Several years ago, I started reading daily comics online. I became frustrated with the services offered by comics.com and ucomics.com and others pretty quickly; I don't want to sort through emails to find my comics, and I don't want to be online flicking through page after page after page.
The first solution I built was an excel sheet that generated an HTML document - a web page generator. Each line on the spreadsheet created a link to a different comic. As long as I opened the page while online, I could read the comics at my leisure.
After a few months, I discovered that my desire for offline reading had grown, and that there were some comics I was saving frequently. As a result, the Excel sheet was not a satisfying solution.
The next version - which I still use - is an Access database. I could have written something from scratch using Visual Basic or .NET, but the database solution seemed simplest. Since February 24, 2005, I have used it to download around 150000 comics. I have a big stack of editorials (a great way to zero in on the important news without being overwhelmed with hopelessness and jaded by sensationalistic reporting), and a few that I save to read again (as the mood strikes me). The long and the short of it? I like comics, okay?
___
My list of favourites:
From Ucomics.com
| Ballard Street | Strangeness. One of my all time favourites. |
| Big Top | A Boy, His Clown, and the Talking Animals Of The Circus. (rerun) |
| Calvin and Hobbes | Brilliant. They are running the series from start to finish, one a day. (rerun) |
| Doonsbury | Political satire, with a Liberal Democratic perspective. |
| For Better For Worse | On par with Peanuts in it's heyday. |
| Foxtrot | Now a Sunday strip only. |
| Natural Selection | Really Strangeness. |
| Non Sequitur | Quasi-political observational strangeness. |
| Red Meat | Awful strangeness. I mean it. Not for everyone. Sick. Really. |
From Comics.com
| 9 Chickweed Lane | Weird wordplay, romance, odd characters. Very imaginative. |
| Big Nate | The stories of a boy with many flaws. |
| Cow and Boy | Sort of Calvin and Hobbes-ish, but the Cow is real, and she talks. |
| Dilbert | Best. Workplace. Comic. Ever. |
| F Minus | Strange observational oddities. |
| Frazz | Brilliant story of a janitor at an elementary school. Sort of 'Calvin when he grows up'. |
| Get Fuzzy | Dogs, cats, weasels and humans can talk. But they're still dogs, cats, weasels and humans. |
| Pearls Before Swine | Animals that talk. Predators live beside Prey. Few humans. Horrible puns. |
| Tiny Sepuku | Weekly dose of twisted advice. |
From Slagoon.com
| Sherman's Lagoon | Sherman is a shark - a big, dumb eating machine. Thankfully, he's allergic to crabs and turtles, so a few other characters survive. |
