Nedroid
is the pen name of online artist Anthony Clark who draws silly pictures and comics "when there's nothing good on TV." You may recognize his work doing the colors for The Adventures of Dr. McNinja.
On his own site, Nedroid draws all kinds of interesting stuff—he has a special fondness for dinosaurs, ladies, and lovingly rendered landscapes following his self-image character, the Eternal Homeless Robot.
But the most popular and recurring subject, and likely the reason you're here, is comics based around the adventures of Beartato, Reginald and their friends, officially titled Beartato Comics (also known as Beartato and the Gang). Here are some of the characters:
- Beartato is half-bear, half-potato, all heart. He's naïve, and impossibly charming.
- Reginald is his best friend who is all bird, all muscle, all brain, and totally available, ladies! Ahem. Reginald is also all ego, and rather desperate. He fancies himself a ladies' man yet hasn't had much success so far.
- Harrison is... who the hell is Harrison? Moving along...
- Gary is a towering humanoid thing whom Reginald considers his most hated enemy for no reason in particular; he's actually good friends with both Beartato and Reginald.
- Rudy is Reginald's dog. He is actually Reginald's most hateful enemy, whom Rudy considers the stupidest being in the world.
- Teddy The Phoenix is an on-fire Reginald with wheels for feet. Keen to cart off the wrong people to save some planet.
- Weirdo is a bearded man who wears all sorts of things on his head. An acquaintance of Reginald and Beartato.
- There's also an assortment of minor characters, that don't usually get any attention these days. Don't worry about them for now.
Also of interest are his collaboration comics with Emmy Cicierega (Yes, sister of THAT Cicierega) under the shared name Laserpony Studios. There aren't any recurring stories or characters, but they're always a new, surreal and hilarious experience.
Not to be confused with Metroid. Not even as a Shout-Out. Or confused with Nendoroid, either.
Compare with Regular Show, which has a similar bird-and-mammal protagonist duo and absurdist sense of humor.
Tropes featured in Nedroid include:
- Aborted Arc: Actual story arcs are rare but Nedroid is infamous for switching back to gag-a-day mode and never finishing the ones he starts.
- Accidental Misnaming: Reginald takes this to the extreme when, at the end of an evening of romance, he accidentally calls his date Becky "Lord Voldemort."
- Affectionate Parody: Pictures for Sad Beartatoes
- Alt Text: Most comics have it (the first one, a one-off, is July 2008; it became a more regular feature the next month). When switching web hosts in May '09, however, converting all the alt text (and comic titles) from before that date was deemed unreasonable to convert. You can still get all that on the livejournal mirror.
- And I Must Scream: The Alt Text of
this comic:"It grows from here. Reginald begins reducing more and more actions to simple lines of dialogue: "nod", "dance", "laugh", "love". Eventually his muscles atrophy; his body wastes away. Only the left hemisphere of his brain remains alive, the spoken word itself reduced to mere thought. And once Beartato earns his master's degree and invents a brain-to-speech synthesizer, that final thought is at last heard: "Weep a single tear for the life I have wasted". - April Fools' Day: In 2010, Dinosaur Comics replaced the entire cast with Nedroid characters (Reginald in place of T. Rex, Beartato in place of Utahraptor, etc). Not just in the latest page, but in the entire archives. You can still see it here. The newspost at the bottom shows you where to find some other cool ones.
- Art Evolution: Over time, the art style got more simplistic, yet more polished. In contrast, the older comics had a bunch of artistic experimentation, ranging from sketchy to finely touched.
- Author Avatar: The Eternal Homeless Robot.
- Awesome, but Impractical: INVISIBLE SWORDS!!!"Probably the best and worst thing about invisible swords is that they are invisible
- Bait-and-Switch: All the time. For example, in the origin stories comic, we see a robotic shark-man being assembled in a lab...only for baby Harrison to toddle in a few panels later.
- Brick Joke: The Alt Text in the last page of the Robotginald story arc references Reginald's supposedly full name.
- …But He Sounds Handsome: A common gag with Reginald.
- Carnivore Confusion: Addressed by the Alt Text of a Thanksgiving strip, which states that no, the bird and half-potato do not eat turkey and roast potatoes for Thanksgiving dinner.
