Deal With The Devil / Webcomics

• 1977:The Comic: Bud's girlfriend's mother is a record producer/manager. She offers to sign up the band. when the contracts are signed, she reveals herself in her true form. Admittedly it gets each band member a $50,000 advance cheque. But at the price of Bud's soul.
• Achewood: Ray Smuckles gains his musical talent (and, arguably, a heap of his subsequent successes) through one of these, but the consequences don't come about until over a year later.
• Archipelago: A major plot point. People who make the deal have a raven spirit enter their bodies through their left eye, turning that eye black with a red pupil. Most of the time the raven spirits even honor their part of the deal, since it's not like they have to plan for the future. And they can always Soulseal the host if necessary.
• Ava's Demon: The only way to rid oneself of their demon is to form and carry out a pact with them. However, the demon and the living participant both have to keep their end of the bargain or they will become a 'monster of failure'.
• Blood is Mine: Nil offers a deal to Macland: it will save the life of someone he cares about, if he gives it his body. Macland gives it the bird and refuses the deal.
• College Roomies from Hell!!! has the devil as a main antagonist. There are two student satanists (Steve and Waldo); it is unclear what they "sold" to obtain it, but they gain certain magical powers (or perhaps hallucinations thereof) from the devil. Eventually, Mike makes a deal with the devil to protect his loved ones at the cost of being controlled by the devil for ten minutes at an unspecified later time. Much later, this leads directly to him cheating on his fiancee to allegedly conceive the antichrist, the disintegration of his entire circle of friends, and his fatal stabbing. While he's dead, it turns out he's apparently Michael the Archangel. Oh, great, Mike. Remembering that would have been good before you turned yourself over to the enemy.
• Daughter of the Lilies: Many of the older or more intelligent drath do this in order to possess you. The teacher of the Magical University that held drath summoning courses noted that the drath are able to sense and latch onto peoples' insecurities, although no one is sure how.
• Demon Candy: Parallel starts off with TWO of these for the same character. The first is when Johnathan accidently sells his soul to Noelle for a Klondike Bar, and the second is when he makes a deal to stay in Hell with Victoria for a year to get his soul back.
• DevilBear: The band members of Smooch (a parody of Kiss) are tricked into selling their souls in exchange for being rock stars for life. They die partying too hard after their first show.
• Devoto: The main storyline follows a man who makes a deal with a demon for musical talent.
• Dungeons & Doodles: Tales from the Tables: Redwen's birth is implied to be the side effects of this. Her real parents made a deal with a mysterious benefactor who could turn their worthless mine into a motherlode of gems, in exchange for nothing but their most precious gem, one that they'd come by in the future. When it turned out that that "precious gem" was actually their newborn daughter, they left her at an orphanage ten days before the collection, in hopes that the devil would not come for her and take them instead.
• El Goonish Shive: Noah once considered doing this, but he was talked out of it while his plans were still in the research phase.
• Subverted / inverted in a storyline of Fans!: The villain, who had sold his soul to Satan for power and the chance to become a hero to humanity, manipulated Rikk into traveling to an otherworldly realm and also selling his soul to protect his friends and thus get Rikk under his power. However, the villain's plan was flawed in that he had not considered that (a) each individual person encountered the realm — and the entity within that realm — in a different way depending on who they were, and that (b) Satan was not the only celestial being interested in doing deals for souls; Rikk, being a genuinely selfless person interested only in protecting his loved ones, actually sold his soul to The Big Guy Upstairs, thus enabling him to defeat the villain.
• Justified (from the demon's point of view) in Goblins. Demons feed by inflicting suffering on immortal souls, and if they can gain ownership of a soul, it can provide them with nourishment for the rest of eternity. But most of them aren't powerful enough to take souls by force; they need to persuade mortals into giving their souls up willingly.
• Mentioned and subverted in Homestuck. Caliborn offers Jake English support but denies that this is a Deal With the Devil situation. Caliborn claims that Jake has nothing to offer Caliborn in return. Caliborn is merely doing this because he believes he and Jake are kindred spirits since they both have terrible social skills and because he believes Jake, being a Page, can become a Worthy Opponent.
