1/0 declared "war" on another webcomic on September 11th of 2000.
ThisAchewood strip suddenly got a lot less amusing when news of a sex tape (link SFW), falsely attributed to be of the real Meg White, was released almost a year afterward.
Alfie (2010): The beginning of Chapter 12 has a rather heartwarming flashback where Vera Tolman reassures her young daughter Alphanea that the whispers and bullying she receives from the inhabitants of their hometown are not really aimed at her, but fallout from the hostility directed at Vera herself for a number of reasons; ending with the words "... such a good girl! Everybody loves you." The denouement at the end of the chapter makes it clear how much Alfie, now a woman grown and on a trade caravan well on it's way to the Kingdoms of Men after a painful falling out with her mother, has internalized the unspoken (and to Vera's credit, unintended) corollary that if it becomes known that she is not a "good girl" she will receive the full level of hatred Vera endured for all of Alfie's lifetime. Her unreasoning terror of that fate, or to be more precise her frantic attempt to avoid it, not only estranges her from two of the very few sincere friends she has ever had ("benefits" are involved, as it is that sort of webcomic, however the friendship is real) but scuttles the tentative beginnings of an actual romantic relationship.
Most of the interactions involving housekeepers in Anecdote of Error:
Shimei’s taunts are bad from the start, but become even worse once we learn that she bullies Atshi because she thinks she’s being uppity.
Luntsha never gets the chance to tutor Atshi in magic like she said she’d do on page 27, because she gets expelled just a few days later in Webcomic Time. Even worse, two pages later she says, “They won’t kick you out. At least, not on my watch.”
In Awful Hospital, the resident Mad Doctors and their Comically Inept Healing attempts get a lot grimmer in retrospect when the protagonist learns that the Hospital and, by association, the very concept of medical care is being sabotaged, driving the doctors insane and eroding their ability to understand what's helping or hurting their patients.
Dr. Phage:Gaps in my understanding of reality are widening. I can feel it. ... There is little we can do but to continue our work as healers to the best of that ability, however fractured that ability might become. Dr. Phage: We'll have those hearts pumping healthy yellow bile again in no time!
A super-compressed in-universe example in Batman and Sons: In the first strip of the Loeb tribute, Batman suffers a BSOD when he recalls his last Halloween costume before his parents' deaths—
Thomas Wayne: And who are you supposed to be, son?
Young Bruce Wayne: I'm Death! And you're a dead man, Daddy!
Boy Meets Boy: An exorcist mentions going to a horrible alternate dimension — "a world where George Bush is reelected in 2004."
ThisBrawl in the Family comic, doubly so, because not only did the Ice Climbers end up getting cut from Smash for Wii U/3DS, Snake, the other character in this comic, did as well. To make matters worse, the author comments below the comic mentions the possibility of the 3DS not being able to handle the Ice Climbers, which ended up being the reason they got cut: the 3DS just doesn't have the power to keep up with four sets of Ice Climbers at once without serious lag or framerate drops.
This comic of Bug Martini talked about attacking Paris; it became a lot less funny in 2015 after the Chariie Hebdo shootings that January and even less funny after the much deadlier attacks ten months later.
An early running gag has Roger vehemently deny being a werecoyote, despite the fact that nobody accused him of being one. By the time he reveals that he is one, the strip's taken a dark enough turn that a terrible bloodlust, to which his mother has already succumbed, is a major plot point.
Another early story has April and Roger get possessed by ghosts inhabiting a television set and a hairdryer, respectively, to do battle. Later stories show that Roger is particularly vulnerable to possession by Satan in his werecoyote form, and April's gradual progression to Yandere and eventually Manipulative Bastard is implied to be at least partially due to Satanic influence.
The king of them all, however, is in the earliest storyline of note: A paranoid Marsha stabs Mike, hospitalizing him. Immediately afterward, she blames April, because "Miss Wimpy didn't want any bloodstains on her wimpy clothes!" It's Only a Flesh Wound, and Mike (a consummate Manipulative Bastard) recovers perfectly, then leverages Marsha's guilt to start off their relationship. In a much later storyline, Mike is Killed Off for Real when April, following an argument with Marsha about her relationship with Mike, fatally stabs him.
In this comic, Nintendo mentions how she's told investors a million times that she's NOT interested in making iOS games and asks them to stop asking her about it. Some weeks later...
One of Nintendo's terrible advice "spam mails" says to "replace [her] boss", referring of course to Nintendo's CEO and president at the time, Satoru Iwata, who was often critizised by analysts and investors. After Iwata's death in 2015, suddenly this became a lot less funny...
A Ctrl+Alt+Del Silly strips made this joke at the end of 2008, about Death needing to "break his record" of famous-people deaths in 2009. He managed.
