Opposable Thumbs / Gaming & Entertainment

The 12 most incredible webcomics

We pick our favorite digital funnies.


For those who like their comics on the smart side, xkcd can't be beat, just as it can't be pronounced. Creator Randall Munroe describes the name as "a word with no phonetic pronunciation—a treasured and carefully-guarded point in the space of four-character strings." Phonetic or no, the xkcd name is now synonymous with the sort of nerdy humor likely to appeal to anyone looking for a "webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language."

Topics are eclectic; a recent comic abandoned the traditional panel format for a huge blueprint-style drawing of a NASA rocket—but one labelled using nothing but the most common words in English. ("Things holding that kind of air that makes your voice funny," said the label on a liquid helium tank.) But the comic remains best-known for classics such as "Duty Calls"—a signed copy of which hangs in my office—in which a man refuses to go to bed because "someone is wrong on the Internet." ~Nate Anderson

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

SMBC hilariously offers excellent advice.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, or SMBC, looks like it could be composed using MS Paint. But the simple graphics belie a keen intellect. And it's funny.

Written by Zach Weinersmith, SMBC covers all sorts of topics, but most frequently returns to themes of religion and romancescience and superheroes, and parenting and programming. It's been around since 2002 and has won several Web Cartoonists' Choice awards.

SMBC gets to me on a couple of levels. As a parent, I'd love to respond to my kids' reports of being teased at school by telling them their friends are assholes, but I know I can't. And as an editor who reads and edits a lot of science coverage, Weinersmith's takes on science leave me laughing and sharing links with Science Editor John Timmer far more than I suspect he would like. ~Eric Bangeman

Mr. Toast

What do you get when you mix strangely adorable humor with anthropomorphic food? You get Mr. Toast and his gaggle of well-drawn food creatures making silly references to pop culture and spouting off cheesy food humor. While it’s not the type of comic you read for mental edification or laugh-out-loud hysteria, Mr. Toast and friends is a delightful afternoon palette cleanser after a hard day’s work, and the adorable cast of characters are sure to put a smile on even the grumpiest of faces. ~Florence Ion

PhD Comics

A couple of comics that are already on the list, like xkcd and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, frequently tackle science themes, and usually do a fantastic job of it. But if you want to get a sense of what it's like to actually be a scientist—and, more specifically, suffer through the long and painful training experience that starts when you enter a PhD program—then what you seek is PhD Comics.

Graduate school can be an absurd experience, one where you can spend months struggling to write a thesis, get it approved by a committee of scientists who can range from supportive to pedantic, and then get tripped up by some administrator because you got the margins wrong on page 79 out of 300. Jorge Cham, who creates the comic, captures various aspects of the absurdity brilliantly. I don't know if they're to everyone's taste (I have a rather personal appreciation of the absurdity), but if they are, they're great fun. Cham also gets bonus points for creating a brilliant explainer of the Higgs boson~John Timmer

The Oatmeal

Ok, I’ll admit, I’m not a big webcomics guy. Sure, I enjoy a good chuckle every now and again—I’m a sucker for Calvin and Hobbes—but online, it just doesn't enter into my daily routine. That is, until I discovered The Oatmeal earlier this year. Honestly, I’d never even heard of the site until Ars’ coverage earlier this summer of the conflict between the site and lawyer Charles Carreon. (This is despite the fact that I had ordered a $4 Sriracha fridge magnet from Matthew Inman, aka "The Oatmeal," without knowing its provenance.)

Sure, The Oatmeal can be a bit graphic (there’s a lot of toilet and blood-and-guts humor and exuberant uses of the phrase “LOVE MEEEEEE!”), but in the end, it often makes me guffaw—even when I’m sitting alone at my desk. The Oatmeal really nails the sometimes-ridiculous tech zeitgeist, and happily, gleefully hyperbolizes on reality.  ~Cyrus Farivar


Ostensibly, Sheldon by Dave Kellett is about a ten year old who became a billionaire tech mogul by coding some Internet software. But the strip stopped being about the hilarity of a fourth grader running a business a long time ago. These days, it's much more about author Dave Kellett's random musings, such as the utter American-ness of ranch dressing, the quick-rotting of raspberries and cowboy era quadruple negatives, all illustrated with Kellett's trademark expressive line work. Kellett isn't above putting tons of nerdy references in his strips either, ranging from worries about the Star Wars franchise to semi-osbcure Star Trek: TNG jokes that likely make no sense to non-fans. Sheldon combines the tight drawing and jokey punchlines of the best gag-a-day newspaper strips with the niche obsession common to web comics, and that's why it has a happy home in my RSS feed. ~Kyle Orland

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