• Housepets!: When Keene ends up in hell and is trying to find a way to escape and rescue Breel, he realizes too late that he has accidentally made a deal with a devil when the cute demon who agreed to help him in exchange for being brought to earth with him suddenly speaks in a less cute voice and says "THEN THE CONTRACT IS SEALED" after they agree to help each other. This has major consequences in a later story arc.
• I Log In Alone Gods can make deals with players to give them powers. But they end up being turned into monsters and losing their humanity.
• IronCrown's main plot really starts with this, as a dictator's daughter on the run (our protagonist) bargains with a demon in the basement as the country falls to pieces around them. It goes about as well as you'd expect.
• Little Worlds: Subverted in this comic, where Derby insists to The Accountant that he is not making a "soul-bargain" when he demands the answers to life, the universe, and insomnia.
• Kill Six Billion Demons:
  • Devils are one of the four creations of the gods, a creation of the hungry black flame. They work by binding themselves to the service of one of the other three types of being through a contract, leeching power from their summoner in return for their servitude (the nature of the service depending on the nature of the devil). Being living ids whose driving principle is "Do as thou Wilt", most devils will immediately look for a loophole in their terms of service and kill or drain their summoner the moment they have had enough. It does bear mentioning that they can break their contract directly, but they immediately suffer Death of Personality from doing so as they shatter their masks and turn back into an eldritch mass of primordial chaos.
  • Incubus' stock in trade. As a Dream Walker, he can enter people's heads, see their aspirations, and offers them ambition and power to reach their potential, without the need for Training from Hell or Character Development. Just say 'yes' to him, and suddenly anyone in the Might Makes Right Crapsack World of the KSBD-verse can make their own mark with one easy signature on the dotted line^note side effects may include Ambition Is Evil, Victory Is Boring, Always a Bigger Fish, The Dark Side Will Make You Forget, Enemy Within, and being reduced to an Empty Shell forced to wait on Incubus for the rest of your existence. Terms and conditions apply. Allison becomes one of his clients in book 3, only to have her sense of self sequestered by her inner power-hunger. Considering the state of some of Incubus' other 'patrons' that lounge around his court, she escapes relatively unharmed.
  • Gog-Agog offers a somewhat different take on this trope. She is able to turn anyone into a copy of herself by having them consume a piece of her, and since she is Throne's biggest celebrity and "being her is really fun", she offers people the willing opportunity to become another instance of her because it will make them feel better. Given the number of Gog-Agogs that have appeared on-panel at several occasions, it's possible some of them might have been seduced into 'willingly' taking one of her worms.
  • Metatron 1 offers 82 White Chain a new, more powerful, body if White Chain joins the Knights of the Thorn. In this case both Metatron and White Chain are literal angels, but the context remains the same. White Chain refuses, only to ally with Metatron and 2 Michael's goal to give Throne to Zaid on an ideological basis later.
  • Allison makes a deal with the Devil in Seeker of Thrones: She bargains with Himself, the King of all Devils, to get a Caper Crew to rob Mammon. All the Devil asks for is for her to succeed (or he'll make it open season on Cio, who is in bad standing with the Heretic's Court), and for her to "think about me when the throne is offered to you". As the Alt Text states, this is one of the Devil King's "most lenient wagers".
• A deal with the devil is what starts the plot of My Best Friend Marneao. Jacob sells his soul in order to gain a best friend, and he gains it in the form of Marneao, the son of Lucifer. When a human sells their soul, the demon that accepts the deal is bound by contract to give them whatever they asked. Jacob becomes sad to hear this, thinking none of the fun they had was for real. That is, until it's revealed Marneao never accepted his soul because no demon would accept Jacob's request,, and simply ran away from home.
  Marneao: I'm not bound by any contract because there never was one! I'm having fun with Jacob because I want to have fun with him!
• Marionetta: Downplayed. Anyone who makes a deal with the Castle (and Tonny) is enslaved to stay inside the castle forever... until they finally get bored of being eternally young and request a Mercy Kill. Dotty reveals it used to be a miserable existence nonetheless, but she found a loophole that let her move and alter the castle to give the residents more freedom.
