Oh, Nancy, this will raise more mysteries than it answers.

About Hark! A Vagrant:

Hark! is Kate Beaton’s irregularly published, always vaguely historical web comic. Expect an update or two a week, and expect to laugh until you have tears in your eyes. It is consistently excellent.

This is what he does, so be cool about it, ok?

About Pictures for Sad Children:

John Campbell’s MWF comic is about many things. Sadness, happiness, having a dead roommate but not knowing he’s dead, when a heavy thing falls on you, and occasionally, running for ghost.  The archive is big, but you should still be able to work your way through it if you feel like you need to start right at the beginning. Not surprisingly (stick art being what it is), it is the writing that makes this comic such a winner.

Predictably, the computer has difficulty. Of course, accusing an indie rock band of being pretentious is a little like calling the pope out for wearing his Mitre, but you listen to the Crane Wife parts 1, 2, and 3 and tell me if Justin Pierce isn’t too close for comfort here.

About Wonderella:

Wonderella is America’s most… American superhero? She cares exactly the minimum amount to get the job done, and, you know, just read it. It’s spectatcular. I honestly wish it were more than once a week. Notable enemies include Hitlerella.

27 year olds everywhere cringe.

About Dinosaur Comics:

Dinosaur Comics is Ryan North’s unusual, but long running and well regarded, web comic. The art is the same every day, but it’s so perfectly expressive that it isn’t distracting at all. Just look at that guy. Some weeks the strip is a dictionary of literary terms, some weeks it is a font of relationship advice. Most of the time I read my own thoughts in T-Rex and cringe. You will probably enjoy it.

The criticism is valid. It makes Achewood fans sick to admit it, but there aren’t a lot of ladies in the strip, and as the punchline of today’s Cat and Girl points out, Molly is really just a foil for Roast Beef. That said, it isn’t deep and realistic characters that make Cat and Girl such a good comic either. Cat eats paint, Girl is ambivalent about her hipsterism (obviously I make exception for the most well-fleshed character: Bad Decision Dinosaur). And yeah, Achewood doesn’t have the best crop of female characters (Tina, Ray’s Mom, Phillipe’s Mom… not an inspiring list), but what Chris Onstad does with the male characters makes it worthwhile. Dorothy Gambrell makes that clear with the first half of the joke I posted above. It is, of course, “well done, like Achewood?”

About Cat and Girl:

Cat and Girl is a long running comic, with archives back to 1999, about a cat, a girl, another girl, a boy, a vampire dude, hipsterism, consumer culture, and so on. It is highly likely that you will enjoy it. It’s also pretty likely that you didn’t need me to tell you that.  Written by Dorothy Gambrell and posting Tuesday/Thursday/Friday, if that makes any sense.

That said, fans of Animal crossing will probably have felt, at one point or another, that this was the fate that awaited them if they went back to their neglected towns.

About Penny Arcade:

Penny Arcade is the long running, highly popular, and very polarizing video game web comic of Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, which occasionally diverges from gaming discussions to talk about the news, giraffes, fruit rape, and so on. It runs Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and the earliest strip in the archive is from November of 1998. There is a video game based on the comic in the works, and there is a yearly Penny Arcade Expo. The two also founded the Child’s Play charity, which has donated more than a million dollars to children’s hospitals worldwide, hoping to combat the media image of video gamers as violent sociopaths.

About Achewood:

Achewood is a web comic about a series of cats, stuffed animals, at least one human, and arguably, the English language. I love it dearly, and my only complaint is that I actually like Asahi Super Dry, which is the butt of an occasional beer joke. See also the blogs and various print projects that attend the main comic. Chris Onstad’s baby.

About Bathos:

Bathos is a weekly comic that often discusses some historical tidbit. Subjects include biography, cryptography, and etymology. It is created by P. Calavara, and runs weekly on Tuesdays. The archive dates back to June 6th, 2006. Notable characters include Polly and Perry Calavara, Super Famicom (a parrot), Judge Rat (a raccoon), and countless robots named Bathos.