Author Guest Spot

Being insulted by your own characters is a common side effect.

Authors of webcomics are fond of, whenever they want to address the reader more directly, inserting themselves right into the strip. Often they use an exaggerated, partially fictionalised version of themselves, especially if they "appear" frequently. Of course, this is not merely a webcomic trope, but more 'professional' or serious works tend to shy away from it. (Except for Animal Man.)

A sillier and less Fourth Wall-threatening version of this trope is the Author Avatar. If the author or other staff are playing characters instead of being themselves (or an Avatar thereof), it's a case of Descended Creator. If the author or staff members are simply appearing in scenes without being given much importance, it's a Creator Cameo. These can all have some overlap, but please be mindful of these distinctions.

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Examples:

Webcomics

• Mark Shallow a.k.a. Webrunner occasionally inserted himself into Adventurers! but never interacted with the characters.
• Paul Gadzikowski made a point of not doing this in Arthur, King of Time and Space, the closest being characters reading notes from "the Management", despite Guenevere pointing out that author inserts were a tradition of both webcomics and Arthurian romance. He finally broke this rule for the announcement that he was wrapping it up.
• Sophie Labelle of Assigned Male sometimes just draws herself into certain strips, such as this one.
• It took a while for Mat Sherer to appear in Badly Drawn Kitties, but he finally did, proving he's not a transexual or something.
• Bob and George took this to a logical extreme, with several plots hanging on the manipulations of the Author (a purple Mega Man recolour). There was even an Evil Counterpart of him, the Helmeted Author, and a Freakazoid-like version that was supposedly what happened to the author after drinking an expired soda (though he ended up appearing separately too).
• Ian McDonald, of Bruno the Bandit, occasionally appears in the strip as a very, very muscular Deus ex Machina.
• When Catena was still active, Tracy and/or DeBray Bailey occasionally appeared in strips, usually when announcing a hiatus or convention appearance. Tracy occasionally wore a Darth Vader mask in her appearances.
• Tim Buckley of Ctrl+Alt+Del.
  • He's also had Mohammad Haque, creator of Applegeeks and friend of his, appear in his comic.
• Amber Williams of Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures often appears outside the context of the comic to lampshade events happening within the strip, such as here.
• Jennie Breeden of The Devil's Panties occasionally appears alongside her comic persona.
• Lora Innes of The Dreamer sometimes inserts herself and friends/family into the background.
• The artist of Ears for Elves draws herself, in the style of the comic, when making announcements, doing Q&A pages, and sometimes in filler strips. She also drew Archmage (the site maintainer) in the Halloween cosplay filler, by which he wasn't impressed.
• Brian Clevinger has inserted himself into 8-Bit Theater with a sprite that looks a bit like Megaman except in a pants and T-Shirt, but never in the canonical setting. Also, he eventually stopped doing this altogether.
• In El Goonish Shive, Dan Shive has a special "meddling squirrel" avatar character (who is known to change his own gender (and that of other people!) at whim) for when he addresses the readers directly.
• Girl Genius artist and co-writer Phil Foglio makes a few guest appearances, including the very first page. As does Kaja Foglio, his wife and co-writer.
• Andrew Hussie has appeared several times in Homestuck to deliver explicitly-fourth-wall-breaking Recap Episodes and other occasional side gags, and near Act 5.2's conclusion embarked on a sidequest to wrest back control over telling the story from Doc Scratch.
• One of the themes in Irregular Webcomic! is called "Me", starring creator David Morgan-Mar, although he stated that the character is not him and does not necessarily represent his opinions. Gets particularly bizarre when he dies and interacts with the characters from his webcomics, as a live action person among Lego figure Deaths.
  • It's even weirder as his murderer is himself from the future.
    • It gets weirder. When he chooses not to murder himself when he time-travels to the past, he causes a Time Paradox that ended up destroying multiple realities from nearly all the themes except the "espionage" theme.
• Carefree Shadow appears occasionally in his comic Laser Feet as a bearded man who has the ability to turn his feet into lasers.
• Erik Schoeneck, author of Loserz. For example, here.
• The two male leads of Megatokyo, Piro and Largo, were named after the nicknames the creators were using at the time. Whenever Fred Gallagher speaks to the readers in a DPD or OSE, he does so using the image of the "Piro" character as his avatar, sometimes with rectangular glasses for distinctiveness. At the end of most chapters, his wife, Sarah ("Seraphim") does this with her avatar character as well.
• My Cage: Ed Porker and Melissa DeHaresus appear in the "Meet Your Maker" story.
• Shaenon Garrity sometimes used the Sunday strips of Narbonic to address the reader directly. This continued in Skin Horse, with her sharing the stage with co-writer Jeff C. Wells.
• Shivian of Oh My Gods! speaks occasionally with his characters, but only as speech bubbles. The characters also often reference his (lack of) social life.
• Opey The Warhead has Zac Crockett insert a self-depreciating version of himself at the end of every Opey the Warhead chapter.
• The Perpetual Aquarium has the author occasionally appear as a ball of light to talk to the audience or the characters directly. There are also occasional parenthetical comments which reference something outside the comic, usually a specific fan or event, of which the characters would not have any reason to be aware.
• Mae Dean of Real Life Comics regularly interacts with her characters as a Voice Of God style speech-bubble-from-above. The characters are shown completely self-aware of their status as comic characters during these exchanges, and frequently abuse and berate her for the ridiculous scenarios she puts them through.
  • This is made more interesting by the fact that the main character is herself a fictionalized version of Dean. Combined with the fact that the "voice of Author" is sometimes herself somewhat fictionalized, this creates a dizzying spectrum of fiction and metafiction.
  • She will also appear in the strip, manifesting as comic-Mae, but wearing brown instead of blue.
• The author of Sabrina Online often appears in strips.
• Schlock Mercenary: Especially during the earlier days of the strip when the Fourth Wall was much more permeable, artist and author Howard Tayler occasionally appeared in the comic, including one time as the equivalent of Saint Peter when Kevyn Andreyasn died, in The Sharp End of the Stick.
• David Willis has been seen a couple times in Shortpacked!, once getting in a fight with Ethan over an Edit War on the Transformers Wiki.
• In Sleepless Domain, Mary Cagle used a purple amorphous version of herself (think The Purple One but with Mary's glasses) to promote her appearances at comic conventions, guest comics, or her Kickstarters. Not to be confused with Ms. Cable, Cagle's Creator Cameo, who's Tessa's new teacher.
• When Pete Abrams of Sluggy Freelance addresses his audience personally, he draws himself as a faceless, supernaturally glowing, godlike being (possibly as a parody of the depictions of God in certain Jack Chick tracts).
  • In a guest artist's story line in late January 2007, the glowing faceless Pete was given the "Wizard of Oz" treatment.
• Randy Milholand often addresses the audience directly in Something*Positive, though he never interacts with his other characters, appearing with his jerkass muse Rippy the Razor in "Life With Rippy" strips.
• The author of Stickman and Cube occasionally appears in disembodied voice form, usually to reveal whatever new tack he's trying to milk more money and pageviews out of the readers. The two title characters are usually quite unimpressed.
• in Triquetra Cats whenever the author(s) need to address the audience they show up in a stylized (and sometimes anthropomorphized version of their appearance speaking in fonts made from their own handwriting.
• Illiad of User Friendly usually turns up in his thirty-second "nag strips", politely begging for donations, with a paper bag over his head.
  • She'll also pop up at random to answer questions from readers in strip format.
• Erin Lindsey often does strips like this in her comic Venus Envy.
• The 'real life' Anne Onymous and Robin Ericson of The Wotch had to create separate avatar characters whose appearances were distinct from the characters of the same names in the series when they had a reason to address the audience.
  • And Anne's gets lampshaded that it's just the character with a beret.

