Webcomics are comics published on a website or mobile app. While many are published exclusively on the web, others are also published in magazines, newspapers, or comic books.
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.
Sinfest is a long-running American webcomic by Tatsuya Ishida. Updating daily, Sinfest started as a black comedy strip in January 2000. It covers such topics as American politics, organized religion, and radical feminism.
Joey Manley was an American LGBT fiction author, web designer, and webcomics publisher. Manley wrote the successful LGBT novel The Death of Donna-May Dean in 1992. He moved to San Francisco in 2000 in order to work in web design. Manley was the founder and publisher of the Modern Tales family of webcomics websites, which included Modern Tales, Serializer, Girlamatic, Webcomics Nation, and others. Manley is considered one of the "founding pioneers" of the webcomic movement for creating a then-revolutionary subscription model.
A Softer World is a webcomic by the writer Joey Comeau and artist Emily Horne, both Canadians. It was first published online on 7 February 2003 and was released three times a week until its end in June 2015. Before starting the website in 2003, the comics had been published in zine form. With the launch of the website, the comic gained wider recognition, most notably when Warren Ellis linked to the comic on his blog, and then began to feature it as a "Favored Puny Human". It appeared in The Guardian for a short time until a change of editors caused it to be removed. Between 2008 and 2010, science fiction-themed strips of A Softer World were also produced and published on Tor.com.
Matt Brooker, whose work most often appears under the pseudonym D'Israeli, is a British comic artist, colorist, writer and letterer. Other pseudonyms he uses include "Molly Eyre" for his writing, and "Harry V. Derci"/"Digital Derci" for his lettering work.
Gunnerkrigg Court is a science-fantasy webcomic created by Tom Siddell and launched in April 2005. It is updated online three days a week, and seven volumes of the still continuing comic have been published in print format by Archaia Studios Press and Titan Books. The comic has been critically acclaimed and has won numerous Web Cartoonists' Choice Awards, as well as receiving positive reviews for its artwork and storytelling.
Cyanide & Happiness (C&H) is a webcomic written and illustrated by Rob DenBleyker, Kris Wilson, Dave McElfatrick and formerly Matt Melvin, published on their website explosm.net. It was created and started running daily on January 25, 2005. It has appeared on social networking sites such as Myspace, Quora, LiveJournal, and Facebook, where, in April 2006, it had generated more than a million visits per week.
FreakAngels is a post-apocalyptic webcomic created in 2008 by Eagle Award-winning writer Warren Ellis and artist Paul Duffield, and published in book format by Avatar Press. The plot focuses on twelve 23-year-old psychics living in Whitechapel six years after civilization in Great Britain is destroyed. The webcomic has received various awards and has been collected in a series of six volumes.
The Ongoing Adventures of Rocket Llama is a webcomic starring "a high-flying llama, a sword-swinging cat, and a rocket as loyal as a cowboy hero's horse." Created by Alex Langley while he was a student at Henderson State University, the comic first appeared in a comic book titled The Workday Comic.
Eric Millikin is an American contemporary artist and activist based in Detroit, Michigan. He is known for his pioneering work in Internet art, Postinternet art, and webcomics, as well as AI art, augmented and virtual reality art, video art, conceptual art, poetry, performance art and body art, including "artistic drinking projects." His work is often controversial and semi-autobiographical, with political, romantic, occult, horror and black comedy themes. Awards for Millikin's artwork include the Pulitzer Prize.
The history of comics has followed different paths in different parts of the world. It can be traced back to early precursors such as Trajan's Column, in Rome, Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Bayeux Tapestry.
Homestuck is a webcomic written, illustrated, and animated by American author and artist Andrew Hussie, and it is the fourth overall webcomic published on MS Paint Adventures (MSPA). The webcomic centers on a group of teenagers who unwittingly bring about the end of the world through the installation of a beta copy of an upcoming computer game.
Sandra and Woo is a comedy webcomic written by a German author, Oliver Knörzer, and drawn by an Indonesian artist, Puri "Powree" Andini. It is published in English and German. The first strip was put online on 19 October 2008 and the black-and-white comic strip has been updated twice a week since then. As of 18 June 2020, 1187 strips have been published. From strip #307, published on 12 September 2011, to strip #398, published on 30 July 2012, the comic was colored by the American artist Lisa Moore. She also colored selected strips from the strip archive during this time. The 1000th Sandra and Woo strip was posted on 1 July 2018. A Kickstarter was announced on 7 November 2018 for a printed anthology of the first 1031 strips published already, and a second book containing art based on the comic.
David Morgan-Mar is an Australian physicist, known for his webcomics and for creating several humorous esoteric programming languages. He is also the author of several GURPS roleplaying sourcebooks for Steve Jackson Games, as well as a regular contributor to Pyramid magazine.
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.
Moving Pictures is a late 2000s webcomic written by Kathryn Immonen and illustrated by Stuart Immonen. Set in occupied France in World War II, the webcomic presents the complex relationship of Nazi officer Rolf Hauptman and Canadian museum curator Ila Gardner. The historical setting of Moving Pictures serves purely to frame the "fucked up" relationship between its two protagonists.
The business of webcomics involves creators earning a living through their webcomic, often using a variety of revenue channels. Those channels may include selling merchandise such as t-shirts, jackets, sweatpants, hats, pins, stickers, and toys, based on their work. Some also choose to sell print versions or compilations of their webcomics. Many webcomic creators make use of online advertisements on their websites, and possibly even product placement deals with larger companies. Crowdfunding through websites such as Kickstarter and Patreon are also popular choices for sources of potential income.
