Webcomic / Irregular Webcomic!

"No, I'm totally not trying to get Irregular Webcomic! mentioned on every single page of TV Tropes."

— David Morgan Mar

A webcomic done with LEGO figures and roleplaying miniatures, by David Morgan-Mar, an Australian physicist, who also perpetrates Darths & Droids. Full of deliberately bad puns and surprisingly erudite references; one can learn a great deal just by reading the annotations. Despite the name it was updated daily.

The comic finished with strip #3198 on October 29th 2011, although weekly annotations continued alongside a re-run of the entire archive, with new annotations for each strip. In April 2015, after a successful Patreon campaign, David Morgan-Mar announced new strips on an at-least weekly basis, which commenced on April 26, 2015; initially just twice-weekly, the comic currently runs on weekdays, with the rerun continuing at weekends.

Covers a number of ongoing themes, including:

• Fantasy: A group of roleplayers guide their party through a quest that tips the hat to Tolkien... before laughing at him.
• Space: A Space Opera gone bad. Very, very bad. Like Fantasy, also intended to be chronicling the events of an RPG, rather than directly telling a story. With two of the same players, no less. They transpose rather neatly.
• MythBusters: Adam and Jamie test somewhat more unusual myths than normal (this one crosses over with the Death one, below, a LOT).
• Steve and Terry: The adventures of a crocodile hunter (no, not THAT one), his long-suffering wife Terry, Dame Jane Goodall, and Cthulhu.
• Nigerian Finance Minister: The source of all those spam e-mails and his quest to raise money. Funnier than it sounds. Has not appeared since the strip restarted.
• William Shakespeare: Shakespeare is a Fanfic-writing office worker.
• Cliffhangers: an Indiana Jones spoof. In a few early strips, this is also an RPG campaign.
• Espionage: a spoof of James Bond, this time directly following the plot of the movies and with very few crossovers with other themes (and implied to exist outside the rest of the strip's continuity, given it continued as normal when the entire universe was destroyed). Got partway through From Russia with Love, but ended some time before the comic originally finished and only restarted, on an infrequent basis, in December 2020.
• Imperial Rome: Winner of a reader poll to introduce a new theme, but in practice was too difficult to write jokes for and has not been seen since 2009.
• Scientific Revolution: An excuse for DMM to write heartfelt annotations about Newton, Halley, Pascal, Pasteur, Linnaeus and their contemporaries.
• Martians: The attempts of a group of Martians to take over the world, and their encounters with an Ordinary College Student and overly zealous government agent.
• Pirates: Exactly What It Says on the Tin
• Supers: A hand-drawn theme featuring the adventures of some superhero RPG characters. Pretty much retired after 2008, as DMM doesn't draw those strips himself and the artist who did could only draw them in his spare time.
• Stranger Things: The newest theme. Currently following the plot of the first season.
• Me: the ongoing adventures of the comic's author. This theme has not been revived since the restart.
• Star Wars and Harry Potter parodies. The former isn't done much anymore, likely to leave some jokes for Darths & Droids (although it was revived in 2019 and has become pretty frequent since then), while the latter is often part of Shakespeare's fanfics.

The themes Crossover very, very often in combinations you would not expect.

Death is common in all the themes and has its own theme as well. There is not just one Death, but Deaths for different causes, who get moved around depending on job performance. One, Death Of Being Wrestled To Death By Steve, got wrestled to death by Steve. Twice. The favorite death is Insanely Overpowered Fireballs, who has been demoted and re-promoted several times.

Can be found here

Not to be confused with Regular Show.

There is an accompanying podcast (Irregular Podcast!), which does original material. Number #13 is particularly funny for tropers.

