Sad to say, I have to admit that mine was Megatokyo, which I found mildly funny when Caston was writing it.
After I went found other comics like Okashi Okashina, Penny Arcade, 8-bit Theatre...it wasn't until I found a comic called Eversummer Eve did I stumble across a story-centric webcomic rather than a funny one. Then my reading list grew crazily. >>;
Either Cyanide & Happiness or Ctrl+Alt+Del. I only read (and knew of) those two for a while, and then I learned of a whole lot more and gradually accumulated a list of over 50. Neither of those two are really my favorite webcomic, but they were amusing for the long time that they were the only ones I read.
Although I also read the newspaper funnies at that time too. 8)
I started out with 8-bit theater. Then I went to go find other sprite comics before finally trying out those hand-drawn ones.
...It scares me to think I used to read sprite comics exclusively.
I once tried to find more sprite comics, but none really reached the level of humor as 8-bit Theatre. Though on a similar note, I did read a copy-paste comic called Elf Only Inn that very funny. It later changed to being totally drawn, and was the better for it.
My first comic was Sluggy Freelance. One of my main genre's for reading is military Sci-fi. So back in the early 2000's I had a roommate. At the time I was pretty much stuck on Stephen King books and I wasn't reading much else. I had a night job that was long and boring and I was trying to learn CSS and XHTML and that wasn't really going well so I was sniffing around for some new stuff to read.
My roommate started throwing a bunch of Military Scif-Fi into the mix. First EE Knight's "Way of the Wolf" from his "Vampire Earth" series (Eric, the author has since become a friend); Rick Shelley's "Officer Cadet" which is part of his now completed "Dirigent Mercenary Corps" series": and the book that got me into webcomics (actually it was the fourth book in the series, but I was slopping them all up like gravy by then so it was pretty shortly after he told me about the series that I found Sluggy) John Ringo's "A Hymn Before Battle" which is part of his "Posleen War" series or if you want to be more current and all encompassing the massive (it's like up to 14 or 15 books by now) "Legacy of Aldenata" series.
In the fourth book "Hell's Faire," "Sluggy Freelance" plays a fairly prominent role in that a bunch of the comics are interspersed throughout the story (the creator of Sluggy wrote comics that commented on the storyline in the book as if it were real history and the comic was related to these current events... it was pretty cool). Also, much of the story was about this humongous main battle tank (Like the size of a destroyer only a tank and on land) which the crew nicknamed "Bunbun" which is a character from Sluggy; a switchblading wielding, sociopathic , murderous rabbit.
After reading the book there was something in the afterward directing readers to the comics' website. I went there and started reading but I wasn't there long. Other comics started pulling me away and I've since completely lost track of Sluggy's storyline.
Ozy and Millie (http://www.ozyandmillie.org/): I discovered it after looking for cameos of Calvin and Hobbes for my fansite. It was not the first comic on the web I looked at, but I didn't really understand the concept of a "webcomic" before so I can't remember those.
I was once linked to Real Life Comics, from where I was linked to Penny Arcade which is really the first one I really started reading. From there I started running into a lot of gamer comics, and from there comics about movies. Then I came in contact with Instant Classic (I think it was through Carrington Vanston's now defunct 'Movie Punks') which I've loved ever since, and also worked as a gateway to pretty much most of the well known webcomics. It linked me to Sam & Fuzzy, Questionable Content, who linked me to everything else, pretty much.
It's hard to remember the exact one... but the webcomics I first began to follow were comics which had been in print in the 90's and later transitioned onto the web. I'd collected Girl Genius (http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php) (when I could find it) when it was being released in floppy format, and I was delighted to discover it many years later online. The other one that started me off into webcomics was by a friend of mine whom I had lost touch with. I adored the Amy Unbounded minicomics (later collected into a Xeric-Award-winning book (http://strangehorizons.com/2003/20030623/amy_unbounded.shtml)) by Rachel Hartman, and when I saw she had a new story, Return of the Mad Bun (http://girlamatic.com/madbun/) (now complete), running on Girlamatic, I devoured it. Next I read a bunch of the other stories hosted on Girlamatic, including Dylan Meconis' first webcomic Bite Me! (http://girlamatic.com/biteme/). That's when I decided to apply to Girlamatic myself. I launched my comic there in September 2006. :-)
Probably Bob and George. After that and millions of others of my and my peers' (random IRC chat-hanging people) bad, bad Megaman sprite comics and lined paper doodle comics, I went on to start reading things that were actually entertaining. Unfortunately, most of the things I read and enjoyed back then, including work by some of my friends, have pretty much ended or, more commonly, disappeared. It's sad but the majority of links on Millennium's links page were added within the last year or two.
I found my first webcomics from the World of Warcraft homepage. Then I realized there are tons of these (They are just not submitted for the monthly contest) and started reading those. I didn't like the most popular ones like Cru the Dwarf or LFG, I liked Ding! and Dark Legacy Comics more.
