Megatokyo does, Girl Genius does, Ctrl+Alt+Del does... And the books always sell pretty well. If you start a webcomic (which I plan to do one day soon too, actually) and then want to publish it later, it's fully possible. If you plan on publishing a totally different story than your webcomic, that's even simpler. As for using your real name, most webcomic artists do for ownership reasons. Like Adrian "Adis" Ramos, or Tim "Absath" Buckley. Of course, there are dangers to posting your real name online, but that's just something you have to decide on your own. If you end up publishing your work, people are going to know who you are and be able to connect your identities anyway. You could always create a pen-name for yourself and use that for your published work too (like you suggested). Heaven knows you wouldn't be the first writer to do that.

I can't think of any "repercussions" in that it might make it difficult to get something else published later on. Hell, it might even look good on your resume if it got popular.

Well, the problem with the PPC and ISBN publishing (digital books would also get ISBN) is that the PPC is fanfic based and fanfic has some copyright issues. I think that was the trouble TM wanted to avoid.

A webcomic isn't necessarily fanfic, so you could avoid the infringing someone else's copyright problem. I know of a few webcomics that are also published in albums that you can buy and put on a shelf. Usually with some "not previously published on the Internet" material to make them more interesting for purchasers.

Getting an on-line following might actually be a good jumping ground to becoming a published author. You may not be able to publish (with ISBN) what you had previously published on the internet, but that's because publishers like to have exclusive exploitation rights for a set period of time. You'll just have to write something for them that you haven't posted on the internet.

I guess the advice would be to keep your fanfic related stuff separated from the non-fanfic stuff. Though even if you did it would still be possible to link the two (they post from the same IP-address for instance).

There's nothing wrong with having a comic and a novel going, so why should it be different for a webcomic and a novel? Unless you were planning to use existing images or characters: then it starts to be more like fanfiction.

If you're worried about it, use a different screenname and put it with links to your normal one. It'll be easy enough to get rid of the links if you need/want to.

Much as I hate to think it, anyone who tried would probably have little difficulty linking out internet lives to our real names. I hate that. Webcomics would probably get less attention than fanfic, though, so you might not have the same issues. I'm not sure. I'd err on the safe side, wherepossible.

*wanders off grumbling*