I’ve got several questions for you guys, so I’ll just jump in and see where we end up. First, how do you organize your webcomic picks? Favorites list on your browser? Internet-based pull list? Or do you simply remember the few that you enjoy enough to keep coming back for more and enter them manually per update cycle?
While I used to utilize the no-fuss, no-muss Internet-fueled list, I found it just wasn’t quite comprehensive enough to fit my needs. So, I moved back to a simple Favorites list, meaning if I was ever away from that one, particular list, my favorite strips were once again up in the air, left only to the memory of a brain struggling more and more to contain the knowledge acquired from day to day. Suffice to say, that pool would be a shallow one to fish from.
Wash away the previous questionnaire and you find yourself in my current situation: on vacation, back home in Kansas, and at the mercy of a dial-up connection (there’s talk that the Sunflower State will see electrical power by the end of 2008, but the slim population is doubtful on that high hope). Upon powering up the family PC and hearing that now-archaic dialing sequence, I realized that a new challenge had been made out of my daily webcomic ritual, leaving me to mine my addled brain for those most intense of emotions I have felt, and thus retained, while reading webcomics.
Somewhere between a trickle and a strong stream brought those memories to the surface, buoyed greatly by the numerous instances of true, laugh-out-loud humor of Penny Arcade. Soon after, sharp writing from PvP and Brinkerhoff reminded me of the controversial moments from greats like VGCats and The Perry Bible Fellowship. This steady flow quickly became a blast and I found myself with titles flooding out of my head much faster than the snail’s pace of my 46.6 Kbps connection could produce.
My point in all this aquatic lingo? If you find yourself drowning in a deluge of titles like I have, do the world of webcomics a favor: for one week, forgo your usual method of catching up and just try to remember. You might be surprised just how easily you forget some strips and earn a new respect for some old Favorites.
I use a RSS newsreader, and check it several times a day. I generally don’t keep up with any comics which don’t have a feed.
See, I use that for various strips (the aforementioned VGCats and PBF being two of those) but again, it was just too easy to keep adding them and adding them until my reader was too large to read through at the end of the day.
Basically, I read a great deal of mainstream comic book titles already and so this cuts down on my time spent reading leisurely. It also keeps me from reading any webcomic that follows your basic, comic book layout and format.
Also, such a reader is useless on this dial-up connection, so those titles I rely on RSS to keep up with are also left to my memory. I just found it fascinating that when I was forced to fall back on memories of the strips I’d always been so loyal to, in the end I was still able to recall those titles for one good reason or another.