Non Indicative Name / Webcomics

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• Many webcomics have this type of name. 1/0, for example, has nothing to do with impossible mathematics.
  • The name does get explained in a footnote as having to do with the impossible nature of existence (i.e. "Everything (1) coming from Nothing (0)"), but that's still arguably oblique.
• 8-Bit Theater:
  • The "Goblin Punch" is an attack that is actually a kick to the groin from a very non-goblin monster. It was named by "the greatest crypto-zoologist in all of Red Mage history: Blindy O'Sightless."
  • Dataspheres are square/cubic (sort of). Blame that on pixels. Conversely, a strip had a Summoning Cube that looked like a sphere.
  • In one strip, Fighter ponders how we drive on parkways and park on driveways.
• Awkward Zombie: Despite the webcomic's name, it is not about zombies (let alone awkward ones). Its focus is on (usually) disconnected gag-a-day strips about various video games that the creator has played. (There is one World of Warcraft comic involving an undead rogue in an awkward situation, however).
• In The Bird Feeder #194, "Rebuilding," in response to vandals adding feathers to his featherless sculpture entitled "Plucked," Josh creates another featherless sculpture entitled "Plumed."
• Buttersafe has very little to do with butter, or the safety of it.
• In Chasing the Sunset, there is the magister Malvenicus * Dramatic Thunder * , who is a rather normal looking guy.
• Crystal Heroes is a deliberately cliche-sounding fantasy title to emphasize how much the setting and characters deviate from genre standards.
• Curse Quest:
  • As far as we know Captain Walrus is not a captain nor a walrus.
  • Mogarth the Unbreakable doesn't seem to have any qualities indicating being unbreakable. He is a big soft marshmallow personality-wise and takes a huge stabbing from an owl-bear bleeding profusely.
  • "The Kobold's Dungeon" didn't feature a single kobold at all.
• Discussed in this Daisy Owl strip: Mount Ruin is a Meaningful Name because it's huge and evil-looking, but Steve comments that it would be funny if its name was switched with the nearby Mount Marmalade, which would've resulted in this trope.
• The name of the journal comic The Devil's Panties has absolutely nothing to do with its content. At conventions, the booth banner declares, "It's not Satanic porn, honest!"
• Finding Your Roots: The protagonist's team, Team Hearth. It's supposed to be a portmanteau of "Heart" and "Earth" and has nothing to do with fireplaces. Shelly lampshaded this when she was coming up with the name, but Cedar cut her off to say it was perfect.
• In Girl Genius, Castle Heterodyne has the "Fun-Sized Mobile Agony and Death Dispensers". While the latter part of their name is very accurate, they're anything but Fun Sized.
• Girls with Slingshots contains plenty of girls, but few slingshots. The name does, however, crop up in reference to an alcoholic beverage in one strip, a tongue-in-cheek concession by the creator to those baffled by the ambiguous title.
  • In the back of the first printed collection of the webcomic, the creator writes that it began with a few sketches - guess what they were of - and that after drawing a few of these, people began to ask Danielle Corsetto when those "girls with slingshots" would have their own comic strip. The kicker is that she then adds that she was drawing slingshots "...because I couldn't draw guns very well."
• Girly has Officer Getskilled^*(As in "gets killed", not "get skilled"). Not only does he survive the entire run of the comic, he ends up becoming immortal in the final arc.
• One might assume that Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name provides some kind of exploration of gender or sexuality, but no, it's just about a goofy Occult Detective who happens to have a Gender-Blender Name. The first two strips give a Title Drop, but beyond that Hanna's name is not particularly important. (Or at least, never seemed important by the time that the comic stopped updating.)
• Killing six billion demons is not the subject matter of Kill Six Billion Demons. The phrase is, however, the name of The Chosen One as recorded in prophecy... who is also not literally intended to kill six billion demons. According to Word of God, the name is a metaphor for the hero ending all the evils and injustices of the current age. (Kill Six Billion Demons began as an Interactive Comic on the MS Paint Adventures forum where the objective was to kill six billion demons — the comic in its current form is a Continuity Reboot that decided to keep the name.)
• Irregular Webcomic! is this on one level (it's one of the most consistently updated webcomics out there) but not so much on others (it's a very unorthodox style of webcomic, what with the numerous unrelated plotlines and such).
  • Between 2011 and 2015, when it had ended, it was no longer irregular (updates every Sunday) nor a webcomic (new content consisted of new text annotations, released regularly every day). Now, it is a webcomic again, with two new strips a week injected into the re-runs...but it's still pretty regular, with the new comics coming out at set times.
• The full title of the Remix Comic Jet Dream is Jet Dream and her T-Girl Counterspies, inherited from the original comic book feature, Jet Dream and her Stunt-Girl Counterspies. However, in the Remix Comic, "Jet Dream" is the name of the organization, not the lead character, whose name is Harmony Thunder. She's occasionally referred to as "the Jet Dream Queen" as partial justification, but in truth, the title was chosen because photoshopping out the letters "STUN" made for a quick and dirty title change that also fit the main theme of the series.
