Generic Graffiti

The artist's signature is just about legible, if you know what you're looking for

"I just wrote on the wall: Take that, society!"

— Graffiti sprayed on a wall in an episode of Family Guy

Since the 1970s, graffiti have become an increasingly common occurrence in urban areas, and you probably won't find a back alley or an underpass that doesn't have a handful of tags sprayed on, unless it's been recently buffed. Therefore, when works of fiction deal with modern urban settings, graffiti cannot exactly be ignored. In live-action movies and TV series, one can just film the real things, but with comics, animation and video games, the artists must stretch their own imagination. One solution, which doesn't involve creating more detail than necessary, is to make the graffiti too illegible to mean anything at all, just random marks that may or may not look like they were intended as writing.

Since most artists don't have an aerosol-scented past, graffiti are usually ignored, unless used as a plot point, such as conveying Arc Words. Also, you rarely see massive murals painted as homages to the neighborhood.

Also a popular form of territorial marking by Gangbangers. See also Bathroom Stall Graffiti, Sweetie Graffiti.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The America episode in Excel♡Saga featured hilariously Gratuitous English graffiti.
• AKIRA features plenty of graffiti written in English. Mostly simple, generic phrases ("DIE PUNKS", "FUCK YOU", etc).
• In case we forget where she came from, Revy from Black Lagoon mentions how the painting in the "Das Wieder Erstehen Des Adlers" arc isn't any better-looking than New York subway graffiti. There's also a scene with Bathroom Stall Graffiti, including rather generic scribbling.
• Samurai Champloo had an episode involving some graffiti artists. Then Mugen gets in on it.
• Averted in Monster, where some of the graffiti is thematically related (in a slightly meta way) to the plot or surrounding scenery.

Arts

• In 1977, the United Nations Postal Administration issued stamps for its New York headquarters with the words "Combat Racism" written as a graffito.

Comic Books

• Watchmen has no tags in sight. "Who Watches the Watchmen" is painted liberally on any available surface, as well as a lot of band names and other thematic stuff.
  • There is one notable tag. Artist Dave Gibbons drew a stylized "G" as part of the repeating graffiti, usually alongside "Who Watches the Watchmen?". So you could say that he tagged the landscape.
• In The Filth, the tagged underside of a bridge has some tags, but mostly ties in with the theme of the story.
• The Phantom visits New York in one story, and one wall has a graffito reading "Lee Falk Was Here", Falk being the author of the strip.
• The Swedish strip Rocky has a Running Gag where the word "Penis" is spray-painted everywhere.
• Hellblazer featured graffiti reading notable fans names.
• Averted by Brandon Graham, who is actually was a graffiti artist when he was younger so he usually has fairly authentic looking tags littered throughout the environments of his comics.
• in City Of Silence by Warren Ellis and Gary Erskine most of the Graffiti are scrawled phrases like "No Mercy No Future" or "Psycho Christian Rappers Suck".
• In Top 10, the graffiti around Neopolis is a part of the background feel of a city inhabited exclusively by super-heroes and super-villains. Almost all of it is parodies of comics tag-lines throughout history or the territorial tags of Neopolis street gangs, who are themselves parodies of super-teams. The men-room graffiti at Godz (a bar patronized solely by Physical Gods) is oriented toward the mythological clientele of the bar.
• Johnny the Homicidal Maniac may lack the more artistic forms of graffiti, but averts this trope when he takes advantage of using the graffiti to help set the mood, reference something, or poke fun at typical writings found on bathroom walls, Such as "If you looking for a good time, don't call me. I am boring."
• Averted in The Invisibles, where King Mob is often portrayed as tagging properly.
• Averted in Marshal Law. The city and the comic book are absolutely covered in graffiti, most of it pop culture satire. Half the fun of the book is reading it, a personal favorite is "Real men don't write slogans."
• Issue #50 of the third X-Factor comic book series ends with a character walking past a wall covered with graffiti for the names and initials of the various creators who've worked on the title.
• Much like the film of V for Vendetta the young girl does graffiti ("BOLLOCKS" and then a V) once the cameras go down. Except she survives.
• In The Powerpuff Girls story "Bow Jest" (DC Comics, issue #20), Mojo Jojo's jail cell has "All Your Base Are Belong To Mojo" scribbled on the wall.
  • In the Rowdyruff Boys' first comic book appearance, "Anything Boys Can Do, Squirrels Can Do Better" (Cartoon Network Action Pack #1) the boys challenge the Powerpuffs to a football game. In the opening panel, the boys are scribbling demeaning graffiti about the girls.
• British artist Norm Breyfogle (best known for his work on Batman in the late '80s and early '90s) almost always draws an Anarchy "A" and a "Street Demonz" tag whenever he draws an alley, whether it's in an official comic or a fan commission.

