I should check the date more often (missed another birthday):

Happy (belated) birthday, dunkle_feuer!

This would have been a good opportunity to send you all the stuff I've collected for you...

Then again, I'd much prefer to give it to you in person. Say, ever thought about visiting Ffm? I have a beautiful new inflatable mattress.

I've done a "one sentence plus a link" rec of this before...

but since it's currently getting thoroughly revamped, it's worth pointing out again:

North World by Lars Brown.

A webcomic about a wandering swordfighter in a world that looks much like 1950s/1960s America, only without television, and with slightly more up-to-date clothes styles. And an amusingly anachronistic (sub)culture of people who run around the woods armed with swords, hunting monsters. (Yes, the monsters are real.) If this premise sounds a bit bizarre, wait till the hero decides to attend his highschool sweetheart's wedding in his old hometown. Yes: it's Grosse Pointe Blank meets Dungeons and Dragons. Lars Brown, the author, calls the genre he invented with North World "plain-clothes fantasy", and that just about describes it.

North World is one of webcomics' bigger recent success stories. The author recently got a publishing deal for it with, err, I forgot which publisher but it was a well-known one (in the realm of comics, that is). He's using this occasion to rewrite and redraw parts of the - already finished - first volume, and, being a generous webcomicker, he's posting it all, page by page, to the North World website again. It's like a rerun, only better, because it's improved! *g* (It was pretty good to begin with, but you could see that the author was 'still growing', in places, and there were a few things that were a bit confusing, which will hopefully be cleared up in this new version.)

Lars Brown also endeared himself to me by being a Finder fan, something he has in common with the authors of some of my other favourite webcomics, too. :-)

Oh, and I recently updated the links bar here in my LJ (left column in my current LJ layout), so if you want a few more recs, do check that out. Or you could just click on one of the tags here, of course, for older recs. I can only encourage anyone who hasn't so far dipped a toe into the world of webcomics to try it - it was, to me, just as wonderful a discovery as reading fanfic.

Well, and now I'm off to make dinner.