"I’ve always been an expert in ignoring my problems."
"NEVER! Never in my long history as Headmaster of Flabscabs have I encountered a worse student! Not only for their disastrous academic results, but for their PESTILENT CONDUCT! Joy Kaplan! Alone, you did more damage to this institution...than TWENTY generations of DARK LORDS!"
Kicked out of the Academy of Magic as a teenager before she could finish her studies in witchcraft, Joy Kaplan is a talentless mess, living a life of expediency in the normal world. Although, the place she chose to live in, is pretty far from normal...
Updates Tuesdays & Fridays Here.
- A Date With Rosie Palms: The second chapter opens with Joy supposedly looking through a catalogue for magic wands. It's ambiguous if they just happen to resemble dildos or if she was lying to Alix about what kind of catalogue she was reading.
- The Alleged Car: Joy's Bootleg M89 Magic Wand, a cheap and unreliable enchanted twig (held together by scotch tape) with very limited range.
- Bound and Gagged: The Balls Grinders taped the mouth of the Nightmare Bible shut before their concert because they found its constant yelling aggravating to listen to.
- Brick Joke: Tuomas of the Balls Grinders is introduced mixing what he believes to be a homemade aphrodisiac which is composed of Beer, Cologne, Pheromones, and his own semen. He returns over a dozen strips later during the concert where he sprays Alix with it. Twice. In the eyes.
- Building of Adventure: The Blight Court apartment building Alix and Joy live in is a former asylum built on an Indian Burial Ground whose architect was a serial killer. It also has poor wi-fi.
- Composite Character: Satanica Graffiacane is a blonde, red-eyed fusion of Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy, resulting in a temperamental, elitist nerd who is perpetually infuriated by the plebeian teenage drama of her school.
- Creepy Good: The wizards of Flabscabs do battle against Dark Lords constantly, but are themselves rather macabre. When she was still a student, Joy had to write a paper on the meaninglessness of existence and she was a part of the "Demon Goats" (the equivalent of Slytherin) student house.
- Damsel out of Distress: When Joy predictably screws up rescuing her from the Balls Grinders, Alix uses her rage at the entire situation to rip herself out of the sacrificial cross she was tied to.
- Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: Upon being confronted by the Eldritch Abomination the Balls Grinders summoned with their spell, Joy fearlessly mocks the creature because she had all ready put in motion a banishing hex against it a few pages before.
- Drink-Based Characterization: "The Bad Day" is Joy's favoured cocktail whenever she chooses to plague the Devastatorium with her presence. To wit, it contains One Bloody Mary, One Long Island, and One Margarita all mixed and sipped out of a blender jar. She doesn't share.
- Drugs Are Bad: Unwilling to get a regular job, Joy pays her part of the rent (ranging from half of it to a mere quarter) by selling her old school textbooks to occult enthusiasts online and buying legal magically-charged substances from the wizarding world so she can repackage them and peddle them to junkies as exotic narcotics. Joy indulging in marijuana from her fourth year onward in Flabscabs is outright stated to have contributed to her declining scholastic performance and eventual expulsion.
- Everyone Has Standards: Timmie and his fellow drug enthusiasts of the Nerdgasm comicbook shop might buy illegal substances for a quick high, but even they found the Battle Mushrooms that Joy sold them to be over the line. Firstly because when they were opened, one of them broke one of their jaws in an attempt to escape, and secondly, after they were subdued and rolled up into joints, they wouldn't stop screaming as they were being smoked.
- Expy: If not necessarily one to Harry Potter himself, Joy is one to his fellow students from Slytherin, even flunking out of a similarly named wizarding school and receiving her (mostly junk) mail through owls which swarm around her building. She also has shades of the author ILLUMINATED's rendition of Carol Danvers from his other webcomic Everything is Illuminated...and then Dies, a crass, acid-tongued, self-righteous, self-loathing, violent, and overall toxic garbage fire of a fantastically empowered woman.
