Webcomic / Penny and Aggie

The best of enemies.

Penny and Aggie is a High School-centric Teen Dramedy Betty and Veronica pastiche with Ho Yay and a healthy dose of that T Campbell (of Fans! fame) weirdness.

The comic mainly focuses on the titular teenagers: Penny, a cross between Lovable Alpha Bitch and the Naïve Everygirl, and Aggie, a wanna-be activist who torments Penny for no particular reason aside from Penny being the most popular girl in school. Penny leads a life of affluence, stability, and popularity, while Aggie's still recovering from the death of her mother and the concept of her widowed father possibly dating again. The comic grew to an extremely large cast, mostly consisting of Penny's clique, Penny's enemies, and later even Aggie's own clique of weirdos and oddballs. The comic's plot tends to revolve around how all these people mesh and conflict with each other in the savage jungle of high school. Plus a large amount of Ship Tease over whether the titular characters are also into each other.

While for the most part, Campbell's noted weirdness has kept itself to fantasy sequences, these can drag out for weeks and weeks of strangeness - the filler strips have even taken place in alternate universes in which the main characters have magical powers. Originally, the artistic style of the strip was set by Gisèle Lagacé (who later became known for Ménage à 3), though she eventually departed the strip to focus on her own work. Her replacement, who tried to keep her style as much as possible, is T's longtime collaborator Jason Waltrip (also from Fans!). In December 2010, Campbell confirmed on the comic's forum that the plotline beginning in December 2010, "Last Summer of Youth", would conclude the series; it ended on August 26 of the following year, followed by a Distant Finale ending September 26.

A spin-off/sequel starring Sara and Lisa, QUILTBAG, began running on the Penny and Aggie website in October 2011 a few weeks after the conclusion of its predecessor, then moved to its own subdomain on Keenspot in January 2012. The series was cancelled rather quickly, thus ending this continuity.

The comic has a storyline guide.

Connected to the Walkyverse by way of Helen's departure for Boston in Something*Positive.

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This series provides examples of:

