Comic Strip / Kabouter Wesley

"I like existing"

Kabouter Wesley (“Gnome Wesley”, or "Wesley the Gnome") is a Belgian series of short comics written and drawn by Jonas Geirnaert, first published from 2008 to 2010 in Belgian magazine Humo. From fall 2009 onwards, the comics were adapted as cartoon shorts on television for Man bijt hond.

The series revolves around “Kabouter Wesley”, the titular grumpy gnome. It has a very simplistic and surreal style, and often portrays violent and obscene material.

Geirnaert created Wesley while working on his short film Flatlife, to let off some steam, which explains the silly stories with a simple art style. Wesley is voiced in the series by Jonas himself, while the supporting cast is voiced by Jelle De Beule.

---

Trope examples in Kabouter Wesley:

• 20 Minutes into the Future: Parodied when a robot appears in front of Wesley and claims to be from the future. Which time period? Next Wednesday.
• All Just a Dream: Used in one comic where Wesley is obliged to temporarily use his freezer as a telephone due to technical work by the telephone company. When the work is done, he ends up calling with his cat. At the end, all of this turns out to have been just a dream of Wesley's telephone.
• Ambulance Cut: Happens in the comic where a hedgehog has dared to ask this question to two policemen:
  Hedgehog: What is the difference between a cop and a bucket of shit?
• Anachronic Order: Episode 25 starts with the end card and Wesley in a bar stating that Memento sucks. The episode starts making small jumps into the past, piece by piece revealing the story of how he got there.
• Anthropomorphic Food: In one comic, Wesley takes a talking and walking pita to his home, only to eat it after he has given the pita a tour of his house. Later, he takes home a small pack of chips without sauce and a cheese croquette, but those two end up eating Wesley instead of vice versa.
• Armor-Piercing Question:
  Magic watering can: If you say “Turbo” twice, I catch fire!
  (Beat)
  Wesley: And what is the practical use of that?
• Bestiality Is Depraved: When entering a computer competition, Wesley's self-made computer “Sloeber” suddenly exclaims: “Jan fucks goats”. Jan immediately admits having done only once, out of curiosity. Sloeber then shows everyone a censored picture of him in the act. Wesley wins the competition.
• Bigger on the Inside: Kabouter Wesley's home mushroom appears to be barely bigger than himself on the outside, but actually contains, among other rooms, a neogothic chapel and an illegal chicory plantation.
• Big "NEVER!": One episode has Wesley ask an ice cream vendor for an ice cream, to which the latter replies with this. What follows is an extremely long Chase Scene in which Wesley keeps following the vendor for several years to get an ice cream.
• Black Comedy: The series has featured death, bestiality, violence and abuse for the Rule of Funny.
• Bottle Episode: In one comic, a popped light bulb causes the entire story to play out in pitch-black darkness, with only the speech bubbles being visible. Wesley Lampshades it:
  Wesley: Wow, somebody sure didn't feel much like drawing stuff here!
• Call-Back:
  • The impulsive gnome who runs over Wesley's house mentions in his backstory an uninhabited planet called Vognor 7, and the episode ends with the gnome and his mother leaving for Vognor 8. In a later episode, Wesley meets some aliens that also come from a planet called Vognor.
  • The magic watering can from the "Turbo Turbo" episode is mentioned again in another episode, where it appears as part of a newspaper offering.
• Comedic Sociopathy: If you say “Turbo Turbo” to the magic watering can, it gets set on fire, which is incredibly painful. Everyone else finds it gut-bustingly hilarious.
• Comically Missing the Point: Happens in the comic where Wesley has seen a duck stepping out of a UFO and he reports this to a journalist. When the journalist asks him for a picture, Wesley delivers a picture... of the duck.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Implied. After a friendship fairy challenges Wesley to a battle to the death, the episode cuts to a perfectly fine Wesley, commenting on how surprisingly quick it went.
• Death as Comedy: There are several occasions on with characters die in quite bizarre ways. Even Wesley himself has died several times over the series.
• Deus ex Machina: Wesley is shot by a police officer in one episode. After the officer mourns to Jesus that he regrets it, Wesley is revived again.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: To make the pig survive, both of the pig exterminators suddenly die with no explanation given. They Lampshade it in deadpan voices.
• Establishing Shot: The episode with the malfunctioning TV set contains one that is explicitly marked as such.
• Evil Sorcerer: Featured in the comic with the magic watering can.
• Gilligan Cut: Used on multiple occasions, an example is this moment:
  (Wesley has been sleeping in a prison cell, but he is suddenly awakened by someone on the outside)
  Fitted carpet dealer: Pssst... Wesley the Gnome, it's me, the fitted carpet dealer. I've come to rescue you!
  (cut to the two of them sitting in the same prison cell)
  Fitted carpet dealer: Sad that it didn't work out.
  Wesley: Yeah...
• Grammar Nazi: One of two pig exterminators has the ability to hear dt-mistakes^note A lot of Dutch verbs can end on either “d”, “t” or “dt”, depending on conjugation, but you can't hear that in conversation.. He keeps pointing out the other's mistakes. This gag works in the animations because, despite benig voiced, it retains the original comic's text balloons.
