Webcomic / Jack (David Hopkins)

Jack is a furry webcomic by David Hopkins. The main character, Jack, is a rabbit who is also The Grim Reaper. Most of the stories take place in the afterlife or involve death in some form.

Oh, and fair warning, this comic can get very very very NSFW: gore, sex, swearing, and all around blasphemy can be found. Went on a long hiatus for a twofold reason: Mr. Hopkins was figuring out the last few arcs that would wrap up the comic and due to something that happened with a former fan that nearly resulted in legal action on both sides. It is back on a schedule now where the full arc is posted after it is done as opposed to its former Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule.

Now has character pages under construction. A complete downloadable archive of the strip can be found here, as the former website has gone completely offline at Hopkins' request. Another archive can be found here.

On January 18, 2021, David released most of his characters to the public domain. Though the post has since been deleted, it has been confirmed that fans are still allowed to use those characters for future stories.

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This webcomic provides examples of:

• Action Girl: Farrago, Central, Brisk, Lita, and Specks, though all with varying degrees of competency. Generally, angels fare far better than mortals when it comes to fighting in Hell.
• Aerith and Bob: Often due to the incorporation of readers' original characters.
• Afterlife Avenger: Lita kills herself with the express purpose of going to Hell and killing her father, the notorious serial killer and rapist Drip who raped her mother, a second time.
• After the End: Some chapters are set after apocalyptic events. In fact, almost the entire comic, save a handful of chapters, actually occurs after an apocalypse which wipes out most life on Earth. Including the original denizens of the planet - humans.
• All-Loving Hero: God is one of these, effectively claiming to love everyone, in every possible way. Though she ends up being a dark version that is prone to inflicting strict and cruel punishments on those she "loves" if she thinks it's for their own good. She even claims to still love Lucifer/Satan despite banishing him to Hell and is content to let him back into Heaven if he apologizes.
• Always Accurate Attack: In "Undying", Lucifer has a shotgun which never misses its shot and will kill multiple targets when fired.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: Surprisingly used with restraint. Only Jack, Jill, Drip, and Lita are shown to be unnatural colors that wouldn't be found in nature. In Jack and Jill's case, this can be explained as being [[spoilers: the first of their kind. The scientists who created them likely wanted an easy marker to be able to find them should they break out, something that is actually done in real life with animal test subjects.]] Drip's bright blue coloration isn't explained. Lita's color is inherited from her father, thought it is a far more diluted blue than Drip's thanks to being half-rat and half-raccoon.
• Animal Is the New Man: The world used to belong to humanity. That was until Jack killed them all, giving rise to the furries.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: Several characters are personifications of one of the Seven Deadly Sins, the one that they committed most egregiously in life. Jack is Wrath.
• Arch-Enemy: Among the villains that Jack faces, Drip and Dr. Kane stand out.
• The Aristocrats: Drip tries telling one of these jokes to the starfish demons. It actually grosses them out.
• Artistic License – Biology: In-universe. Arthor doesn't really know that much about cancer himself (however he does know that cancer is a group of diseases), but his speech to the press essentially tells them cancer is caused by evil monsters.
• Art Shift: During the "The Once Was Swan" arc, the art style changes several times due to Emily repeatedly hitting her mirror due to suffering Villainous Breakdown. It goes back to normal by the end of the chapter.
• Art-Style Dissonance: It's a comic set in the Bloody Bowels of Hell, done by an artist whose biggest influence is Tiny Toon Adventures. Also apparent in the side arcs focusing on Arty and Vinci, which have an adorable cuddly style reminiscent of Chuck Jones
• Ascended Extra: Within the series' universe. When humanity died in the Human-Furry War and furrykind failed to learn from man's mistakes, God ensured that the ensuing history would follow that which came before (sans biological-warfare-apocalypse) as closely as possible. However, certain furry works of fiction, such as Extinctioners and The Funday Pawpet Show, are now mainstream works.
• The Atoner: Too many to count, but Jack seems to be the most prominent one.
• Author Appeal: Hopkins has said in a fan interview that he hates women, owing mostly to his issues with his own mother. This explains a lot about how some women are written in Jack. This also explains the use of Drip as one of Hopkins' avatars, as Hopkins also says Drip was created to be a personal coping mechanism and outlet for these negative emotions which he freely admits are wrong (he claims real-life violence against women outrages and disgusts him).
• Author Avatar:
  • Pepe Val Pew, the Fursona of Dave Hopkins, appears both as Pepe Val Pew and as Satan. Interestingly, only when appearing as Satan does he appear to be able to discuss plot points and openly break the fourth wall, other appearances are little more than cameos. He has also identified himself as Drip in various places, and Hopkins himself is a widely-criticized yet still somehow popular book author in-universe.
• Author Tract: The pro-life themes get pretty thick, not to mention the lavish attentions paid to women being abused in various ways (and, most infamously, being made to apologize to their abuser). One example comes from "Fnar the Unborn": Jack says that presumably raising Fnar would have saved his mother's soul and she wouldn't have gone to Hell. This is important because this is the only time in the entire comic that it's suggested that a character is be able to do anything to redeem themselves while living after doing some minor thing that would have otherwise damned them.
• Barefoot Cartoon Animal: Most of the characters are fully clothed except for footwear.
• Be Careful What You Wish For/Literal Genie: Hell tends to twist a person's ideals and fantasies - if all you really want is to belong, then oh, you will. If you want to forget, then day after day, that's what happens. If you want control over life and death... well...
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • Jack and Reckonin pull this off in "Wednesday's Child" when they save Wendy and Anna and again in "Sever the Hunger" when they kill Bob and Lisa.
  • Brisk in "Megan's Run" a few different times while she's in Hell. Notable since she's a mortal and not a Sin or angel.
• Big "NO!": A few over the course of the comic, but the biggest one surprisingly goes to Drip, when the Tomato in the Mirror reveal hits him after Satan tricked him into killing his own parents.
• Black Comedy Rape: Happens a lot, usually to men.
• Blessed with Suck: Most of the characters who are punished with being anthropomorphic personifications of the Seven Deadly Sins are given far greater powers than a normal denizen of Hell. However, they're unable to actually enjoy the activities that embody their lust. The angel Central told Jack that one of the reasons the Sins were given power was so that they would not seek out redemption, continuing their punishment in Hell.
• Bloody Bowels of Hell: One punishment for those who are guilty of the sin of Lust is being fused into a huge, writhing gob of meat, similar in form to a Gibbering Mouther from Dungeons & Dragons.
• Body Horror: All the time in Hell. See Bloody Bowels of Hell above, for one instance.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Inverted after a fashion, starting here. It's called the 7th wall.
• Break the Cutie: Good, decent, cute people get REALLY broken and abused, sometimes just for being good, decent and cute.
  • It's no better exemplified than with Fnar, the Innocent in Hell. An unborn baby who died with his mother, Fnar was given the form of a small child and told that he's to stay in Hell for the time being but that Hell will not affect him since he did not do anything to be damned personally. His role in the comic is to wander through people's personal tortures not quite grasping what's going on, and acting as Jack's Morality Pet. Fnar even manages to acquire a girlfriend (a deformed demoness introduced in a previous arc as the killed-as-an-infant child of that arc's protagonist) and a pet (a Rework, which is a 28 Days Later style feral zombie). Fnar fails to notice anything off about either, and they both become very much fond of him in turn. Everyone likes Fnar and wants to be nice to him (and those that don't stay uninvolved in his dealings) until Fnar is told he is finally going to leave Hell. This event is treated with a lot of build up and celebration, until Fnar's father Drip, serial rapist in life and the Sin of Lust personified in death, figures out his connection to Fnar and molests him right before he was to leave, spoiling his innocence at the last minute. This causes Jack to have a Heroic BSoD where he lashes out at an angel who had been one of Jack's few true friends, spoiling their friendship.
