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They are so cute at that age (Webcomics)

Here's another time sink for you, a webcomic called Snowflakes, brought to us by James Ashby, Chris Jones and Zach Weiner. You may remember Zach as the author of my favorite webcomic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, but Snowflakes is decidedly less edgy than that (in fact, I'd describe it as PG-rated at worst) although still fairly irreverent and usually pretty funny. It's a storyline comic about a bunch of kids living in an orphanage operated by nuns. My favorite character is Wray, the black-haired girl advocating torture in the strip above, who you can tell has a sort of warped sense of things and a bit of a short fuse. I suggest starting at the beginning since there is a bit of a storyline (you can find the archive here) but there's only about 50 strips so far so it won't take long to catch up. Snowflakes updates three days a week and I encourage you to put it in your feed reader and follow along in the fun!

Unshelved (Webcomics)

I haven't been posting much lately and the timing is nice for this one, so let's do another webcomic. In honor of the American Library Association meeting in Chicago this weekend, which I know of due to a friend's Twitter feed and the website that I'm currently introducing, I want to bring to your attention Unshelved, a comic about public libraries which I've mentioned before. You are probably already wetting yourself laughing with thoughts of all of the hi-jinks at your local public library, but nonetheless I assure you that Unshelved is worth your time. It hosts a cast of great characters from wise-cracking comic aficionado Dewey to Buddy, a guy in a beaver suit, to the naked libertarian lawyer Ned.

Unshelved has a typical newspaper comic format: a daily three-panel black and white strip with a longer, color version on Sundays. With the exception of Sundays, the strip focuses on the antics of the characters and varies from fairly funny to hilarious. But the highlight is the Sunday "Book Club" strips which provide a little comic teaser for a book. The books can be old or new, for different age groups, of different genres, and are often done by guest artists or writers. Here's an excellent one about Moby Dick by Zach Weiner of SMBC, although they are usually a little less satirical. Today's Book Club about Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan is also done by a guest artist, Box Brown of bellen!, which I may post about in the future.

Unshelved has been around for a while, and in fact they used to be called Overdue. They have a substantial archive dating back to 2002, and even better have a separate archive of the color Sunday Book Club comics. Finally, they have stuff to buy, too, like some funny shirts and books.

Warbot is Hell (Webcomics)

Today I wanted to tell you all about Warbot in Accounting (WiA), shown on the left, brought to us by the good people at Nuklear Power. This is a very good, but infrequently updated, comic following the life of the titular decomissioned Warbot as he persues his new career in the business world. Warbot is silent, huge, and ridiculously slow. To conform with Warbot's pace, the comic tends to be somewhat long and slow-paced itself (the last one had 22 panels in 11 rows) and there is very little dialog. But this is all part of the joke, so don't rush through a strip but rather savor each panel and the often subtle differences between panels. The other part of the joke is the general misfit nature of warbot in his new life and his sad attempts to fit in. Although pretty funny, Warbot can also be a bit of a downer, which is no small feat using a character with no dialog or facial expressions. One last note: the artwork is pretty good and is detail-oriented. The details really make it work so don't miss out (see his little tie in the panel above).

While you are at Nuklear Power, you might be interested in checking out some other things there. They have the regularly updated 8-Bit Theater, but I can't say that I've really gotten into it. The art is ripped directly from Final Fantasy, which is kind of funny at first and then annoying after a while. But I can recommend Atomic Robo. This is a full-fledged newstand comic book which they have some samples of which are pretty good. I found their navigation kind of confusing so I'll just put the links to the sample comics here and here. I think the second one is hysterical.