Comic Strip / Twisted Toyfare Theatre

A comic series published every month in Toyfare magazine — an action figure hobbyist magazine and price guide spun off from the comics magazine Wizard that was humorous in tone — since the magazine began in 1997 and collected in trade paperbacks, "TTT" combines snarking, liberal references to anything in pop culture, tropes on top of tropes, and fair amounts of Black Comedy as a topper.

Twisted Toyfare Theatre originally featured 1970s Mego dolls (many of them customized, and most of those being Marvel characters) as the main characters, although other characters (such as Cobra Commander and the Stormtroopers) became more prominent as the Megos got stale. ^note Literally, those things were held together with rubber bands, as was pointed out in the comic many times.

Writers Matt Senreich, Tom Root, and Doug Goldstein went on to work for Robot Chicken, which was directly based (at least initially) on TTT. Former editor Rob Bricken went on to work for their sister publication Anime Insider, ran the Topless Robot nerd-blog for several years, and is now working for io9.

Sadly, Wizard shut down all of its magazines, including Toyfare, in 2011, taking the series with it.

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Twisted Toyfare Theatre provides examples of the following tropes:

• The Alcoholic: Iron Man, in an exaggeration of his Demon in a Bottle" problem from the comics, is intoxicated and slurring his speech nearly every single time he appears. "Iron Resolve" actually sees Captain America threaten to kick him out of the Avengers if he doesn't show up at their next meeting sober, and he enlists Hulk's aid to help him stay alcohol-free the night before — but the Party of Five'' collection that Hulk brings to help keep Iron Man's mind off booze inexplicably mentions alcohol in nearly every scene, leading to him falling off the wagon.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Odin, who, taking a cue from the "Odin-Sleep" established in the comics, peppers his dialogue with unnecessary "Odin"-phrases (see Cloudcuckoolander below), and has baby pictures of Loki ready at hand to show guests.
• And Call Him "George": The Hulk kills Cyclops this way.
• Animated Actors
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: When George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger entered the race for the Megoville mayoral election, Reed Richards uses the Cosmic Treadmill to go back in time to retrieve Thomas Jefferson, whom Richards calls the third greatest president in history; he feels that this is not important enough to bother Abraham Lincoln or Jimmy Carter. A variation on the trope used in Daredevil v. Ben Affleck:
  "The court will now hear the case of Daredevil v. Ben Affleck, for the crime of every movie since Good Will Hunting and the lesser charge of character defamation!"
• Ass Shove: Has happened to the Hulk. Willingly done by Sulu to himself
  Bones: (extracting tribbles from Sulu's rear) Damn it, Sulu, what did I tell you?! These things multiply and expand!
  Sulu: Oh, I'm well aware.
• A-Team Firing: Mocked in a G.I. Joe vs. Cobra battle. Spidey points out that they might actually hit something if they aimed lower, and nudges Duke's rifle to a more effective angle; Joes and Cobra alike are horrified when this results in a dead Cobra soldier.
• Audience-Alienating Era: invoked Just about every one suffered by a Marvel character will eventually be brought up.
• Black Comedy Rape: H.E.R.B.I.E. is known for his "banana in the tailpipe" trick. And he doesn't have a banana.
• Bloody Hilarious: Frequently. Dr. Doom's Pikachu dissection tray is one of many examples.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: "All actors are robots. Or gay. Or gay robots."
• Butt-Monkey: Cyclops, who is constantly insulted and abused by Professor Xavier. Also the Falcon, by Captain America. Doom, right from the start. The first strip had him beaten senseless by Ponch and Jon from CHiPs, and it just went downhill from there.
• Camp Gay: Northstar, taken to ludicrous heights after his comic counterpart was revealed to be homosexual.
• Character Exaggeration: Nearly every character who appears is a heavily exaggerated parody of themselves. Doug Goldstein said a favorite technique of his was to take a personality trait and twist it just slightly, making it ludicrous while still true to the character. As an example, he cited the Borg; the first time they knock on Spidey's door, he slams it in their faces, but when he tries to do so a second time, the Borg "adapts to his defensive capabilities" by sticking a foot in the door. By contrast, Mego Spidey himself is a complete 180° from the classic "with great power comes great responsibility" of his comics counterpart—he would much rather avoid/ignore whatever shenanigans are afoot and be left in peace.
