What was your first webcomic? I'm sure you remember.Mine was Charley Parker's Argon Zark! in the mid-nineties. It took forever to load those images on my parents' dial-up connection, but even so I tore through that strip's (then) small archive as fast as I could. It blew my mind--comics! On the Internet!--and new pages couldn't come fast enough. I was hungry for more of these magical e-funnybooks, but as far as I could tell Argon Zark! was the only site of its kind. (In actual fact there were six. Remember the years before Google, when we had to walk uphill to the Internet in the snow, both ways?)
Flash forward thirteen years and there's an embarrassment of e-riches. Newspapers may be fading, with their funnies section the long-suffering canary in the mine, but it's become clear that those of us who grew up reading the funnies--and first, before the front page, unless our brother beat us to them-have developed a deeply ingrained need for comic strips. Thewebcomiclist.com currently has a tally of over twelve thousand webcomics. Twelve freaking thousand.
But where do you start? When you have thousands of options, how do you know which ones are worth your time?
Well, Dear Reader, you've come to the right place. We professional nerds at Dark Horse have a passion for all things comics, and we've made a habit of scouring the Internets for you, seeking out the proverbial crème de la crème. After kicking things off with cult hit MegaTokyo in '04, we upped the ante with the wildly popular Penny Arcade, relaunched our flagship anthology Dark Horse Presents as a MySpace monthly, and made big waves last year with the first collections of The Perry Bible Fellowship, Achewood, and Wondermark--all three of which, by the way, will be releasing their second volumes in the coming months.
"Okay," I hear you thinking, "but what's new?"
Well how about Star Wars--that do anything for you? To celebrate Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare and LucasArts's hugely anticipated MMORPG (that's "massively multiplayer online role-playing game," for you luddites), we've teamed up with one of the game's writers, Rob Chestney, and BtVS: Tales of the Vampires alum Alex Sanchez to present a biweekly webcomic at swtor.com. It's already begun, so if you've had a hankering for lightsaber battles and space opera-and really, who hasn't?--fire up your computer and check it out!
"Cool," you think, "a Star Wars muh-more-pa-guh. I . . . hey waitaminute, Star Wars has been around since the '70s! What's new-new?"
Fair enough. First up is AppleGeeks, one of the most stylish strips being made today. Artist Mohammad Haque and writer Ananth Panagariya's long-running misadventures of a Mac®-obsessed college student, an aspiring writer, and their pals--including an "iGirlfriend"--have entertained even the hardest of geek hearts for years. When the main character starts to hallucinate due to hunger from his Ramadan fasting, all bets are off!
Look for volume one in late May.
Hot on its heels is the book I'm most excited about this year: Sinfest. That's right--the hugely popular strip from international man of mystery Tatsuya Ishida is headed to print, and I can't wait. Drawing on classic comic-strip influences yet touching on such topics as religion, advertising, sex, and politics, Sinfest is the best newspaper-style strip you'll never see in a newspaper--"the best webcomic out there," according to ComicsWorthReading.com. We're starting at the beginning, with the first appearances of Ninja Theatre™, beat poetry, calligraphy lessons, and Pooch & Percival in volume one's nearly six hundred strips. Catch the MySpace DHP appearance in May, and look for the book in June!
I'm out of room already, but stay tuned for further webcomics news from Dark Horse. It's a brave new e-world out there, and we're paying attention.
Katie Moody
Editor