• Narbonic: Subverted. Demons, as former angels, have to honor the spirit of any deals they make and put customer satisfaction over their own interests. They are therefore very happy that humans believe deals with demons always end badly; the demon just gives the human some minor gift like a candy bar, and the human counts himself lucky to have come out ahead.
• At the start of Necropolis, after a raid by bandits plunders her village, burning down her house and killing her father, a young girl goes to a magic being called Ibis and makes a deal for a magic sword that will give her the power to take vengeance on the bandits. Afterwards a curious witch tries to see if she can get the girl free of the contract, noting that sometimes imprecise language in these deals allows someone to wriggle out of it, but the young girl made the mistake of promising Ibis "everything" in exchange for power. (Ibis declined to take anything up front from the urchin girl, instead apparently looking into her future and determining that she'll take her payment later, when destiny has brought the girl much more than she had at that moment.) The comic's narration noted right from the start that this was not going to end well for the girl.
  Even children in the hinterlands know that more is lost than gained in a deal with devils. But all that remained to her was a weeping mother, a sleeping sister, and her own young life. She believed that she had nothing left to lose. So she went to bargain. And that was the beginning of all her troubles.
• The Non-Adventures of Wonderella: Wonderella considers making a deal with the literal devil for teleportation powers, but she runs it past her lawyer, who points out that she's promising eternal servitude in exchange. It's negotiated down to one month of servitude for teleportation among all North American Pinkberry locations. The devil wins annyway: Pinkberry shuts down its North American operations.
• Clare's backstory in No Rest for the Wicked. She can tell the people feel guilty about their children because they look like her parents did after her father accidentally sold her to the devil — and never tried to give back the money.
• Subverted in Oglaf: a nerdy wizard summons a demon so he can wish for sex with hot devil girls, for which the demon says there is a terrible price: after his death, the wizard will become a hot devil girl and have to sexually service lonely nerds like himself. Not only are all the devil girls also former nerds (and the orgy quickly becomes a miniatures-painting session), none of them have a problem with it, since they get to be hot devil girls and have lots of sex.
• In The Order of the Stick, Vaarsuvius tries to get one of these deals to get enough power to save their family. This zigzags wildly — the fiends claim that they don't really want V's soul for eternity, but just a proof of concept that the different fiend types can work together, so their deal is for X minutes of damnation each fiend for however long V holds onto that fiend's power. But as they point out, V committing Evil acts while Drunk with Power is on their soul and is likely to lead to their eternal damnation anyway. But the worst snag is when the contracted damnation will take place; V assumes it will be immediately after their death and before whatever afterlife their alignment earns, but it's actually whenever the hell the fiends say so, as V learns to their dismay when they try to stop Roy from destroying Girard's Gate.
• Phantomarine: There are two, but with a catch:
  • If Phaedra can ask a question Cheth can't answer and if he asks a question she knows the answer to, then she and her crew get their lives back. What Cheth didn't tell her was that she only saved her own life, and her life force was divided between herself and her crew, condemning them as seaghosts.
  • Phaedra now has to find an artifact that can resurrect herself and her crew by the year's end. If she doesn't....Cheth will come to claim her.
• Re;member does this, with Igon's bargain with Levistus. Unusually however, we later see Levistus explaining his reasons for accepting what at first looks like a bad deal for him.
• Sandra and Woo:
  • Parodied in this strip as Sandra accidentally sells her soul to the devil for a glass of lemonade.
  • "...but now I don't have to! Thanks, whoever did that!" You think it'd be so easy...
  • Comes up again with Larisa during the Divine Comedy arc. In order to save Sandra's life from one of the human god's pranks, she signed a contract with the devil that would condemn her soul to hell upon death (the contract would be rendered void if they failed to save her). Although, it was more like a job offering than an eternity of torment (the devil wanted to put her talents to use as a succubus).
• Sleepless Domain: After Tessa loses her powers and her teammates, a nameless shadowy entity (known only as "Goops") approaches her and offers a way for her to have powers again. This plays out in an unorthodox way: Tessa doesn't believe her offer for a minute and assumes that Goops is just luring her out in order to kill her, but she accepts the deal anyway. Tessa turns out to be wrong on both accounts, as Goops does give her powers again... by forcibly merging with her. It's still unclear how much agency or awareness Tessa has in their new form, or even if she has any at all.