In Cuanta Vida: "If I killed 'em, they'ed replace 'em with someone faster." Poor, poor Liam.
ThisDominic Deegan strip features Greg complaining about his magic being called a "super power". A few years later, there would be some agreement on that point.
In Drowtales, thisfiller of Snadhya'rune demanding a refund for Kalki was put up during the publishing of chapter 46, and became a lot less funny at the end of that chapter when Snadhya brutally murdered Kalki and declared her nothing but a tool.
Sometime in 2010, ITN reported on an Indonesian boy, then 2-years-old, who started smoking at the age of 18 months.
In July 2013, ParentDish UK had an article headlined "Parents who smoke 'deprive their kids of food, clothes and presents to fund habit'".
In the Electric Wonderland comic "Shrooming with Shroomy," Nina Wing deems all of her StreamVue streaming service's pre-2050 content a waste of space, then deletes it from the servers, requiring consumers to watch it through less convenient or legal means. Ten years later, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zslav would begin removing vintage and original programming from their own streaming service, HBO Max, for the sake of tax write-downs. The owners of Paramount+ and Disney+ later did the same.
In an Exterminatus Now strip, Lothar theorizes that Australian entertainer Rolf Harris is actually a pedophile based on his mannerisms and elements of his show. Eastwood reacts furiously and storms off in disgust, calling Harris a "national treasure", with the joke being that only someone as cynical and selfish as Lothar could ever think such a thing. Come 2014 and Harris is arrested for child molestation, meaning Lothar was right all along. To make matters worse, the strip was accompanied by a disclaimer reminding the readers that the opinions of the characters didn't necessarily coincide with the opinions of the authors (despite said characters being self-inserts). Which means presumably they all thought the world of Harris as well until the news came out.
ThisFull Frontal Nerdity with Death apologizing for a rash of celebrity deaths in early 2016 ends with a joke about how Abe Vigoda was safe. In real life, Abe Vigoda died (of old age) less than a week after the comic was published.
Girly. Literally everything the two heroines go through becomes one big moment when it's revealed that it was all pre-set up by the villains to prepare one of the heroines to lead their uprising.
Go Get a Roomie! has Ramona picking up a guy but not wanting to go through her usual dominatrix routine with him, which has caused some amused comments and discussion, seeing the lengths Ramona has to go to get something as "good, plain vanilla sex". She ends up asking the guy to grab her by the wrists and have rough sex with her in a back alley — one strip later, a visibly shaken Ramona returns to the bar and confides in her friends that the guy broke down crying in the middle of the act because his mother lived through this very same scenario, only she was raped.
A EGS:NP strip has Susan and Sarah discussing vampire romance novels and how they would translate into real life. It turns out she was almost killed by the way she described would happen in a vampire romance.
Abraham being incredulous about the nature of Ellen's "curse" is funny until you realize that he's angry/freaked out because he vowed to kill whatever the diamond made, and that means he would have to kill something human.
To make it worse, not only is Elliot's improper awakening a direct result of Ellen's creation, her partially magical biology means that her Awakening will be a lot easier to handle than Elliot's.
Kat's belongings sometimes have the names of bands printed on them. In this page, her shirt reads Sparklehorse. Mark Linkous, who led that band, committed suicide 2 months prior to the page being published. Considering the 30-page buffer kept by the author, it would seem that the page itself was made a few weeks before it happened. It has been confirmed by Word of God that this was intended as a tribute.
After triggering a warning klaxon, Annie quite calmly states that she dislikes alarms. A few chapters later, there's a flashback to when she was much younger and had to experience a ghost child's memories of dying in a house fire, complete with smoke alarms.
Some of Allie's comical references to feeling miserable about her life and/or having low self-esteem can be kind of Tear Jerkers in light of her struggle with severe depression. Feel better, Allie!
A few of the earlier posts mention Allie doesn't shower very often. A common sign of depression is not taking good care of personal hygiene, like putting off showers.
An Irregular Webcomic! strip involved a character who is obviously not Steve Irwin not dying from a fatal snakebite because Death was on strike. It had the annotation, "Oh come on. You all knew Steve wouldn't die." The strip in question came out on the exact day of Irwin's death (although it was composed some three weeks before). This is pointed out in the annotation.
Lil Formers having strips poking fun at Transformers: Animated have become far less enjoyable to read after the sudden death of artist Derrick J. Wyatt in late 2021 at age 42.
