The Whiteboard: It's Paintball. And a Polar Bear. And Explosions!

The Whiteboard is a long-running webcomic created in 2002 by Doc Nickel, an expert machinist and paintball enthusiast based in Alaska. The strip centers on a fictional “Doc” polar bear, who runs a fictional Alaskan paintball shop, along with his raccoon sidekick Roger, and a stalwart crew of anthropomorphic animal cronies.

Much of the action is paintball-related, but “Doc” also has a penchant for gadgets and explosions, and seems to derive a lot of his income from developing advanced technology—everything from a pizza teleportation system to Iron-Man-style motorized combat armor—for the military, thus, the semi-secret twelve-level underground research facility beneath his ordinary-looking paintball shop. Doc and Roger's next-level caffeine addiction has also led to serious incidents, even threatening severe disruption of space-time reality.

The author has stated that The Whiteboard was not intended to be a “furry” comic, with polar-bear Doc initially the only animal character, positioned as a lone “fish out of water” in human society. But, as TV Tropes puts it, furries are easier to draw. Over time, the entire cast, including minor supporting players, has become anthropomorphic.

As the name The Whiteboard implies, early strips were drawn on the author's machine shop whiteboard, then photographed for publication. After the first five episodes, the strip switched to conventional drawing methods, first in black and white, then in color since 2012.

Because The Whiteboard has such a large archive, this database and search facility were created by fans of the comic to facilitate the location of particular episodes.

Using the Search Form

You may use either the text-search box, or the character-appearance search buttons/menus separately, or combine them for a more restrictive search. Note that you can boolean-join up to four character searches with "AND" or "OR". In the middle, you have the special choice of ) AND (, which lets you group pairs of choices as (1 OR 2) AND (3 OR 4), overriding the usual precedence that AND takes over OR. This is usually what you want, so unless you are very sure of what you are doing, prefer ) AND ( over regular AND.

The name "OTHER" is coded in the database as an actual character name, and is used for very minor characters who are hard to otherwise identify, as well as incidental people in the background, so be careful of possible unexpected results when searching "OTHER". Select "Help" from the top menu for more search tips.