• The Chew Toy: The Negative Zone Alien, whose entire purpose is to have garbage repeatedly dumped on him by The Thing.
  • The Falcon is generally treated just as badly; if he manages to get out of a strip with something horrible happening to Redwing, it counts as a victory.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Odin
  Odin: Let the Odin-feast commence! Someone pass the Odin-basket, the All-Father be Odin-Starving! DODEY-ODIN-ODIN-DEY!
  Spider-Man: (to Loki) Psst. I think your dad's Odin-senile.
  Odin: HEY! I Odin-heard that!
• Comes Great Responsibility: Usually completely averted with the Trope Namer—Mego Spidey would be more than content to ignore the absurdity surrounding him and remain on his couch, watching TV and eating potato chips. Even a Pre-Asskicking One-Liner moment, after the other Megos come to him for help when the Marvel Legends figures attempt to take over, ends up as a precursor to Mego Spidey kicking them out of his house.
• Continuity Nod: Tons, but one of the best involved Odin and Loki.
  Odin: And Loki... call thy mother.
  Loki: My mother was a frost giant and you killed her.
  Odin: Yep, and your real father. Hoo-boy, good times.
• Curse Cut Short: One of the most blatant examples was in the Harry Potter spoof "When Harry Met Spidey".
  Mego Spidey: Ugh... a "Hulk-flavored bean"! Never tasted that before!
  Hulk: Rarrgh, that not true! Spidey just very sound sleeper!
  (silent panel)
  Mego Spidey: WHAT THE F —
  Hermione: Wanna see my wizard trading cards?
• Deadpan Snarker: Mego Spidey, the Stormtroopers.
• Disability Superpower: Subverted in that Daredevil not only lacks his signature radar sense, but he also seems to be much more clueless of his surroundings than any normal blind person could ever be. When the Marvel Legends come calling, two Daredevils fight to the death in Hell's (actual) Kitchen... except they're both just manhandling pots and sacks of flour while thinking they're really fighting the other guy. He also seems to believe that wearing a white shirt and a hat over his costume is a disguise.
• The Ditz: Hulk
• Driven to Suicide: "That '70s Twisted Toyfare Theatre", taking place in the '70s, sees Charles Xavier absolutely owning everyone else in a dance contest while proclaiming the two things he loves in life: dancing, and his enormous black afro. He goes on to win the dance contest, giddily shouting "This is the best day of my life!"... before we cut to present-day Professor X waking up from the dream, now his bald and paralyzed self; he pulls out a gun from his nightstand drawer and shoots himself offscreen.
• Evil Is Petty: Loki. God of Evil he may be, but he spends most of his time in the strip pulling annoying pranks.
  Spider-Man: Isn't there a Rainbow Bridge or something that leads to your house?
  Loki: Yep, just plant these Skittles.
  panel break: And, so...
  Spider-Man: There, done. So when does the Rainbow Bridge start sprouting?
  Loki: It doesn't, I just wanted to see if you'd actually bury candy. The real bridge is over there.
  Spider-Man: *pause* ...You're such a tool.
  Loki: I'm not the one with the Skittle garden.
• Flanderization: Thor's Transparent Closet. Additionally, Alan Moore's main purpose being rescuing Man-Thing and correcting people who confuse him with Swamp Thing.
• Groin Attack:
  • The Hulk manages to kick Jarvis in the crotch so hard, his legs rip off.
  • Mego Spidey does this to Famous Covers^note a line of 8-inch cloth-covered figures that were intended to be Spiritual Successors to the Mego line; released by Toy Biz in the '90s, the line died a quick death Spidey in "Clash of the Titans Part I".
• Handsome Lech: Captain Kirk.
  Kirk: (with his shirt on) Time travel... again? HOT DOG! Sulu set a course... for ACTION!
