If you want to know where the comics really come from, they are generated by a fractal algorithm seeded from the "publication date".
One could, perhaps, think of it as the Webcomic of Babel... or maybe the Webcomicof Leaves. You can find the "first one" here.
Lightning Made of Owls: a webcomic consisting entirely of user-submitted Guest Strips, launched on 15 November 2008. Its name is a deliberate Word Salad Title. It features the following stock characters:
Holly, an optimistic, lively young woman. Always depicted with clear round Nerd Glasses.
Ambrose, a learned, eccentric older man. Always depicted with a yardbrush moustache.
Samantha, a smart, vain, self-motivated young lady. Always depicted with large earrings.
Comments on a Postcard: Having finally completed their magnum opus, the phenomenally acclaimed genre-defying webcomic known as Postcard, the Comic Irregulars have started to re-run it from beginning to end. But there's a problem - all of the comic image files have mysteriously been deleted! Furthermore, nobody else seems to have ever heard of Postcard, or have any memory of ever reading it. But, unperturbed by this apparent glitch in the time stream, the Comic Irregulars are simply running the News Posts without the comic images, and hoping that the reader's imagination will suffice until they can find someone, somewhere, who has a backup copy of the files in their browser cache. note Actually, there never was a webcomic - the "commentary" is user-submitted and the reader is left to imagine the described non-existent image. Whether or not this even counts as a "webcomic" is a question that'd have Scott McCloud lying awake at night. Launched on 8 December 2008.
The above description is one of many random descriptions of the webcomic that load when the "About" page is viewed.
Awkward Fumbles: Launched on April 14, 2009. A collaborative webcomic where mezzacotta readers send in comic strips with blank speech balloons, and the Comic Irregulars other readers insert dialogue and captions of their own making, to create a finished comic that isn't quite what either of the parties intended! (If this sounds like something that the Dinosaur Comics creator Ryan North already did a while back, that's because it is.)
Schedule Slip - Although it doesn't have a schedule, it didn't update at all between May and August 2009, due to it being more work for the Irregulars than the other comics, where the readers do all the work. It changed with an overhaul, allowing readers to not only draw but also write the strip.
And then it slipped again. Currently, the latest strip was published on March 30, 2010.
Lampshade Hanging: One of the "About" pages: "How awesome would it be if someone produced a webcomic without the comic? Each day, they'd just post the author comments for the comic, and leave it up to the reader to imagine what they actually drew. Perhaps there could be a fictional backstory about the mysterious lost comic for which only the author's comments survive."
This was actually the original pitch, as posted on the Mezzacotta forums.
Framing Device / Kayfabe: It's pretty clear that the Comic Irregulars haven't really been making comics since before the universe began, but that's the story.
Anachronism Stew: References to modern technology and concepts, and the use of modern vocabulary (like "dude"), pop up long before their invention.
Eternal English: Plenty of the comics are in nonsensical English, but English nevertheless, even though most of them were written before the English language came into being.
Non Linear Character: A possible explanation for the anachronisms. Either that or the Comic Irregulars are time travellers.
Time Abyss: Did we mention "making comics since before the universe began"? Even if they are time travellers, there are literally trillions of comics, sloppily drawn and written though they may be. To create them all manually would require an absurd amount of time.
Ruined Forever - the first line in the first comic is "I think this comic is going downhill." If so, it's been doing so since before the universe existed, so it must either be pretty horrible now or have been really good at some point before.
Sturgeon's Law - mitigated by the inclusion of a Hall of Fame for top-rated comics.
(yes, all-lowercase) is a website launched by David Morgan-Mar and The Comic Irregulars (authors of Darths & Droids and Irregular Webcomic!) to showcase "all the weird, crazy, half-baked ideas we come up with."It contains the following webcomics:
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