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Irregular Webcomic! provides examples of:

• 419 Scam: The Nigerian Finance Minister theme is basically about what would happen if all those spam e-mails were legit requests from the Nigerian government.
  • Steve (and the Nigerian government) fall victim to one when the king of Nigeria makes Steve his heir, only for Steve to get dragged to court. Jane Goodall is able to save him (though not the Nigerian treasury) by pointing out that Nigeria isn't and never has been a monarchy.
• And the Adventure Continues: When the crossover problems were resolved all of the different themes finished their quests and then had this ending.
• Art Evolution: Or Photo Quality Evolution, anyway.
• Artifact Title:
  • The title originally refers to the fact that the comic is being updated irregularly. Since 30 April 2004, it is now regular. This is even lampshaded in the FAQ page.
  • The Cliffhangers and Espionage themes are, like Fantasy and Space, named after the relevant GURPS genre books, although the RPG elements were soon dropped in the former and never used in the latter. They still make sense, but readers might wonder why those specific names, rather than "Pulp" and "Spies", or even "Montana Jones" and "James Stud".
• Artistic License – History: Despite what is mentioned under 419 Scam, while Nigeria is a republic, it also has numerous kings, princes, chiefs, emirs, and others, all recognized by the Nigerian government.
• A Wizard Did It: Paris clone. Although at that point we almost have the explanation.

• Back to Front: "My personal time stream has been running backwards for some reason, and this strip doesn't have a punchline."
• Bait-and-Switch Comparison: has the following exchange after Lambert describes his encounter with a Gollum-Expy
  Lambert: It was going to eat me and then steal it (i-e: Lambert's ring)!
  Kyros: Strange how one can become so tainted by lustfor wealth and power, as embodied in shiny trinkets, and corrupted to such a wretched state.
  Mordecai: Yes, but what about this creature he mentioned?

• Banana in the Tailpipe: One comic features a joke about destroying the Death Star by stuffing a "giant three-eyed Kinyenian potato" into the same thermal exhaust port that Luke shot with a proton torpedo in the movie.
• Beat Panel: A favorite device of the author, heavily lampshaded
• The Big Damn Kiss: Right here. And it's about damn time.
• Big "NO!": The GM here when the Fantasy characters decide to split up to get their prelimary tasks done quickly.
• Big Word Shout: Kiiiiiirrrrrrkkk!!!
• Book Ends: Excluding the series of guest strips that followed, the comic itself ended as it began
  • During the overly long "Orcrift Mountains" arc, at one point, the caravan runs away from yet another Balrog after traveling through time, only for Kyros to catch up again without the Balrog around. The storyline is then interrupted by the Crisis Crossover in early 2009. When the storyline finally resumed, the last two panels of the pre-interruption are repeated before Kyros finally revealed what he had done with the Balrog.
  Alvissa: Kyros! But... but... the Balrog!
  Kyros: Yeah, yeah. Not a problem.
  Alvissa: How do you keep doing that?
• Brick Joke: In the annotation of strip 1324: " In fact, Loren is a Martian. This will be revealed in strip #1500." Sure enough, strip 1500. According to the rerun annotations, the author did not seriously intend to follow through with it at first.

• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Every character has their own distinct colour for speech bubbles, although as this strip notes, this can occasionally cause problems when themes crossover in unexpected ways.

• Crisis Crossover: at the end of 2008, the universe imploded due to temporal paradoxes ocurring simultaneously in most of the themes. The characters all ended up at the Infinite Featureless Plane of Death, but eventually managed to get their respective continuities rebooted.
  • Although they might not have gotten it completely right... Nazis run the world.
• Dead Artists Are Better: Discussed in this strip.
• Death Is Cheap: None of the Deaths have actually collected more than one soul in the entire storyline. Nor, for that matter, have they collected a pay-check, leading to Death Takes a Holiday...
  • Death of Being Ground by a Mars Rover Rock Abrasion Tool might be getting his chance soon, though!
• Death Takes a Holiday: The Deaths going on strike.