  Spock: Captain, if history has taught us anything, it is that... that... you're gonna do whatever the hell you want. Ass.
  Kirk: (with his shirt off) God, I hope my ancestors are HOT!
• Hilarity Sues: Daredevil sues Ben Affleck for the Adaptation Decay of his movie.
• Hulk Speak: Hulk, with the occasional Lampshade Hanging.
  Hulk: You know Hulk's grasp of language tenuous at best.
• Insufferable Genius: Reed Richards—condescending, dismissive, and willing to sacrifice his teammates and loved ones (and anyone else that might happen to be on hand) at the drop of a hat for science. It's also pointed out in a biography page from volume 5 of the trade paperbacks that it takes a special kind of hubris to name yourself "Mister Fantastic".
• Intangible Theft: The story "Hello Kitty" re-envisions Kitty Pryde's tour of the X-Mansion, including her parents. Professor X introduces Storm, briefly mentioning that she used to be a thief. A quick introduction, and Storm leaves. Hilarity Ensues as Storm is accused of stealing Kitty's virginity. (Here you can have a look.)
  Dad: "Hey...my WALLET!"
  Mom: "My PURSE!"
  Kitty: "My VIRGINITY! Wow, she's good."
• Jerkass: Professor X is not a very nice guy in this series. Also, he's not really paralyzed and fakes it for laughs.
  • Doctor Strange is somehow even worse, at one point banishing a kitten to hell.
• Killer Rabbit: Don't mess with the Ewoks unless you want to be dismembered and eaten. This has some basis in actual Star Wars canon; see the part at the end of Return of the Jedi where an Ewok beats the severed heads of the downed Stormtroopers like drums.
• Large Ham: Arnold Schwarzenegger stand-in Conan the Barbarian and Schwarzenegger himself (who mainly speaks in quotes from his movies). But these both pale in comparison to the Mego version of Dr. Doom, who manages to make his mainstream Marvel counterpart look underplayed by comparison. Truly an accomplishment in ham.
  Dr. Doom: MWAH-HA-HA! Doom finally has his revenge by launching the Fantastic Four into space! And now... to blow up space!
• Manly Gay: Sulu, on the rare occasions that George Takei's sexuality is (jokingly) mentioned. Of course, this doesn't stop the writers from having him ride off the bridge on a giant poodle...
  • ...Which is actually a goof on George Takei's Papillion, La Reina Blanca.
• Multiple-Choice Past: Hulk gives about three or four different origin stories for himself over the course of the series. At least two of these are variations on Batman's origin, while another is closer to his standard one from the comics (though he starts out as "Dr. Hulk" instead of Bruce Banner).
• Naked People Are Funny:
  • An ad for Hormel is hosted by "Naked Jonathan Frakes."
  • One full-page parody ad for "META"^*Megos for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in the second TPB features a naked Hulk with the caption "HULK rather be NEKKID than wear FUR!"
• Negative Continuity: Most of the Stormtrooper comics place the characters at different locations during the ending of Return of the Jedi. They have alternately been portrayed working construction on the Death Star when it blew up, watching its destruction on TV in a bar, and being captured by Ewoks as it exploded. Footnotes provide Lampshade Hanging of the inherent continuity errors.
• No Fourth Wall: The characters are well aware they're in a comic strip, to varying degrees. As such, they'll occasionally grumble about being put in certain strips where hilarity is ensuing, and sometimes will even beg the writers to stop putting them in certain panels.
• Noodle Incident: One comic starts with the Hulk sitting on the couch in Spider-Man's house, looking around. One Gilligan Cut later, and Spidey's house has burned down. His explanation?
  Hulk: TV start it, Hulk finish it.
  Mego Spidey: ...Great.
  • Also:
  "Look, if this is about that thing with Bendis' pool, I said I'd pay for it."
• Not Blood Siblings: Human Torch claims he and Sue are this to justify sleeping together.
• Obfuscating Disability: Charles Xavier has been shown to do this a few times, like jumping up and running when he was caught using his mental powers to cheat at blackjack.
