.Has a redraw in progress titled Blood is Drawn. Can be found: here and here
Due to the nature of this comic, beware of unmarked spoilers, and trope names that spoil aspects of the comic.
This webcomic provides examples of:
- Aerosol Flamethrower: In the first chapter, the protagonist makes a flamethrower out of insecticide, a lighter, and a super soaker.
- Air-Vent Passageway: The main character's main method of transportation throughout the first chapter is crawling through the ventilation system.
- Alternate History: At first, the comic appears to be set in our world 20 Minutes into the Future. However, the characters mention that super-powered mutants started appearing during World War II.
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: Chapter 2 opens not to the protagonist of the first chapter, but a completely new character named Fuse. The perspective switches back after he meets, and is infected by, the original protagonist.
- Animate Body Parts: All the enemies in the first chapter are monsters made of human body parts.
- Arbitrary Skepticism: Played for Laughs. When Jane and Fuse use tin foil hats to protect themselves from a psychic attack, Michelle refuses to believe that it worked. When Caius calls her out on this, reminding her that they have all experienced far weirder things already, Michelle says that she just doesn't want Grizwald to be right about everything.
- Arc Words: Stretch thin and drink deep.
- Astral Projection: One of the magic rituals contained in Geoangular Control allows the caster to temporarily separate their soul from their body. The soul has similar properties to a ghost (intangible and can't be seen or heard without a lot of effort), while the body goes unconscious.
- Bargain with Heaven: As eldritch entities go, dealing with the tradesmen is fairly safe. They are honest, they don't exploit possible mistakes in the rituals that invoke their power, they always uphold their end of the deal, they make sure you fully understand the cost of the bargain before you make it, and if you don't like the cost, you can refuse the deal with no harm done. Their prices can also vary greatly, it all depends on how important is the information you seek: some of the smaller trades included giving away a character's favorite shirt or being unable to dye their hair a certain color for a year. The tradesmen can even provide some information for free, albeit in a roundabout way, since it's good for business. Just don't try to intentionally fleece them, or they will eat your family.
- Biomanipulation: Jane can control anything and anyone her blood is inside of, which includes manipulating their biology, such as numbing their pain, reproducing the effects of certain drugs, and healing their wounds. Thale, who has similar powers but lacks any conscience, can manipulate his victims in a far more visceral ways.
- Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Though the protagonist is half human, she was hatched from an egg. The details of this are not given.
- Bizarre Alien Senses: The protagonist can "sense" through objects she's put her blood into, like bandages or syringes. She can sense through them better if she's in physical contact with them. She can also use any senses of any living creatures her blood is inside.
- Bloody Murder: The protagonist can control both living beings and inanimate objects as long as enough of her blood is inside it.
- Body Horror: And plenty of it. Every monster in the first chapter is some grotesque amalgam of body parts.
- Bonus Dungeon: Bunker X is one of the Zone 50 sites, but the key to it was gained through a magic ritual that involved trading with interdimentional entities. It's a place where reality is thin and the rules of the universe don't work correctly. It consists of several levels with dangerous enemies inside and useful rewards at the end.
- Candlelit Ritual: The ritual that allows the caster to contact the tradesmen requires lighting blue candles. When Jane notices a similar candle in a bookstore, it clues her in that the owner knows more than she should.
- Cast from Stamina: Using any kind of magic is very tiring for the caster. When Jane and her team need to cast many useful but draining rituals, they rotate who casts them.
- Clear Their Name: We meet Fuse while he is trying to prove that his friend Howler is innocent of hacking the bio printers. Considering that said hack involved using the printed organs to create monsters that went on to kill many people, Fuse is horrified to learn that Howler was actually guilty.
- Cloning Body Parts: Bioprinters, like the one in the hospital in the first chapter, are used to create human limbs and organs for transplants.
- Conspiracy Theorist: Grizwald is a crazy conspiracy nut who wears a Tinfoil Hat and lives in an empty arcade building, except he is completely right on every single occasion (yes, even about tinfoil hats protecting from psychic attacks). He has an incredible wealth of knowledge and he often provides important information to the protagonist and her team.
- Cosmic Retcon: The library is capable of altering past events. First it changed how Fuse found out about it, then it completely erased Jane, Caius, and Finch's visit to it (though they still have the memory of it and what they came for).Caius: So, uh, did that actually happen, or...?