Comic Books

• In the All American Comics story "Sheldon Mayer meets the Red Tornado", Sheldon Mayer, the writer, meets the Red Tornado, as well as various other creations of his, and is so disheartened by their criticism that he actually tries to commit suicide! (The Red Tornado saves him.)
• Daniel Clowes did this with a visit to "Planet Eightball." His characters live there, treating Clowes as a Hollywood agent, trying to get him to draw them into more comics.
• Grant Morrison did this to top off twenty-six mindscrewriffic issues of Animal Man. Their self-insert was called "The Writer", who ironically ended up appearing again in a Suicide Squad tie-in to War of the Gods event, stuck in another writer's story as a consequence of writing themselves into continuity.
• Jhonen Vasquez has inserted himself into Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Squee, each time with liberal Take Thats against some of his fanbase, especially those who compare him to Johnny C. And also frequent Take Thats to himself.
• Monica's Gang writers and artists pretty much have carte blanche to do this whenever they feel like it. Sometimes they're outside the 'comic' they're drawing, having to answer the characters' criticisms of where the plot is going. Sometimes, they appear within the comic itself. Sometimes they just appear as Lemony Narrators or Speech Bubbles that are going outside the panels.
• In Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud is the narrator and delivers most of the dialogue. Essentially justified, since that's the point.

Comic Strips

• Chip Dunham's newspaper strip Overboard has frequent appearances by the cartoonist (kept anonymous but presumably based on Dunham himself), who occupies an office marked "Overboard, Inc." aboard the pirate ship that serves as the comic's setting.
• In the newspaper comic strip Pearls Before Swine, cartoonist Stephan Pastis shows up as himself from time to time.
  • On one occasion, he collaborated with Darby Conley, cartoonist of Get Fuzzy, for a brief arc in which Conley saved himself considerable work by pasting clippings of his own characters over the main characters of each day's Pearls Before Swine, and painted Conley as an apathetic jerk who was more interested in the extra free time he got from ripping off Pastis' hard work. You guessed it, Conley (and Pastis!) appeared in Get Fuzzy, as Steven tried to get Darby to go back to doing his own work.

Western Animation

• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Goons on the Moon", Squidward has a brief run-in with his voice actor, Rodger Bumpass.

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