  • ARC XXXII: Been Reading Job has a broken cutie. Fangs described himself as a Christian, but became upset about being a social outcast, with it changing to anger when observing celebrations for being free from alcohol or leaving rehab (due to molesting children), when Fangs received no recognition for avoiding alcohol or not requiring rehab. The story shows his breaking point when he perceives that people are expected to be flawed, and chooses to become wrathful.
• Broad Strokes: The canon timeline is confusing, as time does not exist in Hell, so the plot wanders across earth's timeline. Plus, the "history repeats" stuff makes the timeline confusing and possibly broken. The timeline gets really confusing when characters from Rework The Dead start appearing in Jack. The two works seem to fit together, but it's hard to figure out how. Drip is the main problem. Are both Drips the same person? If so, Lita grew up during the events of Rework, but as we see her death and see her alive in the background of "Two For You" both of which are noticeably rework-free. So either the ability to recover from a Zombie Apocalypse ridiculously quickly is one of the lesser known furry attributes, or Drip died multiple times in the same universe, once killed by a rework that looks exactly like his hell-form (which given the Reincarnation and escaping from Hell bits may be possible). Or it's paralleled but related universes. Or the damage to the time line is worse that it originally seems.
• Broken Aesop:
  • The "Hell is That Noise" arc tells the story of Todd, a fox who served in World War I and obeyed the order to kill over a hundred children, a decision he regretted. When he comes home, he learns that his wife committed suicide, and Todd ends up committing suicide as well. In Hell, he refuses to take responsibility for his actions, arguing that he just followed orders and "fate" already decided what would happen in his life. Everyone in Hell (including Satan) calls him out on this and that what happened to him was his own fault. The Story essentially wants the reader to see Todd as irresponsible for following such an order, that he should have refused and that he should accept it's all his fault, but the problem is that a good deal of the tragedies that happened to him were beyond his direct and conscious control, including the action that condemned him to Hell. Later on, it's revealed that the major that ordered Todd to shoot the children was The Devil in disguise, who pointed out that the children would likely grow up to attack the country, and that Todd is a soldier and must obey orders. Todd would still be screwed even if he had chosen to refuse the order, because the devil tricked everyone into believing that he was a general, meaning that Todd would likely be arrested and killed for treason, and other soldiers would simply follow the order in his place, not knowing that the general is an impostor. So, as a result, the story simply prove that Todd's argument that he was a pawn of forces beyond his control is correct all along. There's a reason why David Hopkins isn't fond of that arc.
  • The non-linear nature of time in Hell tends to screw around wildly with the concept of free will and personal choice; the Devil often resorts to directly manipulating the circumstances of the past and future in order to compel his victims to act, and then blame them for it all. This is most notable with Drip, of all people. His grandmother took him in after his parents were killed, directly blamed him for their deaths and used that guilt to force him to perform sex acts with her, setting him on an escalating path of sexual violence and depravity until he finally died. After spending time in Hell and being raped literally thousands of times, the Devil gives him the choice of becoming the Sin of Lust, sweetening the deal with a chance to get revenge on his granny and a treasured memento of his mother, but with a cost: the murder of two people. Drip agrees, because at this point, it hardly makes any difference... and then he realizes that the two people the Devil has just had him brutally kill were his own parents, sealing off a Stable Time Loop. And yet, the Devil closes his argument by saying that it was always Drip's choice, and it was always his own fault, just like Grandma said.
  • We find out from literal Word of Sheep God that souls need pain to grow and change, and this is the reason for all suffering in the universe and the reason why life can't be fair for the good of all... but then she rescinds death on Susan and directly intervenes to give her a good, healthy, happy life full of love and family, and she gets to save many children (because of course saving children is what good women who lives good lives do in this universe) which practically guarantees she'll get into Heaven when she dies; this is explicitly a gift for Megan as an act of contrition on Sheep God's part. So apparently, Sheep God is willing to just fix some people's lives after all and let them bypass all that growth from pain, She just has to feel obligated to do it first. Furthermore, even though this bending of the rules is — again — an explicit act of contrition, it comes with a pricetag. Megan is not only sent back to relive life again on Earth, but deliberately subjected to a hard, painful one.
  • The basic premise of Hell is that everyone in Hell has the power to free themselves, but that's just plain not true. Most of Hell's denizens are either being so constantly tortured they don't have time to think about anything but escaping whatever Disproportionate Retribution is being inflicted on them, being trapped in a dark stasis, unable to move and utterly without hope or even basic human contact, or, most often, having their memories removed so they can't recall the sin they're supposed to repent. And that doesn't even cover those few, like Lita and Silver Blue, who do manage to realize their sin (and gain "open" eyes) but still can't get out of Hell, and only managed that because they had help from the powers that be. Nobody is capable of getting out on their own once they're in.
    • A woman who goes to hell for killing her daughters (because she thought her husband only wanted a son) meets the warped, monstrous shades of said daughters. She realizes what she's done, repents, and then embraces them, accepting the role of motherhood she once rejected (something that has been stated to be enough to save a woman's soul before). This is everything that is supposed to be required for a soul to find redemption and escape Hell, but the daughter-monsters tear her to pieces anyway.
  • Much ado is made about sin and the nature of choice, but Heaven and Hell are both guilty of subverting mortal free will. During his life, Drip is allowed to rape and murder a girl while Farrago and Jack watch. Jack says it's because it has to be his choice, and that this event is what locks him into becoming the Sin of Lust. Cue many, many strips later, when Central locks Bob and Lisa in a freezer in order to prevent them from going their separate ways and, each without an accomplice, be forced to end the cannibalistic lifestyle that marked them as the Sin(s) of Gluttony and thus "escape" punishment. So, Drip got to decide for himself to become a serial rapist for so long that he desensitized himself to his own moral dilemma and thus lived a long, fruitful life of rape and incest while Heaven did nothing, but the Vorshes had to be murdered by an angel, lest they become better people.
    • There's also the premise of the comic. Humanity was wiped out and God forced the universe into a global reset, but with furries instead of humans. Which would be fine, except that God is forcing furrykind to re-enact human history exactly. This means that the furry counterparts to history's worst villains (for instance, Furry Ed Gein or Furry Pol Pot) lived, died, and went to Hell for the sins that God forced them to commit.
  • Suicide is wrong and gets you sent to Hell, even if you accidentally fell to your death, and Jack doesn't get a choice in how he serves his duty as the Reaper. Unless, of course, you're a woman who commits suicide because she had a miscarriage! Apart from the not-subtle insinuations that not killing herself over it would make her a bad mother and thus deserving of Hell, Jack lets Joann see Hell up close, then lets her escape back to her husband so she can give birth to twins. So, Jack does have a choice, and sometimes suicide is okay after all!
  • Committing murder in the Jackverse is considered a one-way ticket to Hell, regardless of good intentions. Specks not only kills and murders a convicted pedophile who serves his (disappointingly brief) time and is released — she tortures him horrifically. She's made an angel that's allowed to work in Hell for it.
