actually im just gonna make my own post about it: please read more webcomics. please try them. every time people make posts about “aw man i wish SOMEone would WRITE about FLAVOR OF QUEER THING/TRAUMA OR ABUSE BUT IN SPECIFIC WAYS I CAN RELATE TO/WHATEVER” and then it gets reblogged into a giant thread of people agreeing with it and demanding Content i die because whatever it is is definitely being painstakingly created by an indie author who would really like for people to consume it and every time i point this out people suddenly can’t read lmao
it is out there it is free it is being made from firsthand experiences by people who care very very deeply who would be DELIGHTED to hear that it’s resonating with anybody at all, please throw some of that enthusiasm and support at people who will actually appreciate it
if you’re an indie comic person and any of this applies to you i encourage you to reblog this with a link to your comic and a short synopsis so people can browse the notes and find shit they’re looking for. or make your own post on your own blog if you don’t want to fool with other people i don’t care this is a sign from the universe that you should be louder about what you’re working on because people can’t fucking find it apparently.
i’ll go first i make kidd commander and it’s about an ensemble cast of queers on their way to kill god, they live on an airship and they’re all too pissed off to die. it’s free to read and it’s in the middle of its third arc right now. it lives here http://kiddcommander.com/
go go go
on second thought gonna add if you’re a READER and you’ve had Feelings about a webcomic feel free to recommend it here too
In addition to Kidd Commander, I enjoy:
Dumbing of Age - semi-autobiographical webcomic by an ex-Christian fundamentalist; explores a wide bevy of social justice issues in more nuanced ways than I often see, especially in regards to abuse
Monster Pulse - A group of kids (some of them explicitly queer) have their body parts turn into monsters; great analyses of trauma and transhumanism
Leftover Soup - slice-of-life story about the most philosophically inclined 20somethings in the world, seriously they spiral off into fascinating discussions all the time, this is basically Having Difficult Conversations: The Webcomic; the opening is terrible but stick with it
i follow a lot of podcasts, i can put together a curated list.
http://ohumanstar.com/ is incredible, it’s about trans robots (in minneapolis! not a huge plot point, but it’s where i’m from). it finished recently, so you can have a completed reading experience.
https://www.baldwinpage.com/spacetrawler/2010/01/01/spacetrawler-4/ spacetrawler started as the story of six humans kidnapped by an incompetent alien to help free the eebs, an enslaved alien race. it’s very good, sometimes it hits very hard. the first and second series are complete, the third series is updating currently.
http://www.rice-boy.com/see/ rice boy is a “brightly colored and surreal fantasy adventure story”. bittersweet chosen one stuff. also by the same author is the order of tales (completed) and vattu (on going, i think it’s near completion)
https://www.egscomics.com/ very queer cast of magical teens. starts out very rough, but that was 19 years ago. lots of gender transformation magic and magical hijinks, with a helping of tragic backstories and nerd stuff.
https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1 about a couple of weird magic british school children at a weird british boarding school. there are a couple chapters in particular that hit hard. also, it’s just very well drawn and written and it always updates MWF, which is more than most webcomics can say.
http://diggercomic.com/ digger is just a good comic, i should reread it again, it’s been awhile. it’s about a “take-no-nonsense” wombat who finds herself dealing with a talking buddha statue, a tribe of the best anthropomorphic hyenas you’ll see, and a dead god.
boy have i got good news for YOU
the good news is that on this list (to my limited knowledge) both my comic and gunnerkrigg court feature wlw protagonists!
the other good news is there are TONS of us working outside the aggregate sites, please please don’t assume those companies are indicative of everything going on in webcomics as a genre. my thoughts on that could fill a whole other post but i wanted to bring it up here at least.
I also just remembered there’s the website https://archivebinge.com , which is FANTASTIC if you’re looking for something specific. It’s limited by the fact that the creator needs to post the comic themself, but it’s got a great tagging system for both genres and content warnings:
and lets you know when new posts go up even on independent sites! Extremely useful for finding and reading a bunch of comics without taking agency from the creators.
i read a shitton of webcomics but here are my recs specifically for ones that aren’t on networks like hiveworks so they need more love (on mobile so sorry if formatting gets weird)
Softies i can’t summarize better than page one sorry. there’s a bit about a stubbed toe that will hit you like a freight train to the feels.