• Oh, Crap!: The writers are clearly fond of having various characters say "crap in a hat" at times. Also in "The New Neighbors" when the invading Borg are "defeated" by a couple of women who mistake them for Beanie Babies:
  Women: AHH-DORABLE!!
  Three of Twenty: ...Three of Twenty has just filled his fecal receptacle.
• Oireland: Clearly the homeland of Banshee.
  Banshee: "And if'n ye cannae tell, I'm Irish."
• Only Sane Man: Mego Spidey, frequently.
• Poirot Speak: Mocked whenever the X-Men appear.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis: Constantly.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Hulk
• Pungeon Master: The writing staff loves these. A strip starring Wolverine, for example, was titled "Up And Adamantium."
  • Wolverine himself becomes one of these in "House Party", where he suddenly becomes fond of snikting his claws and adding "X-tra" to whatever adjective Mego Spidey has just said (the titular "party" is being held at Xavier's Mansion).
    Mego Spidey: Hey, this dip's pretty good!
    Wolverine: Yeah, you might even say it's... x-tra good! [snikt snikt]
    [beat panel]
    Mego Spidey: ...ooookay.
• "Rashomon"-Style: "Snow Day" sees Captain America, Iron Man, and Hulk tell their own versions of how Bucky (once again) died (though Hulk actually tells how he killed Cyclops instead). At the end it's revealed that Cap accidentally shot him while he and Iron Man were hunting.
• Really Gets Around: Sue Richards, the Invisible Woman, attempts to "break Jenna Jameson's record" as part of a contest to try to win her own Ultimate series^*this story came out some years before Ultimate Fantastic Four was a thing. Along with the fact that she cheats on Reed every chance she gets.
  Mr. Fantastic: I'm back. What'd I miss?
  Franklin: [wide-eyed and traumatized] Mommy hugged a lot of people...
  Human Torch: [thinking] WHEW! Good thing I was in the first ten!
• Say My Name/Skyward Scream: It's inevitable, when Doctor Doom shows up, that something is about to go wrong for him, and he'll inevitably shout "RRRIIICHARDS!" in frustration. Even if Reed doesn't show up in that comic. It's practically a Catchphrase.
• The Scrappy: invoked Several well-known Scrappys show up and promptly die violently. Mego Spidey and Hawkeye actually go to a hunting range where the prey consists of Scrappy's from 1980s cartoons, including Orko from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983) ("The 'O' on his chest is like a target from God!"). The exception is the Ewoks. They cement their psychopathic status by charging in to dismember Jar-Jar Binks, at which point Mego Spidey remarks that comparison to Jar-Jar has made them look far more tolerable in comparison.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Franklin Richards frequently tries to threaten people by bragging that his father is Reed Richards. He often suffers shortly afterward.
• Shirtless Scene: Kirk's shirt disappears and reappears during every one of his strips, often from one panel to the next.
• Small Reference Pools: The writers will often throw in references to comic characters from their youth who are all but unknown in the modern age. This is either remarked upon in an editor's note or mentioned by a character.
  Man-Wolf: Hey, is that Frederick Foswell over there by Fancy Dan and The Ox?
  J. Jonah Jameson: Too obscure, even for this strip.
• Sophisticated as Hell: The Leader, who insults people in probably a more sophisticated way than is needed.
  Clerk: You know he can't help the way he is.
  Leader: And I can't help telling you to shove it. So shove it madam, shove every part of it!
• Space Jews: The Predator aliens are Jewish. Somehow.
• Special Effect Failure: invoked Intentional, a humorous example in an early strip (that the DC ban has kept from being republished): Starro the Conqueror is represented by a huge, star-shaped cookie with googly eyes. Spider-Man beats him with a garden hose. Many unintentional examples, too. Kirk drops a "boulder" on the Lizard and Gorn that was pretty obviously a spray-painted crumpled-up piece of aluminum foil, and Thor and Iron Man somehow crashed into the only tree for miles around and flew out of a General Lee that was about the same size as each of them in a failed attempt at a Forced Perspective shot, something even the editors had to call themselves out on in one collection of strips.
