Jigsaw Puzzle Plot / Webcomics

• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja showed signs of this, courtesy of King Radical, Charles Goodrich and Frans Rayner, in that order. Fortunately, there was a big reveal eventually and the series ended up with almost everything explained.
• The Artist is Dead!! takes a little piecing together. Chapter Pi doesn't help things.
• Awful Hospital starts with a simple enough premise: a mother trying to find her sick son in an otherworldy hospital, but as the series goes on, it is clear that something larger is afoot, but the audience at most is only given glimpses of the larger encompassing universe at a time. Still, as the arcs go on, the setting starts to make more sense, to the point that even the Techno Babble the characters often use start to become comprehensible.
• Bob and George. Started out as a filler sprite comic while the author learned how to draw, stuff kept happening and we end up with multiple parallel universes, various alternate timelines, clones, doppelgangers, etc. And it still all worked out in the end. David Anez is either the most talented jigsaw plotter ever or the King of Ass Pull. Possibly both.
• In Creative Release, figuring the actual plot out (versus the phenomena it provokes) is akin to a puzzle game. Most pages contain hints, but that's just what they are — hints. Connecting the various hints together is hardly easy.
• Darths & Droids is a comic portraying the Star Wars saga as a role-playing game campaign. Once in a while, the players will mention, discuss, or even complain about other campaigns they'd played "off-screen" in between the Star Wars campaigns. These off-screen campaigns are also based from pop-culture stories and movies, but Darths and Droids never explicitly tells us what the reference is — instead the players will drop highly obscure clues about those off-screen campaigns, leaving it up to the readers and fans to piece it together and figure it out. These mentions are often peppered throughout a whole year of comics.
• Decrypting Rita has four alternate universes with semi-overlapping stories told in parallel, some of which are in partial Anachronic Order, but at least each world is color coded.
• El Goonish Shive, and thanks to Dan Shive's bitter refusal to ever tie things up, some of the pieces just collect dust.
• Erfworld requires a huge amount of attention to detail just to figure out the rules of the world, and that still leaves the mystery of what exactly the world is, and who is working behind the scenes.
• Girl Genius has plot elements that are still being worked out and mysteries in the main plot that started on the third page.
• Goblins has something of a Jigsaw Puzzle Plot, with various Cryptic Prophecies and two current main story arcs, with a couple of other villains floating around, all of which seem likely to come into confluence at some point.
• Gunnerkrigg Court: A bizarre fantasy/science-fiction mixture with loads of unresolved mysteries. Fans sometimes joke that for every question a chapter answers, it brings up at least 10 more. Author Tom Sidell has a Word of God mail slot, but doesn't give away much (aside from his Catchphrase of sorts, "Mystery Solved!"). Coyote even lampshaded this in-story.
• Homestuck — A video game turns out to be a harbinger of the apocalypse, destroying the world while the players, including one raised by a spacetime-bending dog, escape to timeless alternate universes to break stalemates between anthropomorphic chess pieces while aided by strange beings from a ruined world; meanwhile, aliens from another alternate universe have recently finished playing the same game by subtly different rules while tending to multiversal Eldritch Abominations. Then it just gets confusing...
  • This is Lampshaded; the term "Ultimate Riddle" is mentioned by a few characters. During one section the reader progresses through the story by clicking on pictures that fell from a scrapbook, which metaphorically translates into the reader picking up pieces that fell from a puzzle and seeing how they all fit.
  • According to Andrew Hussie himself, this trope is probably the best summary of Homestuck we're gonna get:
  "The thing is, Homestuck is both a story and a puzzle, by design and by definition. If asked to define it, “a story that’s also a puzzle” is as close to true as any answer I’d give."
  • Lampshaded by Caliborn as representative of the anti-fans of Homestuck:
    uu: I HAVE NOTICED. AS YOuR AWFuL MEANDERING SAGA WENDS ITS WAY. THROuGH THE ASS CRACK OF NOWHERE AND BACK.
    uu: ANSWERS TO POINTLESS QuESTIONS ARE OFTEN DEFERRED. NIGH INDEFINITELY.
• Last Res0rt not only has a Jigsaw Puzzle Plot, it actually LAMPSHADES this; the working title of the series was actually "Jigsaw's Puzzle" until the show became a bigger focus than the character.
• The story in The Letters Of The Devil appears simple at first, but it becomes progressively more complex as more and more clues surface.
• The Mansion of E tends to spend more time leisurely exploring the eponymous structure more than answering plot questions.
• morphE is designed this way. It specifically alternates between character development, world building and plot development leaving cookie crumbs to answer the Driving Question.
  • Chapter 2 ends with a brief glimpse into a private meeting with Amical and his guards which offered a little insight into what he expects of the seedlings, but not enough information to be sure of what.
  • Chapter 3 involves the three main seedlings calling their families. The narrative didn't elaborate on the history of some of the things they were saying. Asia in particular leaves a lot of intrigue for debate given the clues we have been given about her abnormal upbringing which resulted in her being "rescued".
• Paranatural starts out as a fairly standard, if somewhat silly, parody of shonen anime with a school club that fights ghosts, a main character with a pretty standard backstory and a lot of fun quips at genre conventions. And then it turns out that there's at least four secret societies with different goals vying for power, including a cult run by seemingly unrelated townsfolk, a fragmented diety, an angel, and a Vampire. That isn't including that the main character's mentor is definitely hiding some plans of his own, as is said mentor's oldest friend, estranged sister, and boyfriend. Even the background characters are involved in tiny pieces of a gigantic overarching plot, including a student council that may be the only thing standing in the way of the Vampire, a 'rebellious factor' opposing them led by another ambiguously human student, and perhaps even a looming apocalypse. And that's not even mentioning the talking rabbits.
• Ruby Nation forms its story with scenes and textual ephemera from various points in the timeline, often revealing information out-of-sequence (such as with Elise's brainwashing).
• Sluggy Freelance is either this or a straight up Kudzu Plot, depending on who you ask during what arc. It has got so thick on details that Pete's started including reference links to the archives, in case readers have forgotten the plot point he's currently explaining. At least a lot of the plots, especially earlier on, seem to get resolved by the end of a story; it may be (intentionally) impossible to tell what's really going on, but it's not too confusing to figure out what happens and is revealed during a particular plot before another story comes in and reveals that wasn't all.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: After the Distant Prologue taking place Just Before the End, the reader gets dumped into a time period ninety years After the End. Anything about the setting not spelled out in the Encyclopedia Exposita or by characters themselves needs to be pieced together via various hints given in the story itself. On occasion, the narration of events unfolding in the story's present turns into this.

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