Reading

Comics

Strips that reliably earn their place in the reading rotation.

Webcomics

  • xkcd (Website) — Randall Munroe’s “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” new strips every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with a full archive and the What If? spin-off alongside it.

  • Existential Comics (Website) — a philosophy webcomic “about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also jokes,” updating Mondays, with a running counter of days without a Kant/can’t pun in the corner. Strips put philosophers in the story — Cinderella turning down the palace after meeting Eugene Debs — and a Random button to fall into the archive.

  • Three Word Phrase (Website) — Ryan Pequin’s hand-lettered black-and-white strips, 301 of them in the archive, usually four panels wide and built on someone committing far too hard to a bad idea. Titles give the register away: “Busy Wizard”, “President Bird Returns”, “Sad Bear is Hungry”, “English Major”.

  • Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (Website) — Zach Weinersmith’s daily strip, usually one long panel on science, economics, philosophy or religion delivered by deliberately badly-drawn people. The hovertext carries a second joke, and the red “votey” button under each strip hides a bonus panel; the archive runs back to 2002.

  • Buttersafe (Website) — Raynato Castro and Alex Culang alternating Tuesdays and Thursdays since 2007, on short strips that open on something ordinary and quietly stop being so. The about page promises only that each comic “will have pictures and probably some words. Nothing else is guaranteed.”

Manhwa

  • The Regressed Mercenary Has a Plan — 8/10 (Manhwa) — art by JJJSSS from Gold Haeng’s original: the Mercenary King dies before avenging his family and wakes as his teenage self, rebuilding a house whose knights are already defecting. Ongoing on WEBTOON, new episode every Wednesday.

Superheroes

  • Captain America (Article) — Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s deliberately anti-Nazi creation, debuting in December 1940 punching Hitler on the cover a year before Pearl Harbor. The first issue sold out in days; the German American Bund sent Timely threatening letters over it, and Mayor La Guardia personally guaranteed the publisher’s staff safety.