- Genre Blind: Through a wretched combination of apathy, inebriation, and being just that self-absorbed, would-be witch Joy has been living in Blight Court for years while failing to recognise that several of her fellow tenants are badly-disguised, bloodthirsty , supernatural monsters.
- I Want Grandkids: While not her actual grandmother, Olga wants Joy to produce children so she can eat them.
- Malicious Misnaming: Joy calls people by insulting variations of their actual names if she thinks she can get away with it. Such as calling her elderly (and cannibalistic) neighbour Olga, "Old Hag," and her landlord Asholm, "Asshole."
- Monster Roommate: Joy is one to Alix as she is both detestable on a personal level and a failed warlock who sells magical contraband.
- Muggles: "Normshits" here. But that might be a racial slur on Joy's part and not what the other mages call regular people.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Lucy's design is heavily based off of the appearance of indie musician, Kimi Recor.
- Not What I Signed on For: One of Alix's fellow sacrificial victims screams about how she only accepted the backstage pass to the Balls Grinders concert for the free beer as she's being burnt alive.
- Nutritional Nightmare: Joy's is Fat Frank's Slippery Sweet Suicide. Aptly named due to being made up of Bacon, Bacon Fries, Bacon Bread Wrapped in Bacon, Eggs in Bacon, and Lettuce (read: Bacon painted Green) wrapped up all together and covered in Bacon-Based Ketchup.
- Oh, Crap!: Joy has a very belated one once she realises that the Balls Grinders have the Nightmare Bible she sold online and are going to sacrifice Alix in a real demonic ritual.
- Perky Goth: While garbed similarly and black and in possession of piercings of her own, Alix is a much more upbeat foil to her roommate, Joy.
- Playboy Bunny: Alix dresses like one and pops out of a cake to celebrate the comic attaining 100 followers on tumblr. When asked why she had to play the part of Ms. Fanservice, Joy curtly replies that she wasn't going to bother shaving for just a pithy 100 followers.
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Romantic Plot Tumor: The author commentary clipped to each page of the comic bemoans the arrival of reasonably attractive member of the opposite sex, Aldo Klement, as "another Misguided Romance Subplot." - Shout-Out: The Nightmare Bible is a dead ringer for the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis from the Evil Dead franchise.
- Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Lucy appears to be one, being the only person who manages to get under Alix's skin with her presence alone, but the end of their encounter in Las Vegans implies that she's something much, much worse.
- Squick: Kuusta Katastrophe takes a long hard sniff of Alix's hair to determine her viability as a sacrifice. Creepy and sinister enough. It's made disgusting by the fact that his bandmate Tuomas had recently sprayed her with one of his home-brew "love potions" whose ingredients are listed above.
- Straw Vegetarian: Alix. She even works in a fast-food vegan restaurant called Las Vegans.
- Theme Naming: The clerks and owners of the Nerdgasm comicbook shop are named Timmie, Tim, Timothy, and Thomas (a name which can also be shortened to "Tim").
- Tome of Eldritch Lore: The Nightmare Bible is an Assyrian text that hides the secrets of cruel worlds beyond human understanding with the souls of demons and madmen trapped in its pages. Said pages are made from the scalps of a thousand newborns and written with the blood of a thousand whores. Joy was allowed to borrow it for a month from Flabscab's library when she was still a student. 14 years later, she sold it on eBay.
- Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Joy was once an earnest, but incompetent, teenaged witch who was the only Demon Goat with a sense of cheer. Now she's a cynical and still incompetent grown-up slacker who's usually the most miserable person in any room.
- Virgin Sacrifice: The unfortunately named Virginio is lured onstage by the Balls Grinders so that Kuusta can beat him to death with his spiked microphone to start their ritual.
- X Days Since: The Devastatorium has a "Days without catastrophic fire related accidents" sign that's only up to 5 which doesn't bode well for it's future.