• Demoted to Extra: Quercus from the Space theme is currently this.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Wrestle out Cthulhu, technically. Steve also wrestled to death Death of Being Wrestled to Death by Steve when he showed up to collect the soul, which caused its own problems. That introduced the Paradox Department, which is run by a giant frog. He has also wrestled a Balrog to death. Without even getting any burns.
• Distracted by the Sexy: From the annotations:
  I did half a year of French at high school. I don't think I absorbed much beyond "Je m'appelle David." You'd think I would have paid more attention to the luscious young Miss P. who was our teacher... or maybe that was my problem.
• Done a George Lucas: Redirect Namer (with kind permission from Dr. Morgan-Mar), referencing his adding missing sound effects to a podcast.
• Don't Explain the Joke: This is the comic that averts this rule to the point that you'd never know it existed. If there is any chance that a non-genius in the audience will not get the joke, it will be explained, in great detail. Not only are the explanations incredibly interesting in their own right but they often make the actual joke funnier. This comic's annotation brings explaining the joke up to eleven.
• Dressed to Plunder: Pirates can be easily identified by their fancy hats.
• Dying Race: The author pointed out that a page on this trope is desperately needed here, in The Rant to strip #2765. Four days later, he apparently got tired of waiting and started the page.
• Easter Egg: In this strip.
• Early-Bird Cameo: The Great Dragon Sage Ardaxar makes one in this strip, during the simultaneous explosions the characters cause to restart the universe.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Early on, all of the themes (except for Steve and Terry) were posited as roleplaying games with Morgan-Mar as the DM. All of them ended up dropping this, though it stuck with Space and Fantasy for a while.
• '80s Hair: In flashbacks to Jamie and Adam in college.
• Eldritch Abomination: Cthulhu (in the form of a Lego octopus mounted on a tyrannosaurus miniature) is a recurring character, and often gets wrestled by Steve.
• Elemental Plane: The Infinite Featureless Plane of Death. Note that this is apparently a parody/shout out to Discworld, even though the author denies (in jest) ever reading that series.
  • However, it isn't truly featureless (Link needed: Reference to stubs on the ground), and it might not be infinite
• Eloquent in My Native Tongue: Draak. Justified because the structure of his mouth and throat makes it very difficult to speak English.
• Everything's Built with LEGO: With the exception of Space and Fantasy themes, which use RPG figures, and Supers, which is drawn.
• Expospeak Gag: "Robert the Infuriated Inflorescence"
• Fate Worse than Death: Death of Insanely Overpowered Fireballs is demoted to this at one point. He's not clear on exactly what he's supposed to do with the people who suffer from him — he can't collect them like a proper Death does, after all...
• Fictional Currency: The Fantasy theme uses copper coins called commons, silver coins called nobles, and gold coins called royals. Nobles are the most commonly used; the names of the other two are mentioned in the annotation.
• Fun with Acronyms: Secret Action Squadron Team of Cryptid Hunters.

• George Jetson Job Security: As stated above, Death of Insanely Overpowered Fireballs has been demoted and then reinstated so many times that it is hard to keep track of his job. Other deaths are also shuffled around, but poor, old Fireballs falls victim to this the most This may not happen anymore, though.

• Gold–Silver–Copper Standard: The currency in the Fantasy theme is copper coins called commons, silver coins called nobles, and gold coins called royals.
• The Grim Reaper: An entire enterprise of them, manned by a cynical "Head Death".
• Her Codename Was Mary Sue: William Shakespeare writes those Harry Potter fanfics where the exchange student Will charms Hermione. He also writes the novelisation of the movie of The Lord of the Rings where he creates the character Willimir (Faramir and Boromir's handsomer younger brother). Willimir is the new love interest for Éowyn.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: The Ruby of Dwarven Might from the Arcane Crown of Power turns out to be the gem on Mordekai's belt.

• Historical Badass Upgrade: Sir Isaac Newton is portrayed as a Time Lord, and gathers various scientists from history to fix the time stream.

• Hurricane of Puns: Constantly.
  • Exhibit A: 2.7 puns per panel with one pun-less panel.
  • Then there's such things in the "Steve" theme as "Stoats in a boat", "Weasels on a diesel", and others.

• I Should Write a Book About This: Lambert, at the end of the first great Fantasy quest. He even titles it There and Back Again, or The Hobbit. Here.

• Lampshade Hanging: Lampshades lampshading, twice. Sometimes in later strips the Lampshade Hanging takes the form of a link to this wiki.

• Law of Chromatic Superiority: Head Death is the only Death to wear a non-black cape. It's blue.
• The Lonely Door: There is a teleportation gate connecting the sister villages of Footcrag and Cragfoot, on opposite sides of the nigh-impassable Orcrift Mountains. As explained here.