Fan Works

• As part of Fantasy of Utter Ridiculousness's Credits Gag, Marisa Kirisame tries to engage in this by adding her hat to the female silhouettes on Megas's mudflaps, but Coop stops her before she gets too far.
• Supernova (One Piece): An omake in chapter 15 reveals that someone added "Nefertari D. Lili has a fat ass" to the Alabasta Poneglyph. Though the grammar is so bad that it technically says "Beneath Nefertari D. Lili is engulfing" but they "helpfully" added a very detailed carving of a butt next to it.

Films — Animation

• In Turning Red, the city of Toronto is portrayed with graffiti everywhere and Mei and Ming catch a bunch of teens spraying some on one of their temple walls.

Films — Live-Action

• Children of Men, alongside realistic and real graffiti (including a Banksy piece, which is an anachronism, as someone painted over it sometime after the movie's release), there is a lot of Arc Graffiti, such as "Last one alive please turn out the light".
• Return to Oz, the words "Beware the Wheelers" is written on the wall of the ruined Emerald City.
• In 28 Days Later, the protagonist enters a church after the abandonment of London and sees REPENT/THE END IS/EXTREMELY/FUCKING/NIGH written on the wall of the church.
• The Starsky & Hutch movie didn't fall to this. At the scene where the pair meets Huggy Bear, the graffiti on the background are very authentic-looking 1970s-style graffiti.
• The Warriors has the titular gang painting over another gang's tag.
  • A real gang's tag, and they were not happy with the producers about it. The studio made it up by hiring them as extras in the film.
• Monty Python's Life of Brian has the political type.
  "It says, 'Romans go home.'"
  "No it doesn't."
• The film Demolition Man has La Résistance using time bombs to speed-paint graffiti on surfaces — which have built-in automated graffiti-erasers eliminate it three seconds later, so one wonders why they bother.
• Hood of Horror features a magical spray-paint can. If one uses it to "slash" other's tags, they'll die.
• The Brothers Bloom uses some street art to set up a visual gag in one early scene.
• One recurring element in Be Kind Rewind is a large mural the two main characters are working on in honor of a famous jazz musician who lived in their neighborhood.
• In V for Vendetta, a young girl who idolizes V starts tagging his logo all over London. When a cop sees her doing it, he shoots her right in a public street. This does not sit well with the people watching.
• Shredder Orpheus has the Grey Zone full of graffiti tags, with the most ominous being the Underworld parking garage that's covered in signs warning people not to risk it and go home.

