User Friendly was the first big web-comic, the first to establish the idea of a web-comic as a primary medium, as opposed to being adapted from another source (newspapers) or intellectual property. It started in 1997 which was really early in Internet time, around the peak of the dial-up era (and the setting is a workplace of a dial-up ISP.) It may not have quite been the first web-comic, but it was the one that first reached a critical mass of general notability in geek culture.
> User Friendly was the first big web-comic, the first to establish the idea of a web-comic as a primary medium [...] in 1997
"The first" might be overselling it. For example, Kevin and Kell started in 1995. This TvTropes listing [1] has some more, but oddly enough UF isn't on there so perhaps others are missing also.
As someone who got dial-up in the mid-90s, I remember regularly reading so many of the comics on these lists and it makes me feel old... Some of them are still in my bookmarks...
