A comic strip is a sequence of cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, these have been published in newspapers and magazines, with daily horizontal strips printed in black-and-white in newspapers, while Sunday papers offered longer sequences in special color comics sections. With the advent of the internet, online comic strips began to appear as webcomics.
Webcomics are comics published on the internet, such as 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.
The Family Circus is a syndicated comic strip created by cartoonist Bil Keane and, since Keane's death in 2011, written, inked and rendered (colored) by his son Jeff Keane. The strip generally uses a single captioned panel with a round border, hence the original name of the series, which was changed following objections from the magazine Family Circle. The series debuted February 29, 1960, and has been in continuous production ever since. According to publisher King Features Syndicate, it is the most widely syndicated cartoon panel in the world, appearing in 1,500 newspapers. Compilations of Family Circus comic strips have sold more than 13 million copies worldwide.
James Jean is a Taiwanese-American visual artist working primarily in painting and drawing. He lives and works in Los Angeles, where he moved from New York in 2003.
Shaenon K. Garrity is an American 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.
Dumbrella is an alliance of webcomic artists who promote one another's sites, travel to conventions, and sell merchandise together. It is also the name of the website of that alliance, which serves as a shared weblog.
SpinnWebe was the personal website of Greg Galcik, also known as "spinn". It gathered the most fame as the home of the Dysfunctional Family Circus, which ran in the late 1990s. The site also included a number of Galcik's other projects, which generally had interactive humor as the unifying theme; in this respect, it anticipated the development of later sites such as Fark and Something Awful. Spinnwebe is a German word for "spider web".
Married to the Sea is a webcomic by husband and wife Drew Fairweather and Natalie Dee. Both Drew and Natalie have creative input on Married to the Sea but the comic is not strictly collaborative. Each has a personal webcomic project: Drew is also the author of Toothpaste for Dinner and Natalie Dee produces NatalieDee.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC) is a webcomic by Zach Weinersmith. The gag-a-day comic features few recurring characters or storylines, and has no set format; some strips may be a single panel, while others may go on for ten panels or more. Recurring themes in SMBC include science, research, superheroes, religion, romance, dating, parenting and the meaning of life. SMBC has run since 2002 and is published daily.
Zachary Alexander Weinersmith is an American cartoonist and writer, best known for his webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC). Outside of SMBC, he has worked on a sketch comedy series, a podcast, and multiple other webcomics. With his wife Kelly Weinersmith, he has co-authored the 2017 book Soonish and the 2023 book A City on Mars. He illustrated the 2019 book Open Borders by economist Bryan Caplan, and wrote the 2023 children's book Bea Wolf, a loose adaptation of Beowulf.
Spamusement! was a webcomic originally created by software developer Steven Frank, in which Frank took subject lines from real spam emails and turned them into single-panel comics. Some of these were literal interpretations of subject lines, while others put a twist on what illustration the reader may have expected.
Max Douglas is a Canadian comic book creator. Since approximately 1996, he has worked under the pen name of Salgood Sam which is derived from a reverse spelling of his name.
"Bad" Painting is the name given by critic and curator Marcia Tucker to a trend in American figurative painting in the 1970s. Tucker curated an exhibition of the same name at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, featuring the work of fourteen artists mostly unknown in New York at the time. The exhibition ran from January 14 to February 28, 1978.
Sluggy Freelance is a long-running webcomic written and drawn by Pete Abrams. Starting in 1997, it is one of the oldest successful webcomics, and as of 2012 had hundreds of thousands of readers. Abrams was one of the first comic artists successful enough to make a living from a webcomic.
Jillian Tamaki is a Canadian American illustrator and comic artist known for her work in The New York Times and The New Yorker in addition to the graphic novels Boundless, as well as Skim, This One Summer and Roaming written by her cousin Mariko Tamaki.
Although, traditionally, female comics creators have long been a minority in the industry, they have made a notable impact since the very beginning, and more and more female artists are getting recognition along with the maturing of the medium. Women creators have worked in every genre, from superheroes to romance, westerns to war, crime to horror.
Comics has developed specialized terminology. Several attempts have been made to formalize and define the terminology of comics by authors such as Will Eisner, Scott McCloud, R. C. Harvey and Dylan Horrocks. Much of the terminology in English is under dispute, so this page will list and describe the most common terms used in comics.
Bucko is a comic written by Jeff Parker and drawn by Erika Moen. It was serialized as a webcomic in 2011–2012 before being published as a book by Dark Horse Comics on September 12, 2012. It is a comedic murder mystery story.
Natalie Riess is an American artist, illustrator, and webcomic creator. She gained public recognition after her comic Space Battle Lunchtime was published by Oni Press in 2016. Her webcomic Dungeon Critters created with Sara Goetter was published by First Second Books in 2020.