• Bug War: Arc XXIII "Debts," which takes place in the future of the furry earth.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Darkly subverted. Doctor Thalmus thinks that developing a cure for cancer entitles him to molest children, even going so far as to hold the cure hostage when Aurthor finds out. No one else seems to agree with his viewpoint.
• Butch Lesbian: Specks has a "mannish" appearance (to the point of it not being immediately obvious she is female when she first appeared) and for the most part doesn't act in traditionally "female" ways, but later on is shown to be attracted to other females.
• Came Back Wrong: In the first part of "Two for You," the woman who was resurrected keeps wanting to go back to the afterlife. She eventually kills herself to do so.
• The Cameo: The news crew of Newshounds makes an appearance starting in this strip.
• Cardboard Prison:
  • Worryingly, temporarily escaping Hell without being reconciled with your sins is possible. More optimistically, getting and staying out if you reconcile them is possible and permitted.
  • For that matter, who designs a holding area and lab for an untested GM creature of human level intelligence that you can break out of with a fork?
• Cheerful Child: Fnar, though the mere fact that he is one despite the context he's in also pushes him into Creepy Child territory. His reincarnation, Randy, is a clearer example.
• Chekhov's Gunman: All the souls Jack has collected end up coming back several arcs later.
• Children Are Innocent: Fnar deconstructs this trope, by showing that a cute, genuinely innocent and pure kid who doesn't quite understand the horrors of Hell can be as scary as said horrors.
• Church of Happyology: All of Arc XXIX is a thinly veiled Take That! to That One Church.
• Cosmic Plaything: Hopkins makes this one [Zig-Zagging Trope zig and zags]] this when it comes to Todd: He believes himself this, so he becomes this, with the Devil controlling his life. Then he realizes the Devil told him about the Seventh Wall, which means he can invert it and make the cosmos (or at least the comic strip) his plaything, right? Wrong.
• Crapsack World: Hard to place, as the comic is largely set in Hell, and our viewpoint of events is skewed. While there are some very optimistic bits, the facts are that humanity has been wiped out, humanity's successors are doomed to make the exact same mistakes as humanity in the same order. Hell may as well have a revolving door as far as some of its worse repeat offenders are concerned, and there's a Zombie Apocalypse as well as an Alien Invasion waiting in the immediate future. God seems to have taken a "hands off" approach to things, leaving the fate of the world to mortals, angels and Sins, of which only the worst of the Sins seems to have a clear plan.
• Cursed with Awesome: Most of the Sins.
  • Drip, as Lust, has an endless stable of victims, an entire coliseum that will host a sadistic sexual torture game for him whenever he wants (and then he gets to keep the "winner" for his own use), people who service him sexually of their own volition just to keep him happy, and since he's already in Hell, he can't be further punished for any of it (unless you count the other Sins getting revenge a punishment). The only drawbacks? He can no longer gain physical pleasure from the act of rape, and cannot touch his victims in life unless they give themselves to him willingly. While this upsets him greatly, he can still satisfy his sadism and controlling tendencies.
    • However, as time goes on, he becomes more and more unstable and less interested in his role as Lust.
  • The Vorshes, as Gluttony, are cannibals who have improved strength and speed and can devour entire people easily. The main downside is that everything in hell tastes terrible, which leads them to try to escape from hell to get fresh meat. They also have an ironic punishment of being connected to each other despite hating each other.
  • Jack himself has incredible power, being perhaps the most dangerous of the sins in terms of his personal prowess at combat, and gets to send evildoers to hell - something he always wanted to do in life. However, this act is no longer satisfying to him, and this fact is a major feature in spurring his redemption. As Wrath, he has a lot more power to do good than even most angels do, as there is little that can be done to punish him for breaking the rules save direct combat - something he is very skilled at.
  • Dr. Kane, as Envy, has an enormous army of mindless followers, the Reworks, as well as a number of other minions. He presently seems to be planning some sort of mass takeover, so remains driven by his lust for power that he had in life. There is no obvious drawback to his condition, though he seems forever unhappy with what he has and driven to have more.
  • Vince, as Greed, has an entire city under his control, and even though he was tortured by his former followers, it has only made him into more of an icon. There is no obvious drawback to his status as a Sin, as he has all the followers he could ever want.
• Days of Future Past: Apparently, when furrykind annihilated the human race (their creators), they ended up being knocked back into at least medieval society, working their way back up to what we would call the present day and beyond. An obvious piece of evidence for this is the first official playing card deck, which shows that when Farrago was alive, she was a medieval-style knight or warrior.
• Dead to Begin With: Most of the recurring characters are dead, or have been dead at some point.
• Death Takes a Holiday: In a couple of fancomics. Oddly enough, things work out better when Jack isn't on the job.
• Deconstruction: Of a World of Funny Animals or Animal Is the New Man. From the beginning, the reason why "furries" existed is because they were genetically modified by humans to essentially serve as fodder for less than savory tasks, engineered to act and think like humans but never actually look like us. Hell, they were never meant to have the same rights, since they were made without the ability to reproduce. Yet they could still think and feel all the human emotions, like rage and hatred, which the first of them Jack demonstrated the best, which is why he essentially nuked the world so hard, the entire timeline was reset, with furries now taking the place of humans. And the reason for this is because God intends for them to repeat all of human history. That's right; first, the reason anthropomorphic animals were like us is because they were made to be like us, but only to a degree, and the reason they are now living in a world just like ours, but with them in our place, is by divine meddling. And because they've taken our place, this means they are victim to the requirements to either be absolved or damned forever.
• Deliver Us from Evil: Fnar's mother Jinx. She becomes saved after he declares her love for her son and adopts a bunch of demon girls who were killed as infants by their mother.
  "Your mother did some pretty bad things. But she would have been a good mommy, and maybe it would have saved her soul."
  • Averted with Molly, Todd's wife, who attempts the same thing by embracing the children she killed but is instead slaughtered by them, but that's possibly because she's insane and didn't truly know what repenting her sins meant.
• Deus ex Machina: Wow, it was a really good thing some random kid just happened to bring a gun to school so he could shoot Brian and stop him!
• Did They or Didn't They?: One chapter had the focus character in this situation.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?:
  • A demon insisted in calling Fiver by his name. It does not end well for him.
  • Edmond Vade invokes it when he discovers a style of martial arts that allows him to take on Jack in hand-to-hand combat. Unfortunately for him, he eventually fails.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • In the "What's Pissing off Dalton" story arc, Dalton kills a man because of his speech impediment that causes him to draw out his "s" sounds, which annoys Dalton due to his chronic headaches.
  • Also, Hell, for some of its victims. Not so much because they don't deserve punishment, but because the punishments are meant to teach them what they did wrong in life so they can realize their sin and repent, while often being too obtuse or too terrifying for the victim to interpret, or just plain designed to be hopeless. What can a person learn from being sealed naked into a wall with their arms, limbs, and head covered, and the rest left exposed to be raped by a monster?
  • And Hell in general, considering how incredibly easy it is to get there. Does anybody really deserve to go to Hell for committing suicide because they accidentally fell to their death?
• Don't Fear the Reaper: While played straight with Jack (sometimes), "What's Pissing Off Dalton" has Satan showing Jack who will replace him if he ever leaves Hell. Dalton will be guaranteed to lead to an all-out aversion.
