Cindy and Biscuit is an irregular self-published comic series by the British cartoonist Dan White. Large portions of it have also been posted for free online at the comics and popular culture collective blog Mindless Ones
and at White's own blog. In 2023 Oni Press published a collected edition.
The comic is about the adventures of a little girl called Cindy and her dog Biscuit. Cindy lives in a small town somewhere near, but not on, the English coast, has a single mother who is too harried by the practical demands of life to provide much emotional parenting, and is her school's outcast weird kid. She also spends most of her time out of school killing or otherwise interacting with the surprisingly large number of monsters, aliens and evil robots who plague the area. Although she's the only person who seems to know about them...
This comic provides examples of:
- Alien Abduction: Cindy and Biscuit once got abducted by an alien animal collector. Things did not go well for the alien.
- Aliens Are Bastards: Other types of supernatural entity can be harmless or genuinely nice, but all the aliens that Cindy's met were evil.
- Alpha Bitch: Cindy's school enemy Suzy.
- Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: Cindy has a snowball fight with an Abominable Snowman.
- Blood Knight: Cindy does avoid genuinely harming entities that don't seem to be hostile, but she's mainly driven by a largely unadulterated love of fighting monsters to the death.
- Carry a Big Stick: Cindy's usual weapon is a tree branch. It's indicated explicitly several times that they usually only last for one fight.
- Cats Are Mean: A sinister black cat lures Biscuit into a bizarre cat-themed otherworld.
- Cute Bruiser: Cindy's Establishing Character Moment in the very first story has her hitting an alien over the head with a stick hard enough to smash its spacesuit helmet to pieces and utterly pulverise its head.
- Dem Bones: Biscuit fights a bunch of skeletons in one of the "Sundays" stories.
- Evil Clown: One Noodle Incident appeared to involve an Evil Clown-themed Humongous Mecha.
- The Faceless: All adult characters are shown only from the neck down.
- Faceless Eye: The "Bad Girl" entity has an eyeball for a head.
- Family-Unfriendly Violence: Despite the cartoon art style, some of the battle scenes are extremely graphic.
- For Halloween, I Am Going as Myself: Cindy is paranoid on Hallowe'en about real monsters doing this.
- Frame-Up: The malevolent entity in "The Bad Girl" frames Cindy for acts of vandalism at school and home.
- Gilligan Cut: A Running Gag has Cindy musing on the need for stealth, followed by an immediate cut to a panel of her charging something while waving a tree branch and screaming.
- Heroic Dog: Biscuit fights side by side with his mistress, and has the odd solo strip.
- Hope Spot: Cindy's good day at school and home in "The Bad Girl", before a malevolent entity starts framing her.
- I'm Not Afraid of You:
- Cindy's and Biscuit's nights are sometimes disturbed by a screaming ghostly skull, but since it can't actually do anything they just ignore it until it goes away.
- This is how Cindy defeats the "Bad Girl".
- Killer Teddy Bear: Cindy's sock monkey Mr. Andrews came to evil life and tried to kill her in her sleep.
- Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: One single-panel chapter features a highly-recognisable Transformer who had a very realistic encounter with a car scrapyard.
- Muck Monster: Cindy and Biscuit fight one in the otherworld they are transported to in "The Bad Girl".
- My God, What Have I Done?: In one of the "Sundays" stories, Cindy tests out an alien gun and accidentally destroys a bird's nest, causing her to feel guilty and throw it away.
- Nightmare Fetishist: Cindy is a massive one, even for the nicer supernatural entities that she doesn't need to fight.
- Noodle Incident: Several chapters are single panels that show one moment or a memory of what was obviously a more complicated story.
- Not Now, Kiddo: Practically every encounter Cindy has with an adult.
- Only One Name: Averted in "Sundays", in which Cindy's surname is finally revealed as Carpenter.
- Origins Episode: Chapter Five of "The Bad Girl" reveals how Cindy received Biscuit as a present and how they started fighting monsters.
- Our Mermaids Are Different: Cindy's school biology trip to the seaside ended up with her being attacked by a very fishlike and inhuman mer-thing.
- Our Werewolves Are Different: A werewolf of the "wolf-headed shaggy humanoid" type can regularly be found in the woods near Cindy's house. Despite his gory eating habits when it comes to bunnies, he's one of the nicest entities that Cindy meets, and one of her very few genuine friends.
- Pint-Sized Powerhouse: A pre-pubescent girl who regularly beats monsters several times her size to death with pieces of wood.
- Playing Possum: The mer-creature does this to Cindy so that it can try to eat her.
- Puppeteer Parasite: One of these tried to take advantage of Cindy's more depressive tendencies to take her over, but Biscuit saved her.
- Rock Beats Laser: When Cindy and Biscuit were abducted by an alien scientist, it ended with Biscuit sending his spaceship haywire by urinating on an important control panel, and Cindy beating him with an iron bar until he agreed to take her home.
- Screaming Warrior: One of Cindy's defining characteristics.
- Snowlems: Cindy can't even make a snowman without it coming to evil life and attacking her.
- Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: The entity in "The Bad Girl" looks like one with an eyeball for a head.
- Swapped Roles: When Biscuit destroys Mr. Andrews, Cindy, who slept through the whole thing, thinks that he destroyed her toy out of mischief or jealousy.
- Tag Along Kid: Cindy refuses to accept one in one of the "Sundays" stories, because she doesn't want him getting hurt.
- Things That Go "Bump" in the Night: Cindy and Biscuit's first fight was defeating the monster hiding in her closet.
- Through the Eyes of Madness: It is just about possible to read the comic naturalistically as the story of a lonely and disturbed little girl with a disturbingly violent imagination, although the strips from Biscuit's point of view suggest otherwise.
- Troubling Unchildlike Behaviour: Cindy has a really disturbing love of violence for her age.
- Wake Up, Go to School & Save the World: A particularly tragic version, as Cindy's schoolfellows just think she's weird and bully her, and her mother and teachers think she's being naughty and making up stories.
- The Walls Have Eyes: True of all the soil and rock in the otherworld in "The Bad Girl".
- Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: One particularly disturbing strip has Cindy dreaming about destroying the entire Earth, and being utterly joyful about it.
