Butt Monkey / Print Media

• Charlie Brown in Peanuts is known for being very unlucky, especially since Lucy always pranks him into landing hard on his back by offering him kicks of a football or being pursued by lovesick Patty.
• The original The Addams Family comic strips often depicted Wednesday as one - her frequent unhappy expressions, Pugsley's attempts to outright kill her, and Charles Addams himself describing her as "underprivileged" and "pretty lost" are evidence enough.
• Odie in Garfield is the titular cat's favorite punching bag, with Jim Davis stating that it's very hard to write about Odie besides getting kicked by Garfield off the table because Odie never says anything and isn't as anthropomorphized as the other animals. He stays cheerful, though, and does get back at Garfield occasionally.
  • At least Odie's not Jon; the universe seems to hate the poor guy. Rarely anything goes right for him. Although he does eventually get together with Liz after many years of failed attempts at dating, that doesn't really change much for him, as he's still a loser at the end of the day. However, it should also be noted that, despite everything he goes through, his general quality of life isn't too bad, and makes enough money to keep his pets and himself fed (which is a challenge when you have a cat like Garfield) and a decent middle-class roof over his head.
• Jazmine DuBois in The Boondocks, who creator Aaron McGruder wrote as being more known for her ethnic background than her personality. She is a mulatto born to a black father and a white mother, and neither the black or white kids in her neighborhood accept her as one of them. She doesn't even like herself because she feels unattractive and an "abomination" for being the product of two races mixing.
• Mr. Wilson, a Grumpy Old Man whose dream of a quiet retirement was ruined by living next to Dennis The Menace, who considers Wilson his best friend and is always bothering him, interrupting his leisure, and at times even damaging his property.
• Chris Shepperd in Nintendo Power. Whenever they need an image of somebody in a bad situation, they always use Chris Shepperd. According to NP, he also broke their only time machine. To a slightly lesser extent, there's Steve Thomason, who is jokingly accused of trying to turn Nintendo Power into Sega Visions. He also happens to be the one reviewing most fitness games, despite him openly expressing that he has trouble doing even 10 push-ups. To an even lesser extent, there's Justin Cheng, who received some of this in a few issues following his joining. However, this has diminished incredibly.
  • Before Shepperd, there was "Nester." The creation of former Nintendo fan club president Howard Phillips, Nester's sole purpose in the comic strip "Howard and Nester" was to claim to be a know-it-all gamer who ultimately would be Hoist by His Own Petard while the comic version Phillips revealed the true secret to whatever Game Nester was involved in (This was back when Nintendo Power was more devoted to providing hints and guides to games instead of reviews).
• Guy Haley from White Dwarf was one of these, due to his horrible luck. His Guard army once played an entire game of Warhammer 40,000 without killing a single enemy; his Orc warband in the studio campaign of The Lord of the Rings ended up being led by a one-armed, one-legged orc with a chest problem called Ugbrag the Unlucky and he was mocked constantly for a TV appearance meny years before. He was the Editor for some of this period, but was still Butt Monkey, and at one point attempted to console himself on a particularly bad result.
  • The magazine's internal campaigns also develop this a lot, as someone with no army — boosting victories is likely to continue to lose.
• The newspaper comic Herman plays by the rule that whomever the bizzarre shennanigans are happening to this time is Herman.