Ryujin, the main deuteragonist of the Manhua Under PRIN, is usually terrified of women, and comically so. He even refuses to perform in a girls' college due to this, when singing is the only way for him to earn bread for his son Miryu, which leads to some really hilarious moments between the son and father. This, however, becomes very tearjerking, horrifying and disturbing after it's revealed that he was forced to rape his adoptive sister in the past, and by extension he himself was raped. To elaborate: His mother, the Demon Queen, forcefully fed him the demons' blood, which enabled her to take complete control over his body. She then proceeded to rape his sister while he was conscious during the whole time, unable to do anything because of her absolute control over his body, which means that it wasn't just the sister who was violated, but Ryujin too. Yes, she, his own mother, rapedboth of themat the same time. This horribly traumatized both the siblings, destroyed Ryujin's already low self-esteem completely and was the incident that gave him his gynophobia. After this is revealed, the funny moments related to his gynophobia in the early chapters are no longer funny, but outright tragic.
Megatokyo has this fairly early strip depicting what would happen if Fred worked without Rodney, or vice-versa. Two years later, Rodney stopped contributing to the comic; the old joke strip turned out to be, in many ways, pretty accurate.
Mulberry had a 2015 BANG! Magazine-exclusive story, "My Fat Lady", that comes off as this after the release of Ghostbusters (2016). The comic has Mulberry help Melissa McCarthy re-develop a less self-shameful sense of humor, earning the movie a reception as glowing as that of Ghostbusters (1984). The hopes that Ghostbusters would boast one of McCarthy's least crude performances would eventually come true, but it would only earn a So Okay, It's Average critical reception and box office performancenote a 73% Rotten Tomatoes score vs. the original's 97%, and a worldwide gross that covered the production budget, but not advertising.
The Oatmeal: In the strip "How to Perfectly Load a Dishwasher," the joke is to do such a terrible job that your spouse throws you out of the kitchen and loads its themselves. In the years since this strip came out, this tactic has come to be known as weaponized incompetence. It's most commonly used for the exact situation described here: lazy husbands getting out of housework by pretending they're too stupid to manage it and forcing more work onto their wives. The strip may have been comedic, but this behavior is now recognized as a sign of an unhealthy marriage.
The punch line of this strip is a retroactive example. The aneurysm doesn't come until you remember (or read, if you hadn't already) the Start of Darkness prequel in which you realize just how low Xykon can go (and how painfully aware Redcloak is of it).
There's also the Cliffport police chief talking about how the mayor was going to have his head on a pike because of the ruckus Nale caused. A couple of strips later, Nale cuts off the Chief's head and impales it on his sword.Mmm...shishkabobs.
"It may be the last night alive for many of those girls you just told to 'chill out'. It might even be the last night for you, or one of your friends."
Elan picturing Roy as a surrogate older brother becomes less funny when you realize that Roy really did have a younger brother who might have become a bard, had he not died in an accident at a young age.
In one strip, Xykon says to Redcloak after he murdered Tsukiko: "If you had to smoke her, you had to smoke her. Hell knows I've had occasion to off an uppity minion in my day." This sounds like Xykon being his usual Affably Evil self, until you've read Start of Darkness, where Redcloak's younger brother attempted to kill Xykon to avenge his family, and Redcloak was forced to kill him. Its one of many ways Xykon subtly torments Redcloak.
In this strip, Haley claims it'll take "200-foot tall flaming letters" to help convince Elan that his Affably Evil long-lost father is really bad news. This strip makes a rather dark joke about it when that turns out to be the case, as Elan his horrified when his father spells out Elan's name in the burned-alive bodies of rebellious slaves, the same ones Haley and Vaarsuvius freed in an earlier strip.
After meeting Tarquin for the first time, he makes a comment about how his latest wife died under "mysterious circumstances". While initially treated as a joke about how Obviously Evil Tarquin is (and how blind Elan is to that fact), it becomes less funny dozens of strips later when it turns out he was telling the truth; his wife was killed as part of Vaarsuvius' Familicide spell, along with the rest of the heroic Draketooth clan and who knows how many other innocents that just happened to share relation to a certain black dragon.
The last panel of this strip, in which Dora freaks out about possibly sabotaging her relationship with Marten, has this effect if you've read through the rest of the series.
It gets worse — Jeph Jacques has admitted to a dependence on alcohol and a series of mental issues, so the dozens of strips about depressive people drinking heavily to unwind gets a bit uncomfortable.
In comic 1720, an exasperated Dora tells (a mildly terrified) Hannelore and Cosette that "It's a friggin' coffee shop. Don't show up drunk or high and try not to fuck up too much and you'll be fine." Many strips later, during a alcohol-fueled downwards spiral, Faye shows up to work drunk, and gets fired. It's one of the series' hardest moments to take.
