Hi. I'm Ginny Bratcher (Virginia, if you're my mother). I'm 20, I'm a junior, and I'm an English major at a state university that would like me to spend this much time on Chaucer. I read too many webcomics, on the computers in the campus lab between classes and on the one in my dorm room long after my roommate has gone to sleep, so you don't have to. (You should, though.)

From January to June this page was about the big comics everybody reads, and they're still here under Elsewhere on the Web. Then this summer I started finding comics right here on GeoCities.us, drawn by people in Dayton and Kansas City and southwest Wisconsin, and by one eleven-year-old with a box of markers, and now they're the main event. Every Saturday I pick a Strip of the Week and show it here, always with the cartoonist's permission. Everything else is a link. Go read them on their own pages. That's where their counters are.

WHY THIS ONE
For eight strips THE BUG has been a comic about the end of the world, or at least the end of Cory's games of solitaire. This week it turned out to be about a friendship. Ninety-nine days to go, and the Bug, who rehearsed his big line in a mirror back in strip #3, asks Clock whether he'll be there at midnight. Clock says what Clock always says: he's a clock. He said it at bedtime back in strip #7, when the Bug asked if he was awake, and there it meant obviously, now go to sleep. Here it's the nicest thing anybody has said in the whole strip. Then the hug, and the hearts, and Clock's face doesn't move one pixel, which is the joke and also the point.

And look at that sky. Three stripes, maroon, orange and yellow, in MS Paint, and it's the prettiest sunset I've seen on a monitor all year. This is Cory's first Strip of the Week. As of this morning there are 98 days to go, so I doubt it's his last.

THE LAST FEW PICKS
Strip of the Week started on August 28, once I'd found cartoonists I could actually write to and ask. When a pick comes down from here, it goes home to its own page:

• September 18: UNDER CONSTRUCTION #5, the hit counter. I reload mine too. Everybody does.
• September 11: Over the Back Fence for September 5, the Ferris wheel at the county fair.
• September 4: PIZZA CAT #1, page 5. KA-BLOOEY!!!
• August 28: UNDER CONSTRUCTION #2, in which NEW! has been new since March 1997.

The comics I've found on GeoCities.us so far, newest review first. Every title is a link, and so is every "start here," which takes you to strip #1. Start there. Trust me.

HOW I RATE THEM
In modem speeds, because that's how I measure everything anyway.

What it is. The Y2K bug lives inside Cory's computer, a beige 1994 486 he got for nothing out of the back room of the used computer store in Dayton where he works the counter. At midnight on New Year's Eve the Bug is going to make the system clock say 1900, and then, chaos. If he can stop worrying first. His costars are Clock, the system clock, who runs on the coin battery, has exactly two expressions and is impressed by nothing, and Floppy, a cranky old disk with a bad sector from a virus he caught in a school computer lab in '92. Cory draws it in MS Paint, on the computer it's about.

What's good. The countdown. Every strip has the days to go up in its title bar, starting from 115 on strip #1, so the comic has its ending built in and you can feel it coming closer. Cory says the last strip goes up on New Year's Day no matter what, and if the power's out, when the power comes back. I've never read a comic that knew its own last day before. Then there's Clock, who gets the best lines with the least effort ("This computer is for solitaire"), and strip #5, where Cory's 14.4 shrieks its way online to download a Y2K patch and forty minutes later it's at 3% and the Bug is lying in a hammock. If you've ever downloaded anything, you'll laugh, and then you'll wince.

My one gripe. The archive is a single page with every strip on it. At nine strips, fine. By New Year's there'll be around fifty, and on a modem that page is going to take longer than Cory's Y2K patch.

Start here: THE BUG #1. All nine take ten minutes, and you'll be back Monday.

What it is. Odessa Kohn drew a single-panel cartoon called Over the Back Fence for her county paper in southwest Wisconsin every week from 1962 to 1997, about eighteen hundred of them, with a crow-quill pen and India ink at a drawing table her husband built for her out of an old door. This summer her grandson Roland got her on the computer, and now there's a new one every Sunday: one drawing and one line under it, about farmers and church and the county fair and the weather, and lately about the computer.

What's good. The drawing, first of all. It's real pen and ink, scanned a little crooked on purpose (Roland offered to straighten them, and Odessa said a little crooked shows a person did it), and after a summer of pixels it's like a glass of cold water. Then the jokes, which are the kind you keep smiling about all day: a grandmother working the mouse on the floor with her foot, like the treadle on her sewing machine, or a pastor telling a boy whose pager goes off in church that if it's the Lord, he's almost done. There's a crow hidden in every one of them, a habit since 1963, and I've found him in all four. Read her notes, too. She writes the way she draws, and her line about what a county thinks about for thirty-five years (mostly the weather) is the best sentence I've read on GeoCities.us.