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: If you're content with Purgatory and don't want to reincarnate because you know you won't remember anything about the afterlife and are guaranteed a harder life than the one you had the first time (which, because you had only an okay life, is that much more likely to land you in Hell) a cadre of busty, horny angels will invite themselves into your house, refuse to let you leave no matter how many times you don't want what they're selling, and shove their hands down your pants until you admit that deep down, you really do want to fuck them despite them only teasing how such pleasure is only for entrants into Heaven. But they might let you go peacefully if you tell them that you "can't accept" their sexual assault. They're only spreading happiness and love, after all! They're angels, they couldn't do it if it wasn't good!
• Downer Ending: "Dinner at Arloest's" and both stories in "Two For You" spring to mind.
• The Dragon: Brian, to Kane.
• Driven to Suicide/Suicide Is Painless: A lot of the recurring non-angelic cast took their own lives out of either desperation or a desire for control. No less than three recurring characters were driven to suicide by Drip.
• Easily Forgiven:
  • Played With regarding the denizens of Hell. Any one of them (up to and including Satan himself) is perfectly capable of ending their time in Hell at any time by recognizing their sins, repenting for them, and asking for forgiveness. Seems easy, but the people who end up in Hell tend to, by their very natures, resist doing this. At the same time, a good number of Hell's victims don't remember enough about their lives to account for their sins, particularly Jack, and thus can't repent and seek forgiveness for something they don't remember doing.
  • Inverted in "Hell Is That Noise", when the mother character recognizes her sins, repents for them, and asks forgiveness of the children she killed as infants. They angrily tear her apart instead.
• Easy Road to Hell:
  • If you cannot forgive yourself for your life sins, you can't get into Heaven.
  • If you were enough of a Jerkass, you go to Hell.
  • If you commit suicide for any reason, you go to Hell. In "Games We Play in Hell," it was implied that accidentally jumping to your death also counts as suicide.
  • If your evil was of such a prodigious magnitude that Hell does not know how to punish you, you become Sin itself.
  • It is stated that if you don't believe in God, S/He cannot accept you into Heaven (but at least this version of Purgatory isn't that bad, amounting to a peaceful, idealized version of Earth).
    • If you die and go to Purgatory, angels will sexually harass you until you agree to be reincarnated and live a harder life than the one you had the first time...which practically guarantees that you will go to Hell.
  • If you're an unborn child whose mother went to Hell after being murdered, you go to Hell with her! But your innocence protects you from comprehending any of the horror you witness or being harmed except by your psychotic rapist sin-incarnate father. Fnar is called The Innocent In Hell and is told early on that he's just on standby before he can be born properly, but that doesn't really change the fact that he was sent to Hell for someone else's sins, and ultimately, to be someone else's punishment.
  • If you are killed as an infant, a deformed, demonic copy of you is sent to Hell to torture your parents. Averted in part, however, as the actual soul of the child is not, though the copies appear to be thinking, feeling beings themselves.
  • If you make the decision to repent your sins and live a better life while you're still on Earth, an angel may come to kill you before you have the chance to act on that decision, so you'll go to Hell.
  • If you manage to make it into Hell while living, you're welcome to buy souls at auction while you're there. But if you try to go back to the living world with them, it's suddenly a sin to own souls, and you'll stay in Hell.
• Even the Dog Is Ashamed: In the (Non-main-story-canon) Frigid McThunderbones, most of the cast of Jack, watching the resultant movie, turn on Hopkins in disgust when they see he's written a killer snowman filler arc. When Drip is asking you "At least spare us a carrot rape scene." you know Even The Rat Won't Touch It.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Even DRIP of all people can feel bad about what is happening to others, and when two characters are captured by Kane, Drip gives one a Mercy Kill and offers to do the same to another. He later goes on to being regular Drip, but look at his eyes in panel 4 here.
  • In "Games We Play in Hell," were are shown how Vince (the Sin of Greed) manages his empire. He frequently make sadistic shows on his coliseum and his followers generally enjoy the "spectacle." On days when Drip is visiting, he usually suggests the "Musical Holes" game, which is a Not Safe for Work version Musical Chairs. It's noticed that very few actually enjoy this game, the rest (including Silver Blue) only pretend to enjoy to avoid punishment.
• Every Episode Ending: At the end of every main story arc: "TTFN" (Ta-Ta For Now). Lampshaded in the story arc "Twist, Twist, Twist."
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Even if they do have good in them, it's clear why the damned are damned: they shift blame around and say it's all the fault of a higher power they got condemned to Hell.^note Excluding those who were actually sent to Hell by a supernatural being, as it's been shown that Satan, the Sins, and even the servants of Sins can do so. Some of them (like Lita) get disproportionately incensed at angels whenever they see them.
• Eldritch Location: Obviously Hell, particularly in "Mr. Smith Goes To Hell" where the landscape changes not only in shape, but also it laws of physics and logic are distorted like a pretzel.
• Eunuchs Are Evil: Fangs, Drip's third apprentice that he trained to make a living off torturing and raping women, reveals to his victim Penelope that he's not going to rape her because A) He's gay and B) More importantly, he castrated himself by removing his dick and balls years ago.
• Exact Words: Angels can restore a damned's memory with a physical gesture of love. While the norm is a kiss, for a very stubborn damned, a punch to the face can work just as well.
• Explicit Content: Although there is the occasional display of nudity throughout the strip, "The Games We Play in Hell" has more than a bit of explicit sex, particularly of the non-consensual variety.
• Famous, Famous, Fictional: "... before uzis, RPGs, jets, bars, saws, lazers, power armor and pathmakers"
• Fate Worse than Death: These are often used as punishments for Sins and for the damned in Hell, who due to their ability to regenerate get to relive the punishments again and again.
• The Fettered: Central's job is basically to make sure the rules get enforced down to the letter. This tends to make her less than popular with, well, pretty much everyone. She herself doesn't like it all that much either and seems to be planning to step down at some point.
• Fourth-Wall Observer:
  • The so-called insane creature named Nostrum who narrates the "Two For You" arc. He also likes to screw with the reader.
  • Abba from "Megan's Run" chats with "Dave", who appears to exist outside of the comic.
  • Todd isn't so much an observer as he's able to move in between panels.
  • "Lucy" is not only an observer, he draws the comic.
• Foreshadowing:
  • All throughout 'The Games We Play In Hell', Silverblue's internal monologue comes with a number that ticks up and down. At one point, she takes a break to briefly read from a bastardized copy of The Dunwich Horror. The meaning of both of these are revealed at the end of her arc.
  • When Drip promises to hurt Jack worse than Jack's ever been hurt before. He hurts Jack by molesting Fnar.
  • Randy's design. He's half-frog, which means he's got no visible nose like his former incarnation Fnar. He also asks Lita to be his sister the minute he meets her, which is a little weird considering kids often ask new people to be their friends but not family, but since Lita was sister to Fnar it makes sense.

• Furries Are Easier to Draw: The author himself has said he's bad at drawing humans.
• Furry Confusion: Furries are genetically engineered, apparently, so there's nothing weird in a family of crow-men farmers being pestered by crows. There is confusion about how the furry offspring looks like: a cat-girl's elementary school-old kitten looked like a real life kitten, but Littlest Cancer Patients looked like furry kids.
• Genius Loci: The ground of Hell is the Sin of Sloth. He can feel every footstep and may never rest.