Literature

• The hero in The Catcher in the Rye is angered when he sees the word "Fuck" scrawled on the wall in a public place where kids are likely to see it.
• Discworld:
  • The graffiti in Ankh-Morpork are apparently also heavy on profanity. Then there's also Troll Graffiti, which are scratched into walls. Mr Shine. Him Diamond. Trolls being living rocks, their equivalent of gang tattoos looks a lot like graffiti.
  • Dealing with graffiti is one of many things Adora Belle Dearheart has to do in her capacity as Golem Trust secretary. In Going Postal when she asks Moist what it says over the door, he replies that it says "Smash the barstuds."
• Able Team. In "The Hostaged Island", Gadgets's kayak nearly gets swamped by a huge wave while he's trying to infiltrate the eponymous island. When he makes landfall, he's bemused by SURFERS RULE graffiti and thinks that teenagers actually do this for kicks.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who: "BAD WOLF"
• The Goodies. In "Rome Antics" the Vandals sack Ancient Rome with the obligatory gag of them smashing the place up and painting VANDALS RULE on the walls.
• Look Around You: "Maths"
  [Two children on an urban street.]
  Narrator: Look around you.
  [One of the children starts spraying something on the brick wall, while the other plays lookout.]
  Narrator: Look around you. Just... look around you. Have you worked out what we are looking at?
  [The graffito finished, both children run away.]
  Narrator: That's right, the answer is... maths.
  [Pan back to reveal that the graffito is a complicated integral equation.]
• In the Title Sequence for The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will gets busted doing this and so pretends to be spraying deodorant under his armpits instead.
• Secret Army. Albert has to scrub graffiti off his cafe denouncing him as a collaborator, while onlookers mock him for trying to "wash away your sins." The Dramatic Irony is that he secretly runs the Lifeline resistance group.
• The character of Jonah in the 2011 Australian comedy Summer Heights High has his personal tag throughout the series: "Dictation", which consists of a crude penis, followed by the letters "TATION", is seen all over the school in many scenes.
  • Jonah got a spinoff series, Jonah From Tonga, in 2014. He has a new graffiti tag there: "Pussycat", which is a crude vagina followed by the letters "CAT".
• The opening titles Rome show that graffiti is, in fact, Older Than Feudalism. The tags come to life and dance to the opening theme music. Since the tags are in Latin, there's some Bilingual Bonus to be had, but a lot of it is pretty unambiguous.
• One of the classic sketches of Saturday Night Live was a fake commercial starring real-life New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. He announced a new anti-graffiti measure whereby first-time offenders would have "Sucks!" spray-painted under their tag. Second-timers would have a specially trained artist write "Sucks!" in the same script that you did. And woe be to third-timers: Their tags would be saddled with "Sucks Big Time!"
• The walls of New Cap City in Caprica contain many graffiti, some generic and others of some importance. One of the important ones is the stylised "T" symbols that represents Tamara. The other one is the image of a man and a caption reading "This is not me. It's just my body vehicle". The latter graffiti has sparked some Epileptic Trees, particularly because the camera spent so much time focused on it.
• In the earlier episodes of Republic of Doyle, Des is usually seen tagging areas all over St. John's.
• In the very first scene of Citizen Smith Wolfie is singing while painting political graffiti on an estate block. "PLAN AHEA-" He ran out of the room and then he comments that the structure of the building is wrong.
• In the final season of Breaking Bad, a large "HEISENBERG" is scrawled across the living room wall of the Whites' abandoned home.

Music

• The title track from Graffiti Crimes by New Zealand New Wave group Mi-Sex.

Pinballs

• "El Barto" is scrawled on one of the playfield plastics of Data East's The Simpsons.

Theatre

• In the musical In the Heights, the character "Graffiti Pete" is seen as a blight on the neighborhood (though he is friends with Sonny), and the musical begins with him attempting to tag Usnavi's bodega. At the end of the show he has, with Sonny's help, painted the bodega with a beautiful mural of Abuela Claudia.

Theme Parks

• At Universal Studios:
  • Grafitti left behind by past wizards can be seen in the queue for Hagrid's Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure, with scribbled lines including stuff like the Ravenclow house motto and "I love Hufflepuff".
  • The '70s New York-themed queue line for the former Kongfrontation ride naturally contained a lot of graffiti. At times, there were small events held where guests were allowed to add their own graffiti to the walls.