Job Satisfaction is slice of life about queers and demons and queer demons.
Radio Silence is a coming of age story about a British band on tour.
Ingress Adventuring Company is about Professor Toivo Kissa. He is an elf and he goes on adventures instead of doing his job, which is professoring.
Skin Deep is about a girl who goes to college and finds out she’s a sphinx (i feel like everyone reads skin deep but also not enough people read skin deep).
Sfeer Theory has a magical university for a very complicated magic system, if you’re into Lore.
Outliers takes place in a superhero world but these boys are just trying to be happily married in peace.
Some LGBT webcomics just off the top of my head
Muted - fantasy comic about a gay, poly witch in New Orleans.
Paranatural - All ages fantasy comic about middle schoolers who fight ghosts.
2 Slices - Classic, trope-y romance comic with a queer spin
Sleepless Domain - Magical Girl genre deconstruction. In a mysterious fantasy/sci-fi world where teenage girls sometimes have superpowers, how are those girls treated and valued? Content warning: This comic is usually pretty cute but has some serious violence early on.
Chaos Life - autobiographical slice-of-life comics about an agender illistrator and their gay, disabled wife.
Boy In Pink Earmuffs - All ages comic about two best friends who solve mysteries together and are also crushing on eachother.
Magical Boy - Fantasy comic about a trans boy who finds out he’s descended from a long line of magical girls and is destined to save the world. (tapas exclusive)
what’s up if you’re in the notes looking for recs you can’t see most of them because tumblr hides anything with a link in it, view this reblog to see a big ol’ list of webcomic links
tiger tiger is so gorgeous and funny! a girl steals her twin brother’s identity and jaunts off with his ship to study sea sponges. really amazing.
skinhorse it’s been a long time since i caught up but i’ve admired garrity since i was reading narbonic in middle school. skinhorse is about a government department full of weirdos that tries to regulate nonhuman intelligences and it’s also just very funny and cute.
kill six billion demons is extremely dense, extremely gorgeous. a woman wakes up in hell with a magic thingy in her forehead and it only gets weirder from there.
Do you want ass kicking nuns? Do you want badass witches? Do you want every single person in the webcomic you’re reading to be queer?
I don’t even remember when/where I picked up this webcomic but it’s been going for YEARS now, and I have loved every single thing the artist has ever done.
Aside from the main webcomic (updated twice weekly I think?), there are the missing moments, short stories about the world and characters that fill in a TON of lore and are well worth a read.
Yamino has also done some zines about elastigirl and stratogale that have changed the canon of the incredibles for me, not to mention the awesome sailor moon polycule content on patreon.
My runner up suggestion is Questionable Content by Jeph. It’s a little slow to get started and there’s a LOT to catch up on, but it’s updated every weekday and it just gets queerer and queerer as time goes on. Also quirky robots (seriously Melon is my absolute fave).
These suggestions are brilliant but I need to also flail wildly in support of Motherlover, a slow-burn romance about moms possibly in love, and all the mess that entails, by Lindsay Ishihiro.
I love this, though, because my favorite thing about Superman is he isn’t Batman. I love Batman too, but Superman isn’t a dude who decided to live his life in pursuit of a vendetta against society when he was eight and then just did nothing for the next two decades but get super jacked, become the world’s greatest detective, and memorize every strategy used by every winner in every field of competition in history. Superman is a very good-hearted person who knows how to bale hay, use AP Stylebook, and break meteors into manageable bite-sized pieces by hitting them real hard. And I’m not saying Superman isn’t smart. He’s a bright guy, he’s just not like, one of the celebrated geniuses of the DC Universe. The best thing about Superman is he is basically a normal dude who happens to be orders of magnitude stronger than anyone else. Normal dudes have brain farts. Normal dudes are presented with a life-or-death situation they have less than four seconds to resolve and make a decision that is not optimal. Normal dudes aren’t typically asked to rescue a child from a 10,000 ton machine bearing down on him at 85mph, but if they were, they would probably sometimes panic a little and do dumb shit like ruin a train when they could have just whisked the child to safety.