• Mountain Time is not particularly concerned with mountains, time, or the Mountain Time Zone, with the exception of one comic.
• MS Paint Adventures has been made in Photoshop since day two.
  • Problem Sleuth is about weird puzzle shit and RPG mechanics.
  • The characters in Homestuck got out of their homes quite some time ago.
    • Discussed in Homestuck when the trolls compare their cultural naming conventions of movies. Troll movie titles are very long and Exactly What It Says on the Tin, down to describing each individual character, plot element and how many kisses and murders there are. When John points out to Karkat how stupid this is, Karkat justifies it by saying that troll movies have been around for much longer than human movies.
    • Each of the heroes has a Title consisting of a Class and an Aspect, like Heir of Breath. Some of the aspects are non-indicative, like Breath (which effectively means wind) and Light (chance or probability). The titles, though, are almost completely non-indicative. A Prince is not a leadership role, but rather someone who brings destruction to their aspect, or by means of their aspect. A Witch is creative, a Bard is passively destructive, etc.
    • However, if you have the right Title, you can have a secondary ability that makes your Aspect more literal. For example, a Page of Breath can use wind to perform CPR, and a Sylph of Light can cure the blind.
• Orange Marmalade is about a vampire, Ma-ri, dealing with humans at her school (mostly a boy with very tasty blood who has a huge crush on her) on the backdrop of vampires being allowed to live within society and lots of Fantastic Racism. No marmalade at all. In an FAQ, when asked what orange marmalade was (in regards to the story), the author simply explained how one made orange marmalade.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • Miko Miyazaki isn't a miko, and Lord Shojo is neither female nor adolescent, though it should be noted that both "Miko" and "Shojo" can be written with kanji that don't have the common meanings, and Japan doesn't exist in the OoTS universe.
  • #1288 mentions a monster called a Blue Poet. According to the strip title, they're not even blue.
• Penny Arcade generally features home console or PC releases.
  • There's the subseries in the comic Twisp and Catsby, featuring the surreal adventures of the titular cat and demon. The cat is Twisp, the demon is Catsby.
• The Perry Bible Fellowship has nothing to do with The Bible, fellowships, or anyone named Perry, rather being a series of one-shot Black Comedy comics.
• Route 148 doesn't really have anything to do with any roads other than that people use them to travel by.
• Luna from Sandra and Woo mentions a gang called The White Brotherhood took over her old neighborhood in Camden, New Jersey. Sandra assumes they're Neo-Nazis, but Luna points out they're actually a Black gang. It's implied they got their name because they believe mayonnaise is Serious Business.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, in much the same way as The Perry Bible Fellowship, is a bunch of one-shot philosophical and/or Black Comedy strips. No relation to cereal, or Saturday-Morning Cartoons, or anything else the title might imply.
• In one Something*Positive strip, Fred is horrified when Peejee tells him Davan is at a store named "Getting High", thinking that Davan is now a pothead. Davan is actually going there to laugh at stoners who are disappointed to find that it's just a kite shop.
• Star Impact:
  • Even though Etna is named after a volcano, she isn't themed around any volcanic symbology whatsoever, and instead proudly brandishes a dragon Animal Motif.
  • Stryker isn't a paragon of awe-inspiring physical might, and is rather the semi-retired owner of a boxing gym.
• Terror Island: The comic's plot has nothing to do with terror or islands. Lampshaded by the former Tag Line, "I'm not sure why it's called Terror Island". Within the comic itself, Ned Q. Sorcerer a.k.a. "The Obvious Dentist" is neither a sorcerer nor a dentist, and Centre of the Earth University is actually on the surface of the Moon.
• Guy from Two Guys and Guy is a girl, but a masculine one.
• Unsounded: The Lions of Mercy are an army that has Rape, Pillage, and Burn as a matter of policy, goes out of their way to attack a shrine full of children to torture and kill in order to try and turn public opinion against a foreign queen and view foreign women as little more than livestock, and their own little better since they don't think they should have jobs, prevent them from owning property or learning pymary and force them into marriages to make babies.
• A running gag in White Dark Life is that thus far only two werebeast turn into what their names say. Tora(tiger) turns into an oni, Tori(bird) becomes a cat, Saru(monkey) changes into a snake, and Inu(dog) and Uma(horse) transform into harpies.
• Xaos^*pronounced Chaose of The Wotch is an avatar of order, and conversely, the protagonist is one of chaos.
• Wright as Rayne is, in spite of its name, about Badass Normal superhero Alex Rayne being part of a one-sided "Freaky Friday" Flip with teenage girl Dorothy Wright. Apparently Rayne As Wright doesn't have the same ring to it.
• xkcd
  • The comic's title may seem like an initialism for something, but it doesn't mean anything. It's just a string of random letters that creator Randall Munroe liked, as it's one of the few combinations of 4 English letters that can't be pronounced at all. It has, however, been pointed out that the numerical values of the letters add up to 42.
  • "Exoplanet Names 2" proposes that a certain astronomical object be named "The Moon". Not only would this cause confusion with Earth's moon (which is commonly referred to as "the Moon" in English), but the object in question is actually an exoplanet.

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