Comic strips - part 1

I read a lot of online comics. A LOT. By popular request (when you have 8 readers, a single suggestion is "popular request") I'm listing them for you. This is the first of several posts.

User Friendly (http://www.userfriendly.org/)
One of the first online strips I ever started reading. This is a strip by a guy who works at an ISP about a bunch of guys who work at an ISP. He's making enough off this that he could quit his job and work on this full time, but he doesn't. O'Reilly Books, known for making programming books with animals on the cover, prints only one thing that isn't a programming book and that is the User Friendly collections. The art is nothing special, but the humor keeps the strip going.
He is currently on vacation and running repeats.

Sluggy Freelance (http://www.sluggy.com/)
This strip has changed significantly over the years. It started with rather simple art and the standard gag-a-day strip. This is what is now known as the "Suicide Bikini Frisbee Days" for reasons that become obvious when you start working your way through the archives. Soon the stories became bigger and grander to become whole sagas. For one he even gave up being funny just to tell the story. Now it's all one saga running into the next while still managing to be funny most days.
He has managed to quit his day job and make this his full time business and the art (sometimes) reflects the extra time he can spend on it.

PVP Online (http://www.pvponline.com/)
This started as a gaming strip about a group of people working at a game magazine. While it's still technically about that, the gaming side has slipped to allow broader appeal. This author has also quit his day job. He's one of the leaders in the online comic industry. He allows anyone to print his strip free of charge just as long as they also publish the source so readers come buy stuff from him.

Schlock Mercenary (http://www.schlockmercenary.com/)
This is a science fiction comic about a team of mercenaries. The author used to work as a brain at Novell. He took up cartooning as a way to relieve the stress. Then his strip became popular enough to allow him to quit his day job. There are 5 printed collections so far. I've got them all and recommend them highly.

While thinking about "Schlock Mercenary" I suppose I should mention the comics Howard Tayler has joined forces with. Because comics have a business side that can't be ignored several comics join together to pool their server expenses and business experience. "Real Life Comics" and "Shortpacked" joined with Schlock Mercenary to form Blank Label Comics (http://www.blanklabelcomics.com/). There are other comics in the group, but two of the three have stopped updating and I stopped following the third for some reason. Probably a really long hiatus.

Real Life Comics (http://www.reallifecomics.com/)
A comic about the author's life that strayed from the topic a bit. He tries to keep it semi-connected to his life. However, it should be stated that his best friend does not have an actual satellite or portal.

Shortpacked (http://www.shortpacked.com/)
A comic about the people working in a toy store.

Kevin & Kell (http://www.kevinandkell.com/
Bill Holbrook is a comic producing machine. This is one of three strips that he does every single day. The other two are On The Fasttrack and Safe Havens.

Sheldon (http://www.sheldoncomics.com/)
This guy started off with an online comic and achieved what many of the online cartoonists yearn for. He became syndicated. But despite the quality of his art and humor he wasn't widely accepted. Newspapers are dying off and most papers don't have room for new strips. They'd prefer to run strips whose creators are long dead. So he left the syndicate realizing that they were taking a huge bite of his profits and those profits would be bigger on his own. So he went back on his own.

Nukees (http://www.nukees.com/)
The art is simple but the comic is quality. This was originally a strip about the nuclear engineering department at a major California university. It still is, but they don't talk about it as much anymore. The author is one of the grandpappys of online comics. He helped get Keenspot up and running and makes guest appearances in many other strips.