I think sometimes Superman makes the wrong decision, not necessarily to the result of extreme catastrophe, but something like this, where everyone is standing around clapping and cheering and the kid’s parents are weeping in gratitude and they want to pose for a picture for the 6 o’ clock news with Superman and the conductor, and in the crowd someone is like “Why didn’t he fly the kid out of the way?” and rather than rolling with the fact that the emperor is naked his friend just says “Shut up, Drew, it’s Superman.”
And then, because I also love Batman for very different reasons, I imagine that later on the same day Bruce Wayne gets a phone call and Clark Kent is like “Hey, Wayne, I uh, need a favor.”
“Do you now.”
“Yeah, I, uh, kind of owe the Union Pacific Railroad $60,000.”
“Oh, and why’s that?”
“Come on, don’t do this to me. It was all over the news.”
“I’m prepared to write you a no-strings-attached check for the full amount on the condition that you explain your entire thought process from beginning to end.”
Anyway, that’s why I like Superman.
I think this is very accurate. One time a tree fell on me in the forest and while it would have made more sense to simply jump to the side and avoid it my idiot brain went through the fight-or-flight options and apparently chose fight, so I reached out my hand and caught the tree, then dropped it on the ground beside me. Ended up fracturing my wrist and wondering why the fuck my brain thought that was the best option for survival. I don’t think people are good at really weighing the optimal choices in moments of crisis.
Bruce: “New Justice League policy. I am willing to pay for whatever damages you guys do in the name of justice and saving lives, but you have to write up a report detailing how the damage occured, including your thought process. Every once in a while, I will complie them into a presentation that we will go through as a whole to determine how you could have mitigated the collateral damage.”
Clark: “This is going to be a ‘name and shame’ type of thing, isn’t it?”
Bruce, lying through his teeth: “Of course not, don’t be ridiculous. This is to improve ourselves.”
The ones who admit “I don’t know what happened here” get a pass on shaming but they still get the alternative suggestions list
And on nights when he really needs a break, Bruce pulls those presentations out, watches the video, and laughs his tits off.
Forget the edgy “batman contingency: here’s how I’d kill all my friends” that’s all over YouTube Shorts, THIS is the series I want to see!
JK Rowling: hello children Rowling: i’m happy to report a terrible injussstice has been rectified Rowling: oxfam made a video in sssupport of pride month Rowling: but we sssoon put a ssstop to that! Poe: King: Koontz: Barker: Barker: oh man i bet this story is a real fuckin doozy
Rowling: sssseee this video included a caricature of me Rowling: and that is illegal Poe: caricatures are illegal? Rowling: in england, yesss Rowling: but only in regardsss to me Rowling: we’ve written sssome new lawsss recently you ssee
Barker: so they had a caricature of you Rowling: yesss Barker: you mean the demon terf with the glowing red monster eyes? Rowling: yesss Barker: and you were all oh that’s obviously me Poe: clive Barker: bah bah bah i’m not done edgar
Barker: so you see those glowing red monster eyes and you’re all like that’s me, that’s totally me Barker: no doubt in your mind Barker: when you see a cartoon demon with glowing red monster eyes Barker: that that is you Rowling:
Rowling: the point wasssn’t jussst the monssster eyesss! Rowling: you know who else draws caricaturesss? Rowling: the nazisss Rowling: who are bad! Rowling: except when they show up to our terf deatheater ralliesss Rowling: then they are very very good!
Barker: so wait Barker: are nazis good or bad Rowling: oh don’t be ridiculousss of coursse i’m not sssaying naziss are good Barker: Barker: Poe: clive Barker: wait for it Rowling: i’m jusst ssaying they have ssome good ideass Barker: there it is
Rowling: anyway we yelled online at oxfam til they took it down Barker: huh thats weird, you seem to get real big mad when trans people yell online Rowling: no no it'sss different when we do it Barker: how so Rowling: we also do bomb threatsss