• My Brain Is Big: The male telepath seen in the Space theme.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: At one point, one of Death of Insanely Overly Powered Fireballs' demotions had an extremely strange name. Death of Being Stared at Angrily by a Giant Frog.

• No Swastikas: Not in the comic itself, which features swastikas in some of the early "Cliffhangers" strips, but Lego doesn't make a Hitler figurine (although you can make one using certain parts, the author chose not to). The author made him a brain in a jar. Before WWII.
• Non-Indicative Name: In its original run, the comic actually updated with extreme regularity; even after being resumed, it has (and sticks to) a fairly strict schedule, though with irregular bonus updates. On the other hand, the content is highly irregular (and leaps irregularly between plot arcs.)
• The Nothing After Death: Parodied a bit with the Infinite Featureless Plane of Death. Which isn't featureless as Head Death has a desk and the Paradox Department has an office door and his receptionist has a desk.
  • Not to mention the potentially non-infinite implication of the positive curvature ...
• Oddly Small Organization: Thus far, we've only seen a maximum of maybe a dozen-odd Deaths.
• The Omnipotent: X introduces himself as "semi-omnipotent". He can displace a starship thousands of parsecs with no trouble at all, but

X: I can create a rock so heavy that I can't lift it. And then: I can't lift it! An actual omnipotent being would be able to lift it.

• Overly Long Gag:
  • The start of 2009. The Scientific Revolution theme currently (Aug. 2010) has a story line dealing with paradoxes created as a result of the explosion that destroyed the universe.
  • Will Shakespeare's discussion of overuse of Beat Panel.
• Overly Long Name: Valentina Irina Ranevskaya Galina Ivana Natalya Iriyushka Anastasia Sonyechka Marinochka Ineslenka Tatyana Hvorostovskya, a.k.a. Dr Ginny Smith.

• A Pirate 400 Years Too Late: The pirates become this when they are arbitrarily transported to 1940.

• Pre Ass Kicking One Liner: "It's science, Punk!" Made even better by the annotation.
• Public Domain Character: Several, including Hitler, Shakespeare and Cthulhu.

• Raiders of the Lost Parody: The Cliffhangers theme is one big Affectionate Parody of Indiana Jones.

• Rebuilt Set: Old Lego sets that have been taken apart need to be rebuilt occasionally. Sometimes 8 years later.
• Rubber-Band History: A changed WWII and Hitler's Brain in a jar.
• Running Gag: Mostly involving Death, giant frogs and insanely-overpowered fireballs. Not to mention regular (every 100 strips or so) hobbit puns, "Oh yeah, I killed a Balrog [some number of "Again"s]", and "Nazi science sneers at X!" Two of these are lampshaded here.
• Serial Escalation: When a Darth Maul avatar showcases his weapon in Comic 82, the heroes take their one-upmanship up to eleven.
  Darth Maul: "Fear my trendy double-bladed laser sword!"
  Out of the way, Paris, so I can use my quadruple laser sword!
  Quintuple!
  Septuple!

• Single-Issue Wonk / Berserk Button: DMM really, really hates Monopoly.
• Shakespeare in Fiction: A modern version, who writes Harry Potter fanfics. He likes self-inserts, which means there's also Shakespeare in Fiction in Fiction. Provided it's canon in both storylines, Will was kicked out of the TARDIS by the scientists in the Scientific Revolution storyline as they were gathering scientists after it was pointed out Will wasn't a scientist. He was kicked out around 1990 because they didn't have time to take him back to the 1500s.
• Social Semi-Circle: Will, Ophelia and Mercutio watching Mr Marlowe's Powerpoint presentation in the Shakespeare thread. Mentioned in the commentary here.
• Splash Panel: Here and there. .
• Stable Time Loop/Unstable Time Loop: Occurs in almost every theme, often subverted. Of note is the time Serron and Iki Piki's future selves attempt to bust them out of jail. It fails. Their past selves ultimately get their organs stolen, so they end up stealing the organs from their future selves. Then...
  • Timey-Wimey Ball: Things eventually get so bad that the universe gets destroyed.)
  • Death of Inhaling Hatmaking Chemicals collects Jamie after he died of an insanely overpowered fireball, which led to a fight between him and Death of Insanely Overpowered Fireballs. The fight eventually escalated to the point where the Head Death gets involved, and he punishes them by his usual method of demotion and promotion, promoting Inhaling Hatmaking Chemicals to Insanely Overpowered Fireballs. But he does it retroactively, meaning that Inhaling Hatmaking Chemicals is responsible for the last two victims of insanely overpowered fireballs- the first of which was Jamie.
• Stealth Pun:
  • Shakespeare in #967 has a chance to occupy "office B down on level 2". Does he want it? A dialog box for "PunGuard 2.1" covers the pun in the comic! It would have been a pun on Hamlet: "2B or not 2B, that is the question."
  • Comic #1996 seems to be setting up yet another hobbit-pun. Lambert doesn't tell the pun, and the annotation links to this very trope page. Only Morgan-Mar knows the intended pun for sure. It might have been "Don't make a hobbit of it", or perhaps "Don't burn the hobbit", a pun on "burn the habit."
  • Another example: in comic #2096, Lambert's hobbit-pun is ruined by a (rather ominous, but that's not the point) cough. Lambert probably meant "hobbit-tat," a pun on "habitat."
  • The Quintessential Fifth Elementalist. Consider the literal meaning of the word "quintessential".

