looks like another slow work day, allow me to pontificate
1 like = 1 hot take about 90s webcomics*

*might not actually be actually 90s, just from, ya know, the before time

There was only ever one good webcomic but that webcomic varied from person to person.

The best webcomic of the decade was Ein Stuck Natur. No one remembers it.

The very first episode of every webcomic was the characters speaking to the reader and introducing themselves. the second would be an apology for not updating more. The third, uploaded months later, was the "i'm going to quit if i don't get more comments" strip.

Social media really decimated the webcomics ecosystem, since the primary webcomic experience wasn't actually reading the strips strips -- it was clicking flashing icons on MY COOL LINKS pages to explore through the unexplored country

Every webcomic went through distinct stages, beginning as a wacky college roommates comedy and gradually morphing into an epic battle drama about interdimensional warlords who could only be stopped by wacky college roommates

"When I Am King" was 90s webcomic oscar bait, a critical darling beloved by the webcomic beautiful people for its infinite canvas and its Chaplain-esque pantomime and immediately consigned to the dustbin of history by actual readers.

1/0 was a fascinating meta-exploration of webcomics as a medium, but honestly owed most of its success to its title which brilliantly played the Keenspace algorithm to ensure that it would appear at the top of any alphabetical list.

If you were a 90s edgelord, you could like one webcomic and that webcomic was either Living in Greytown or Sinfest.

Tatsuya Ishida's competent linework and a then fresh anime look were enough to snow everyone into missing the essential hollowness of Sinfest.

The big dream of the 90s webcomic creator was to break into "real" comics, so most early webcomics continued to adhere to the limitations of newspapers despite the potentials of the web. Every comic was 4 panels.

The big debate in 90s webcomic forums was which webcomic would be the first to break into the big time, the smart money was all on either Sinfest or Ozy and Millie. We all know how that panned out!

Spoiler: Dana Simpson is today a syndicated cartoonist with like a dozen books, Tatsuya Ishida creates terf word salad for an ever-dwindling audience of mumsnet weirdos

"The Parking Lot is Full" was the truest precurser to the modern creepypasta, an unsettling blend of dada humor and straight-up grotesque horror absurdity.

The 90s webcomic cast: Wacky manchild main character, long-suffering straight man roommate, sarcastic armcandy (usually goth), and a cute animal that (surprise!) liked to smoke cigars and possibly was plotting world domination

there were more hot goth girlfriends in webcomics than there were in real life

what the hell was up with dawn chapel, how did that get so much attention

Wapsi Square really showed how far you could get on the strength of drawing tits, even weird big square stylized ones

Unicorn Jelly was a flawed but deeply compelling text, a highly original bizarro sci fi with a fascinating mystery at its heart, that never got its due for various reasons but honestly mostly due to transphobia

Piled Higher and Deeper was literally just Dilbert for grad students

I think about 80% of 90s webcomics were made by Schmorky. Schmorky churned out a new webcomic series like almost on a weekly basis it seemed.

The Devil's Panties got big on the strength of that title, you couldn't NOT click it, but apparently enough people stuck around for the boring minutia of the lives of art students wearing big goth boots that it still contiues to this day.

I never read Octopus Pie so I still think of Meredith Gran as that person who did the furry comic about cats in high school.

Its star has faded and its debatable if an alt-weekly comic also posted online was ever really a webcomic, but I think Bob the Angry Flower went farther in defining the new specifically webcomic humor style of edgy dada than any other contemporary

It's absolutely insane to think that Sluggy Freelance is not only still going but still clings to the newspaper paradigm so tightly in 2020 that it has Sunday color strips

If you couldn't think of a punchline in the 90s, just end it by having the characters stare awkwardly at one another and then have one deadpan "I hate you"

Only about 100 people read Latex Blue but every one of those people went on to found their own fetish

Since furries were the pariahs of the 90s internet, furry webcomics developed through convergent evolution into a totally separate ecosystem. There were "webcomics" and there were "furry webcomics." There was no cross over.

Every 90s edgelord agreed that Kit & Kay Boodle was bonkers and every Internet comedy site aspiring to the Something Awful throne had an article expressing horror at the comic's relatively innocuous first arc. Yet they never read any further to where the true madness lay

The sheer mass of gender swap comics in the 90s seemed strange at the time, but in retrospect makes more sense when you realize how many young authors were feeling out their own gender identities.