• God Is Flawed: The series' interpretation of God is a being who allows all the suffering in the world to happen just because She thinks suffering makes people better and She wants people to solve their own problems, despite making it practically impossible for people to do so and allowing Satan to do whatever he pleases. She also regrets aspects of creation and knows she made it unfair, having incarnated (as Jesus Christ) to both experience the life and suffering of a mortal and offer a way to Heaven to those who consider themselves lost. Best exemplified in "The Chalkboard" short where a child named Timmy tearfully writes God why She doesn't stop War, Hunger, and the Killing of Children on Earth. The angel Farrago answers on God's behalf.
  God: Dear Timmy, why should I stop people from doing something, when they are perfectly capable of stopping themselves?
• Go-Karting with Bowser: "For No Apparent Reason" ends with Vince cornering Fnar, Gene Catlow, and Cotton Taylor... and then tagging Fnar. Vince was just playing tag with him, at Jack's request.
• Good Eyes, Evil Eyes: Whilst Sins, God, and the Devil have pupil-less eyes, all non-Sins in Hell are shown with pinpoint pupils until they realize their sin, at which point they are drawn with the full pupils used by Hopkins for the living and Angels. It's also shown that those who have realized their sin can go back to the ominous pinpoint pupils, if they fall in with the wrong crowd, or if they've been brutalized like Vinci in the side story "Pikri Alitheia" after trying to defend Bashful and being half-devoured by the Gorshes. Vinci's eyes, however, almost immediately returned to "open", suggesting that those in Hell can regain their eyes if they remember all the progress they've already made once they respawn.
• Good is Not Nice: God and most of the angels, particularly Central, through a sort of lawful-neutral type behavior. Heaven has many, many laws in place, and outside of the most extreme extenuating circumstances, it does not make exceptions or intervene on behalf of good mortals. God's behavior especially is so cruel and emotionally manipulative, it's given rise to Alternate Character Interpretation.
• Gorn: It is a very violent webcomic, although the impact is definitely lessened by subpar art.
• Government Conspiracy: The American government knows that furrykind was created in a laboratory by humans, who used to be the only sentient species on Earth. They currently have archaeologists doing research in the ruins of that lab, which is also heavily guarded. Anyone who blabs about furrykind's secret origins would likely be secretly killed, but given the widespread panic and existential angst such blabbing would cause (i.e. "We're all descendants of lab-grown creatures, therefore WE HAVE NO SOULS!"), this is a wise policy. However, they also have possible counter-proof of this in the form of Kane's resurrection machine, unless the Government thinks that being brought back to life sent that poor woman crazy and she hallucinated the whole thing. So if they didn't believe her, they're hiding perceived disproof of the afterlife. If they did, they're hiding perceived proof of religion. One wonders which would be more dangerous.
• Gratuitous Rape: One of the biggest criticisms of the comic; the amount of female characters who haven't been sexually assaulted at some point is quite low... and the amount of female characters who actually tried to fight back instead of just lying there and taking it is nonexistent. Estimates of exactly how much of the comic focuses on it range somewhere between roughly a quarter and a half of all the arcs.
• Groin Attack: Megan delivers the mother of all groin attacks, with a sledgehammer, to Fiver after he rapes her. Visible cords are involved.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: "The Games We Play in Hell" has the protagonist stuck in one, until Jack intervenes to break the loop.
• Guile Hero: Specks, who's also an Angel Unaware in Meg's Run part 2.
• Guns in Church: "Angry Brian" contains Guns in School. Justified with Brian, since he was planning on shooting his classmates. Played straight with the NRA Preacher, who just happened to be carrying around a pistol in school.
• Handwave:
  • On one page, Hopkins got so involved in the inking process that he accidentally lettered in some notes he had written to remind him how to ink things. Upon realizing he had done this he added a new one, reading "In Hell, you can see the notes."
  • Done again in "Mr. Smith Goes to Hell," a comic that was published. This time, a hand drawn backwards on one of the pages is...well, handwaved in the end notes by saying that "these things happen in Hell." The publishers weren't impressed.
  • Continuity errors are usually brushed off with some variation on "Time is funny in Hell."
• Half the Man He Used to Be: Taylor from "One Way to Win."
• Heel–Face Reincarnation: It is possible for souls damned to Hell or Purgatory to be reborn as good people and be given another chance at getting into Heaven.
• Heel Realization: Jack in the last moments of his life.
• Hell of a Heaven: There's one character in Heaven, Rachel, who's implied to either be Drip or one of his apprentice's girlfriend, who has made her personal Heaven a creepy noir-themed hunting ground for her boyfriend full of victims for him to kill and rape and other predators for him to make friends with. All this is to tempt him to leave Hell and into trying life again so they can be together. People are horrified at what they see, and indeed, she seems miserable given she's created a Heaven that's not what she personally wants, but she has hope if her boyfriend arrives, his new experiences will make him a better person and he'll want a new Heaven with her.
• Heroic Bystander:
  • The people in the plane crash in "Falling Angels."
  • Wendy and Anna in the arc "Wednesday's Child."
  • Swifty at the beginning of "The Superman Project."
  • Brisk all throughout "Megan's Run."
• History Repeats: Furry civilization and its history are incredibly uncannily similar to human civilization's history, right down to TV shows and individual people like celebrities, to the point where it can't all have been the result of reincarnation of humans, if that was ever a factor in the repetition of history at all. The main source of this phenomenon was probably the lynching of Mr. Grimm, an anthropomorphic vulture who, not long after the end of humanity, attempted to write a manifesto detailing a new society based upon lessons learned from the mistakes of humanity. He was killed by those who didn't agree with his ideas, and those who fail to learn from history are doomed to... well, you know...
• Humanity's Wake: Jack killed all the humans, which is why he is the sin of Wrath and was sentenced to be the reaper. Almost the entire comic, save for a handful of chapters, are set well after this event, with the furries created by humans having taken over the Earth.
• Identical Stranger: Billie, a character in the Cliff comic, is almost the spitting image of Linda, Cliff's old love. He gets them confused quite a bit. Hopkins revealed this was deliberate and that Billie's character design was created to have horns, spikes, and a long tail that could be removed to then create Linda.
• Informed Flaw: The Sins' inability to enjoy the sin they embody. Supposedly they can't derive any pleasure from committing their namesake sin, but they very obviously do enjoy it and continue to do it, especially Drip, who (being the Sin of lust) can still become sexually aroused and achieve orgasms, and he has an entire stable of immobilized women to use as toys.
  • Being a Sin itself is supposed to be a terrible punishment, but being made a Sin means you get vast amounts of power, you're free to commit whatever atrocities you want without any interference, and you get to rule over the souls of the dead and use them in various ways. Even Jack, the only one of the Sins who seems to have any serious misgivings over what he is, is still far and away the most physically powerful of the seven and his duties regularly expose him to people he can punish for pissing him off.
• Innocent Inaccurate: Fnar
• Ironic Hell: Some of the punishments of the damned rely on this trope, although given that it's a long-running webcomic set in hell there have been surprisingly few; really just Todd, Sloth and Megan's mother.
• It's All About Me:
  • Most of the damned and the Sins really can't think (or care) about more than themselves. Jack in particular has a scene where he complains that his feelings were hurt because he wanted forgiveness and Farrago distanced herself from him instead of just accepting his apology whenever he wanted, and Bob's retelling of his last days of mortal life is utterly one-sided, to the point that even his thoughts about Ellie are more about himself than her.
  • God's answer to anyone complaining about the incredibly unfair rules She inflicts on people is "But it hurts me even more!", which is weird because the fact that furry history is exactly following human history is because she decreed it would be so.
