Quote of the Week, Webcomics Edition

"Bork is the sound Swedes make when they have anal."
- Renee Engstrom, Anders Loves Maria #122

(Caution: link is not at all safe for work.)

Since content has been light this week, here's a random list of other webcomics I'm enjoying lately:

• American Elf -- James Kochalka draws himself as an elf (sort of; he has buck teeth and pointy ears) and does a daily slice-of-life diary comic. It's usually very mundane, focused on specific moments in his life.
• Basic Instructions -- Scott Adams was discussing this a few months back, so I expect it's pretty well known. In four panels, most days of the week, Scott Meyer has wordy, acted-out, tongue-in-cheek examples of how to do, and not to do, various things. I think he either uses clip art or uses very extensive cut-and-paste, since the art is decent but the same poses are reused constantly.
• Dinosaur Comics -- Designed to explode the heads of the people who complain about Dilbert's drawing style, Dinosaur has the same six lame clip-art panels every single day...with new dialogue. But it's surprisingly smart and funny, with a wider scope of topics than any other comic I've seen.
• F-Minus -- Probably the best of the post-Far Side surreal strips; it's usually one wide panel in the standard comics size, has a more mainstream art style than usual for the type, and its own point of view.
• The Fart Party -- Julia Wertz is a mid-20s cartoonist who drinks too much, has dead-end jobs, and hangs out with cartoonists. Fart Party is a bit like a self-conscious, Millennial-generation version of Hate!, only it's all (more or less) true.
• Garfield minus Garfield -- Someone (or, more likely these days, several someones) carefully Photoshop Garfield out of the Garfield comic, leaving only Jon Arbuckle and his pathetic life. Bizarrely funny, and occasionally even unexpectedly poignant.
• Girls With Slingshots -- A classy, smart traditional gag-a-day strip that tells an ongoing story, only on the web. It's also has a female point of view, which is very rare in any sphere of cartooning. In a better world, this would be in three thousand papers every morning.
• Hark! A Vagrant -- This is not, strictly speaking, a webcomic; it's Kate Beaton's LiveJournal. But she posts strips there irregularly (often in a big burst) -- both funny and unlikely history strips and vignettes based on her own life. Start with the epic post "Twenty History Comics."
• Real Life Comics -- One of the better "my life, only in cartoony, gag-a-day form" strips, with four nice, big, colorful panels most days.
• Sheldon -- Just a classic style newspaper strip done really well, with a cast including a boy billionaire, his grandfather, and a talking duck.
• Sinfest -- Probably the only ongoing strip that's primarily about religion, Sinfest manages to have a great, very illustrative style and a sly sense of humor. The devil and Jesus are major recurring characters, but cartoonist Tatsuya Ishida isn't on the side of either of them (though he does have a slight bias towards his Buddha character). I imagine Sinfest probably does offend some people, but it shouldn't do so for anyone with both brain and wit.
• Shortpacked! -- It's a strip about people who work in a store that bears no resemblance to Toys 'R Us, and only occasionally descends into massive neepery about Transformers. Quite a lot of it is character-based humor, and even the "isn't this media thing silly"" jokes are usually quite funny.
• Where I Vent My Spleen -- A British cartoonist does mostly short strips based (very loosely, I hope) on his own life. He's got a very expressive, cartoony style -- I see hints of Bill Plympton in it, sometimes -- and his characters are also exceptionally distinctive. (This is probably unsafe for most workplaces as well.)

And some comics I would love more if they were (still?) regularly published:

• Alien Loves Predator -- An honest-to-god fumetti strip, with real continuity, that's quite funny a lot of the time. Too bad the creator is too busy to spend much time on it recently.
• Ghastly's Ghastly Comic -- The epitome of the extremely funny, extremely non-work-safe strip. It's over now, but, in its day, Ghastly was the place to learn about the latest perversion (whether you wanted to or not) and laugh at it.
• My Elves Are Different -- Clip-art strips about the SF world; this was updated regularly about timely topics through most of 2007, but it looks like the cartoonist has lost interest in it.
• Spamusement -- As the tag-line says, "poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!" Some of these are incredibly funny, and even the poorly-drawn part is wonderful in context. There's some kind of problem with the site right now, so it might be dead for good -- but, if you can get in, there's a huge list of very funny cartoons

And that's what I've got; I tried to avoid the ones that everyone already knows (PvP, xkcd, Wondermark), and newspaper comics that I read on the web (my mind loves petty distinctions), but I'm sure there are a couple dozen more, equally good.