A lot of webcomic authors tend to embellish their own lives or take inspiration from real people or even insert themselves into their story. However, there's another sort of comic that prefers to stay within the believable bounds of Real Life: the Journal Comic.
A Journal Comic is different from a normal autobiography, as it's usually done day to day or week to week instead of being written in retrospect; really, it's more or less the comics equivalent of a blog. Each comic chronicles a day in the life of the creator, either reflecting on events or retelling them as a story. Unlike Life Embellished comics, they usually stay fairly true to life — occasional exaggerations and simplifications are about as far from reality as they get.
The comics themselves tend to be drawn quickly, so that the artist can manage to crank them out something close to daily, but this isn't always the case. Some journal comics have a sort of indie vibe to them, due to being less story-focused and more focused on "being real" and being genuine... which may be a good or bad thing, depending on who you ask.
A possible occurrence is a Crossover between Journal Comics if two writers meet each other, such as the one between The Devil's Panties (in this strip
and this strip) and Today Nothing Happened (on this page).
Might include a Con Recap (when the creator devotes an episode to recounting their experiences in a fandom convention) or two.
Examples:
- Alex's Guide to a Life Well-Lived
- Allan
- Something Original, done by Allan's girlfriend Amanda.
- Something Original
- American Elf
- American Splendor, from the pre-internet days, may be the Trope Maker.
- As Seen In VT
- Bad Rabbit
- Boulet Corp
- Bravemule A tale of dregs and clods, of elfs and other elfs, of squares and octogones, of murder and death.
- ChaosLife
- Conventional Wisdom is a webcomic about what goes on at anime conventions.
- DAR: A Super Girly Top Secret Comic (Unfrequently SFW.)
- Dean & Nala + Vinny: Takes a Life Embellished approach to Dean Nicholson's real life adventures cycling through the world with his cat Nala.
- Destiny Fails Us Based on embellishments on the artist's life through her experience in highschool, friendship, and love.
- The Devil's Panties is probably one of the most famous journal comics on the internet.
- Dirty Laundry, a print comic made by Robert Crumb and his wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb.
- Doodle Diaries
- Fart Party, an "autobiographical comic (with frequent but obvious exaggerations)."
- Hang In There Kogasa San, which retells a doujinshi author's life, Touhouified.
- Horribleville
- Hyperbole and a Half
- I'm My Own Mascot
- Inkdick
- Jim's Journal is another print example.
- Johnny Wander
- Junji Ito's Cat Diary: Yon & Mu, a comedic slice-of-life manga by Junji Ito, who's more famous for his horror manga.
- The K Chronicles and its daily spin-off The Knight Life are also print examples.
- Kevin's Journal Comic is in a 2x2 format but it outlines the highlights of Kevin's day from his senior year all the way to the present... over a 4 year period.
- Let's Speak English: the artist of Kiwi Blitz and her adventures as an English teacher in Japan.
- Mostly True Comics, an interesting example in that it frequently departs real life, but always identifies this departure in the "truthometer" that accompanies every comic, rating it on a scale of "Pants on Fire" to "Stick a Needle in my Eye.
- Overcompensating is an undisguised subversion of the journal comic; it claims to be the "100% True Journal Comic about Real Things that happen everyday," despite featuring the webcomic artist's journey to Hell, encounters with Chupacabra, adventures with CERN's Large Hadron Collider and loads of other hilarious and unabashedly false "real-life" exploits. In fact, its new tagline is "The journal comic with a seething disdain for reality."
- Permanently Seated
- Les Petits Riens/Little Nothers (originally written in French, but there's a translation of the first volume into English called Little Nothings: the Curse of the Umbrella.)
- Planet Karen
- Pretty Jeff Like Overcompensating, abnormal events happen to the author, like turning into a snail or sleeping for five years. But most of the characters are real people, and the events expose real-life dilemmas the author has.
- Rational Nonsense is steadily turning into a journal comic post-hiatus.
- Sex, Drugs, and June Cleaver
- Sketch Comedy: the thrilling life of a cartoonist inside his own comic strip.
- Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san was originally published as a journal webcomic about the author and her coworkers' antics around a book store.
- Snail Diaries turns everyone in the author's anecdotes into animals.
- Terrifying Monsters follows the author's daily life with the only difference being that he and his friends are represented as monsters.
- Theater Hopper
- Today Nothing Happened
- Wakako Zake follows the format of a journal comic very closely, and the eating establishments portrayed therein are based on real places, but the stories themselves are at least somewhat fictionalized.
- Wasted Talent: The everyday life of Angela Melick (aka Jam), first as an engineering student and now as a full-fledged engineer.
- Why the Long Face: As the author once put it, it was the comic about his everyday life and himself as an anthropomorphic dragon in a world of anthropomorphic animals. While his other comic Absurd Notions was about entirely fictional humans. Yes, counter-intuitive.