• Karma Houdini: Usually averted. One strip even had Jack help some recently deceased souls prevent their killer from becoming one of these.
  • Played straight with Farrago, whose negligence leads to Fnar being raped by Drip because she cares more about what Fnar's presence is doing for Jack than she does about protecting Fnar. Nobody but Jack calls her on it, and we're supposed to side with her because Jack was mean to her. And then she gets her memory erased at her own request, so she doesn't even have to deal with it herself. It says a lot for this trope when a kid gets raped on an angel's watch and the only guy to suffer any consequences is the one who thought she should have been doing her job.
  • Also played straight with Ordin,a pedophile serial killer. We see no punishment whatsoever in Hell except for when Drip tears his head off...a fairly quick death which will cause him to respawn hundreds of miles away out of any danger.
• Kid Has a Point: Fnar is the first person to figure out how to get out of hell.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: Faced with being dragged down into Drip's reach, Megan tells Arty to chop off her tail to allow them to escape. Notably, she isn't the one screaming about it after the deed is done.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The Seventh Wall, actually.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Private Kedge may be inexperienced and somewhat cowardly, but when pushed too far...
• Losing Your Head: Nostrom, who weirdly enough has the power to switch around from body to body, simply plucking his head off and putting it on another one he's taken from someone else.
• Luke, I Am Your Father:
  • Lita does not recognize who The Sin of Lust is upon meeting him, as his damaged hell form has little resemblance to his appearance in life Jack likewise had no clue he was created by Dr. Kane.
  • It is not revealed to the reader that Drip is Fnar's father right away, and Jack seems to have been keeping the information from Fnar presumably to keep him from looking for Drip (he also neglects to give Lita the exact same "your dad is Lust" info. Neither ]time did it help).
• Madonna-Whore Complex: The moral worth of any given female character is illustrated by how she treats her lovers and any children she elects to care for.
• Mad Scientist: Kane, Nostrom, and Jack during his life.
• Magic Ais Magic A: Discussed at the very end of "Harold," also counting as a Spoof Aesop.
• Manipulative Bastard: Drip does it (mostly) For the Evulz.
  • However, as much of a manipulative bastard as he was, the Father of Lies himself taught Drip a harsh lesson in that there's Always a Bigger Fish, when he thoroughly Out-Gambitted Drip during the process of turning him into a Sin. To go into detail: He convinced Drip to sign the contract by telling him he could help find his abusive Grandmother in Hell for vengeance. After signing, he casually remarks that the only catch is that he's going to ask him to kill someone by the end of the process, and then he made Drip go on a Christmas Carol style trip down memory lane, opening all of his old wounds, reminding him of how people said he killed his parents as an infant, and deliberately agitating him. Then they make it to the last stop, where he's told to kill "Adam and Eve", a couple within the house they're in front of, and only the couple. Drip, deliberately made to think it's his old flame and the guy she ended up getting with, brutally murders them in a violent rage. When he discovers there's a baby, he decides to place him with the dead mother, only after swaddling the baby in the woman's scarf, he realizes that the baby was him, and the couple was his parents, meaning he really did kill his parents when he was a baby. Drip, at this revelation, firmly crashes into the Despair Event Horizon, while Satan reminds him that this was all his fault because it was Drip's choice not his, and ruthlessly mocks him for siding with his tormentors and becoming the very thing they accused him to be. And so ends the mystery of how Satan was so sure of himself when he told Jack that Drip will never seek redemption.

• Medium Awareness: Todd is aware he is in a comic. So is the Devil, and uses that to screw with Todd endlessly.
• Mind Screw:
  • In Arc XXVII, "Why Do I Deserve To Die", Jack delays sending a group of people to judgement after they are killed in a bombed restaurant, allowing them to figure out who among them set off the bomb. Called as such toward the end of the Story Arc.
  • In life, Drip trained three proteges to continue his work after he died (presumably with the thought in mind that he would one day be executed), so that the people who put him away would forever be haunted by the possibility that they got the wrong guy.
• Mood-Swinger: No one character is this specifically, but some of them tend to lean on it. While some slowly express themselves, others can sob gallons of tears and punch people with almost no warning. However, considering what most of the cast goes through in these arcs...
• Mondegreen Gag: Susan in the Megan's Run arc seems to hear one of these every other sentence.
• Necromantic: This happened the first part of the arc "Two for You", though the male protagonist isn't shown as being especially evil for doing it.
• Never My Fault:
  • The damned are all over this trope like white on rice. Truly admitting guilt and responsibility for your own actions is the first step out of hell, something most of them aren't capable of. This is one of the reasons a lot of the damned hate angels; it's easier to blame an authority figure who sent you to hell (even if they didn't) than to think you might actually deserve being where you are.
  • Averted with Virgil, who was in Hell only because he killed himself, but was so convinced that he was guilty of the deaths caused in the Columbine-style shooting in the first arc that he didn't even consider the suicide an issue until eventually being convinced otherwise.
  • Farrago has her memories of Jack trying to kill her removed so that she doesn't have to deal with it. The problem is that the entire reason for it was she left Fnar in Hell instead of removing him when she could have, and Jack flew into a rage over it. Her role in the proceedings is never addressed, and the focus is more on how she should forgive Jack for killing her instead of any responsibility she should take for what happened to Fnar on her watch.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: It's quite common in this webcomic for the protagonists' well-intentioned actions to backfire hideously.
  • Lita made a deal with Drip (without knowing who he was) behind Jack's back. She also ignored Cliff when he tried to warn her, allowing Drip to heal his body.
  • Arloest, who used her gift to tell the future to save a couple of a highway accident. But it turned out that they where meant to die, and by saving them Arloest make them immortal, forcing them to outlive everyone they loved in life.
  • The entire "Megan's Run" saga is around the titular character trying to fix what she broke. More specifically she saved a little girl and friend, Susan, from death by kidnapping her from the hospital and running from the reaper, which not only made her immortal, but also prevented her from growing up and having a life of her own.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • Several times, Drip has said or done things that have pushed Jack into remembering his past and becoming a better person.
  • Brian, of all furs, manages this in Frightened Virigl when he asks the Armor-Piercing Question to Virgil of why he's in Hell. It's meant to just hurt him but ends up being the catalyst Virgil needs to recognize his only sin was suicide and take responsibility for it.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: The non-canon story "Frigid McThunderbones" is loaded with nonsensical stuff that seems to have been thrown in purely for Rule of Cool reasons.
• Noble Demon: Besides Jack, a more literal example of this trope is this demon seems to have more heart them he looks to have.
• Nonhumans Lack Attributes: Played straight for Jack and Jill, presumably as Kane realized making the first batch of his experimental AIs self replicating was a bad move. Noticeably averted everywhere else.
• Non-Mammal Mammaries: Several female birds and reptiles sport mammalian breasts.
• Non-Linear Character: As time doesn't exist in the afterlife, everyone's already dead technically. Jack and Drip winding up meeting their past selves.
• Noodle Incident: Quite a number of them that still haven't been expanded on despite the long-running nature of the comic:
  • It's hinted there's a history between Farrago and Drip, possibly a sexual one, though whether it was consensual or rape is left up in the air. Fans thought they had figured out out but it turned out to be incorrect once Farrago's backstory was revealed. (See Not His Sled for how this happened.)
