questionable Content. Someone else mentioned it before but I think it needs linking to. It's one of the first webcomics I picked up so it's hard for me to judge it fairly, but even having evolved so much since the early days I think there's something to love about every stage of its development. It was just easy reading about hipsters listening to music and drinking coffee, and then somewhere along the way it became a sci-fi story too and goodness I love it.

Put another one for "Kill Six Billion Demons". when i first saw it i finished it in the same day. I'm now subscribed to the rss and happy for each new page.

I'm partial to weird fantasy, dunno what your tastes are. YMMV. Some of these are old!

Gunnerkrigg Court - long-running, fantastic worldbuilding, intricate plot. steampunky urban fantasy.

Wilde Life - small-town mystery, light spooky vibes but mostly feel-good. Relationship focused.

Girls with Slingshots - complete! comedy about a friend group. LGBT+ themes, sex positive. A bit raunchy, if that's not your bag.

Skin Deep - urban fantasy. Neat worldbuilding, long running.

Broodhollow - another small-town mystery, but more legit creepy. Plot of the murder-hauntings-cults variety.

Manly Guys Doing Manly Things - comedy. premise is a temp agency for brawny fictional characters & villains trying to get normal dayjobs. Takes the piss out of common tropes.

Awkward Zombie - comedy. No plot, just comics about video games & other things the artist is into.

Johnny Wander - 4 comics in a trenchcoat, but they're all pretty cute. Started as an autobio comic with the occasional original fiction story mixed in, but they've all been separated out for easier reading now.

The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal - complete! romance about two dudes on a cross-country roadtrip. Touches on some heavy topics, but has some humor too.

A lot of these are hosted by sites that host other comics, so you can follow that rabbit hole pretty far. Also some artists will link to other comics they like in the about/notes pages, good way to find other stuff.

Xkcd, Saturday morning breakfast cereal, something positive, questionable content, and Junior scientist power hour are my favorites.

Girl Genius is one of my favorite. https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php

I'll check it out! Thanks!

It's been running for about 20 years so there are a lot too go through. There are a few filler stories along the way which are good and bad but the main story is really well written and illustrated and pretty different than most stories I've read.

Personally a big fan of hiveworks for finding new comics. If you like story focused ones, I like Widdershins, Sakana, Daughter of the Lilies, and Wilde Life. I read way too many webcomics, so let me know if you need more!

Can I sell you on web novels instead? Worm and The Wandering Inn are a decent starting point.

Worm is great! Somehow, I started with the first few chapters of someone else's fan-fic set in the worm-verse, and later found Worm. I was so incredibly confused for a while on what was real (by the original author) and what was the fiction.

Have you read Vattu? It's hands down one of my favorite comics ever.

Stand Still, Stay Silent is also pretty good.

If you need a comic that won't run out, you can try EGS. A comic about teens running into a wide variety of supernatural stuff.
https://www.egscomics.com/
It's been running since 2002 and still going. And while the early arc are pretty rough in both art style and writing quality, it gets progressively better as the author matures.

Another comic I love is Sleepless Domain, a dark magical girl story about a locked down city that comes under monster attack every night.
https://www.sleeplessdomain.com/

I found both of these through https://hiveworkscomics.com/ which is another, though smaller comic repository like Webtoons.

Schlock Mercenary (complete)
Goblins
Freakangels
Grrl power
Order of the stick

Oh God, Order of the Stick got real deep. Starting at the beginning will be great for at least a day.

Digger by Ursula Vernon has been around for a while but it's my favourite.

I Roved Out. Extremely NSFW, it would be categorized as porn. It is an incredible story, and is so despite the porn. The sex is so interwoven with the story, I can't imagine a SFW version could ever be constructed, which is shame because it's such good art, and such a great story. I can't praise it enough. If graphic sex doesn't bother you, I highly recommend it.

Blastwave. Short, so if you binge it it'll be over quickly.

There have been other great recommendations I won't repeat, but these two have exceptional art.

Edit someone else beat me to recommending Blastwave. It's good.

Unironically Homestuck if you're going to be in bed for a few weeks

I've heard good things about Homestuck. Isn't it interactable? I don't have my laptop, so it'd need to be compatible with mobile until my parents bring over my computer.

Homestuck is mostly static, but there are a few animations and interactive elements.

Problem Sleuth is fine on mobile though (it's the previous webcomic by Andrew Hussie).

Sluggy Freelance is one of the longest running webcomics in the world, and I think it is the longest running one where the author makes a living from it.