Safely Endangered Comics by Chris McCoy

I haven't seen any official figures, and I don't know who would produce them, but the webcomics field seems to be at least as broad and potentially remunerative as newspaper comics at this point. Although "about as good as a thing that has been publicly shrinking and dying for a generation" is not necessarily a positive, I admit. And webcomics have their own financial pressures, as the ad market online has sharpened and tightened.

I guess what I'm saying is: I'm still finding "new" webcomics that have been collected into books. Things that are reasonably popular, have been running for a few years, have a style I'm pretty sure I've seen on social media here and there, have a profile that I hope means the creator is getting something like a living wage from it.

For instance: Safely Endangered! By the British creator Chris McCoy, it runs on McCoy's website to this very day, had a run on Webtoon in the mid-teens, and a bunch of the strips were collected as Safely Endangered Comics in 2019 by Andrews McMeel, the American strip-format-comics goliath.

The book collects a hundred and forty strips from the earlier years of Safely Endangered - it's been running almost as long since then as when the book came out - and they're modern, crisp, often-NSFW, standalone gags, usually in a four-panel format. McCoy draws people consistently as those bright-colored outlines, like on the cover, somewhat in the Mr. Lovenstein mode. There's a lot of jokes about sex and death and superheroes, and it's the kind of strip where people will say "fuck" and "holy shit" when appropriate - that's what I mean.

I find this is a distinctive style of humor: McCoy isn't making the same gags as War and Peas or Lovenstein or Poorly Drawn Lines or several others, but he's working in the same general territory, the same way all newspaper gag-a-day family strips are roughly similar to each other. It just means "gag-a-day webcomic" is basically a genre these days, and we can predict a lot of what that implies about any specific strip.

These are often-sarcastic comics, with video game and Marvel-movie references - not overly geeky, but set in a modern media landscape, aimed at an online audience that will know and recognize the things McCoy is making jokes about. If you like comics like that - and a lot of us do - this book is out there for a sample, and McCoy is still plugging away at Safely Endangered, with what looks like new comics twice a week.