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Here's another Dalek tribute, featuring a con artist named Sam Starfall (normally wearing an animatronic environment suit).

Alternately: What does your name smell like?

Freefall is also an excellent source of information ;) ;)

I'm reminded of a recent "Freefall" (web comic).

haha!

And for those that will miss the reference when the story is surely ammended:

"Sunday is the one hundreth anniversary of the birth of John Von Neumann, the man with one of the strongest claims to the title of Father of Modren Computing. Although, as noted at the time by Mark Stanley of Freefall, several sources indicate that it may have been December 3rd."

LOL!

And for those that will miss the reference when the story is surely ammended:

"Sunday is the one hundreth anniversary of the birth of John Von Neumann, the man with one of the strongest claims to the title of Father of Modren Computing. Although, as noted at the time by Mark Stanley of Freefall, several sources indicate that it may have been December 3rd."

I used to think User Friendly was pretty good, but then either it's quality deteriorated, or i found other, better comics to put it in perspective.

Here's a list of (some of) the comics that in my opinion are better than User Friendly. As usual, your opinion may differ and your mileage may vary.

Adventurers! the best of the CRPG comics.
Dragon Tails comic about strange geeky dragons and a squirrel or two. (Has jokes that cover all kinds of geekery, not just the tech variety) The Wings of ChangeFantasy comic about a dragon, a girl with wings, and a group of pixie children
The Devil's Panties "Real Life" type comic about a female protagonist and a couple of her friends. Frequently touches on goth and comic geekdom, and there's a side comic about LARPs.
Sparkling Generation Valkyrie YuukiA manga style take-off on the "pretty-girl" anime genre. Has some Ranma-esque gender-bending themes if that disturbs you.
Freefall Science fiction comic, primarily focused on an kleptomaniac alien scavenger, a friendly but somewhat dim robot, and a genetically engineered anthropomorphic female wolf.
Ozy and Millie One of those comics with a world (mostly) like ours but filled with anthropomorphic animals. Frequently philisophical or political.
Something Positive "Real life" type comic with a very twisted and sometimes sick sense of humor.
Venus Envy A comic about highschool aged MtF transgendered person dealing with all the issues you'd expect such a person to be dealing with. Obviously lots of gender-bending issues.
8-bit Theater tied for second best CRPG comic.
RPG World the other tied for second best CRPG comic.
Anti-here for Hire by the author of Adventurers! Same style mostly, but with a comic-book superhero theme.
Megatokyo some people love the comic, some people can't stand it. The art is certainly pretty though in either case.
Penny Arcade people talk about it enough on Slashdot (including several mentions in this thread) that i'm not going to even bother describing it.

Okay, I'm tired of making descriptions, so some other good comics that didn't make it into the top tier (but still better than User Friendly IMHO) if you feel like looking around, PvP, Ctrl-Alt-Del, Saturnalia. The Life of Riley, No Need for Bushido

And last (just because everyone here has probably heard of it already) Sluggy, which has had its unfunny moments, but unlike User Friendly has managed to pull out of those slumps and return to its former heights every time (so far)

There's also a large set of comics that i only check every couple of weeks because they don't updated more than once a week, but are still worth taking the time to check. However i'm going to just stick to my daily list at the moment.

At least one or two webcomics do decent science-fiction: Mark Stanley's Freefall and Tailsteak's The Sixth TV. (The navigation on the latter is a bit odd: click on the arrows with the red symbol to move through just this story.) Thre are probably plenty of others I haven't found yet.

http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff100/fv00048.htm

It has been ages since I bought an indy-comic. Partly because there nearest decent comic-store is an hour or so from here - and that seems to cater mainly to the young, inmature section of the market (more tits than in a porno-rag), partly because much of the mainstream norwegian comics are very good (karine haaland, Nemi, Pondus and EON & Wildlife to mention a few), and partly because the web provides me with more under- and overground comics than a sane man can read (Comander Kitty, Fur Will Fly, House of LSD and Kevin & Kell to take the first four on my list of bookmarks).

I don't think that indy-comics printed on dead trees has the importance they had for say, oh, ten to fifteen years ago. The ones that are good will find their way into mainstream magasines (at least this holds true for Norway), the ones that ain't good will die out. That, and the World Wide Wait is the underground printingpress of today; both for comics as well as for writing, art and music.

But as the subject says, that just my 2 cents (by the exchange rate anyway).

My absolute favorite web comic has got to be Freefall. Great characters, good story, and very witty.

Or if you want something slightly more off-beat, try Zero-over-one. Unconventional in the wackiest sense. :-)

If this is indeed going to turn into a comic comparison, someone's got to mention Freefall as an example of a good comic (without color, too). Check it out.

See http://www.purrsia.com/freefall/ff600/fv00529.htm. ..