Dr. Finch: Technically speaking, I don't believe it did. We remember an event that never truly occurred. - Creepily Long Arms: One of the creatures in the first chapter is nothing but arms growing out of the floor and ceiling.
- Cyberpunk: There are robots, cybernetic enhancements, lab-grown genetically modified people, and bioprinters that can create limbs and organs. There are also megacorporations that control everything, including media and law enforcement, the protagonist's home city is segregated into different tiers where people from low tiers live in horrible conditions and are heavily discriminated against, and the "lab meat" are treated more like objects than people.
- Deal with the Devil: Nil tries to make a deal with Macland: it will save Caius, if he gives it his body. Macland gives it the bird.
- Designer Babies: Tube cops, like Michelle, are genetically engineered to be superior police officers.
- Depleted Phlebotinum Shells: Using a magic ritual to "upgrade" regular ammo nets some interesting results, such as radioactive rounds.
- Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: Macland quite literally flips off Eldritch Abomination Nil in chapter 5.
- Eldritch Abomination:
- Fragments of the First Womb which include the protagonist, her mother, and the Mars creature are beings that can be described as living blood. They can manipulate their biology at will and they have access to a pocket dimension with an infinite amount of biological material to pull from.
- Nil is a being described as "the absence between" and "the moment between moments". It can hide in memories, it communicates by erasing thoughts, rituals calling upon its power can decay things out of existence, and its ultimate goal is to end all conscious thought in the universe.
- Eldritch Location:
- The library is an entity that is "smaller than a god, but bigger than a man". Being inside it messes with your senses (you don't need to have your eyes open to see, but you need them to hear). It looks like an infinite library full of books in incomprehensible languages, but you can only take books that are meant for you specifically, or you will incur the wrath of the librarians. The shelves have no walls, instead you can see stars and planets behind them.
- The "error room" is located behind "a door that had to open somewhere, but had nowhere to go". It's a place that shouldn't be and it contains "things that never were, people that aren't, and events that didn't happen". Most people can't perceive the room, but Jane isn't most people. She sees it as a mirror version of the Zone Fifty bunker that has an alternate version of herself inside it.
- Bunker X is a former Zone Fifty site, but the key to it was gained through a magic ritual that involved trading with interdimentional entities. It's a place where reality is thin and the rules of the universe don't work correctly. It is, essentially, a Bonus Dungeon with dangerous enemies inside and useful rewards at the end of each level.
- The red is another dimension that can be used to manifest and manipulate biological material. It's infinite and time and space don't really exist in there.
- Electromagnetic Ghosts: Imprints. Specifically, Edison, Tesla, and Faraday, they can walk through walls, float, and are made of active electromagnetic activity.
- Eyeless Face: The red mostly communicates through a mouth. Just a mouth. One huge, toothy mouth growing out of the wall.
- Fantastic Racism: Neither mutants nor genetically engineered law enforcement ("tube cops," or "lab meat") are respected as much as plain old humans.
- Fantastic Drug:
- Level calms you down, but it can outright kill you if you get too worked up physically.
- Cleantex lets you remember absolutely everything and every single detail, but it can be hard to direct to specific memories. You also sometimes need to be reminded to breathe.
- Save the Queen (or Queen for short) makes you lose time, do odd things, and wake up in random places. It actually contains knockoff alien blood and using it puts you under control of an evil Hive Mind.
- There are other drugs like Crawl, Gabriel, etc. but their effects are less explained.
- Functional Magic: A combination of Rule-based Magic and Theurgy: users can create ritual circles with the right implements and chant to use various effects. Most of these spells are facilitated by entities called 'tradesmen', who grant something when a trade is agreed upon. They also work as mediators between the user and bigger entities, so that the user can call upon the entity's power without directly interacting with them.
- Genius Loci: The Library is sapient, and it can communicate with people when they reach a certain area.
- Genre Shift: Happens in Chapter 2, shifting from horror to more Cyberpunk with a bit of horror. After that, it gets even weirder, as more aspects of the world and universe are uncovered.
- Hive Mind:
- Injecting someone with her blood gives Jane the ability to control them physically and mentally. She can see through their eyes, speak to them telepathically, modify their bodies, dig through their memories, and use their skills.
