Sprite comic

Sprite comics are web comics that use video game sprites and backgrounds for their artwork. It is mainly used by creative people who cannot draw, or do not wish to draw, but want to express their creativity visually. While the ease of creation (just slap some sprites made by someone else on a background, and add text bubbles) allows many low quality sprite comics to be made, there are many that show consistent high visual quality, both in use of custom sprites and graphic editing tools such as Photoshop. The format of such comics varies, from single panel, to four panels across, to comic book-like full page spreads. There are even animated sprite comics, where each 'strip' is a separate mini-movie, some utilizing Flash for enhanced effects, for example Secret of Mana Theater.

Most sprite comics fall into two categories, those using Mega Man series sprites (such as Bob and George) and those using Final Fantasy series sprites (such as 8-Bit Theater). The main reason for this is the wide variety of poses the sprites from these games have, and the ease with which they can be edited into new sprites. Another such way to categorise them would be to place them in the categories of "serious" and "humorous". "Bob and George" is a perfect example of humorous sprite comics, while "Warriors of the Net" is an example of serious sprite comics.

Sprite comics also influenced the forming of the Internet's spriting community.

One form of webcomic similar to sprite comics are Pixel Art Comics. The major difference is that in pixel art comics the sprites used are wholely or mostly created for the comic, rather than being pulled from video games. Two good examples are "A Modest Destiny" and "Kid Radd", the latter being a good example of using html creativly to save on bandwidth.