(Warning: This will look like a plug for a bunch of webcomics. It probably is, but I have a valid point. Mod me into oblivion of you wish.)

The big players in the print industry seem to be the only guys getting real attention when it comes to producing "comics" on the web.

What about the Keenspot or the Keenspace groups? They have a valid revenue model, even if they aren't making a ton of money(making money is a secondary concern to them). Heck, they're doing the opposite of the big boys: Moving from the 'net to print media. (Check for Roomies! and Superosity in your local comic store)

Another group is , which hosts, among other comics, Algernons Dilemma.

There are the big ones you've probably heard of, PvP and Sluggy Freelance who are actually making a living on their webcomic.

Heck, /. has Mega Tokyo banners!

Personally, I'd rather these, and others, than the majority of the junk the syndicates, et al, try to push onto the web. Nevermind X-Men, give me it's Walky!

Disclaimer: I run a webcomic, so this story pushed my buttons :)

J. T. MacLeod
-------------
UBERGEEK the Comic. Umlauts be danged.
http://ubergeekthecomic.com
It's neato!
-------------

In alphabetical order:

• Academy Vale is a strip about Kinkos life with two lady rabbits as the main characters.
• Adventures of Fifine is a lushly-drawn comic of a fox lady, very much in the tradition of Herge.
• Dela the Hooda is about an extraterrestrial fox lady who came to Earth.
• A Doemain of Our Own by Susan Parkin is about Susan Deer. Until recently in the plot, her husband, Eric, was just a minor character.
• Felicia is a well-plotted comic book about a female mage cat.
• Kevin and Kell is about a married couple. He's a stay- at-home rabbit; she's a corporate wolf. Kell gets about as much screentime as Kevin, and is far, far more than a girlfriend.
• Ozy and Millie has two main characters; and Millie (a fox) is far more active as a character than Ozy. In my opinion, it is the best comic strip currently being produced, on or off the Internet.
• Sabrina Online is about a very nice and innocent skunk girl... with a lot of un-innocent friends and coworkers.
• Satin and Silk by Tiffany Ross is a pair of skunk furries. Her other comics have strong, female characters.
• The Suburban Jungle 's main character is 'Tiffany Tiger'. She has fleshed out greatly from being just a model.

BTW, My favorites are probably: Alice!, Ozy and Millie, Clan of the Cats, Free Fall, CRFH, Lean on Me, and Okashina Okashi to name just a few. I don't see playing for webcomics any different they paying to support other online communities. I might even subscribe to Slashdot if they started charging. :)

What's the point in drawing an entity that looks almost like a human, and has a pair of breasts, but also has the head of an animal? Wouldn't it be simpler just to draw her as a human?

I've got no problems with talking animals, though.. although Bun-bun is evil and I really hate him.

The Trib picked a few strips as a survey of the field. No such list would get everything good. The links I added were meta-sites and mega-sites, not individual strips.

Having said that, here are some more that might appeal to fellow Slashers:

o Goats: nominally a couple of Web developers, mostly about ... oh, never mind, just read it. PG-13; your mom might not like it.

o Freefall: A captain of a starship (that's only flown once in the history of the strip), his robot sidekick, and his furry engineer. SF meets Dilbert in a kindler, gentler way.

o GPF: life at a software development company with an unfortunate name.

o Help Desk: life at the tech support desk of a software megacompany named Ubersoft (with products such as Nifty Doorways and Tactile Basic).

(The last two recently had a crossover, a pretty common occurence in online strips.)

o Acid Reflux (previously here): vaguely-D&D-ish strip about a young god trying to restore the universe her sister abandoned.

o Mega Tokyo: a couple of American gamers stranded in Japan.

o Real Life: a couple of American gamers who know they're comic strip characters.

o Schlock Mercenary: light SF strip.

All have complete archives back to the first strip, so you can catch up at your leisure. Enjoy!

The Trib picked a few strips as a survey of the field. No such list would get everything good. The links I added were meta-sites and mega-sites, not individual strips.

Having said that, here are some more that might appeal to fellow Slashers:

o Goats: nominally a couple of Web developers, mostly about ... oh, never mind, just read it. PG-13; your mom might not like it.

o Freefall: A captain of a starship (that's only flown once in the history of the strip), his robot sidekick, and his furry engineer. SF meets Dilbert in a kindler, gentler way.

o GPF: life at a software development company with an unfortunate name.

o Help Desk: life at the tech support desk of a software megacompany named Ubersoft (with products such as Nifty Doorways and Tactile Basic).

(The last two recently had a crossover, a pretty common occurence in online strips.)

o Acid Reflux (previously here): vaguely-D&D-ish strip about a young god trying to restore the universe her sister abandoned.

o Mega Tokyo: a couple of American gamers stranded in Japan.

o Real Life: a couple of American gamers who know they're comic strip characters.

o Schlock Mercenary: light SF strip.