  • Jack mentions when he reaps Lita's soul that he recently reaped another of Drip's kids. This was a bit shocking to fans as only two of his children had ever been revealed: Fnar and Lita. But aside from this one mention, nothing else has been revealed about this child, not even their gender or species.
  • One of Drip's "apprentices" reveals he had three of them: his first, Taylor, and Fangs. While the latter two have their own storylines that come to a conclusion, nothing has been revealed about the first. When Taylor talks about him, he doesn't know his name and he's even only shown in silhouette, with Taylor stating he was already dead by the time Drip started "training" him.
  • Specks is an angel because she killed a child molester. Considering that murder usually sends you straight to Hell, a lot of fans questioned just how bad this guy must have been if she got an exception to the rule, especially with someone as strict as Central as their leader and considering how many chances in life Drip of all people got to change his ways. Unfortunately, no more info on what happened or who this man was is give out beyond the basic explanation.
  • Jinx's past. While it's clear that Drip fathered her child it's unclear what relationship she had with him in life and whether she was a willing girlfriend (like Rachel in Heaven claimed to be with her murderous boyfriend) rather than someone he kidnapped to torture. Drip generally didn't keep his victims alive long enough to get to the point her baby was at in pregnancy when she was killed and it's unclear if it was even Drip who killed her, if it was someone else, or if she committed suicide. She states once she's found redemption that she "doesn't need him anymore", implying that perhaps she thought she was in love with him at one point and was controlled by him.
  • Doctor Thalmus and Doctor Dee share such a close resemblance (Dee just missing the horn that the rhinoceros Thalmus has) that Aurthor asks if they're brothers. Dee evasively replies "Sort of" but he never expands on what that actually means.
• No Pregger Sex: Anna was rather squicked by Wednesday's suggesting sex while she was pregnant, in the arc "Wednesday's Child".
• Not Afraid of Hell: Lita is first introduced in Short XVII: Father training to fight in hell, and when she dies later, explicitly tells Jack that she is going to hell for the purpose of punishing her father.
• Not His Sled: For years, fans theorized and were all but convinced that Farrago had lost her wings and been raped trying to redeem Drip, given the vague backstory they kept referring to they had each other, and Drip even mentioning his stink "already being on her" when he said he'd bring her to Kane. Come the arc that tells her backstory and it turns out she did indeed lose her wings to the Sin of Lust.....it just wasn't Drip, but one of the furries that came before him, a pedophile priest Farrago had known in life.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: Said almost word for word in Arc XLIV "Choosing Sides" by Bob.
  "To be clear, I'm not here for your revolution. I don't care about redemption, and I am not for any of what you're doing. I am against HER"
• Not Growing Up Sucks: In the story arc "Megan's Run," Susan Lancaster and Megan Fairchild are not only not able to die, get sick, or remain injured, but neither will grow old or mentally mature any more than their current state.
• Oh, Crap!: Happens a lot. It's bound to, since much of the plot revolves around people dying. The Seventh Wall has an epic one, where Todd learns how to break the seventh wall to escape Hell...except The Devil, who controls the seventh wall, has kept him firmly in Hell. Todd never stops being fun for Satan.
• Only Six Faces: It's not uncommon for furry comics to have characters that are distinguished only by the features of their unique species. It's less common for them to still not be distinguishable despite being radically different species. It does get a little better as the comic goes on, as shown by the Art Evolution between Sepka's first appearance and one years later, though never truly goes away. Averted with the arcs illustrated by other artists, which tend to have more diverse species.
• Our Angels Are Different: They have a sex life, to begin with...
• Our Souls Are Different: The souls of the dead appear to have some physical form in both heaven, Hell AND on earth (otherwise they'd fall though the floor) this enables the dead to move objects, and kill their murderer.
• Precursors: It turns out it's humanity.
• The Plan: Kane's favorite MO, especially in "Sever the Hunger" and "Frightened Virgil".
• Plot Hole: There are plenty, most of them handwaved, but a couple of notable ones:
  • Central says she was involved in five of the Sins' deaths and was present for all of them because she killed them once they had locked themselves into becoming their Sin of choice, but this contradicts what we know about the rest of the Sins' deaths, particularly Drip, who lived a good long while after he raped his way past the point of no return.
  • Jack's angst comes mainly from his having no choice in who he reaps, and when souls try to escape him, he has to chase them and can't be avoided forever, and suicide is an instant ticket to Hell. Joann kills herself, but Jack consciously lets her view Hell to scare her straight and then lets her go back to her body.
• The Power of Legacy: Lieutenant Bullock recounts how he told a fellow soldier's parents that their son died while pulling wounded men out of a fire. What really happened... well, it wasn't quite as dignified.
• Punny Name: Beo Wolfe. A wolf, natch, and notable for being a character created by a fan.
• Rape and Switch: After being kidnapped and raped repeatedly by Drip in life, Arloest chose to abandon any relationships with males out of fear and distrust, even starting new lesbian romantic relationships when returning to Earth. In "Megan's Run Part 2", Megan does this as well after her rape by Fiver, having devoted herself completely to the female Farrago afterwards.
• Rape as Drama: The author is infamous for how poorly he handles such delicate subject matter.
• Recursive Reality: When Todd speaks with "management", he's shown comic strips of his life in hell. One page shows what's happening on the strip. The page also shows the next page. This was used as a way to say that the devil was in control of his like in Hell.
• Recycled In Space: The Divine Comedy... WITH FURRIES! AND STUFF THAT WILL NEVER LET YOU SLEEP AGAIN!
• Red Eyes, Take Warning/Glowing Eyes of Doom: Played with somewhat. Jack's eyes are pure glowing red most of the time. Since he's the reaper, people tend to take warning. But his actual Wrath Mode turns everything but his pupils black. ...and those go after his memories are restored. The other Sins also have similar eyes. Emily has bright yellow eyes, Drip has green eyes and the others have red ones if they have them at all. God and Satan have uniquely pure black eyes until "Sever The Hunger".
• Religion of Evil: Vince's cult.
• Religion Is Right: While the comic is heavily inspired by Catholicism, (right down to the Seven Deadly Sins and purgatory) it's a subversion in that where you go has nothing to do with your religion. According to Farrago, the only standard for getting into Heaven is to acknowledge God's existence and lead a good life because of it.
• Retcon: Bob starts out being just as horny and philandering as Lisa, feeling entitled to cheat on her to pay her back for cheating on him some time ago. Then we get Choosing Sides, which shows us that Bob is really just a sensitive nice guy, who wanted to cheat on Lisa, but was too morally upstanding to do it, and instead he just really resented her for not having sex with him.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter:
  • Fnar.
  • And Randy (even though he WAS Fnar). Only David Hopkins could make a skunk-frog hybrid look mind-blowingly cute.
    • Lampshaded by Lita.
• Ring-Ring-CRUNCH!: Silverblue stabs her alarm clock. It's not known if she always did, or if she just started because she's been woken up by the exact same sound at the exact same time each morning for 125 years.
• Rouge Angles of Satin: The spelling is pretty infuriating. "your", "angle" and so on and so forth.
• Running Gag: The demon of loneliness protesting that his mom's not a whore... and then proven wrong, once even by said mom in "Frigid McThunderbones".
• Sadistic Choice: This comic being what it is, this comes up often. In one particular example, Satan introduces Jack to the guy who will be replacing him should Jack actually manage to escape Hell. He's... less than pleasant.
• Scale of Scientific Sins: Dr. Kane manages all them, at various points in his life.