- The drug Save the Queen, which contains knock-off alien blood, puts those who take it under control of Patton Thale, who is capable of overwriting their minds and turning them into his copies.
- The Many is a mutant containing multiple minds telepathically linked with each other.
- It Came from the Fridge: When Fuse investigates Howler's apartment, the kitchen is full of horrors. The fridge is in a mostly decent shape, but the oven is starting to grow its own ecosystem.You also check inside the oven. It takes you a second. This thing hasn't been opened in... a while. You finally manage to pry it open, and inside... inside is science. Things are growing in there. Long after the end, when this miserable planet is a smoldering wasteland, what was once in this oven will rule the new world.
- Kill It with Fire: Jane, Michelle, and Finch attempt to kill the bioprinter monster by throwing their squirt-gun flamethrower, which they've rigged to explode, at it.
- Law Enforcement, Inc..: All law enforncement agencies in the protagonist's home city are privatized.
- Lovecraft Lite: There are Eldritch Abominations that can "drink deep of worlds," and other such entities, but our main protagonist is partly one of them, while retaining her compassion and humanity. Her mother, while significantly more alien, also loved her family deeply.
- Mad Scientist: Arvin Carpenter not only started the hospital situation from the first chapter, but he keeps sending more bio-mechanical monsters after the protagonist.
- Magically-Binding Contract:
- If you agree to a bargain with the tradesmen, you will not be able to break the deal. It's done to prevent anyone from accidentally or unwillingly breaking the bargain. (Trying to intentionally scam the tradesmen is a very bad idea.)
- After taking a book from a living library, Dr. Finch wonders how they are going to return it, since the library will be gone once they leave it. The library assures him that they will return the book when they are done with it. Then it clarifies that this wasn't a command or a suggestion, it was a statement of a fact: when they are done with the book, they will return it.
- Magic Misfire: Messing up a magic ritual, like mispronouncing words or drawing the runes wrong, can allow the entity whose power this ritual draws upon to exploit it. What exactly might happen depends on the entity in question: tradesmen are very lenient and never take advantage of such mistakes, because screwing over their clients like this is bad for business, but other beings are far more dangerous. When Jane invokes Nil to destroy Carpenter's robot, it works, but Nil uses the errors in the ritual to gain a foothold in Carpenter's mind. For this reason, some magic spells, like "Combat #11", have built-in safeguards to prevent disaster even if you mess up some of the symbols.
- Magic Versus Science:
- Dr. Finch has issues with magic. He doesn't deny that it works, but he wants to know why and how it works.Dr. Finch: I don't want the book's assurance that almighty-so-and-so will fulfill their end of the space bargain, I want to know why it happens at all. I understand that there are untold physics in play... but I want those untold physics to be told. To me. Specifically.
Caius: Sometimes... ya just gotta accept that ya ain't gonna know. S'magic. Jus' let it be.
Dr. Finch: I do not have to accept that. I refuse to. I will crack this code. - Mad Scientist Carpenter hates magic, calling it "voodoo nonsense", though he might be just angry because his robots don't have any defenses against it.
- Dr. Finch has issues with magic. He doesn't deny that it works, but he wants to know why and how it works.
- Master of Your Domain: The protagonist's mother and other beings of her kind have full control over their biology and can manipulate it at will.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: At one point, Jane's friends start wondering why they trust each other so easily, when they all have reasons to be paranoid and some of them even used to be enemies. It could be the result of Jane's blood subtly influencing their minds, or they could be simply Fire-Forged Friends who went through hell together. When Liz, who has Jane's blood but still hates her guts, joins the team, they agree that it's most likely the latter.
- Mexican Standoff: Michelle and another tube cop in chapter 2. It ends with the interference of an animated bedsheet.
- Mental Fusion:
- Jane can "sync" with people who have her blood inside them. This allows her to share their skills and knowledge, but staying synced up for too long can lead to their memories bleeding over and their identities starting to blur.
- Thale can use similar abilities to rewrite the minds of his victims.
- Monster in the Ice: The purpose of Zone Fifty Bunker B is to contain the Eldritch Abomination that awoke From a Single Cell in a failed government experiment, now frozen and cut into multiple blocks of ice as an extra precaution. That happened over a century ago and the structure still stands there with the frozen creature inside when the protagonists stumble onto it.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: An attempt was made to inject the protagonist with a mind control serum. What it did instead was wake her up.