Later I found the ,,normal" webcomics, seeing the most popular ones first, but I didn't like them (Penny Arcade, that unfunny copypaste but oddly popular pixel webcomic I can't remember the name of, XKCD, etc etc...) I found these pretty bad and I was a bit discouraged. Then I started clicking banners and discovering stuff I like today, first Order of the Stick, Least I Could Do, Questionable Content, Nedroid, then Menage a 3, Girls with Slingshots, Calamities of Nature, SMBC. In the last wave of my findings I started reading the Webcomics.com ones, Sheldon and PvP (I can't seem to start liking the others, I may give them another try) I disliked PvP when I first seen it, ,,blahblah video game joke ha ha", but now I like it. I also have little discoveries like Bear and Tiger, Amazing Superpowers, Butterfly, Pennie and Aggie, ButterNutSquash.
These are interesting enough to keep checking back.
There is good discussion in the topic, why are we reading or not reading things we otherwise would like or not like and why. (Great sentence, heh)
My first look into webcomics wasn't anything specific at first. A roommate of mine was into them hardcore and I would see glimpses of penny-arcade and others he read. Then I started reading Ctrl+Alt+Del and Megatokyo. Now I mainly read Applegeeks, Johnny Wander, and Jamie Noguchi's new comic, Yellow Peril. Well, those are the big name comics right now. I have a list of other comics done by those of us "up and coming" comics :)
My first webcomic would also be Megatokyo, which I still read now.
I used to live near a library that had a pretty good comic section in and would get at least one book out of there a week for a while. One of them was Megatokyo issue one. I decided to look up the URL and have been reading it ever since on and off, usually leaving it a month or three to let the updates build up.
Lolll! I think mine was also Megatokyo...though I don't read it
so much anymore.
I think after that, I found Penny Arcade...thru MT. And also a
comic called Star Crossed Destiny, when Fred was doing the
whole link a day thing or whatever it was.
After that I think I got into an old one called Schism and then
Inverloch... I love comics with an epic storyline. :'D
8-Bit Theater. Then somehow I stumbled across Avalon, which was never actually finished (there's a write-up ending, but it's not the same), and from there I found Roomies/It's Walky, and from there I found Melonpool, and... well, the chain never quite ended and I wound up with a very long list of comics to read.
The first web comic I read was in 2002-2003 called The Adventures of Us by a now good friend named Evi. On a site called you are drawing. In the same year I joined the same site that was hosting the comics and became friends with many of the artists I had come to admire. I've never looked back since.
Right now I am very much a fan of Sister Claire (http://www.sisterclaire.com), Von Slayer (http://geruru.deviantart.com/gallery/#Von-Slayer) and Evil Diva (http://www.evildivacomics.com/) I highly recommend all 3 especially Von Slayer.
I'm preeeetty sure my first (like a lot of other people it seems XD) was Megatokyo. I actually read an article about it in some anime/manga magazine, I think, and was curious about the idea of online comics. So I checked out the site, got totally hooked, and plowed through the archive in a few days. Don't read it much anymore though.
Sometime later I found Inverloch (which I plowed through in a few hours, haha), and realized that there was a whole WORLD of webcomics out there. And I've been pretty addicted ever since.
The funny part is, I can't remember if I started drawing my own comic and posting it on DeviantArt before or after I found out that webcomics were like, a real thing that lots of other people did.
The first webcomics I read were Evil Dawn (http://evildawn.smackjeeves.com/) and Pulp Stiktion (http://pulpstiktion=.smackjeeves.com/) by Ben Steeves, currently doing [urlhttp://www.zombenstrikes.com/]Zom-Ben[/url] and the arting for my wording on Our Time in Eden (http://ourtimeineden.smackjeeves.com/). He'd been posting comics online for a while before I met him, and the conversation that nudged me into webcomics went something like...
Me: Cool art, man. Do you have any sequential stuff I can see?
He: Yeah, I have a webcomic.
Me: Ew, really?
Up until then, I'd met a few people who did webcomics, but they were terrible artists so I figured that's where bad artists go now. Turns out it was true, but after reading Ben's I got linked to some other stuff that was really good, and some more stuff that was really good, and still more stuff that was really good.
I suppose, truth be told the first webcomic I ever saw was Something Positive that a friend linked to me, but I hated it and never read it again.
Quote from: GibsonMe: Cool art, man. Do you have any sequential stuff I can see?
He: Yeah, I have a webcomic.
Me: Ew, really?
Ha! I have almost exactly the same story for my introduction to comic self-publishing-- just replace "webcomic" with "minicomic" and that was me 15+ years ago trying not to laugh scornfully at some local artists who had already figured out that some of the best comics come out of this tradition. Those same artists later became good friends of mine, and I started making my own minicomics shortly thereafter. :-)
I started in the sprite comic realm, so the first comic I ever read was a little corner-of-the-net gag-a-day sprite comic called "Saturday Night Sonic". Yes, I still remember that. No, it doesn't exist anymore.
I'd say my first real comic was probably El Goonish Shive, which I still read fairly religiously.
I'm old.
My first webcomic was Goats in its first year (not the first year of the reboot, the actual first year) and PA when it was small enough that Tycho actually replied personally to emails you sent.
After that it was Exploitation Now, MT, MacHall, Little Gamers, Sexy Losers, Avalon High, Okashina Okashi (later I made friends with a couple folks IRL who are related to that comic, including the girl that Nyarchan is modeled after, without having any idea who they were) and PvP.
Sadly, I could never get into Poe's second comic, Errant Story. EN ended, obviously. MacHall ended. Avalon High was very sadly never finished.
Now I draw and read a wide variety of comics. Cuz I like'em.