• In-Universe Factoid Failure: In one comic, a mountain goat claims to be the king of Persia. When Wesley reminds him that Persia doesn't exist anymore, the goat corrects himself by saying he is the king of Mongolia, which is confirmed when two Mongolians come to visit their king. It should be noted that Persia is the former name of Iran, not Mongolia.
• Jerkass: Wesley. He has a tendency to beat the crap out of everyone, even for petty reasons. This is also zigzagged, as he is seen to have a caring side towards others sometimes. At least, until he loses his patience.
• Medium Awareness: Lampshaded in a short in which Wesley comes across several things that, according to his remarks, are extremely difficult to animate. Examples include an extremely detailed vintage car, six firefighters on a motorcycle and a dog with six legs that starts to juggle with star shaped tetrahedrons while doing back flips. The short ends with Wesley apologizing to the animators by offering them a bouquet of flowers which continuously change colours.
  • In fact, this could be called Medium Conversion Awareness: the gag was originally created as comic, while the cartoon series was already in production, meaning the cartoonist deliberately made it to force the animators to transform the Stylistic Suck into something actually well-animated. The final panel of the comic explicitly confirms this, with the words "End of this gratuitous fuckery towards the guys who have to animate Gnome Wesley" as the comic's punchline.
• Mime and Music-Only Cartoon: One episode lacks every dialogue as it only features Wesley walking past multiple signs with unnecessary information while whistling. Finally, Wesley accidentally falls into a pond and drowns.
• Orphaned Punchline: Wesley tells a joke to cheer up a crying penguin. Only the punchline (Then I will go to my bike on foot) is heard, to which the penguin exclaims that he doesn't understand the joke.
• Overly Long Gag: Used in a few comics:
  • A dolphin who struggles for a few minutes to pronounce the word 'capsized', before he switches to the word 'sinking'.
  • The two-part comic about the travel agency has a Running Gag about people constantly banging their heads against low-hanging signboards and all needing several hours to recuperate from it.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: How is a pig that looks like a poorly drawn cat hidden from pig exterminators? Hat, glasses and beard. Then it gets subverted when it turns out the “pig in disguise” was an actual gnome who owns a tree where he let the pig hide itself behind.
• Power Outage Plot: One of the comics features this.
• Speech Bubbles: It's normal to see these in a comic, but as the cartoons are mostly unaltered adaptations of the comics, the speech bubbles show up there too. There are some jokes that make reference to spelling errors in the speech bubbles as well.
• Straw Misogynist: One comic has Wesley getting a visit from the commission for equal opportunities because his adventures never feature women. Wesley replies that this is because he thinks women are stupid (which the commission agrees with). After a woman is sought to participate, Wesley urges her to clean his house...
• Stylistic Suck: Everything is low-detail, backgrounds are only used if the characters need to interact with it, the characters go Off-Model all the time and everything has very rough outlines.
  • Lampshaded by a pig that Wesley mistakes for a cat because it is very badly drawn. Wesley agrees and says that it applies to him too.
• Surreal Humor: The trademark of the series.
• Talking Animal: Many of the characters Wesley encounters are talking animals. Famous examples include the pig that looks like a badly drawn cat, the silly hedgehog, the stealing dolphin, the crying penguin, the pizza delivery rhinos and the mountain goat that is actually the king of Mongolia.
• Tempting Fate:
  • After Wesley punches a hedgehog:
    Wesley: What were you gonna do, call the cops?
    Hedgehog: Yes.
  • Wesley is getting shot at. Three kilometers away, two gnomes are filling the world's largest water balloon:
    Gnome: Almost nothing can go wrong now.
    (cue both of them getting hit by the stray bullets)
• Toilet Humor: Has a few people eating poop. And poop falling down.
• Undignified Death: Used several times for a comedic effect.
• Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: Clearly the case with Wesley.
• Visual Pun: Wesley causes a mushroom to loose its spores after beating it, after which Wesley is hit and killed by the train of seven o'clock.^note The Dutch word sporen means both spores and railway tracks.
• Younger Than They Look: Although Wesley sports a white beard and sounds a little like an elderly man, there are no signs of him being any older than middle-aged. He apparently is very physically fit, running long distances and beating up others with powerful blows. Besides, he never acts like an old man either, and is actually revealed to be in his 40s.
• Your Television Hates You: One comic has Wesley watching a television programme about manufacturing faults that make certain television sets, including Wesley's, impossible to turn off or suddenly turn into the most bizarre objects.
• You Wouldn't Hit a Guy with Glasses: Another gnome tells Wesley that since he wears glasses, Wesley isn’t allowed to beat him up. So Wesley says he’ll then continue beating up the guy's mushroom instead. Glasses gnome takes his glasses off, puts them on his mushroom and laughs at Wesley. He gets smacked for his efforts.