Back in 1999, Penny Arcade published a strip about Duke Nukem Forever, which became funnier with each year of the game's famously long development (which, back then, had only been over two years.) Almost a decade later, its developer shut down. Especially good because the strip more-or-less illustrated whyDuke Nukem Forever didn't come out when it was supposed to, long before anyone outside the production company knew. The company just kept playing around instead of delivering the promised game to a distributor (the distributor changed midway); by the time they took the deadline seriously (Take-Two was less patient than the previous distributor), they were no longer able to get the money to complete it. Of course, now that the game was actuallyreleased (and debuted at PAX no less!), the strip has changed to a Hilarious in Hindsight.
Roommates has/had a Running Gag about Jareth failing to do good despite his best intentions and efforts... after the Dark!Jareth arc that got some pretty heavy subtext. As a fictional character he can't defy the story and his role in it, doesn't matter how desperately he may try.
An extremely fast one in Scary Go Round, which introduced a parody of Michael Jackson with a Creepy Child servant just a couple weeks before his death. The author commented:
John Allison: The last thing anyone expects, when they have introduced a character who is a kind of grotesque version of a world superstar, is for that superstar to die. It is entirely possible that Michael Jackson sat down to read Scary Go Round yesterday, began to turn slowly purple at what he saw, and collapsed clutching his arm. Actually I know that isn't true. Jackson was on record (citation needed) as more of a Dresden Codak man.
In Schlock Mercenary, this strip became less funny when Brad failed to survive a similar incident because of his Heroic Sacrifice to prevent civilian casualties on the ground.
Shortpacked!: This strip. The panel with Amber saying she's pregnant suddenly becomes really disturbing due to Faz being Amber's (half) brother.
A demon hunter named Steve Uozin was an obvious Captain Ersatz of Steve Irwin... until he was stabbed through the torso in February of 2005. (By a demon rather than a stingray, but still...)
Five years before that, during a Halloween special, Uozin had been stabbed in the heart by a demon's spear. A demon spear that was referred to as a 'squid-on-a-stick', no less...
This strip of A Softer World illustrates what seems like a rather improbable idea of what causes terrorists to be terrorists. But a later sociological study discovered that many of them don't really care about their cause, and if their mission is actually accomplished they just move on to another extremist group. It concluded that a large proportion really aresocial rejects who can't find friends anywhere else, and are willing to kill for the sake of that bond.
The Distant Prologue spends most of its run pretending to be a typical disease outbreak story, making the comic join a long list of works that can be harder to read after Covid-19 became a pandemic in 2020. On top of this, the Rash (the comic's iteration of The Plague) and Covid-19 both have a Typhoid Mary phase that can last up to two weeks and possibly share means of transmission noteThe Rash isn't outright stated to have a droplet transmission mode in-comic, but the ways it can be caught from infected, but non-zombified people fit with one.
The Finland segment of the prologue in particular accidentally became a snapshot of its 2020 real-life counterpart. By that point, people are wearing face masks in public and someone discusses a possible future ban on public gathering places. There is also a radio show host complaining about Sweden stalling the closure of its borders, which is the main anti-Rash measure countries are taking one after another in the comic; during the Covid-19 pandemic, Sweden became notorious for having significantly more lax lockdown measures than the other Nordics.
VG Cats had a small gag, in its 26th comic, about Elmo getting caught in a sex scandal. Years later, statutory rape allegations were made against Kevin Clash (Elmo's puppeteer, who had the job when the strip was published and ultimately had it for over 30 years), forcing him to resign.
A relatively minor example, which could become major, in Wondermark: this strip made fun of an internet overuser, and joked about what she would do if the Internet vanished. Less than two months later, the strip's website and several of the sites listed in the comic joined a large-scale Internet blackout in protest of SOPA, a bill that could cause many sites to be blacked out permanently.
In the alt-text for this comic about hurricanes, the author expresses interest in damage assessments for hurricanes hitting New York City. Then Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy happened.
The mouseover text for strip #625, "Collections", reads: "You know what really helps an existential crisis? Wondering how much shelf space to leave for a Terry Pratchett collection."
In YU+ME: dream , in Part One, Jake sarcastically tells Lia, "I'm just pretending to be gay for all of the social benefits it brings” — the joke being that so far in the comic, he’s caught nothing but flak for his homosexuality. In Part Two, after it's revealed that everything in Part One was All Just a Dream for Fiona played by actors in the dream world of Nod, it's revealed that the dream actor who played Jake, Sebastian, is actually a "straight douche" who won a Dreamy Award for his portrayal of Jake. The commentary on the site when active (and later in the omnibus) suggests that Sebastian primarily won the award because of the misperception that it's a huge challenge for a straight actor to play a gay character.
Achewood strip suddenly got a lot less amusing when news of a sex tape