Tentacle monsters, and the women who love them.
— Tagline
Ghastly's Ghastly Comic is an adult webcomic that originally ran from 2001 to 2006. Inspired by a NSFW Sexy Losers strip, the series is about tentacle monsters living in our world, and the people they interact with. These people include a chibi, a Transgender girl who speaks broken Japanese, an attention whore Cosplay Otaku Girl, a Flaky New Age Neo-Pagan, Baby Cthulhu, a Cloudcuckoolander who looks perpetually stoned, a furry, a guy transplanted from a hentai game who has an invisible penis, a guy transplanted from a 1970s Blaxploitation flick, and Drunk and Bitter Jesus.
Due to a Creator Breakdown (see the Trivia tab) the main run of the comic ended in 2006 but the creator has sporadically posted new one off strips since then, most recently in 2015. The creator however was still active with one off artwork appearing as recently as June 2018 on his Tumblr image dump before Tumblr purged all adult content.
The series can be found here
. This Webcomic is Not Safe for Work — assume any link leads to NSFW material and be careful about the examples.
Ghastly's Ghastly Comic provides examples of:
- Ambiguous Gender: Glemph and and Nort play a fictional Japanese Fighting Game called Shota Versus Loli, where it's impossible to tell which on screen character is supposed to be which gender.
- Aren't You Going to Ravish Me?: The very first strip, where human girl Kiki encounters tentacle monster Glemph and is put out when he fails to live up to his species stereotypical behaviour and eruditely explains why he isn't going to do what she's expecting him to, leading to Kiki forcefully reiterating what should be happening.
- Art Evolution: Lampshaded in one comic which juxtaposed the early black and white character designs with the more polished modern colour versions.
- Attention Whore:
- Cosplay Girl has this as her her only real character trait, even saying "She who dies with most attention, wins!"
- Bunny Boy isn't a direct example but gets a lot of (negative) attention for his extremely aggressive and in your face flaunting of his sexual proclivities.
- Author Appeal: Lots and lots of futanari. Aside from Freddy, lots of one off and filler art is of these.
- Bait-and-Switch: Two characters go to "play doctor" off camera. After a lot of suggestive remarks like "It won't fit!" it turns out that they were talking about the doctor coat being too large for one of them.
- Bestiality Is Depraved: Played with in multiple ways. Kiki has sex with an octopus on the aquarium floor but some of the tentacle monsters consider sexual relations with humans to be this, though it's always Played for Laughs.
- "Blind Idiot" Translation: On a dildo made in Japan, the words "Three year warranty" accidentally got translated as "Not recommended for three years and under".
- Brain Bleach: Alan Moore yaoi. Not yaoi using Alan Moore's comic characters, illustrations of two 'Alan Moores' engaging in the activity.
- Catapult Nightmare: Kiki has one. In keeping with the subversive nature of the comic, her nightmare is about conventional missionary position sex with a human male. Also Hammer has one where Bunny Boy was about to yiff Hammer's fluffy bunny slippers one after the other.
- Cloudcuckoolander: The aptly named Kwerki, whose most common activity seems to be infiltrating presentations and hijacking them with her bizarre sexually based hypotheses.
- Cosplay: Cosplay Girl, who cosplays all day every day as a way of attracting attention.
- Eldritch Abomination: Fnanp mistakes the tentacle monsters for these, not realising that, aside from their appearance, they are just regular people with lives similar to humans — going to the bar, surfing the net, etc.
- Exposed to the Elements: Cosplay Girl is seen wearing her usual Stripperiffic costume on the street in the middle of winter, attracting plenty stunned looks. This is precisely the point, as she thinks to herself, "Winter is the time when you can tell the real attention whores from the simple posers."
- Exact Words: The commissioner wanted yaoi featuring Alan Moore's characters, but asked for Alan Moore yaoi. Ghastly provided Alan Moore yaoi.
- Eyes Always Shut: Hammer the barkeep.
- The Fundamentalist: Chick-Boy. This causes him a lot of angst when he gets into a relationship with Freddy.
- Genki Girl: Freddy. The girl aspect is debatable (they're depicted with breasts and a penis). The genki aspect is not (bouncing around like crazy first thing in the morning after sleeping with Smokey).
- Good Angel, Bad Angel: Chibi Sue when she's considering losing her virginity via a glory hole. Subverted in that both angels egg her on. When her quest fails (as it was H.G. on the other side and she couldn't see his invisible penis), the two of them proceed to have sex with each other as she watches in frustration.
- Gratuitous Japanese: Freddy."If I was a cat-girl, baka-baka-baka-neko-neko-neko-neko-dum"
- Hime Cut: Kiki, an unusual example as she has no obvious Asian ancestry.
- Hypocritical Humor: Glemph defends his cousin's homosexuality... only to flip out on discovering his cousin's boyfriend is human.
- Ignoring by Singing: A tentacle monster frantically starts yelling "LALALALA LAAAAAA!!" trying to drown out someone's hypothesis on why zombies are constantly moaning.
- The Internet Is for Porn: Bobby looks at Yaoi porn online.
- Jive Turkey: Brewster "Da Funk" Bombe, who is an obvious parody of black American Blaxploitation depictions from The '70s.
- Local Hangout: The Spanked Monkey bar run by Hammer, where most of the main cast hang out when they're not otherwise engaged.
- The Loins Sleep Tonight: One of the tentacle monsters suffers from his tentacles not working when he ends up in bed with Kiki.
- Lovecraft Lite: Cthulhu, who is actually a baby, and his parents pawn him off to a babysitter.
- Meaningful Name:
- Kwerki. Not quirky as in "endearing", more quirky as in "weird and disturbing in a bad way".
- Also Fnanp, which stands for Flaky New Age Neo Pagan, which is a pretty accurate description of him.
- Meet Cute: Offscreen: F'ga and Bobby met when F'ga reached through a glory hole to ask for toilet paper because his stall had run out.
- My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Glemph is appalled at Kiki's insinuation that he intends to rape her, and frequently finds himself exasperated by the perverted antics of the rest of his species.
- Naughty Tentacles: The general premise of the entire comic. Probably covers every form of Playing with a Trope of this.
- Not Growing Up Sucks: Chibi Sue, who's thirty-six but is stuck in the body that looks six years old. This is... problematic when it comes to relationships.
- Older Than They Look: Chibi Sue, who is thirty-six, but as her name suggests looks like a six-year-old. Parodied, as Hammer explains that her claim of only being thirty-two was because she went into denial in her late twenties.
- Orphaned Series: The main run of the comic abruptly ended without any resolution due the the author's
Creator Breakdown.
- Shrouded in Myth: Among other exploits, Hammer once rode the range and fought in a Sentai team... always alongside a masturbation-obsessed dip named Clem.
- Take That!:
- Several aimed at Megatokyo. These lead up to a piece of Self-Deprecation: When he compares his vasectomy to a long line of people waiting to kick him in the nuts, Largo and Piro announce they've gone three times.
- Jack Chick and his tracts are parodied mercilessly. See Useful Book below for the first instance. Later on, Freddy makes Doujinshi tracts.
- Useful Book: Nort finds himself with no toilet paper, and starts yelling blasphemous things until Chick-Boy shows up and flings some tracts into the stall. Punchline: "I knew there was a use for these things."