• Take That!: To every Audience-Alienating Era that ever existed. Brian Michael Bendis appears as a character almost entirely for the purpose of Take That's against him. He fills the panels with huge amounts of dialogue, brags about being paid by the word, and is killed by the Scarlet Witch in a New Avengers parody (while all of the characters he killed off in Avengers Disassembled refused to help him). Ed Brubaker's transformation of Bucky into a grim and gritty Anti-Hero is utterly mocked in one installment, complete with Nick Fury trying (and failing) to teach Bucky to be a badass. And two villains decide to kill Franklin Richards after seeing him "stealing" in a cardboard box and declaring the Raiden section of Metal Gear Solid 2 to be a ripoff.
• Tempting Fate: "There are only two things Chuck Xavier loves in life: this hair and dancing!"
• They Killed Kenny Again: The entire cast has been killed off at one point or another. Bucky, however, dies nearly every time he appears.
• Third-Person Person: Hulk, Dr. Doom, and the Borg collective.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Spider-Man's reaction to everything, such as finding Cobra infesting his house like mice.
• Those Four Guys: The Stormtroopers.
• Time Travel for Fun and Profit: Kang the Conqueror had to lead a group of people from the future to the present as a tour guide.
• Too Dumb to Live: Franklin Richards; Bucky; Dr. Doom; Hulk
• Too Much Information: Doctor Octopus and Aunt May have sex in an airplane toilet. It doesn't even need the visual to achieve a thorough level of badness, because Doc Ock is kind enough to inform us that "it's a good thing I sweat butter, 'cause round two's gonna be needing some lubricant!" Mego Spidey laments that "This never happens to Ultimate Me."
• Trademark Favorite Food: Mego Spidey is almost NEVER seen without his Lays potato chips (even in the picture on this very page). Just don't try to figure out how he actually eats them through his mask...
• Transparent Closet: Thor, which gets Flanderized quite a bit. Also, Banshee, who constantly hangs around Northstar yet spouts suspiciously homophobic dialogue. He is later seen waking up next to Northstar, hoping that he didn't do anything "sinful" while he was drunk.
• Trope Overdosed: Most strips get into at least double-digits in less than 10 pages.
• Unlucky Everydude: Spider-Man.
• Unusual Euphemism: Golden Age Spider-Man's web-shooters. See, in his day, "webs" were what they called "bullets", and...
• Unsound Effect: When Mego Spidey comes across a horde of Beanie Baby animals in "Clash of the Titans Part II":
  Giraffe: Me-mew. Me-mew.
  Platypus: Quack quack.
  Cow: Moo moo.
  Kangaroo: Kangaroo sound. Kangaroo sound.
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: The Falcon is frequently derided for having the power to talk to a single bird. (Quoth Ben Grimm: "How you ain't a DC character I'll never know.")
• Whole-Plot Reference: The second Manly Men of Action arc is entirely based on the plot of Avatar. That said, if we took the time to list all the examples this would take all day. Suffice it to say, there was an entire strip done in the style of 24, for example, and another that re-enacted the events of 300 with the Spartan space marines from the Halo games.
• Wingding Eyes: Seen often on characters when they die.
• Wolverine Publicity: One of their favorite targets of mockery. There was an entire strip about Wolverine's hectic daily schedule because he's in so many comics. The first trade's cover features Spider-Man and Wolverine:
  Wolverine: So, how long do I have to stand here?
  Spider-Man: Just long enough to sell this thing.
• Zombie Apocalypse: The story "28 Smurfs Later".
• You Wanna Get Sued?: The characters occasionally make references to DC Comics' refusal to allow their characters to appear in the strip. In one such occurrence, one character tells the other not to make DC jokes... while Bat-Pumpkin is sitting next to them giving a thumbs-up to the camera.^*As you can probably guess, Bat-Pumpkin is a re-themed Mego Batman figure with an orange cape and a pumpkin symbol over his Bat-chest insignia.

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