- Combining Mecha: Combined with Department of Redundancy Department: BATTLE-READY BATTLE DRACULA, BATTLE READY!
- Contrived Coincidence: Double Subverted in the Harrison Adventures story arc. Harrison runs into what look like Beartato and Reginald underground and is surprised that they happened to be there at the same time. "Beartato" replies he is actually an Identical Stranger called Buttfranklin. Harrison asks "Reginald" his name...and he turns out to be the actual Reginald, who had fallen down a hole shortly before.
- A Day in the Limelight: It rhymes with “Schmarrison Stories”
- Decoy Protagonist: The site calls comics featuring Beartato or his friends Beartato Comics. If you read from the beginning, he definitely seems to be the focus. However, as time goes on it becomes increasingly clear the main focus of the comic is Reginald as most of the jokes are about his insecurities or negative qualities and a lot more information is revealed about how he lives and thinks, with Beartato only there to play the Straight Man. He even appears later on in Harrison's Adventures while Beartato is absent.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Reginald kicks Beartato out of his house because he loaded the toilet paper the wrong way.
- Doomed Hometown: Beartato was born on one, according to the SECRET ORIGINS comic.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The art style was all over the place, and Beartato and Reginald weren't even the main characters!
- Enhance Button: Parodied in Crime Lab. Luckily, the killer's face just happens to be a 4x5 clump of pixels and compression artifacts.
- Epic Fail: Played with. In attempting to fix Beartato's printer driver, Reginald ends up deleting all the files on Beartato's computer, the backups of those files, and the computer itself. But he also somehow manages to get the printer working anyway.
- Escalating Punchline: The Alt Text often functions as another layer of this.
- Flanderization: Inverted, interestingly. Beartato's earliest appearances implies him to be dim-witted and un-popular. As time goes on, he starts seeming more like a normal person, plays the Straight Man to Reginald what with having more common sense and apparently having more friends than Reginald. One comic even calls Beartato cool while Reginald is uncool.
- Fling a Light into the Future: Beartato's parents sent him off in a rocket before their planet was destroyed, playing the Superman origin story straight. Parodied with Reginald, who ended up in a similar rocket, but his father just wanted to get rid of him.
- From Bad to Worse: Exaggerated in this strip.
- Frozen Face: Reginald very rarely closes his beak.
- Funeral Cut: One strip subverts this trope. Harrison tempts fate by asking what could possibly go wrong with a particular plan. The next panel cuts to Harrison's tombstone. Then in the last panel, we see Harrison thanking his friends for buying a full-sized novelty tombstone.
- The Generic Guy: Occasionally minor character Gary fills this role.
- Gift of the Magi Plot: Linky.
- Harmful to Minors: Reginald says something bad, traumatizing Beartato... and himself.
- Heroic Willpower: Reginald has it.
- Heterosexual Life-Partners: Beartato and Reginald. There's even a Running Gag that they're Mindlink Mates.
- Hurricane of Puns: Linky.
- Hypocritical Humor: In "Advice About Comics."
- I Know You Know I Know: This strip.Beartato: You might as well give up, Reginald. You see...I knew your plan all along.Beartato: But what you failed to realise is that I knew that you knew that I knew.Reginald: Sweet, naive Beartato. I knew from the start that you knew that I knew that you knew.Reginald: WHAT?!!
- Inconvenient Summons: This strip. More inconvenient for Reginald, though, as he was in the middle of a story when Beartato was summoned away.
- Inelegant Blubbering: Beartato, after reliving his "rough" childhood.
- Insane Troll Logic: This strip. Reginald's advice on working out, given that it's better to do fewer reps with more weight, is to take it to its logical conclusion and do zero reps of a million pounds.
- Insistent Terminology: Referring to vampires as "draculas".
- Internet Jerk: Implied in the Alt Text of this strip—Beartato's new name will be chosen by internet poll, and turns out to be "Fartballs".
- It's All About Me: Reginald.
- It's Been Done: After this strip ran, apparently tons of xkcd fans sent emails saying the joke had been done already. The next strip hangs a lampshade on it, and adds a Garfield parody to the mix.
- Literal Metaphor: That's my name, don't wear it out!
