Nighttime reading

The odds are good that you'll be up all night with a sick child at some point, so you'd better decide on some way to pass that time now. If you're like me, then you've got a video game or three that you wouldn't mind spending countless hours playing but even the most exciting of these will start to blur at around three in the morning.

So I suggest online comic strips. They're a favorite pastime of mine and are well worth getting into. Unfortunately, a lot of the better ones have been going on for years and contain a billion plot lines. So what better time to catch up on the archives than with eight sleepless hours?

Sluggy Freelance is my all time favorite. It's funny, got decent artwork, and the guy can spin a good yarn. The early strips are a bit rough but things get better pretty quickly. There are a lot of fantasy and sci-fi spoofs sprinkled in between stories of dimensional/time travel, demonic possession, video games, and heavy drinking. With ten years of daily updates it'll keep you amused for hours.

Schlock Mercenary is another good one and should appeal to the sci-fi fans. It's about a team of space mercenaries and has a gallows humor to it. Plus the writer likes to lecture on physics in his blog area.

Funny Farm is a boarding house full of eccentric characters. The humor is consistently funny and the artist is good at actually updating on a daily basis.

Player vs. Player is about a bunch of people who work for a gaming magazine. A fair amount of the content is about computer games but there's plenty of other stuff in there.

Girl Genius is originally a comic book by the brilliant Phil Foglio, and he's posting a page of it at a time online. The artwork is great, the jokes are funny, and it's steampunk!

Order of the Stick is an excellent D&D comic. It should be required reading for anyone who plays. A mere 500+ strips in the archive, but they are much bigger than the standard three or four panels so it should take a fair amount of time to go through them all.

Penny Arcade is mostly about two guys and video games. I'm really out of the loop with the gaming industry so some of the jokes escape me, but it's still a funny strip. (Not appropriate for the young'uns, though, what with the bad language.) This is the comic that got me through three nights of Simon's roseola so I'm forever in its debt. If you're still daunted by the thought of catching up on years of plot hooks then this one is ideal, since it contains very few hooks to plot.