Video Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: There are various sets of graffiti found throughout Skopp and Noctis city. The Concept Art Gallery features them in full detail.
• In Season 8 of Brawl Stars, titled Once Upon a Brawl, the castle has quite a lot of graffiti tags. Yep, you read that right, a fairy tale castle with graffiti tags on it.
• Clash of Clans: Appears a good bit in the rap video to promote the Hammer Jam. Fitting, considering that the video is meant to be hip hop themed. There's also a scene with streetwear-laden goblins near a graffiti wall.
• EXTRAPOWER: Giant Fist: Has fun with this in the Milles City stages, with various tags on the walls referencing the EXTRAPOWER series. There are even a couple of larger pieces: a Happy Pizza from Happy Challenger Yamada with a requisite Easter Egg if struck on top, and a large mural to the Galaxy's team behind the stage boss.
• Final Fantasy VII has "AVERLANCHE" [sic].
• MapleStory has basketball player portraits.
• In Jet Set Radio, painting graffiti and slashing over tags are major play elements. The tags and pieces rarely actually read anything. In the late part of the first game, an evil businessman is trying to summon demons by spraying ugly magical symbols on walls, and the heroes spray over them.
  • In the sequel graffiti is just as much Serious Business. Your main way of defeating rival gangs is to catch up to them and graffiti them into surrender before they do the same to you. As before you have to slash over tags and the game culminates in another boss which, yes, you have to spray paint into oblivion.
• Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, being a Spiritual Successor to the aforementioned Jet Set Radio, also has painting graffiti and slashing over tags as major gameplay elements, both of which earn you "Rep" in order to progress through the story. New tags can also be found either as collectibles on the world map or as rewards for clearing certain challenges. In a nice touch, many of the tags seen in-game were all designed by artists who contributed their works to the game's development and are thus credited accordingly.
• There are plenty of spots around Urbzville in The Urbz where the player's Urb can spray graffiti. Curiously enough, the same spots are used for both throw-ups and actual pieces and drawing on the wall erases the previous throw-up/piece.
• The streets and walls of Anachronox is liberally embossed with the ominous phrase "Eddie knows".
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas lets you tag over rival gangs. Tag all 100, and a nice arsenal of weapons will spawn at your home in Grove Street.
  • Grand Theft Auto IV has quite a bit of graffiti all around Liberty City, though you can no longer spraypaint as a gameplay mechanic.
• You can also do this in the Saints Row series, a GTA clone. scrawling to colorful murals.
• The Warriors features a graffiti mini-game, graffiti competitions and tags for all the gangs. These were done by real graf artists
• The City of Heroes games feature graffiti in many of the city zones. Some of it is generic while other bits are related to specific gangs and only show up in the areas that they occupy.
• Marc Eckō's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure was banned in Australia because it was about graffiti.
• Shadow Hearts: From The New World has some generic graffiti on the walls in the "secret" town of Harlem. Mind you, this graffiti is appearing about fifty years before it would become a common sight in New York, and the game's setting predates spray paint by about 20 years.
• There's some generic graffiti in the various Tony Hawk games, as well as some not so generic graffiti, including in one level the Leeds United Football club logo. In Manhattan.
  • There's also graffiti mode in multiplayer, where doing trick on ramps, benches, rails, etc. will color it red or blue. The person with the most of their color wins the round.
  • Tony Hawk's Underground 2 allowed you to create your own custom graffiti tags and spray them everywhere, likely in response to the success of Jet Set Radio at the time.
• Many multiplayer FPSs (particularly those on Valve Software's Source engine) have a "graffiti button" which allows players to apply a user-supplied texture map to walls. Most often, this takes the form of porn or shock pics, sometimes used to actually distract opposing players.
• The Wii version of Need for Speed: Nitro lets players design custom tags. Walls and buildings along the race are bombed with the leader's tag.
• In one of the later levels of Wolverine: Adamantium Rage there's some graffiti simply reading "Paul was here", which bothered Linkara to no end:
  Linkara: "Paul was here"? Who the hell is Paul? Paul Warner?
  Spoony: I heard that, Linkara!
• Portal has its famous graffiti left by former escapees.
• The filthy restroom in Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards has graffiti all over the walls of the toilet. If you read enough of them, you find a clue.
• The Marines in Half-Life leave some graffiti behind to express their feelings about Gordon. Specifically "SURRENDER FREEMEN", "DIE FREEMAN!!!", and "YORE DEAD FREEMAN".◊
  • In Half-Life 2, there is more conventional graffiti in City 17, apparently dating from both before and after the Seven-Hour War.
• Fireball 4 in the original Mac version of Dark Castle had "Alaric Was Here", "Huns Rule" and "Vandals Sack". The Genesis version idiotically replaced these with "Gamers Rule" and "Saddam Was Here".
• Call of Duty: Black Ops allows players above a certain rank to create their own emblems for their playercard, and at a certain higher rank, apply that emblem to their weapons. You're limited to specific shapes and objects, but you can position, rotate, resize, recolor and combine them in any way you see fit.
• Dead Space informs the player on the proper strategy for defeating necromorphs through graffiti reading "CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS".
• The Splatoon series lets players draw graffiti that will appear around the Hub World and in the games' multiplayer stages, which can also be shared to social media. The original Splatoon had this feature tied to Nintendo's own social media website, Miiverse.
• Subway Surfers is about running away from getting in trouble for doing this.
• In inFAMOUS: Second Son Delsin Rowe can do graffiti in certain sections of the game after doing certain things such as fighting enemies.
• In Remember Me, several are spread all over the place in the Slum 404 where the Sensen addicted Leapers live in Urban Segregation.

