User Friendly was a webcomic written by J. D. Frazer, also known by his pen name Illiad. Starting in 1997, the strip was one of the earliest webcomics to make its creator a living. The comic is set in a fictional internet service provider and draws humor from dealing with clueless users and geeky subjects. The comic ran seven days a week until 2009, when updates became sporadic, and since 2010 it has been in re-runs only. The webcomic was shut down in late February 2022, after an announcement from Frazer.
Webcomics are comics published on the internet, such a on a website or a mobile app. While many webcomics are published exclusively online, others are also published in magazines, newspapers, or comic books.
A cartoonist is a visual artist who specializes in both drawing and writing cartoons or comics. Cartoonists differ from comics writers or comics illustrators/artists in that they produce both the literary and graphic components of the work as part of their practice.
Tom the Dancing Bug is a weekly satirical comic strip by cartoonist and political commentator Ruben Bolling that covers mostly US current events from a liberal point of view. Tom the Dancing Bug won the 2002, 2003, 2007, 2008, and 2009 Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Awards for Best Cartoon. The strip was awarded the 2010 Sigma Delta Chi Award for editorial cartooning by the Society of Professional Journalists and best cartoon in the 2018 Robert F. Kennedy Book & Journalism Awards. His work on the strip won Bolling the 2017 Herblock Prize and the 2021 Berryman Award for Editorial Cartoons, and he was a finalist in the Editorial Cartooning category for the 2019 and 2021 Pulitzer Prize.
Dinosaur Comics is a constrained webcomic by Canadian writer Ryan North. It is also known as "Qwantz", after the site's domain name, "qwantz.com". The first comic was posted on February 1, 2003, although there were earlier prototypes. Dinosaur Comics has also been printed in three collections and in a number of newspapers. The comic centers on three main characters, T-Rex, Utahraptor and Dromiceiomimus.
Keenspot is a webcomics portal founded in March 2000 by cartoonist Chris Crosby, Crosby's mother Teri, cartoonist Darren Bleuel, and Nathan Stone.
Cayetano 'Cat' Garza is a comic artist, cartoonist, illustrator, and musician in the United States. He is best known for his experiments with webcomics.
Patrick Sean Farley is a freelance illustrator and Web page designer. Known as a pioneer of webcomics as a medium, Farley works out of Oakland, California.
Shaenon K. Garrity is a webcomic creator and science-fiction author best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse. She collaborated with various artists to write webcomics for the Modern Tales-family of webcomic subscription services in the early 2000s, and write columns for various comics journals. Since 2003, Garrity has done freelance editing for Viz Media on various manga translations.
The infinite canvas is the feeling of available space for a webcomic on the World Wide Web relative to paper. The term was introduced by Scott McCloud in his 2000 book Reinventing Comics, which supposes a web page can grow as large as needed. This infinite canvas gives infinite storytelling features and creators more freedom in how they present their artwork.
Argon Zark! is a webcomic, created by cartoonist and web site designer Charley Parker. The strip, drawn using a graphics tablet and computer graphics software, first appeared in June 1995. A collection, billed as a "Dead Tree Souvenir Edition", was published in 1997. The strip was last updated in September 2019.
Where the Buffalo Roam was a comic strip by Hans Bjordahl that ran from 1987 to 1995. It was published on Usenet starting in 1991, making it one of the first online comic strips. Witches and Stitches was published earlier, in 1985, on CompuServe.
A daily strip is a newspaper comic strip format, appearing on weekdays, Monday through Saturday, as contrasted with a Sunday strip, which typically only appears on Sundays. They typically are smaller, 3-4 grids compared to the full page Sunday strip and are black and white.
Cyanide & Happiness (C&H) is a webcomic created by Rob DenBleyker, Kris Wilson, Dave McElfatrick and Matt Melvin. The comic has been running since 2005 and is published on the website explosm.net along with animated shorts in the same style. Matt Melvin left C&H in 2014, and several other people have contributed to the comic and to the animated shorts.
The Really Heavy Greatcoat is a British cartoon, by John Freeman and Nick Miller, that is now published as a webcomic.
T.H.E. Fox is a furry comic strip by Joe Ekaitis which ran from 1986 to 1998. It is among the earliest online comics, predating Where the Buffalo Roam by over five years. T.H.E. Fox was published on CompuServe, Q-Link and GEnie, and later on the Web as Thaddeus. Despite running weekly for several years, the comic never achieved Ekaitis' goal of print syndication. Updates became less frequent, and eventually stopped altogether.
A rage comic is a short cartoon strip using a growing set of pre-made cartoon faces, or rage faces, which usually express rage or some other simple emotion or activity. They are usually crudely drawn in Microsoft Paint or other simple drawing programs, and were most popular in the early 2010s. These webcomics have spread much in the same way that Internet memes do, and several memes have originated in this medium. They have been characterized by Ars Technica as an "accepted and standardized form of online communication." The popularity of rage comics has been attributed to their use as vehicles for humorizing shared experiences. The range of expression and standardized, easily identifiable faces has allowed uses such as teaching English as a foreign language.
The history of webcomics follows the advances of technology, art, and business of comics on the Internet. The first comics were shared through the Internet in the mid-1980s. Some early webcomics were derivatives from print comics, but when the World Wide Web became widely popular in the mid-1990s, more people started creating comics exclusively for this medium. By the year 2000, various webcomic creators were financially successful and webcomics became more artistically recognized.
Shen is the pen name of cartoonist Andrew Tsyaston, the creator of the comic series Owlturd, Shen Comix, and Bluechair, and the co-creator of Live With Yourself. Shen Comix has 2 million followers on Instagram while Bluechair has 1.2 million subscribers on Webtoon.
