One of the more comprehensible strips.
"Slurping and drooling and hurr."
The comic's unofficial motto
Jerkcity (renamed Bonequest
in 2018) is a Long Runner of a webcomic, starting in August 17, 1998 with strips coming out almost every day after that. It follows the adventures of Pants the "christmas tree monster", Spigot the beatnik, and Deuce the tiki. The story is essentially non-existent, with much of the dialogue coming from real IRC chat logs rather then being written specifically for the comic. That being said, the majority of strips feature the three (plus some other minor characters) Having a Gay Old Time.
NOTE: Not Safe for Work
This webcomic provides examples of:
- The Alcoholic: Deuce, if the Drunk Deuce tag is any indication. The infrequently reoccurring Inebriated Crustacean likely also counts.
- Ambiguous Syntax: "Wanna Pounda Dope?" Spigot soon realizes he's the dope.
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: Space Nuts appears to center around three all-new characters: "Sparky" the rabbit, the uncredited Korean man (known now as Private Jim), and a man simply called Captain.
- Beatnik: The way Spigot dresses, though nowhere near the way he acts. However, he does sometimes recite poems.
- Broken Record: Home On The Range.
- Censor Box: More often used to redact dialogue as though the comic were a sensitive document, but sometimes used in the more traditional way, over a character's crotch. Sometimes in an upward diagonal. It has also been used to obscure characters' eyes, including Pants, whose nine eyes were individually covered.
- Dada Comic: The comic often has intentional production errors that make the dialogue illegible. It also has some pages that are not comics at all.
- Demoted to Extra: To the point of almost being a case of Retgone. There was a fourth main character, Rands the alien, and he was almost entirely removed from the comic when it renamed to Bonequest. Trying to use the website's search function for Rands, in short, doesn't work. note Given that the real-life Rands and co-creator of the strip, Michael Lopp, is now Vice-President of Engineering at Slack, this might be some variety of Take That!.
- Makes Just as Much Sense in Context: Yeah... pretty much every strip.
- Medium Awareness: Often the characters are aware that they are in a comic, excepting Pants, who has more trouble recognizing that he isn't real. Atandt attempts to point this out by reading his thoughts.
- No Fourth Wall: This strip has Atandt point out a real bug in OpenBSD to a real person.
- Noodle Incident: Nearly every comic is an In Medias Res situation with zero context.
- Only Sane Man: Hanford acts as stage manager for the strip, and often has to tell the others things that should be obvious.
- Orwellian Retcon:
- At some point in 2020, a number of strips were edited to change mentions of "Jerkcity" to "Bonequest", mainly in the very early archive, but also when the name of the comic is mentioned within the comic.
- Also edited in 2020 were strips featuring the Rands character, edits of which often, but not always, put Atandt in Rands's place. A few such strips were shortened by a few panels or replaced altogether with a completely different strip. This has resulted in some strange plot holes, such as a strip where a character asks Deuce to be his smooth buddy. In the original version of the strip, this character is Rands, but the new version has Pants say this instead, who in the strip immediately afterwards laments having missed Smooth Buddy Week.
- A much more minor retcon is Effigy's pool ball head. Formerly depicted as an 8 ball, old Effigy strips were redone to give him different pool balls for his head.
- Platonic Prostitution: Pants and Spigot get whores to do chores.
- Queer People Are Funny: The creators have said that the strip is a satire of this sort of humour.
- Refuge in Audacity: Very commonly used, especially early on.
- Shout-Out: This strip is a wholesale reference to the famous "shinebox" scene in Goodfellas.
- Show Within a Show: Spigot sits down to watch Space Nuts and the next few strips take place within the show. And then Pants & Deuce take over the show.
- We Wait: Pants says this after seeking help from the dick cache god.
- We Want Our Jerk Back!: The obviously intended reader reaction to the Kinder Gentler Deuce storyline (starting here and featuring at least once every two strips).