Web Animation

• In Step 4 of There she is!!, the spread of hateful graffiti mirrors the growing social intolerance toward Doki and Nabi's forbidden cat/rabbit relationship, covering even the vending machines where they first met. In the Final Step, we see them cleaning it off as a sign that things are going to get better (as well as offering a nice Book Ends finale).

Web Comics

• In the first chapter of Tove, Tove and her brother come across an abandoned spaceship that is completely plastered in graffiti. Although the do take note of it, neither of them think it's strange that spray painting is the most action people would take upon discovering a spaceship.

Western Animation

• On The Simpsons, when Homer became the leader of Stonecutters, he urged them to help the community, including painting over graffiti. The graffiti were just "Graffiti" written over and over again.
  • Also Bart's tag "El Barto" violates common sense, since it directly references his name. Not that anybody notices the connection.
    • Then there was Homer's variant, "El Homo".
  • A sight-gag from when Homer and Abe sneak into Canada for medical reasons shows teens spraying a wall with "Obey the rules".
• In one Hammerman episode, "typical" graffiti are just big blobs of color and completely random words.
• "Riley Wuz Here" from The Boondocks, similar to Bart above.
  Police Officer: It says "Riley Wuz Here". And you took photographs of you posing in front of the work. Also, you have paint on your hands.
• In a The Powerpuff Girls (1998) episode, the Gangreen Gang starts spreading graffiti saying stuff like "The City Of Townsville Sucks" and "The Mayor is Dumb". Then they get to a subway tunnel where they start doing more "personalized" work: Snake writes "Sssssssssss" and Big Billy writes "Graffiti: By Big Billy"
• One plot of Arthur revolved around someone who was tagging the school and other buildings with the name "Binky". The character Binky claimed it wasn't him, and the gang spends the rest of the episode trying to clear his name. Turns out it was done as promotional material for an upcoming band.
• In Recess, the graffiti kid's trademark is the fact that he has the spelling of a 5-year-old.
• Averted in Motorcity in which Dutch's art leads to an Art Shift Flashback.
• In episodes of Motormouse and Autocat, we see "Autocat is a rat" scribbled under the garage time clock.
• In the Bugs Bunny cartoon "Fresh Hare," Bugs defaces two wanted posters of him with graffiti.

Real Life

• Older Than Feudalism (at least!): A Greek soldier—probably one of the Pharaoh's numerous Greek mercenaries—wrote "Archon, son of Ambochios, and ax, son of nobody, wrote this" on Abu Simbel in Upper Egypt.
• While 2000 years may separate ourselves and the people of Pompeii, a study comparing graffiti found the excavated Bathroom Stall Graffiti and the graffiti from contemporary 1960's (at the time of the study) graffiti shows rather remarkable similarity. Well, good to know people were always like that.
• The Maes Howe tomb on Orkney has Viking-age graffiti on its walls that translates to the same "xy was here" messages you can find on the walls of every bathroom stall. It really is comforting to know that some things ARE constant.
• The walls of the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul also have Viking-age "X was here" graffiti.
• One of the lions in front of San Marco, in Venice, also has some very artsy Viking engravings on its shoulders (although it's mostly gone now). They were originally in Athene.
• Some of the paintings in the Vatican have graffiti from landsknechte that are full of anti-Catholic profanities (landsknechte were rather the rag-tag bunch of misfits of the time).
• After Soviet victory in World War II the Reichstag in Berlin was covered in Soviet soldier's graffiti, still readable to this day. Most of them are just “From [Russian City] to Berlin” with a name or “Kilroyski was here” (or just this last one), or the occasional "Hitler kaputt".
• A boxcar on a train is rarely seen without vibrant graffiti.

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