• Stuff Blowing Up: The line from Excel♡Saga "Explosions fix everything!" could have applied here, since several characters think it might be able to restart the universe, and some are preparing to make things explode. The existence of the character "Death of Insanely Overpowered Fireballs" says a lot.
• Stupid Jetpack Hitler: Pretty much the entire "Cliffhangers" theme.
• Stylistic Suck: Shakespeare's in-comic writing of his own Harry Potter fanfiction.
• Submarine Pirates: The pirates somehow end up in 1940 and hijack a German U-boat.
• Take That!: #2870, among other. DMM even apologizes for it in the annotation.
• Techno Babble: This strip brings it up to eleven before lampshading it.
• Temporal Paradox: Built up to during the latter half of 2008, when pretty much all the themes started Time Travel story arcs, and eventually a few of those (as well as the Large Hadron Collider) started leading to paradoxes. 5 or so paradoxes occurred, and on New Year's Eve culminated in an "ominously silent explosion". New Year's Day's comic is just a big blank expanse, marked as a crossover between every theme except the "isolated" ones. Later, it was the subject of another crossover arc.
  Head Death: Alright, who destroyed the universe?
• They Killed Kenny Again: Adam and Jamie in particular, but by all means not the only people to die multiple times.
  Adam: You can only die once. Busted!

• Tonight, Someone Dies: Morgan-Mar announced the permanent death of a major character before the end of 2007. After setting up most of the regulars in highly perilous situations, 31 December came about — and the "Me" character, Morgan-Mar in person, was killed.
• Torches and Pitchforks: Wielded by several angry mobs in the Fantasy theme, usually after the heroes have (more or less) accidentally burnt down their village. First seen here, also here, and here.
• TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life: Mentioned In-Universe—this strip warns "Do not click if you have something urgent you need to do today!"

• Unsound Effect:
  • TRANSCEND!
  • Grab! Climb! Maintain precarious grip!
  • ICE!
• Viewers Are Geniuses: And some of the more complex ones come with footnotes, which may or not be related to the strip in some tiny way.

• Webcomics Long Runner: By his own count, the 18th longest-running webcomic in existence^note Using strip count as a metric. He notes his strip-a-day schedule means his count increases more than twice as fast as the popular Monday-Wednesday-Friday pattern..
  • Has long since gone well past the 3000 mark.

• We Come in Peace — Shoot to Kill: The invading Martians in the theme of the same name.
• Weird Trade Union: Deaths on strike. Which was eventually broken.
• Wham Episode: The author (as a character of the comic), promised on strip 1667 that a major character would die before the end of the year. On strip 1800 (on New Years Eve no less), he makes good on his promise. He kills himself.
  • The next year ends with several paradoxes occurring in all the strips, causing the universe to collapse and everyone from all the strips ending up on the Infinite Featureless Plane of Death (again for some).
• Writer on Board: The Shakespeare theme started out as a one shot railing against the culture-deadening evils of Microsoft PowerPoint, though it moved away from this quickly.

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