Black Comedy / Comic Strips

• The Far Side at least skirted this trope at times. In the commemorative book A Prehistory of The Far Side, Gary Larson printed some of the ones that got rejected by his editors because... they stopped skirting and plunged right in.
  • In one case, a snake was crawling through a crib, with a huge bulge in its center. The caption reads, "No, you didn't see this. Turn the page." The real joke of the picture was that the snake became so enlarged by the bulk of the freshly consumed infant that it couldn't squeeze through the bars of the crib, and was trapped.
  • Another strip that newspapers refused to publish concerned some cowboys who were so hungry they could eat a horse, and did so. (A good example of Values Dissonance: In several European countries, horse meat is openly sold in every butcher's shop.)
• The Argyle Sweater by Scott Hilburn, a Spiritual Successor of sorts to The Far Side (almost to the point of plagiarism), deals heavily in black comedy.
  • The characters of Winnie the Pooh are gathering around to eat a meal. Pooh begins to speak to Piglet and then notices Piglet is missing, as Christopher Robin brings in a familiar-looking pink ham.
  • A hunter is taking aim at a deer in a theater. The deer is bending down to pick up a dropped gummy bear, and sitting next to him is Abraham Lincoln.
  • A dolphin in a pool and a staff member is carrying a container of tartar sauce. Caption:
    An awkward day at SeaWorld
• Pearls Before Swine takes delight in excessive Black Comedy with frequent jokes about death, and often killing off one-shot characters for the purpose of a joke.
  • Pig convinces a mallard to talk to a quiet duck on the pond to whom he's attracted, but it's actually a decoy duck that leads to the mallard getting shot and killed.
  • Rat's "children's" stories. One of the milder ones involves an extended family throwing a member overboard because he overscheduled their vacation.
• Finnish newspaper comic B. Virtanen seems to fit the trope.
• Peanuts boasts death-free black comedy — Charlie Brown's life is pathetic enough to be tragic, and humorous enough to be black comedy.
• In one Achille Talon strip, the eponymous hero is demonstrating various classic gags to illustrate different types of humor. Getting to the step-on-the-rake-get-hit-in-the-face gag, he then proceeds to show Black Humor when he stomps on the rake, impaling his foot.
• Dilbert uses this trope quite often. One arc features the Pointy-Haired Boss's dead body getting stuffed by a "Libertarian Taxidermist" and being played with like a hand puppet.
• Garfield can engage in this from time to time:
  • One strip has Garfield kicking Odie off the table, then dropping a flowerpot on his head as a "get well soon" gift.
  • There was an arc which implied that Odie and Jon were figments of Garfield's imagination, as he slowly starved to death.
  • There is a strip where Garfield and Odie get into a squabble in the bedroom, on top of Jon, while he is trying to sleep. After Jon orders his pets to leave the room, he finishes his sentence once Garfield and Odie have left with "while I lay here quietly and bleed to death."
• There's a Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin proposes a class debate on "whether cannibalism is grounds for leniency in murder, since it's less wasteful." No, really. Since it's a family-friendly strip, Calvin ends up sitting in the corner, wondering why the teacher "would rather teach us stuff that any fool can look up in a book."
• MAD:
  • Their strip Just Below the Surface frequently uses it, including an example in which a baby turns to dust when testing a super-absorbent diaper.
  • And also 360 Degrees of Separation: "Come on sweetie! Open up for the airplane... Open up for the..."
• Every single strip of the New York Daily News-exclusive comic Between the Lines (2011) is this.
• The Danish newspaper comic Homo Metropolis by Nikoline Werdelin derives much of its humor from people put in really extreme situations and their absurd attempts at coping, such as:
  • The suicidal psychiatrist who accidentally agrees with her patient:
    Patient: And when Death finally comes, he is a friend... I will sail to the other side... There is peace and quiet... no pain ... just... quiet...
    Dr. Kleist: That sounds wonderful!
    Patient: What?
    Dr. Kleist: Erm, no, I mean, you must remember your ressources, that life is unique and...
  • The terminally ill man who dresses up:
    "Yay! My old tux fits again! [beat] Yay..."
  • Bea, whose son, Jan, owes money to drug dealers:
    Jan: There's a guy, Stopja, who says that he wants the money before Christmas, or I'll get whacked.
    [beat]
    Bea: I'd really like to have a talk with this Stopja person's mother.
• The St. Trinians School is a Boarding School of Horrors where seemingly only the worst juvenile delinquents study, with a tendency to murder, torture◊, and as the adaptations like to show, treat field hockey as◊ an excuse for violent beatdowns.
• While Madam & Eve is usually family-friendly, it sometimes dips into some dark areas, such as this strip about childhood AIDS.◊