If you are not reading Freefall, you should be. Ignore the fact that it has an uplifted wolf as a main character: it is a ridiculously sophisticated hard-SF webcomic that is in the middle of tackling the exceptionally ethically tricky question of sapient rights (both biological and mechanical). In a just world, it’d be syndicated and run in every daily paper.
Moe Lane
PS: Yes, at some point I will update the Webcomics Page.
Sophisticated, funny hard SF. Also, Sam Starfall is the best worst boss ever.
And he tells the human colonists the best explanation ever for Fermi’s Paradox.
… in this strip
Good Lord, this thing goes back to 1998?! …you do understand that I have things to do tonight, right?
Sometimes you gotta take the hit, man.
It’s a good one. (Warning, when the cartoon picks up color, the characters may be different colors than you imagined them.)
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But a newspaper printing a cartoon that’s a continuing story? That hasn’t happened since Prince Valiant. (And that was only on Sundays.)
Suggested updates to your Webcomics page:
Sluggy Freelance: It’s still not on your list!
Gunnerkrigg Court: A distant relative of Harry Potter, with alchemy.
Mare Internum: Set in an underground ecosystem on Mars.
The Meek: Apparently set centuries in our future; very mildly NSFW. Same author as Mare Internum.
Power Nap: When almost everyone takes “Z-sups” to eliminate the need for sleep, it turns out that dreams are necessary … and will not be suppressed.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: If you like xkcd, you’ll probably like SMBC, too.
Oglaf: Yes, it’s often profoundly NSFW, so you most likely won’t add it. But I love it, and sometimes it’s even PG-rated: http://oglaf.com/wolf/ … “Ornithology” is an all-time classic.
Alice Grove: Set in a distant future that seems stranger and stranger as we learn more and more about it. By Jeph Jacques, who also does Questionable Content.
You might consider reinstating Questionable Content, too — it’s been on good behavior for a while.
I haven’t read Sluggy in a while. QC/AG I’m considering taking out of timeout, although that language the guy used was in fact pretty nasty. SMBC/Power Nap I in fact read regularly. Oglaf… he’s not kidding about it being profoundly NSFW, folks. Also, hysterical – but, then I’m a social moderate (albeit one who doesn’t think that it’s nice to bait social conservatives).
A while ago I found a comic it pains me greatly that I can’t find again. It was a future sci-fi thing about a young woman hired to be a pilot for a scientisty type who looked like a 7-foot-tall Tom Baker who was studying gravity or something and IIRC was on the verge of some kind of huge breakthrough in something the comic hadn’t gotten to yet.
Quantum Vibe. http://www.quantumvibe.com/strip?page=1
THANK YOU.
May I ask where/why Sluggy lost you?
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Just curious .. I know why I’ve debated giving up on it, and I know I *will* eventually be giving up on it ..
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Mew
I just stopped being able to keep track.
Others I recommend:
Daughter of the Lilies May look like another D&D-inspired story, but turns out to be something much, much better. Because of a major revelation a few weeks ago, it would be best to read DotL from the start before reading anything about it.
Unsounded A dark(ish) fantasy in a deeply thought-out, highly original setting, with some of the best art I have ever seen in a comic (including print comics!).
Darths & Droids is based on the Star Wars movies, imagined as a role playing game. Has very very little to do with the actual plot of the movies, and intentionally tries to play with the characters [the guy playing R2D2 is intentionally annoying, for example]. They’re on the 6th movie, so it may be coming to a close. http://www.darthsanddroids.net/
Lady Sabre and The Pirates of The Ineffable Ether is a steampunk flavored adventure comic. Interesting, but it’s come to at least the end of a chapter and maybe the end of the comic. http://www.ineffableaether.com/2012/04/30/glint/
And a comic that seems to be finished, and is most likely NSFW [in a few parts], Roswell, Texas. An alternate universe in which our USA is split into several nations, Hitler was an artist after all, and Texas won the Battle of the Alamo. http://www.bigheadpress.com/roswell?page=1
Lady Sabre … somehow it tried too hard, and yet not enough. There are too many tropes in play at one time (steampunk! dragons! pirates! Indians and the wild west! World War I Germans! Victorian England! absurd flying machines!), we’re never given a reason for their universe’s physics and cultures being so similar to and yet different from our own, and worst of all the characters suffer from the Eight Deadly Words. And given that millions of lives are at stake, why didn’t they just copy the bloody map and give it to everybody?
I enjoy “Lady Sabre”, but wish that either the central character was less opaque and mysterious or that that the viewpoint characters had more idea what she was up to.