Comic strips have been the stuff of newspapers for well over a century. However, much like the pulpy pages that contain them, this tried and true art form is in the midst of migrating to an online format. And, as they stake out their residences on the Web, plenty of new comics that never would never have seen the light of day in the world of Old Media have flourished — especially those devoted to video games.

Ten-year-old Penny Arcade is one of the most successful webcomics in the world. It’s a sharp and insightful lampooning of both games and the game industry starring a pair of affable doofuses named Gabe and Tycho. They unabashedly poke fun at bad games, wittily call out quacks and hypocrites in and around the gaming world, and try to make sense of gaming culture (in trying to understand the poor behaviour of many online gamers, they put forth the droll formula: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Complete Moron).

Penny Arcade has made writer Jerry Holkins and artist Mike Krahulik millionaires through advertising and merchandising. They have their own charity (Child’s Play), their own geeky conference (Penny Arcade Expo), and have even managed to create their own role-playing adventure game, the amusingly monikered Penny Arcade Adventures: Episode One – On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, released in May for Windows and Xbox Live Arcade.

But there’s a lot more to game-themed webcomics than just Penny Arcade. Ctrl+Alt+Del, which has proven successful enough to become a very profitable career for creator Tim Buckley, has been running four high quality comic strips weekly since 2002. It began as the simple shenanigans of a couple of game geeks named Ethan and Lucas, but has evolved over the years into a sophisticated comic with longer, more serious story arcs. At press time, Ethan, a game store clerk, and Lucas, a programmer, were dealing with the sobering subjects of fatherhood and childbirth complications.

Buckley’s site attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors, and has been collected into several volumes in print format.

Other game-themed webcomics forego the sincerity of Ctrl-Alt-Del and the prickly social commentary of Penny Arcade in favour of unadulterated satire. And many of these pure-humour cartoons actually use graphics from the games they spoof. Like Brian Clevinger’s 8-Bit Theatre, which debuted in 2001 and features simple sprite characters from the first Final Fantasy game portrayed as endearing buffoons with names like Fighter and Thief.

Over the course of 8-Bit Theatre’s 1,000-plus strips, the story has done little more than show the game’s 400-pixel protagonists involved in one misadventure after another — getting shot out of canons, accidentally mass murdering castles full of people, peeing on ants — with no other aim than to make readers laugh.

And these three strips compose just a handful of the more successful gaming comics online. TheWebComicsList.com has a roster of thousands of video game-themed strips, ranging from VG Cats, which places kittens in the roles of famous video game characters, to Little Gamers, in which toddler gamers engage in decidedly adult discussions about their hobby.

The fact that none of these comics have found their way into mainstream newspapers alongside Peanuts and Family Circus is perhaps surprising. The enormous critical and commercial success of strips like Penny Arcade and Ctrl+Alt+Del proves that they have enormous audiences. Indeed, their humour is often so universal that just about anyone who has ever played a game (which, these days, is just about everyone) would curl a lip at most of their jokes. In fact, you don’t have to be a gamer to laugh at Penny Arcade’s gag about a game meant to help people stop smoking that comes with a carton of cigarettes.

Yet editors have reliably dammed off the flood of webcomics, game-themed or otherwise, that has risen since the late ’90s, diverting it online, where able artists have the freedom to purvey their humorous wares without going through any grey-haired, grey-suited gates.

And, in the end, does it really matter if they make it to print? The continuing collapse of newspapers all but dooms B.C. and its comic brethren to extinction, while gaming webcomics are proving that they have a very bright future online.

Here’s a sample web comic from VG Cats.