Follow The Leader / Webcomics

• Penny Arcade's success led not only to a swarm of gamer Web Comics, but a swarm of gamer Web Comics starring Two Gamers on a Couch.
• Bob and George and 8-Bit Theater did the same thing for sprite comics.
• DM of the Rings was the the first Campaign Comic. Once it ended, Irregular Webcomic! creator David Morgan-Mar took some of the words of Shamus and Adam Bloom as a challenge, and he got the Comic Irregulars to put together to create Darths & Droids. Since then, the Campaign Comic became practically a genre in its own right.
• The Order of the Stick inspired a lot of Dungeons & Dragons-based comics in general; often using "a compelling story with Dungeons & Dragons physics" as the premise. Even the fans have been putting this trope to use going as far as creating such comics in Burlew's stick-figure art style.
  • A good example of this is the webcomic anti-HEROES.
  • It also inspired Keychain of Creation, a stick-figure comic based on Exalted.
  • Servants of the Imperium is another stick-figure RPG comic, based on Dark Heresy.
• Similarly, xkcd has spawned a few more stick figure comics.
• It's also becoming popular for non-stick-figure comics to go stick-figure for fillers. "Shirt Guy Xom" appears to be a Shout-Out to "Shirt Guy Dom" (as GGC often riffs on MegaTokyo)... which, in turn, was a Shout-Out to "Shirt Guy Tom".
• Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures spawned quite a few fancomics such as Project Future and The Foxfire Chronicles... And somehow also inspired Last Res0rt, at least in terms of the art style. The main difference is that both Project Future and The Foxfire Chronicles use Cubi outright as a central locus; Last Res0rt, while having a few characters that appear Cubi-esque, considers these characters as a variant of Celeste, which have distinctly different powers and otherwise are very not-Cubi. (Also, evil.)
• Sluggy Freelance and Goats largely paved the way for World of Weirdness webcomics like College Roomies from Hell!!!, El Goonish Shive, and The Adventures of Dr. McNinja.
• Fans from Nintendo Acres are known to duplicate the premise as well.
• The Wotch is almost solely responsible for the creation of many, many Gender Bender Transformation Comics, some of which (or to others, all of them) are fetish fuel with very little in the way of actual plot besides men being randomly turned into very attractive women. The good ones don't exclusively revolve around it, with the victim(s) also having actual lives, problems and Character Development. The others are the exact opposite, in which Gender Bender is the center of the universe which everything in existence revolves around, particularly anyone male.
• Parodied as a major running theme of Checkerboard Nightmare. Checkerboard Nightmare wants his webcomic to be a massive hit, so he constantly and shamelessly copies anything that catches his attention. Even his appearance and name were plagiarized from a guy he knew in school, Striped Reverie.
• MS Paint Adventures inspired many to copy its interactive faux Adventure Game style; it was the Genre Popularizer for Interactive Comics.
  • In addition, Homestuck also inspired a Sub-Genre of fan adventures involving children playing The Most Dangerous Video Game.
• The Nerf NOW!! strip "Clone" mocks this.
• Goblins is among the oldest of several "monster adventurer" comics, including Rusty and Co. and By the Book.
• Planet of Hats by David Morgan-Mar is a weekly, 12-panel, episode-by-episode parody of Star Trek: The Original Series, named after a trope assiciated with the series. It is openly and unabashedly inspired by Shaenon Garrity's Monster of the Week, a weekly, 12-panel, episode-by-episode parody of The X-Files, named after a trope assiciated with the series.
• TwoKinds has spawned at least 2 more "braindamaged former supervillain with anthropomorphic tiger girlfriend" strips.

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