To be have a comic strip on the web is to watch your intellectual property violated all day, every day. People are constantly posting our strips to Tumblr, or Pinterest, or their image-hosting site of choice. Often it’s with good intentions, but unless you have our permission (which we often give!) it’s against the law. Please link to our strips early and often, but you need permission before posting an entire comic strip.

That brings us to a special breed of websites which hope to recreate the great newspaper comics page experience, but on the web. It’s a great idea but, again, it usually happens without permission. And that permission is not usually forthcoming because, as you can imagine, it’s hard to do in a way that allows us to make a living by selling advertising and merchandise.

Enter Just the First Frame, a very clever site that presents a sampler of comics from around the web, but (as the title hints) just the first frame. As the creator Henry Kuo explains, everyone wins - you get enough of a taste of a strip to decide if you want to read the rest, and we get the benefits of you visiting our site.

There are some strips I love there, and some I don’t, but that’s the point. Hopefully there’s something for everyone, and you’ll find something new. Highly recommended!