The cool trash-talkin' jerklords of Penny Arcade and PVP bear a heavy burden for solidifying gamer as an identity rather than a hobby

The 90s concept of gaming was very much like the medieval concept of sexuality. it wasn't something you WERE, it was something that you DID

Kris Straub probably has some of the most interesting range of the early web cartoonists, his early punning and wacky stick figure strips don't give a hint as to his natural knack for genuinely chilling horror microfiction.

It's low-hanging fruit to slag on Tim Buckley but seriously has there ever been a more hateable man?

Objectively the worst webcomic ever made was Jack, a muddy amatuerish slurry of reactionary pseudo-christianity, edgelord posturing and barely disguised rape fantasies

It's still baffling to me how Jack skyrocketed to the top of the furry comic reading lists; either hopkins knew all the right nobby people or people were extremely hard up for rape porn in these days

If a furry webcomic wanted to be deep, it would be about a world where humans oppressed furries. So it would be Cats Don't Dance

Classic 90s webcomic bit: Jesus but acting all cool and casual like a bro.

I always get weirded out seeing Owly comics in the comic store. Isn't it somehow associated with Fat Jesus and President Ass? Or is it just a similar art style?

One of the few times that a genuinely experimental, weirdly unique new take on the medium got any actual media attention was Dinosaur Comics

Between Failures has always been nipping at the edges of the popular must read lists, but its foundation of snark built around a warm human core has made it one of the mid-morning of the web's most quietly enduring success stories

The Wotch episodes where the one character specifically wanted to be turned into a little girl seemed bizarre at the time, but talking to trans people who lament missing out on a childhood in the right body it makes sense and actually becomes kind of sweet

I don't think enough attention gets paid to Kate Beaton's stellar mastery of comedy cadence in Hark a Vagrant, where tiny type details -- dropped punctuation, weird capitalization, multiple word balloons when one would normally due -- subtly push the joke into the heights

Flying Suit Reiko began ostensibly as a fetish comic but its deceptively sharp satire and rapid fire chicken fat joke delivery elevated it to something far more and made it palatable to normies

how could anyone take jack seriously as a "horror" comic with that goofy hair

Nukees was the platonic ideal of the 90s webcomic

Dril is social media pokey the penguin

Something about Achewood -- the way it marries mundane daily relatable comedy with the sense of something far bigger and far more unknowable lurking below the surface -- has always made the strip feel like something just outside of my understanding. I don't get it.

why does achewood give me big undertale vibes

3 kinds of early furries, each defined by which body part of Sabrina Skunk they most wanted to jack off to

Sabrina Skunk was never a super funny comic but its combination of gently sweet-natured whimsy and low stakes work place drama demonstrated the early power of relatability as a driving force of webcomic success (also hot hot skunk ass didn't hurt)

12 Will Die was an amusingly constructed gimmick webcomic cribbing from the 10 Little Indians playbook which was mostly notable for when the author got too horny to hide their vore fetish

every webcomic adaptation into web toon has been awful

There was a certain subset of webcomics that survived solely on hate clicks; no one actually read them other than to write scandalized forum posts in which they tried to one up each other with increasingly florid and complex ways to say "this sucks"

Shredded Moose was one of those comics. I don't think it had any actual fans, I don't think that anyone ever actually read it. It just existed to be the example if you wanted to talk about shitty misogynist bro comics in your Something Awful front page rant.

In retrospect, I think Misfile, The Wotch, El Goonish Shive were all about exploring gender identity but I 100% believe Exiern was just about jerking off

Least I Could Do is like the Shredded Moose that people actually read.

Rayne in Least I Could Do is the most punchable webcomic character

schlock mercenery is still going

Early webcomics loved breaking the fourth wall, but the best meta-commentaries on the medium were 1/0 and Elf Only Inn.

Elf Only Inn would have been yet another high fantasy spoof, but the framing device of it all being dialogue from an RPG chatroom and Josh Sortelli's ear for the sound of authentic online posturing really elevated the material

Elf Life is the 9 Chickweed Lane of webcomics

fuck zen pencils

PVP is a weird concept, it was originally about a gaming magazine, then about a video game maker, so it's not really a gaming comic, it's a workplace comic which seems to add unneccessary layers of distancing between itself and its core demographic of video game consumers.

Skull the troll does violence to the central premise of PVP. It's a comedy about a workplace that makes video games but one of the characters from a video game also works there? I hope someone got fired for that blunder