So one of my long-held interests is webcomics with extremely long archives. Part of this is that it's nice to get lost in a story that someone's cared about for a long time, but another vital part that, through the lens of one person's long-standing art project, you get to see the whole of society change over decades. If you ever want to be reminded that Francis Fukuyama was wrong about history, just do a webcomic archive binge.
To that end: Sabrina Online is a furry webcomic about a skunk named Sabrina who loves Amiga computers and Transformers toys. The plot, more or less, is about her getting a job doing IT at a porn studio, falling in love with a fellow geek over IRC, and trying to keep her family from finding out what she does for a living.
(Beyond this point are major spoilers for Sabrina Online, so if you wanna give it a fresh read, the archive is here.)
Because the story starts in '96 and continues to present day (that's right, it's still updating!) we get to see the world change over decades. We see Sabrina deal with the dawn of the modern internet, the Bush administration, the Obama administration, the Trump administration, vtubers, the pandemic, and more, while she goes through her own life. There's even a wild 9/11 tribute that I'll post at the end of this.
Also the comic is, like, surprisingly okay about sex work and porn? Not completely perfect, but a LOT better than you'd expect from the late 90s. The gag-a-day nature of the comic means that about 60% of the jokes are about Sabrina's pornstar boss, Zigzag, being promiscuous, but she also pretty strongly feels like her own person who cares about what she does and is proud of it. Her work isn't a tragedy; it's a triumph.
This is the arc that a lot of characters in the comic go through: Sabrina falls on hard times and gets a job at a porn studio; Amy gets a job at a bar; Thomas gets a job at a weed dispensary. All of them eventually find meaning in "demeaning" work, finding pride in doing their best regardless of the circumstances.
Recently (well, sevenish years ago), the comic changed its format, going full-color with portrait pages, and focusing on longer plot arcs with fewer immediate gags, though that thesis is still very much at the core of the comic:
Overall, it's a pretty neat comic! Not without its problems, but, y'know, that's 90s furry webcomics for ya. I'd recommend it if you wanna lose yourself in a gag-a-day soap opera for a few hours, or if you wanna see history get unended before your very eyes. You can find it here.
Some various uncollected thoughts:
- The best plot arc is Sabrina having a baby
- The worst plot arc is the one where Sabrina starts a webcomic that everyone hates, so she gets depressed, quits, gets mugged, ends up in the hospital, her boss finds the mugger and beats him up, and then she goes to court-mandated therapy
- The most ??? plot arc is where a foxgirl dyes her fur to look like a skunk to get free amusement park tickets, then gets cancelled for appropriating skunk culture. Like a lot of furry webcomics that try to use species as a metaphor for race, it ends up really weird and muddled in that direction, except in literally one case (the plot arc where Sabrina has a baby, which results in one of the most poignant moments in the whole comic)
- There are like fifty subplots about the Transformers toys actually being alive and literally all of them are skippable imo. I think some of them are election pastiches, but I couldn't tell you more than that because my eyes glaze over as soon as the Transformers are the only things on-panel
And, as thanks for reading this whole post, I now bestow upon you: the Sabrina Online 9/11 picture.
