2019 Big Webcomics Catch-Up: Introduction

Post index:

Introduction (you are here)
Tapas, Part #1 (Bad Bad Things, Cupido, Desert Rose, Finding Home, The Firelight Isle, Fisheye Placebo, Fox & Willow)

Webcomics used to be one of my favourite forms of entertainment. I first got into them around 2010 or 2011, with Romantically Apocalyptic, Shadowgirls, The Phoenix Requiem, and probably a few others – though The Phoenix Requiem is the only of those early comics I’d still recommend and even remains one of my favourites to this day. I never had enough. It was quite hard to find new things to read, lots of sorting through crap, lots of artists who went on a perpetual hiatus and comics I lost my patience with for other reasons, but eventually, I accumulated about 80 that I followed. Not all of them were favourites, not all of them necessarily the best, a few will likely be DNF’d in the next few weeks or months or years, but it’s the current state of my list.

I used to check for updates religiously, every day as soon as I came home from school. I didn’t discover feed readers until last February and relied almost entirely on bookmarks until then. When I started with uni, time became more scarce and I started checking less often, until eventually, I stopped completely for a few months, tried to come back, discovered Feedly only keeps data for about a month, and gave up completely. The backlog in the meanwhile grew to an intimidating size. Still, I switched readers (currently Inoreader, which seems to keep a longer backlog, thanks for the rec Farragut) and I want to try again.

My preferences for comics are similar to books – leaning towards fantasy, mostly secondary-world and non-portal – with the addition that I find art to be really important. I don’t mind a rougher start (Gunnerkrigg Court comes to mind…), but if the style doesn’t mesh with me (Girl Genius, most manga-style comics) or if it starts bad and never improves, it will be a dealbreaker.

As part of this series, I will catch up to each of the series I used to read before I fell off the wagon (maybe rereading the whole comic, maybe not, depending) in no specific order, and write a post with 5 or so mini reviews. There might be a post on completed or DNFd comics later on, and if I catch wind of a new one, or restart something that I lost track of even earlier, it’s quite possible it’ll make its way in as well – I’ll be basically making it up as I go along.

Hopefully this will help someone discover something new!

And since I’m perpetually looking for new recommendations: what are your favourite webcomics?