h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's been going for years, it's extremely geeky and it has an excellent community attached. May also be obtained in collections in dead-tree format.

The setting is basically a Canadian Internet Service Provider's offices. There's the usual set of characters one might expect in an ISP, plus a few more unusual ones.

Conventional characters include the web designer, the techs who keep the network running, the marketing guy, the tech support team and the boss. Less normal people featured include the Smiling Man, Pitr (a geek with a bad fake Slavic accent and aspirations of world domination), Erwin (an artificial intelligence currently residing inside an SGI O2 box) and Dust Puppy (a small furry creature made out of the dust from inside an old server, plus two feet. Nobody knows where the feet came from).

There are of course regular guest appearances by such varied characters as the evil God Cthulhu, Dust Puppy's arch enemy Crud Puppy (made of dirt and the knarled hands of a Microsoft programmer, who seems to have an unfortunate tendency to fall into cups of coffee and get drunk), another evil being named Hastur, and the God of Caffeine Addiction.

This is turning into something really dull. But if you're really bored, pop over to http://www.userfriendly.org and check out the recent storylines. Or just pop right back to the archives, which start in 1997, and witness the increasingly bizarre events which led up to this point (at the time of writing, half the employees are at the south pole, having been sent there to install Service Pack 2 on the base's Windows XP machines. Unfortunately, Crud Puppy also managed to come along).

How can you miss finding out what happens when they set up shop inside an abandoned nuclear missile silo? Or how to play Quake 3 on an abacus?

Thank you, more recomedations are alway a good thing.

I believe a huge version of either dust puppy or crud puppy had a guest appearance on Sluggy?

UF is one of the first online comics that I started reading, and still one of the best. Many are the days when I have started work at 7am (UK time) and have impatiently waited until 8am, when the daily comic is unleashed on an unsuspecting public.

Greg's Tech Support calls and Erwin and Dust Puppy's musical interludes are personal favorites of mine..

Oh, and as for the crossover between UF and SLuggy, there was a period where AJ from UF went on vacation and found his way to Torg and Riff's apartment coplex and helped out fighting baddies, while Torg was AJ's temp sub at Columbia Internet.

Yes, Torg turned out to be very bad at AJ's job, I think. I tend to forget that one, as my usual guest star remembrance is when Eric Cartman worked for tech support in UF for a few days.

It is good to see cooperation among webcomics though, especially UF and Sluggy as they're extremely compatible I think. Different certainly, but they have a large potential (and actual) shared audience.

UF still has to get my vote though. Dust Puppy's just so cute! His first Christmas I always find quite moving, actually.

I think I'm going to have to say that Sluggy is my favourite.

UF is good, but it seems as if Pete (Sluggy artist) is better at story telling then Illiad of UF is.

Illiad is better at having pops at current events and he's very good at M$ bashing, but Sluggy usually has better story lines, although I'm not sure about this current one with the parrallell universe and the demon infestation of earth. Maybe it's a way for Pete to act out on the romance between Torg and Zoë a bit.

And yes, Torg wasn't very good at the web design bit.. Maybe that's why he's out of a job.

Probably. One of the reasons I like UF so much is that I'm a computer programmer, so a lot of the in-jokes and geeky references make a lot of sense to me. The MS bashing is actually fairly consistent with that which we see at work - it's just that at work we also bash most other operating systems a lot as well (yes, including Linux - some of it is astonishingly bad).

And Dust Puppy's so darned cute...

The styles are certainly different though. Illiad draws cartoons which are typically quite spartan, sometimes they have a complex background but mostly they're pretty simple frames (not as simple as Dilbert though - Scott Adams works wonders with simple, clear outlines). Some of Pete's frames strike me as extremely complicated, which suits the style of Sluggy's stories very well of course.

Dust Puppy may be cute, but Bun-Bun was brought in to be the cute cuddly furry animal at Sluggy. Okay, so he didn't end up very cuddly and cute, but then there was KiKi.

Anyways, I was just in the UF archives, refreshing my memory of the Cross over, and I think that the reason Torg never has any work as a freelance web designer is that he uses Front Page, and if he messes something up, he uses blink-tags to diver the attention of... Ooooh.. Blinking tags.. So pretty. Radio buttons! *click* *click**click* *click**click* *click**click* *click**click* *click**click* *click* *poing*