• Scunthorpe Problem: Inverted on the forums: the name "Matt" is changed by the filter to "Dolphinfucker". Apparently the artist's wife had a rather scary ex named Matt, who, among various other crimes including stalking her at some point, reputedly did something unpleasant involving a beached dolphin's blowhole (possibly more than once). He also appeared in the comic a couple of times in an Ironic Hell in which he is the victim of rape by dolphins.
• Self-Deprecation: Aurthor makes fun of the artist, saying that "when he's not being gorey, he's being preachy."
• Self-Inflicted Hell: You can't leave until you let yourself, but whether you arrive in Hell in the first place is pretty objective.
• Self-Made Orphan: Drip was told by his horrific grandmother that he had killed his parents, in some roundabout way about his birth forcing them to live in a bad neighborhood where they got brutally murdered. But then in an arc showing how he became the Anthropomorphic Personification of Lust it's shown that thanks to the odd nature of time in the afterlife he actually did kill his parents, Lucifer led him to believe that they were an ex-girlfriend of his and her husband, and he didn't realize his mistake until he dropped their baby on his mother's torn open ribcage and got a good look at him. And Drip's daughter Lita is more than a bit obsessed with killing him for what he did to her mother and to herself, even committing suicide in order to follow him into hell and kill him again, though she really had no idea what she was getting into.

• Sexual Karma:
  "Well, let me put it this way. In Heaven, they make love...on Earth, they have sex...but down here in Hell, down here...they fuck."
• Shout-Out:
  • Among other things, to various other web-based furry works, Watership Down, Earthworm Jim, and Nine Inch Nails.
  • The afterlife is supposedly based on The Divine Comedy, but numerous mistakes imply that the author only has fleeting knowledge of it.
  • In a recent arc, a character Richek reveals that he's seen the grim reaper numerous times and considers him somewhat of a friend, but no one else has ever seen him, and he doesn't know his name. What does he call his tall, rabbitty pal? "Harvey!"
  • Aurthor reads Redwall to the children sick with cancer. The same arc shouts out to Redwall again with the fact that Sue is in "Saint Ninian's Hospital.
    • Obligatory link to the first example of Buster Charlie's dislike of Redwall.
  • Newshounds interviews Aurthur in Suffer.
  • The bathhouse in "Frigid McThunderbones" is filled with Shout Outs of random cartoons.
  • Jack and Jill's coloration (green and pink, respectively) are likely a shout out to Buster and Babs Bunny of Tiny Toons Adventures, who likewise were oddly-colored rabbits.
• So Bad, It's Good: Invoked in the side arc "Frigid McThunderbones.". David Hopkins has quite clearly set out to use this trope in the entire arc. Not only does he parody a wide variety of awful material, but he does it in such a way it's actually funny at times (which is somewhat surprising, considering that Jack is normally a serious story comic).
• Splash of Color:
  • In "Games We Play in Hell," only red things are colored (usually blood).
  • In "Two for You," only Hell is colored.
• Stable Time Loop: Drip ends up being the Butt-Monkey for one, ending with him murdering and raping his own parents in front of his infant self, making him ultimately responsible for all of the tragedies that happened in his life.
• Stalker with a Crush: Cliff for Lita. Not immediately obvious but it's there.
• Stealth Pun: Several, but notably Edward Vade - E. Vade.
• Take That, Audience!: In the Very Special Episode:
  Farrago: "One of Dave's fans is on drugs!"
  Drip: Heh...Just one?
• To Hell and Back:
  • "Megan's Run part 2" has Megan going to Hell in order to reach Heaven in a roundabout way and ask God to allow an immortal child to age.
  • "Prayer of the Mantis", back when Vince was alive he had his necromancer send a queen he captured to Hell, and four of her subjects one of them Farrago followed to rescue her.
• Torture Porn: Generally a lot of detail is given to torture and mutilation scenes.
• Traumatic C-Section: Kane threatens to do this to Wendy, in the arc "Wednesday's Child", if she doesn't cooperate with him.
• Tsurime Eyes: How you can tell someone is a bad guy, generally.
• Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000: Evan's favourite game, "Killing Killers and the Killers who Kill Them".
• Unfortunate Names: The detective in the B-movie parody arc Frigid McThunderbones: "Aidsyphilis Smallbush ... It's Greek."
• Unreliable Narrator: The point of the short animated arc "Twist, twist, twist."
• Uplifted Animal: The characters are this. See Arc XLVI - In the Beginning.
• Very Special Episode: Parodied in the story "A Very Special Jack", drawn by Guest Artist Mat Sherer of Badly Drawn Kitties.
• Villain Protagonist: Drip, especially in the stories that take place before his death. Being Hopkins' self-insert, this was probably inevitable.
• Watch the World Die: The titular character did this after triggering the collapse of civilization and the extinction of the human species
• Webcomics Long-Runners: This comic has been consistently running for over twenty-three years, ladies and gentlemen.
• Wham Episode: "Sever the Hunger". It reveals just what Jack did in life that made him become Wrath. Long story short, he wiped out humanity and so thoroughly wrecked the universe that he caused Generation Xerox on a cosmic scale, with furs going through the same kind of history that humans did. The kicker to this is that he himself did not know this beforehand—prior to his own demise, he asked to forget what he had done.
• Wham Line: When Kane first steps out of the shadows, Brian can't tell what species he is.

  "That's not surprising. I'm from before your time, Brian. You see... I'm human."

• What Happened to the Mouse?: Quite a few given the Kudzu Plot and non-linear storyline.
  • There's quite a lot relating to Drip, especially given at one point Hopkins claimed he was going to make a Drip-focused comic after completing Jack, but many of these ideas have been folded in as it seems he might have changed his mind.
    • Lita was for years assumed to be one given she appeared in only one short that led to much fan speculation about her. The fandom rejoiced when she finally appeared in Those That Run and became one of the main characters.
    • Drip is stated to have three apprentices: one who died, a cat named Taylor, and a wolf named Fangs. Absolutely nothing has been revealed about the first apprentice despite being set up as a Chekhov's Gunman while Taylor and Fangs haven't been seen since their deaths, though it is implied Drip might have forcibly made their bodies join the gory Valley of Lust. A girlfriend for one of them is even shown to be in Heaven later on waiting for one of them but nothing more is done with their characters.
    • Jack mentions when he picks up Lita's soul that he wasn't expecting to pick up another of Drip's children so soon. Given Fnar was shown to be reincarnated into Randy, it couldn't have been referring to him, so there's a third child out there of Drip's.....and nothing more has ever been said about them.
    • The end of the ''Cliff' comic shows Cliff giving into Drip's influence entirely and not nearly done on the Roaring Rampage of Revenge he's set out on. Poor sales from that comic made Hopkins state that the Sequel Hook would not be followed up on. The next time Cliff is seen he's in Hell with only an indication that "now both eyes match" as for how he died and got there.
    • The Screaming Barrel, another originally paper comic, ends with Drip abruptly leaving his teenage victim Sandy on the side of the road while she cries with no indication what's to become of her. Partially this is due to the number of pages that could be fit into the comic and partially it was because Hopkins had more story arcs planned for her, including a possible one where she teams up with Richek the Russian penguin detective to expose the horrors of The Screaming Barrel itself.
• Yandere: Cliff essentially loses it when Lita starts to redeem herself AND fall for Farrago. That she also kissed her teacher Eric beforehand doesn't help.

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