You have a to-do list the length of the Great Wall — people are phoning and email­ing you with yet more “little favours to ask”. You can’t cope — you need a break. So allow me to help. The fol­low­ing selec­tion of web­comic won­der­ment are some of the most estab­lished on the web today. All are massively enter­tain­ing and also enjoy a healthy archive sec­tion that should eas­ily keep you enthralled and productivity-free until the office closes tonight. So grab a cof­fee, pos­i­tion some spread­sheets on your desktop in case any mon­itor peekers are in the area, and enjoy this selec­tion of the cream of today’s web comics.

1. Least I Could Do Let’s start with some of the Big Guns. A ver­it­able behemoth in the industry, Least I Could Do is the ‘Friends’ of the Webcomic world — you’re never going to split your sides laugh­ing at every single show, but you can eas­ily find your­self watch­ing epis­ode after epis­ode, absorb­ing your­self into the life of Rayne and his friends’ lives. Written by Ryan Sohmer with frankly stun­ning art­work from (most recently) Lar DeSouza — the out­put and fre­quency is stag­ger­ing, espe­cially as the qual­ity has remained con­sisted for much of their run together — the strip has been updated Monday to Friday for the last 6 years. What makes this all the more impress­ive is that the both of them also pro­duce the epic Looking For Group at the same time.
2. Questionable Content Man Alive, I love this comic. If LICD is ‘Friends’, then Questionable Content is ‘How I Met Your Mother’ — sharp, funny, and with enough ang­sty rela­tion­ships and kinky sub­vers­ive­ness plots to retain the elu­sive ‘Factor Cool’. The premise is the same as pretty much any sit­com you care to men­tion; a group of friends enjoy­ing mini adven­tures together  (with the occa­sional mini robots romp­ing around every so often). However, it’s the writ­ing that would keep you com­ing back time and time again — the banter between the char­ac­ters is a joy to behold. Oh yes, did I men­tion there’s swear­ing now and again? Swearing is awesome.
3. Pictures For Sad Children Dark, a little twis­ted, a lot mel­oncholy — John Campbell provides the emo con­tent of this list, dar­ing you to find any­thing enjoy­able about some of the twis­ted stan­dalone tales involved here, because you know, happy com­ics are so… ugh, main­stream or whatever. Start from the begin­ning, work through them all, then go find some­thing cuddly to hug.
4. The Abominable Charles Christopher TACC tells the story of Charles, a kindly forest dwell­ing man-beast, and his encoun­ters with the vari­ous wood­land creatures and myth­ical beings that share the woods. The comic mixes stan­dalone strips with an ongo­ing story about an approach­ing ‘great danger’, seem­ingly sig­ni­fied by approach­ing human civil­isa­tion. The strip dis­plays cre­ator Karl Kerschl’s mas­tery of brush and pen — rendered entirely in black and white, I can hap­pily browse between strips for the art­work alone. Invoking memor­ies of Jeff Smith’s won­der­ful ‘Bone’ this is a magical and involving comic that will keep you enter­tained for hours.
5. The Perry Bible Fellowship Although not updated since 2008, I can­not recom­mend this strip enough. Surreal, some­times offens­ive, always hil­ari­ous. You will almost cer­tainly have seen this comic some­where about your travels on the web. I’m really just includ­ing it here because if just on the off-chance you HAVE missed this gem, you simply need to go read it. Now.
6. xkcd A reg­u­lar entry on Digg’s front page, xkcd has been run­ning now for 5 years — and is another strip that you will have seen the famil­iar stick fig­ure draw­ings before now as web­site avatars or email for­wards. xkcd describes itself as “a web­comic of romance, sar­casm, math, and lan­guage”, and is aimed at those of us that derive enjoy­ment from com­puter geekery and “your mum” jokes. And let’s be hon­est here, who doesn’t enjoy those?
7. Platinum Grit I’m still not sure if this counts as a web­comic in the tra­di­tional sense. Not provid­ing reg­u­lar con­tent in the form of a strip as the oth­ers in this list do, PG provides a full comic epis­ode every 9 months or so. And what a comic! the scripts are tightly writ­ten, the art­work stun­ning and the stor­ies whip along as you are drawn fur­ther into the strange world of Jeremy and Nils. The stor­ies have been writ­ten and drawn by Trudy Cooper and Danny Murphy since 1994 (there are 20 epis­odes to date) and as such there is a not­ic­able improve­ment in style between the first chapter and the more recent entries. Set aside a few hours, start at the begin­ning and enjoy.
8. Nedroid Featuring mainly the adven­tures of Beartato and Reginald, this is the sketch show comic of this roundup. The two stars, a bear and a bird respect­ively do goofy stuff that’s funny. Very funny. You should read it.
9. Bunny Caught some­where between xkcd, nedroid and ‘The Far Side’ — Bunny is a (mostly) single pane comic fea­tur­ing some­what obvi­ously, bun­nies in sur­real situ­ations, com­ment­ing on themes as wide-ranging as tech­no­logy through to Daleks, through to love. And ninjas. Drawn by Welsh artist Huw Davies, it’s sharp and witty enough to keep you enter­tained for a very long time and it’s excel­lent to see that my fel­low Brits can hold their own in this department.
10. Western Nostril I learned of this web­comic after mov­ing over to SA — and it’s a goodie! Western Nostril, writ­ten and drawn by Cape Town artists Patrick and Alex Latimer, spe­cial­ises in word­play and pun­nery. Yes, you’ll be groan­ing, but you’ll be doing it with a smile on your face.

Honorable men­tions

A couple of extra shouts should definately go to MenageA3 and Oglaf.com — both beau­ti­fully drawn (and incedent­ally NSFW; not sure if there’s a dir­ect cor­rel­a­tion there)