I have always loved reading typical newspaper comic strips. Unfortunately though, a lot of it them are pretty bad and unentertaining and, more relevant to this website, usually seriously lacking in any interesting female characters or creators.

Cathy, with her trademark explosive perspiration

Cathy, with her trademark explosive perspiration

One of the few cartoons created by a woman I saw in newspapers published around where I grew up was Cathy Guisewite’s Cathy. And that is a really bad strip. I have rarely found much humor in it, and most of the time it is concentrated on nothing but perpetuating stereotypes about how women care only about shopping, their own weight, food and weddings. Men, on the other hand, care about nothing other than technical gadgets. Women are of course not interested in those.

If you want more exposition on why Cathy is so bad, visit the comic strip doctor. 

The stereotypes are just as bad in most other newspaper strips. The women are typed as domineering, humorless wives getting in the way of their husbands fun, or blonde buxom bimbo secretaries. And the men almost always play poker and golf, spend their evenings drinking beer at the pub and can’t stand doing housework.

Sure, there are precious gold nuggets among the newspaper strips, as previously mentioned I do enjoy reading them. But I haven’t read them much since I discovered webcomics seven years or so ago.

Not that all webcomics are good – God no. There are so extremely many webcomics out there and very many of them are utter crap. But I don’t think that’s something to complain about, since I don’t have to pay anything to read them and can choose whatever I want to read. And the good ones are really good.

And there are plenty of female webcomic artists, and almost none of them feel the need to conform to stereotypes.

For instance, Katie Tiedrich does the gaming comic Awkward Zombie,  Kel McDonald does the entertaining fantasy comic Sorcery 101, Rene Engström does the romantic, dark and sometimes pretty adult anders loves maria, and so on.

There are thousands of other examples, and I don’t know any significant fraction of them. And that’s great; we love artistic, creative girls. Some webcomics are nerdier an others though, and we like that even better. For instance, young Darcey Riley who does Decorum.

Decorum is a stick-figure comic strip filled with jokes with some very geeky jokes about subjects like physics, mathematics, linguistics and sex. It is often pointed out that it is very reminiscent of nerd-favorite xkcd, but I think that Decorum definitely has its very own humor, with a different feel to it than xkcd.

Either way it is an oftentimes intensely cerebral comic (though sometimes it is instead very silly) that is not for everyone. If you like jokes about physics and penises you should check it out.

Regardless of the gender of the creator though, many webcomics have interesting female figures. Girl gamers, scientists, librarians, philosophical warriors and other women with enticing minds abound in the world of webcomics.

There are too many to mention, but some of my personal favorites are the X-Box fangirl from Fanboys Online, the titular Emma Verne from the steampunk story The Aethereal Adventures of Emma Verne (unfortunately that one doesn’t seem to be updating anymore) and the girl genius Agatha Clay from the gaslamp fantasy Girl Genius. 

What are some of your favorite female webcomic artists and characters?

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