- People Jars:
- Before being woken up, genetically modified people like Michelle and Caius are stored in glass containers.
- Bunker B is filled with containers full of frozen human remains as a result of experiments with alien blood.
- Random Effect Spell: The trade up ritual allows you to exchange a number of objects for a single object with similar but improved properties. However, it's always a gamble, because you never know what exactly you will get in return: it can be very useful (a phone that can call to Mars) or have major drawbacks (an alien computer with OS written in alien language that no one can understand).
- Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Protagonist's home city is ruled by the rich. Everything is privatized, including law enforcement, so good luck trying to get rich folks to answer for their crimes.
- Shout-Out:
- Bunker E's real entrance is a blue police box.
- The team names one of their rats Pac-Man.
- When Grizwald talks about everyone thinking that Jane is dead, he says "that which is dead does not eternal lie", hinting at the source of her powers (and the true genre of the comic).
- Caius calls his idea of using astral projection to pilot a meat golem Ghost in the Shell.
- Shut Up, Hannibal!: When Nil attempts to bargain with Macland, he flips it off with a truly epic rant."Y'know what, forget it. This stuff's over my head and I don't know what you're on about. What I do know, Nil, is two things: I'm done being played, and whatever it is you're acting like I need you for, that crazy nurse can probably do without you. You've done a lot of spilling, but between this and all that time we spent buddying up when I was comatose, the one thing you've made ABUNDANTLY clear is that you're scared of the red. Full blown, absolutely fucking SHOOK, and I think you wanting to save Caius isn't just about getting my body. I think you're trying to earn that chick's favor or whatever, just in the most fucked up, stupid way imaginable. You don't get people—if you did, you wouldn't admit to wanting to undo thought. Fuck you, Nil."
- Semantic Superpower: Jane's blood powers work on herself and on things that her blood is inside of. Except "herself" and "inside of" are defined purely by her own perception: for example, she can control an Air-Vent Passageway after smearing her blood over its surface because her mind counsiders it as "inside of the vent". Her mother took it a step further: since marriage can be defined as two people becoming one, she considered her husband a part of herself, thus she could manipulate his biology even without giving him her blood.
- Starfish Language:
- Nil talks by blanking out thoughts. You have to figure out what it took to understand the messsage, then it will give your thoughts back.
- Mom's red can speak verbally, but its natural language is a resonance that moves blood.
- Sufficiently Analyzed Magic: The author of the bone armor spell points out that magic rituals can become outdated: they invoke higher beings, but the cosmic balance of power between these beings can change drastically. The author wants to update and improve old rituals to better reflect the new cosmic order. An older draft of the bone armor spell also shows that the author tested many different versions of this spell during its development, before arriving to the final result.
- Tinfoil Hat: Grizwald wears a tinfoil hat, as befitting a Conspiracy Theorist. Considering that Jane and Fuse later use tinfoil hats to block a psychic attack, he might be on to something.
- Tome of Eldritch Lore: Geoangular Control is a book about magic and rituals that call upon the power of various eldritch monstrosities.
- Underground Monkey: The monsters in Level 0 of Bunker X heavily resemble those encountered in the hospital, back in chapter 1, only these are much stronger.
- Vasquez Always Dies: Played with. Michelle is a vaguely Hispanic Action Girl that outright describes herself as expendable. She works for Vasquez Law Enforcement. She not only survives and becomes one of the main characters, she kills the very Vasquez the company is named after... a male Dirty Cop named Vasquez.
- Wrong Time-Travel Savvy: When the library reveals that it can alter past events, Dr. Finch asks if that means it can travel in time. The library replies that travel is for lesser beings. It doesn't travel, it just is.
- You No Take Candle:
- When Jane first meets her Mother's red, it talks in very broken English. After she feeds it more of her blood, it starts speaking normally.
- Baby red is a very small fragment of Mother's red. It can barely string two words together because it doesn't have the mental capabilities to speak properly.
- You Wake Up in a Room: The comic begins with the protagonist waking up in a hospital room. She does recognize it (it's a hospital she works in as a nurse) and she knows who she is, but she doesn't remember how she got there.