My one gripe. Three from the files so far, and there are about eighteen hundred on the shelf in her sewing room. I'm not saying mow fewer lawns, Roland. I'm just saying you own a scanner.

Start here: the first one, the mouse, then the old ones from the scrapbooks. The one about the information superhighway is from 1994 and it still holds up.

What it is. A comic made entirely out of the free clip art in the GeoCities.us gallery, used exactly as it comes, by Robin Lowery, a web designer in Kansas City who has put every piece of it on somebody's page at one time or another. The star is Dig, the little jackhammer man, who has been under construction on everybody's home page since 1996 and has never finished one. His coworkers are the NEW! badge, who has been new since March 1997, the Mailbox nobody writes to, the hit Counter, the Globe, who can't stop spinning, and Cone, who says "...".

What's good. If you've ever built a home page, you know the whole cast personally, and you've probably hired a few of them. The jokes work because they're true. Dig, asked when the page will be finished: nobody said anything about finishing. The Mailbox finally gets a letter, and it's a chain letter, and the only one he knows to send it to is Cone. Robin's notes under each strip in the archive are half the fun, all frame counts and file sizes and the quiet despair of somebody whose clients have all promised their sites will be done by the year 2000. And Cone, who has said "..." in two strips and nothing else, gives the best supporting performance of the summer.

My one gripe. Some of the jokes need the footnotes. When the Globe said "Lucky. I'm 24." in strip #4, I had no idea what he meant until I read Robin's note that globe.gif has twenty-four frames. It's a good joke. It shouldn't need a note.

Start here: UNDER CONSTRUCTION #1, and watch this Monday, when the Best viewed at 800x600 button joins the cast. I've been waiting all week.

What it is. Pizza Cat is an orange tabby (orange, not yellow) in a red cap (red, not orange, and he never takes it off) who delivers pizza on his skateboard for the Pizza Palace in Cheesetown, where even the buildings are made of cheese, and fights crime on the side. Kaitlin draws it in marker on notebook paper. Her best friend Alejandra helps color, and she invented Anchovy, the small, very brave kitten in the too-big blue cap. Kaitlin's dad scans the pages and types in the words.

What's good. It's a real story, and it's built right. Every page ends on a cliffhanger. There are clues (pepperoni crumbs, a teeny tiny footprint), a villain in the dark with glowing goggles, and a door marked KEEP OUT, which, Pizza Cat points out, does not say keep out cats. When the PEPPERONI VACUUM 3000 starts in on Cheesetown, our hero wins with the one thing only a pizza cat would have: an extra-cheese pizza, delivered straight down the hose. KA-BLOOEY, every letter a different color. And the ending is kind. Dr. Mousenstein only ever wanted to be invited to a pizza party, so he gets invited. Then, two yellow eyes in the dark. This is an eleven-year-old's first comic on the Internet, and it's terrific. I read plot for a living, more or less, and I've been assigned novels that set up their endings worse.

My one gripe. Two weeks between pages is a long time to leave Dr. Mousenstein with his hand on the lever. (Page 6 took three, because school started. Kaitlin apologized for that, and it's the best excuse on this whole page.)

Start here: Page 1, and read them in order. Kaitlin says don't read page 6 first, it ruins it, and she's right. Then write and tell her your favorite part; her dad says she reads every letter twice. If you draw Pizza Cat, she wants to see it. His cap is RED.

These were the whole Funny Pages from January to June, and I still read every one of them. No links and no pictures here, on purpose: they don't need my help finding readers, and they don't need me borrowing their strips. Any search engine will turn them up. Oldest first.

• Dr. Fun  Single-panel gag cartoons, going since 1993, which in Web years makes it a founding father.

• Kevin & Kell  A rabbit married to a wolf, since 1995. Every marriage has its differences. Theirs involves the food chain.

• Goats  Since 1997. My roommate swears by it and won't explain it, and now that I've read it, neither will I. Start at the beginning.

• Sluggy Freelance  Since 1997. Torg, Riff, Zoë and Bun-Bun, who is a mini-lop rabbit with a switchblade. If that sentence doesn't sell you, nothing else I say will.

• User Friendly  Since 1997, the staff of a small Internet service provider. Required reading for anybody who has ever worked a help desk, or called one.

• PvP  Since 1998, the staff of a computer gaming magazine. I don't play many games, and I read it anyway, which tells you something about the people in it.

• Penny Arcade  Since 1998, two guys and video games, three times a week. I'm in it for the two guys.

If you have a links page, I'd love to be on it. Right-click the button, pick Save Picture As, save it as funnypages.gif, and put it up on your own page instead of loading it off mine. Then paste this in:

Cartoonists: if you draw a comic on GeoCities.us, write and tell me about it. I read every comic I'm sent from strip #1, and I always ask before I show one.