• Sluggy Freelance:
  • One of the earliest strips has Riff and Torg making a deal with a demon for beer and pocket change. Luckily, the demon is short on coins, so they just get the beer and he doesn't get to conquer the world.
  • Gwynn makes some kind of a vague deal to get magic power from the Book of E-Ville early on that continues to haunt her forever in different forms.
  • Spoofed during the Vampires arc when Torg suggests the vampires should stop sneaking around and just openly sell vampirism.
    Lysinda: "Foolish Mortal... do you really think humanity would give up its immortal soul forever just to look good?"
    [thinks about it]
    Lysinda: "Sylvia..."
    Sylvia: "Infomercials, next quarter, check."
  • In "KITTEN", a Satanic cult has agreed to let Satan have a child with one of them in an attempt to create The Antichrist. He ends up becoming drunk and breeding with their cat on a dare instead, though.
  • In "A Time for Healing", we hear the story of the zombie Jane, who had naively made a pact with a voodoo woman to become a zombie.
  • In "A Time for Hair Raising", Gwynn does a desperate deal with soul-trading demons who couple as Jackass Genies and make deals with mortals for free at first in order to persuade them to make a second deal for the price of one's soul. You can guess how well that goes.
  • Before the Dimension of Pain became the Dimension of Pain, one of the original inhabitants made a pact with the invading Legions of Hell. She gave them entrance to her city, thinking she could save her lover from dying in the war and flee with him. Naturally, he died anyway and she was cursed to become one of the demons.
  • K'Z'K the Destroyer has a good record of getting mortals to summon him into the world, even though that basically means The End of the World as We Know It — which he has caused several times. He has offered things such as "the ability to kill a demigod who offended your gigantic ego" and "sparing you and your loved ones since the End is coming soon regardless."
• According to Something*Positive, Alan Moore gained his writing abilities from the Devil. The deal was for Moore to stop beating the Devil up during school.
  • The To Hell and Back sequence there also references the Robert Johnson folk-tale. Also, Ray falls ass backwards into money like a pig into mud, it ain't even a thing.
• In Sonic the Comic – Online! Sonic goes to the Drakon Empire and makes a deal with Master Scholar in order to try and save Mobius from Dr. Zachary and Shadow.
• Team Fortress 2 It is revealed that The Medic sold his soul to the Devil, but he notices the fine print and mentioned that the Devil needs to have a majority stake and he has surgically added 8 more souls into himself. He then sells another soul for 50 years and a pen, and plans on not making it easy for the Devil to get the other souls.
• [un]Divine: One of the main characters, Daniel, kickstarts the plot when he summons a demon who he would call Esther to willingly give up his soul for her servitude. And he did all of this on a whim, mind you.
• Unsounded:
  • Roger Foi-Hellick makes an agreement with Shaensigin, a powerful senet beast, to learn how to destroy the Dhammakhert in exchange for bringing her two toes, who she considers her children (and they consider her mother). She tells him that he must cause enough unrest in Alderode for them to cast the Etalarche curse on him, which will infect the country's population with a Hate Plague that specifically targets him. She neglects to tell him until after the curse is cast that the next step involves having his soul melted and dissected to learn the method of destroying the Dhammakhert, which will cause Roger to cease to exist, as his soul and memories will be unable to return to the khert as they normally would when one dies. Roger is not happy when he finds this out.
  • Lemuel made some kind of deal with the Black Tongues trying to circumvent Duane's death rather than prevent his assassination. This did not work out like he was hoping it would, and when Duane finally stops avoiding admitting that he was betrayed to his current fate he is utterly heartbroken and furious.
• xkcd was all over this as a way to make fun of End-User License Agreements.
• In Zoophobia, it's a demon's job to trick mortals into selling their souls. But interestingly, tormenting their signatories may not always be intentional. While Satan agreed to grant his nephew immortality as a favor, the nature of his magic forced him to grant it as a curse. Thus, while Jack can’t die and heals quickly, he still feels pain and regularly suffers “fatal” accidents thanks to unnaturally bad luck.

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