Examples of Misaimed Fandom for characters in Newspaper Comics.
- Darby Conley's Get Fuzzy has attracted a moderately sized vegan high school and collegiate fanbase due to numerous appearances of PETA apparel. The catch? Bucky uses PETA as a shield for misbehaving under the guise of a revolt against whatever stick is up his butt during that installment, while Satchel is too dumb to know what they're really all about. This isn't official support from the organization - just many younger members without enough English courses under their belt to recognize the mockery of their hijinks. (And maybe a few who don't care.) Will usually occur in forums, blogs, journals, or news commentary box debates.
- Bloom County:
- Berke Breathed used to complain that, no matter how unsympathetic he made Steve Dallas seem in The Academia Waltz, many University of Texas students couldn't help but LOVE the character.
- A similar thing happened with Bill the Cat. No matter what he did with the character, including making him a coke addict, a communist spy, an illegal arms dealer, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick's lover, people couldn't get enough of him. Breathed created Bill to be the anti-Garfield. Breathed must have failed to realize how many people in his audience hate Garfield, and were more than willing to buy Bill the Cat merchandise in protest. Breathed even joked in the late 1990s that there were probably still tribes in Africa using old hollowed-out Bill the Cat dolls as banana hammocks.
- An in-universe example in (possibly) Drabble: the main character notes that he only realized how very conservative his father is when they went to see Star Wars: A New Hope and Dad cheered for Darth Vader.
- Many real-life human resource directors love Catbert from Dilbert, despite him being a (usually) exaggerated caricature of how thoughtless and self-serving most HR directors are. Nonetheless, there still have been some HR directors out there that have asked Scott Adams to make Catbert nicer, so as to make the portrayal more fair. Thankfully, Adams has not abided their wishes.
- Calvin and Hobbes
- A long-running fandom debate is whether Hobbes is a talking doll that can come to life, or if everything Hobbes does is all in Calvin's head. There's evidence for both sides — Calvin was once tied to a chair in a way he couldn't have done by himself when Hobbes was the only other character in the same room, and Hobbes was once taken away by a big dog and found by Susie while doing nothing to defend himself or reacting to anyone else's presence. But comic author Bill Watterson carefully avoided making such a firm distinction either way, intentionally keeping Hobbes and his sentience as an Ambiguous Situation. Watterson held that the argument of whether Hobbes was real or not defied the point of the strip.[Calvin & Hobbes] is more about the subjective nature of reality than it is about dolls coming to life.
- While he has moments of genuine philosophical insight, part of the fun of Calvin is supposed to be disagreeing with him. Despite his insight, Calvin is still a bratty self-centered six-year-old who wants everything his own way. Yet many take Calvin's philosophy out of context as genuine, when Watterson often wrote Calvin's speeches as a Take That! to faux intellectualism and "pop psychobabble." The panels people cite as brilliant are often followed by a punchline where it's revealed that Calvin is clinging to any philosophy that lets him claim greatness or avoid responsibility without having to do anything or change who he is in any meaningful way. In short, Calvin is supposed to be seen as Brilliant, but Lazy, not just brilliant.
- A long-running fandom debate is whether Hobbes is a talking doll that can come to life, or if everything Hobbes does is all in Calvin's head. There's evidence for both sides — Calvin was once tied to a chair in a way he couldn't have done by himself when Hobbes was the only other character in the same room, and Hobbes was once taken away by a big dog and found by Susie while doing nothing to defend himself or reacting to anyone else's presence. But comic author Bill Watterson carefully avoided making such a firm distinction either way, intentionally keeping Hobbes and his sentience as an Ambiguous Situation. Watterson held that the argument of whether Hobbes was real or not defied the point of the strip.
- The creators of Alex have had letters from people who chose to become bankers and stockbrokers because of the comic. They find this baffling as the strip is primarily a satire about the soulless, materialistic, egocentric nature of the world of finance.