- Mathematician's Answer: Answers to questions on the Nedroid tumblr are rather obtuse.spiderholic: is reginald purple or blue
nedroidcomics: He’s #555eaa - "Metaphor" Is My Middle Name: He's "Reginald Danger Safety", apparently."I guess it balances out."
- Mind Screw: A storyline revolving around Reginald's "brain problems".
- Missed the Call: Harrison constantly pines away to be swept up in some big heroic adventure like Beartato and Reginald often are. He's offered several chances practically on a silver platter, but turns his nose up at all of them until recently. Then he comes across Beartatonote and Reginald, who literally fell into the same thing he was chosen to do.
- Negative Continuity: Characters have went missing, been killed, turned into vampires or humans, or generally had about a dozen different backstories. It never sticks. "Everything I draw is canon, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff."
- Noodle Incident: Pool closed because EELS
- Oddball Doppelgänger: Show up with a surprising frequency: One strip involves both Reginald and Beartato encountering strange, and monstrous facsimiles of each other. In another Beartato and Reginald have totally not been kidnapped and replaced by crude imitations of themselves...
- Out of Focus:
- Harrison, though acknowledgement of this has become a sort of Running Gag.Nedroid: When I was originally drawing this, I was trying to think of as many characters as I could that had appeared in Beartato strips. I honestly forgot about Harrison until I was about halfway through the coloring process.
- When Beartato and Reginald pre-bought tombstones for the three of them, Harrison's says "Always there when we needed him".
- Harrison, though acknowledgement of this has become a sort of Running Gag.
- Poke the Poodle: Trash Talk!
- Running Gag: Among the others listed across this page is "I guess I got X problems" where X will be anything.
- Sadistic Choice: Made fun of in a strip where the chooser asks if he can shoot the bad guy instead. The bad guy pretends he can't be shot.
- Serious Business: St. Patrick's Day and April Fools' Day,, apparently.
- Shaped Like Itself: "Can you describe your bag, sir?" "I don't know, it was... luggage shaped"
- Shout-Out:
- To My Immortal here.
- The MiB referring to the pair as "Bear and Bird" in their censorship here may be a reference to 'Banjo-Kazooie''.
- This comic has one to Earthsea.
Beartato: Naturally, I can't tell you my true name, as you would then have power over me. - To My Immortal here.
- Show Within a Show: Reginald's comic strip "Bartholomew", which is essentially a Garfield ripoff drawn by somebody who knows nothing about real cats.
- Space "X": In space, Beartato runs into an alien who looks like Reginald with antennae at least at first and calls him "Space Reginald", to which the alien replies "How did you know my name?"
- Stripped to the Bone: "Good Move" has a guy punch off all of his sparring partner's flesh. With a single blow, no less!
- Star-Spangled Spandex: Space pants.
- Subverted Rhyme Every Occasion: Beartato's Night Before Christmas pastiche:The stockings were hung by the chimney with care
Except for Reginald's,
And Beartato also forgot his. - Tempting Fate: Beartato counted his problems and came up short.
- Tomato in the Mirror: Linky.
- Tonight, Someone Dies: This teaser reveals that in the next strip either Beartato, Reginald, a guy with a mustache, or Harrison will die!
- Typewriter Eating: *hormf* *snarmf* DING!
- Unfortunate Names: Beartato's underground doppelganger Buttfranklin Buttwhistle. It's mentioned that he finds the above-worlders' names to be equally silly to him.
- The Unreveal: This fan art◊. For those interested, Nedroid himself later answered this question on his "about" page.
- The Voiceless: The Eternal Homeless Robot.
- Voodoo Shark: Beartato and Reginald don't wear safety equipment because they wished for a genie to make them invincible while skateboarding.
- What's a Henway?: Subverted in this comic:Reginald: "Hey Beartato! Boy, it sure smells like updog in here!"Beartato: "Yeah, he's staying with me for a few days"Updog: "My house burned down!"Updog (Alt Text): "It was my own fault though. I left the henway on."
- X Called; They Want Their Y Back: Subverted in a strip where Reginald wears nineties clothes and Beartato begins the stock joke, but then Reginald says:Reginald: Did you warn them about what happens?!
