Hitherby Dragons

"When Ellen was a young girl scissors attacked the Earth. There were billions of them and they came from space. They were unreasonable in their aggression and humanity had to defend itself, leaving in the end an exhausted, stunned, and uncertain world littered in the mangled corpses of snippy blades." (The Dynamite Trilogy: Navvy Jim)

Hitherby Dragons.

I'm going to break with my standard format here (haven't noticed one? Compare any few of the posts, I stick to it fairly closely) to discuss Hitherby Dragons, because it's something quite different from any other webcomic - well, "webcomic" - that I've encountered. Some basic facts first: Hitherby Dragon's been running since September 2003, it's written by Rebecca Borgstrom
(she has her own Wikipedia entry!), and it's a 'text webcomic.' I'm pretty sure that's her own description of it - it's not something I'd call it otherwise, but it sort of fits, and that's why this is a 'webcomics' post... anyway.

Hitherby Dragons is pretty complex - awesome, but complex. A good summary can be found here: but if you don't want to bother clicking, then basically it's a bunch of really neat and creative short fiction (frequently using elements of popular culture in an unexpected fashion) with a running backstory. The first post is here; the plot 'begins' here, but it has no particular attachment to chronological order. Plus the first few have some interesting things going with metaphor and figurative language...

Seriously, though, you should probably click that link.

It used to update daily, but it went on hiatus for a month and a half recently, and for the last few months before that updated only thrice-daily. Still, update frequency isn't that big a deal, especially with four years of archives to read, and the quality far overweighs the quality. Read it! If I advocated any of the webcomics that I've posted here (and I certainly have), then I recommend this one easily twice as much*.

*Note: If you cannot read but can only look at pretty picture, you may ignore this recommendation. Otherwise, it stands.