Over the past few months, I have started exploring the world of web-based comics with increasing seriousness. I now have at least a small circle of strips I am reading regularly. The three that have me most excited (to the point of going to the website at 11pm and impatiently hitting the refresh key to see if the next day's comic has posted in the last few minutes) are:

• Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques — I started reading this back in February and have been following religiously ever since. Ostensibly a relationship comic, QC's hallmarks are the absurd banter of the characters and the anarchic antics of Pintsize the "AnthroPC." Also, great T-shirt designs.
• Dinosaur Comics by Ryan North — I've been enjoying the exploits of T. Rex and his pals (a select group that includes two other dinosaurs and God) since about August. The humor here is frequently bizarre (e.g., T. Rex arguing with God about sitcoms), but if you can get onto its wavelength it is just as frequently hilarious. Formally, this belongs to a strange category: the art is, with rare exceptions, identical from one strip to the next. It is still "sequential art" in that the panels change meaning and relationships with each other each strip based on the dialog. Most of the time though, I am too busy chuckling to be concerned about its taxonomy.
• Wigu by Jeffrey Rowland — I'd been hearing about this strip here and there, but it was until recently on an extended hiatus. Rowland's "memoir comic"—Overcompensating—was running but hadn't especially moved me. When Wigu's re-launch was announced, I got it into my head to go back to the beginning and start reading, and I was quickly hooked. The comic, which centers on the adventures of eight- (or seven-) year-old Wigu Tinkle, combines whimsy with black humor in a way that is hard to describe, except to say that I feel both elated and a little sad every time I read it.

In addition to the above, I'm following a several other strips with a bit less obsessive passion, but enjoying them all the same.

• College Roomies from Hell!!! by Maritza Campos — A fairly long-running comic (it began in 1999), CRFH has been tagged as "Friends meets The X-Fiies." A large cast of college freshmen stumble through romantic misadventures when they are not mutating or being persecuted by Dread Cthulhu. Recently came off hiatus.
• Penny & Aggie by Gisèle Lagacé & T Campbell — The official slogan is: "The teenage years. Learning. Growing. Changing. And hating. Lots of hating." Centers on the rivalry between rich and popular Penny Levac and rebellious Aggie D'Amour. Artist Lagacé says she's influenced by Archie comics, but I'm pretty sure there was no elevator sex in those.
• Kristy versus the Zombie Army by Kidnemo —This is less a comic strip than a serialized graphic novel. The art is highly stylized and anime-influenced, and it is being updated at a rate of one page per week, so it is very slow-moving when you read it week-to-week. Going back through the archives and reading it all at once, as I did with Books 1 and 2 (we are now on Book 5), works much better.
• Templar, Arizona. by Spike (Charlie Trotman) — One my latest discoveries. According to its author, a "story about a town, and the people who live there." The titular town is located in "a slightly irregular Arizona that fell off the back of a truck somewhere." This has a sprawling feel, with a large number of secondary characters following individual (but sometimes-intersecting) plot-lines, so it feels somewhat slow-moving, but it definitely has my interest.

That's it. It seems, to this uninformed observer, that the web comics ecosystem is fairly robust. There's lots of other comics out there. It's encouraging to see that most of these comics have been around for a couple years already, suggesting that the authors have been able to make, if not a living, at least enough money to justify the ongoing effort.