All have complete archives back to the first strip, so you can catch up at your leisure. Enjoy!

I go out into the Big Blue room to be retro, and do some shopping in this place called a store, and when I get back, what do I see?

Anyhow, my two bits of webbased strips:

Sabrina -(mirror here) - Life as a dedicate Amiga user, etc.

Vinny The Vampire - Almost everyone is a hollywood classic monster of one sort or another. But other wise it is a more or less "normal" world.

Supermegatopis - the worlds largest open air insane asylum

FreeFall - Space Opera Lite

GeekComics - 'nuff said

RIGHT???

True to the original :-)

I'll tell ya why. When I use Netscape and click on my /. bookmark, it takes me right there. Same with my Freefall bookmark, my User Friendly bookmark, my news bookmark, and even my play bookmark. Direct. No redirects.

But now Micro$oft comes along and says, "Hey, we can make money off this too!" and starts doing redirects with their strong-armed browser market. Load balancing? Hit tracking? Bullshit. Let MY ISP deal with load balancing, or the sites that I'm actually going to (notice none of them are M$). Ditto with hit tracking.

Basically, M$ has no NEED to redirect. They just decided to do it and grab MORE information from those who happen to use IE (not me!!) and yet further bend the Internet public over and have their way with us.

Freefall had a cute series about this idea a few months ago...

Freefall had a cute series about this idea a few months ago...

In the past couple of decades, anti-technology has become something of a trendy national political movement, especially among journalists, politicians, academics and other intellectuals.

To a large extent this can be traced to our schools and universities. While it is almost impossible to get a 4-year degree without taking a number of literature classes, there are scores of college graduates who have not had a math class since high-school algebra. Chemistry? Get real. Physics? Forget it. These people have only the sketchiest understanding of how the gadgets that run their world - and on which they depend - actually work. What they do not understand, they are often helpless to affect. And they fear this.

Technophobic writing and demagoguery is usually full of examples of scientific cluelessness. To the extent that the audience for these things is no better informed, the errors go uncorrected or even multiply. We wind up with a situation of the blind leading the blind.

I am of the opinion that our schools and universities are largely responsible for this. A person should not be considered worthy of a high-school diploma if they have not mastered algebra and chemistry and biology. Science classwork should be a requirement for all degree programs in universities, including literature and arts. When the future of our society depends on being able to understand and manage these things, there is no excuse for our educational system allowing people to slip through without having a firm grasp of the fundamentals, at the very least.

This is especially true of the communications specialists, journalists and politicians. No PolySci grad should be able to get into the field without knowing *why* CFC's are bad (chemistry) and the reason we do not want to use antibiotics and antibacterials when not required (evolution). No journalism major should get out without knowing the difference between radioactivity and radiation, or a kilowatt and a kilowatt-hour. No person should graduate high school without knowing something about ROI and the unsustainability of Ponzi schemes (which is why we're having such a hard time reforming Social Security).

In a dumbing-down world, smartening up the populace isn't going to be easy. But we have to, because it's essential to our future.
--
Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,

Flying one on the Vomit Comet would be a fairly easy way to shake it down, and cheap compared to a rocket launch. A business jet is certainly a lot cheaper to operate than even the Vomit Comet, can probably fly the required parabolic arc, and is likely roomy enough to test a robot intended for use in confined spaces. You just have to make sure that the robot lands on something that won't break the fan blades between periods of free fall.

Hmmm... Lets see:

http://www.userfriendly.org/static
http://www.gpf-comics.com
http://www.herdthinners.com
http://www.purrsia.com/freefall
http://www.brunothebandit.com
http://www.geekcult ure.com/geekycomics/aftery2k/aftery2kmain.html

And of course /. and linuxtoday

Thats my breakfast :)


Sorry for the double-posting and for not using tags before :(

No doubt some twit Senator, having read your advice, is having the bill drawn up even though you may think you were offering sarcasm.

(holding a leafy sprig) "And the plants! And the animals that eat the plants! They all ultimately get their energy from a nuclear source. WHY AREN'T THERE WARNING LABLES ON THESE THINGS!"

Florence: "Don't shout too loud. You might start another government agency."

See more biting social comment in Freefall

No doubt some twit Senator, having read your advice, is having the bill drawn up even though you may think you were offering sarcasm.

(holding a leafy sprig) "And the plants! And the animals that eat the plants! They all ultimately get their energy from a nuclear source. WHY AREN'T THERE WARNING LABLES ON THESE THINGS!"

Florence: "Don't shout too loud. You might start another government agency."

See more biting social comment in Freefall