Christmas is a time of giving, so for my last pre-Christmas column, I'm going to give you the gift of people who are more talented than me. Each of these webcomics started this year, or late-ish last year, and each is worth your hard-earned minutes of staring at a screen for free.

Scenes From a Multiverse

Jon Rosenberg has been making webcomics since before anyone ever heard of The Penny Arcades and Questionable Concepts. And this year he has pelted us with a new comic, one set essentially in his own shudderingly original imagination. Plus, it gets all Web 2.0 on you, with a weekly vote for which destination to visit again the next week.

Axe Cop

Everyone's heard of Axe Cop, but if I left it off I'd get mail from people telling me I forgot Axe Cop. Written by a child, drawn by an adult, if it were edited by an old man it would be a great answer to a sphinx riddle. But as it is, it's merely a devastatingly brilliant comic about a cop with an axe whose name I forget.

Manly Guys Doing Manly Things

It's a concept so simple, only an innocent child or a genetically enhanced European magpie could have thought of it. God knows which Kelly Turnbull is, but this is her hilarious strip about over-muscled videogame and movie characters, plus one skinny Pokemon trainer. With a nice mix of story lines and one-off gags, this is the perfect comic for anyone who enjoys pleasure.

Bad Machinery

While there are dozens of newspaper comics about children and their adorable throw-ups, there are relatively few webcomics dealing with childhood. Overall, my grade school years are something I'd rather forget and erase from history, but that doesn't keep me from enjoying Bad Machinery, which is mostly about British kids solving mysteries. John Allison, who previously created Scary Go Round, has a knack for crisp dialog and expressive art that almost makes the recurring schoolyard nightmares go away.

Troll Science

It's in panel form and posted to the web, so I'm going to call it a webcomic, although you could also call it an exercise in crowdsourced smartassery. Drawn by the infinite fingers of 4chan and starring the internet's own Trollface, this is a series of scientific inventions that would probably almost certainly in all likelihood not work, along with simply shocking commentary. There are Troll Science repositories all over the web, but the one linked is a good sampling.

Everything Dies

Box Brown's comic defies categorization. Part autobiography, part illustrated history, part philosophical musing, the strip has a somber mood and a deeply thoughtful nature. In a web full of irony and posturing, it's nice to read something genuine and heartfelt. Brown also publishes a series of print comics featuring completely separate content from the website, so that's nice if you like objects.

Ellie on Planet X

Ellie is a charming robot exploring a far-off planet and befriending the very strange inhabitants thereof. The strip's only been around since June, but the personality just jumps out of every panel and the story has a classic, all-ages approach without feeling like a retread of a newspaper comic. The strip seems to have settled into pretty regular updates, and I hope Ellie lasts at least as long as the Mars Exploration rovers.

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*Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a compiler, a comptroller and a composter. *

Image by Jon Rosenberg

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