hallo! ive been really getting into the 'early 2000s webcomics' vibe as of late because a friend introduced me to penny arcade and i immediately binged the entire 26 year archive, LOL. i've read the other big one that i knew of (cad) and a few smaller(heavy asterisk) ones like megatokyo, machall, and vgcats. Do you have any other recommendations of the same ilk?
Narbonic is my all-time favorite-
Oh no, the site’s been hacked! I told the author about it on bluesky, and she told me to tell you to buy the books. But also, and you didn’t hear this from me, she’s working on getting the site back up and you can check back in a week or so. It’s short, and while the early strips are almost literally unreadable due to bad lettering, it goes from 0-60 at lightning speed and has the most satisfying ending of any webcomic before or since, so it’s worth sticking through the first storyline or two (Seeing webcomic artists improve used to be a big selling point of them!)
Otherwise, hmm....
Of the Big Famous Early 2000s Webcomics, one glaring omission from your list is Questionable Content. It’s a very comfy low-stakes comics. Too comfy and low-stakes for a lot of people, to the point the running gag online that it was Questionable if there was any Content. I tapped out like five years ago as it became a series of Quirky Robot Girls, but it’s undisputably a part of webcomics history, and there are worse things that could happen to beloved early-2000s webcomics.
Of course, if you don’t want something comfy, you can also try Something Positive. It starts off kind of edgy (cough) but is also one of the most depressing “sitcom slice of life” comics I’ve ever read. This might be one of the best first strips of its decade, though, just in terms of making it clear exactly what you were signing on to. Sadly, it looks like most of the archive isn’t on the site right now, and it jumps from a house burning down directly to a literal Mickey Mouse comic (the artist went pro), so it might be hard to find. I hope it’s not lost media, though.
At least you have its sometimes crossover buddies comic Girls With Slingshots though. GWS is weird in that it’s pretty good and I like it a lot but I can never find anything to say about it. It’s a pretty good sitcom strip that’s pretty grounded but still has enough of that lolrandom energy of the era to not feel out of place. It also has substantially fewer back alley abortion jokes than Something Positive. I hope that sentence becomes my second quote to end up on the back of someone’s book.
We interrupt this discussion of early 2000s comics for Octopus Pie. It’s very difficult for me to talk about Questionable Content and other slice-of-life comics without talking about Octopus Pie, maybe the greatest slice-of-life webcomic ever made. That comic started in 2007, though so it’s not really an early 2000s webcomic. It is a great one though, so I’m slipping it in when no one’s looking. Anyway, going back to the 2000s name comics...
Applegeeks was sort of the Mac-flavored Penny Arcade back in the day. I actually thought it was offline until literally just now when I remembered it. Man...that is an early 2000s-ass anime girl, ain’t it? Not just that it’s a horny design but the specific way it’s horny is so Bush term 1 coded. You can just look at this page and have a pretty good idea of when it was drawn.
Speaking of obviously early-2000s comics, I’m cheating a little by listing Serenity Rose, since that was a print comic that later got re-serialized as a webcomic (hence this chapter cover having a price on it), but I read the print version as a kid and liked it a lot. I have no idea if it holds up or if it’s horrifically problematic or something, I haven’t read it in decades. But still. Look at that black-and-white with spot colors style! Hardly anyone does that anymore!
(You should, it’s very efficient)
You know what’s another really efficient way of making comics that was big in the early 2000s?
Don’t draw anything, use sprites from video games. I’m not sure offhand if Bob and George was the first sprite comic, but I am sure that it was THE sprite comic. And it was also one of the first comics to get really heavy into the fourth wall breaking, with “the author” being a recurring character and various characters fighting over control of the narrative. Often with time travel and alternate versions of characters. I don’t know if Homestuck (which it itself, technically, a sprite comic most of the time) was directly inspired by Bob and George, but there’s a solid enough through line that I have to imagine it at least was in Andrew Hussie’s memetic soup. And it indisputably inspired dozens if not hundreds of sprite comics after. It’s really emblematic of one of the big 2000s-era genres of webcomics.
You know, like the "Hey guys, you know how you always think about how much cooler it’d be to be a girl? You don’t? It’s just me?” genre. Which was HUGE, back in the day. I was more into Misfile and the Wotch, but El Goonish Shive is probably the definitive example of this.
Though Order of the Stick dipped it’s one-dimensional toe into it. OotS is a comic about a Dungeons and Dragons adventure (itself a bit of a sub-genre), starting with the characters being converted to the then-new 3.5 edition. Which has since been replaced by 4th edition. Which has since been replaced by 5th edition. Which has since been replaced by 2024 edition.
But there’s never been a better example of someone doing a lot with a little than Rich Burlew. It’s a stick figure comic, but look how fucking cool it looks nowadays. It’s a fantastic comic, and should more than serve to keep you entertained until the Narbonic site is fixed.