• Aborted Arc
  • Duane's use of the phrase "that's just gay" was originally, according to Word of God, meant to be a plot point. However, Penny dumps him as she begins to question, which is where homosexuality starts to become a major theme, and he falls Out of Focus for about 400 strips. By the time he's back to being a major character, Penny and Aggie's now-shared social circle contains a gay boy, two lesbians, and a pansexual (or at least very loudly questioning) girl, and he doesn't seem to mind. T now says it should be written off as "a common linguistic tic among teens."
  • The Minjung Filler story was meant to tie into the main strip somehow, but as the end of the series approached, T later admitted to having had no idea of how to resolve it. Even so, Yun-Sung finally made a reappearance in the epilog of the strip as Duane's girlfriend though many readers didn't recognize her until someone finally gave her name because of the difference in art style.
• Abusive Parents:
  • The introduction to Charlotte's mother features her slapping her daughter across the face and berating her for doing a private interview with the police, rather than letting her do the talking. During Duane's interview with the cops, he raises his suspicions about such treatment as well, though after the conclusion of "Missing Person," Charlotte is serving out a prison sentence — which finally gets her away from her mother.
  • Charisma makes it clear multiple times that she resents being a mother and has very little care for her son's feelings, until she loudly declares that he was put on this earth to get in her way and slow her down. In public. In front of hundreds of people.
• Accidental Kiss: Penny and Duane; later, Penny and Stan.
• Adults Are Useless: Quite a few jaw dropping moments.
  • Penny's parents, despite being portrayed as attentive, actually let Penny's friends keep convincing them that Penny is with them for several days when she ran away from home.
  • Nobody from the school, not a teacher or administrator, ever appears in the arc in which Sara is accused of raping Charlotte. In the real world, this is a punishable offense that would require at least some level of teacher involvement. Extremely strange in that administrators do get involved when Penny and Aggie keep feuding in the halls, when Aggie commandeers the school's PA system, and after Rich gets kicked out of school.
  • Averted gradually but decisively with regard to Cyndi's dangerous and sadistic schemes, beginning in "Her Private Chambers" and culminating in "Missing Person." See the entry on the corresponding trope page.
  • Averted in "The Last Summer of Youth: May," when Penny's parents, Rob and Lynda, prevent a potential date rape at her party—and do it with style.
• All Elections Are Serious Business: Done over two student council election arcs. Stan, Cyndi, and Aggie take these far too seriously, despite a joke about students not even realizing a student council even existed.
  • Both Penny and Meg point out on at least one occasion how completely ridiculous everyone was treating the virtually useless title.
• All There in the Manual: The webcomic’s old forums were often a critical component to understanding the webcomic when it was still updating. As the author is an enormous fan of the "Show, Don't Tell" principle, post he made in response to fan question would often explain some pretty important plot points that could otherwise be lost. This is particularly noticeable in "The New Reality" where, among other crucial details, the very name of Sara's reality show (Hot Lights) appears only in the forum, and only after someone asked Campbell what it was. This problem is further compounded by the forums eventually being taken down some time after the series ended when it moved to a new host, as those important details are now lost to time.
  • A number of characters that didn't show up in the series finale had their epilogs dealt with during "Ask T" posts on the forums. The cancellation of Quiltbag meant the end of this continuity so those long-lost forum posts are the only answers to what happened to people like Karen.
• Alpha Bitch: Penny is seen this way by Aggie early on and by the Omega Sisters. Meg apparently was one of these before Penny took her out. Karen becoming one of these is basically a major story arc for the first half of the series and only Penny, Aggie, and all their friends teaming up knock her down. By the end of the Popsicle Wars, all the characters matching this trope have been dethroned.
• Alone with the Psycho: "Charlotte and Cyndi" - they're both dangerous loons, but in two very different ways.
• Animesque: Lagacé's art style was a blend between Archie Comics and anime with it being closer on the anime spectrum. Waltrip's art still keeps a mild animeish theme, but stays closer to the western cartoon style.
• Anticlimax: The Popsicle Wars storyline, after months of build-up and melodrama, basically ends with Cyndi slipping most people at the party a laxative and Marshall walking out on Karen.
• Art Evolution: Lagacé's style started out cartoonish before morphing into a more realistic style during her tenure on the strip. When Waltrip took her place as artist, his style, though aping Lagacé's by design, gave many of the female characters larger lips and bigger busts.
• Awkwardly Gay Dream: Quite a lot of them. Penny alone has had three. After Sara plants the seed in Penny's head that her rivalry with Aggie is the result of Unresolved Sexual Tension, Penny has a dream with her then-boyfriend Duane and Aggie. Later, her mental sequence in which she imagines possible futures for herself about her decision to run away with Rich ends with a future Penny and Aggie living together and clearly in a relationship. Finally, Penny has another dream entirely about potentially hooking up with Aggie, in which Aggie and Lisa are naked and her gay friends are egging her on. Outside of Penny's confused sexuality, other characters have had a few of their own. Stan dreams of how he might be sleeping with Michelle only because it's the closest he's gotten to sleeping with his idol Rich. Sarah had a day dream about Lindsay Lohan before she finally came out of the closet. Aggie has a recurring dream about falling in love with a female mannequin that seems to represent Penny.
• Babies Ever After: Jack and Katy-Ann in the epilogue, with one son and another child on the way.
• The Beard: Fred and Daphne are both gay, and they spend enough time together that they could easily be mistaken for boyfriend-girlfriend. Fred later jokes about doing the same for Penny during Meg's graduation ceremony.
• Beautiful All Along: Harshly subverted with Karen, who is given this kind of makeover but then her personality drastically changes to a more insecure and manipulative one and her pursuit of the power beauty offers her destroys her ability to be happy.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Toyed with for some time with Penny and Aggie, before finally being confirmed.
• Better as Friends: What Daphne, after high school, eventually realizes she is to Sara, following a year of bitterness over their breakup.
• Betty and Veronica: In early strips, Penny, Aggie, and Duane were obvious pastiches of Veronica, Betty, and Archie.
• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: The Pennies, the Aggies, and the Omegas all have this.
• Camp Gay: Fred for much of the strip. The epilog shows that he mellowed out considerably after high school.
• Canon Welding: Penny and Aggie shares a multiverse with T Campbell's other strips - cameos of alt-universe versions of characters from Fans! and Cool Cat Studio appear at various points.
• Cast Full of Gay: Between actual coming out stories and multitudes of inner monologues showing characters thinking about crushes on the same sex, one may wonder why Fred and Daphne ever complained about a lack of gay students at their school, although to be sure the comic focuses on a small, non-randomized subset of the student population. It's also a mystery as to why Fred drew the short straw as the only gay male in the cast. During the lead-up strips to Quiltbag, T revealed that he and Jason had been jokingly calling Penny and Aggie "Incredibly Lesbian Comics".
• Cat Smile: Aggie here.
• Cerebus Syndrome: The increasingly dramatic nature of the arcs, especially Missing Person, led to some debate over whether the strip was descending into this when the original premise was essentially the teenage girl version of Tom and Jerry.
• Chick Magnet: Darren Danforth, despite being essentially a passive and somewhat dim, if good-hearted, klutz, inadvertently draws girls' romantic attention as they project their own personalities and interests onto him.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Sara fears that Daphne may be this while sharing her room with Lucy out of compassion for her
• Coming-Out Story: Sara was the primary case; Aggie and Penny also ended up walking that path. Other characters, such as Stan, who some readers thought were heading in the same direction, never did make the jump.
• Comeback Tomorrow: In one strip, Aggie held back a comeback deliberately so as not to start a fight with Penny ... leading to her suddenly screaming it out at two completely unrelated people well after Penny had left.
• Continuity Lockout: The comic attempted to address this by having the homepage display a summary of the plot and character descriptions for the key players; this only appeared for a few weeks. It's still more appropriately read with an Archive Binge. The current archive page encourages the latter, while also pointing out some key arcs to give new fans some background if they're too impatient.
• Contrived Coincidence: Penny knows the exact place and time to drive by and find Aggie crying in a heap and having suicidal thoughts because of an argument she started with Marshall over Karen. Penny even knows the exact contents of a telephone conversation Aggie just had with Karen, in which Aggie said nothing. A few pages later, Penny explained that Sara told her where to find Aggie, but that doesn't explain the precision - or why nobody ever noticed Penny driving around the block and stalking Aggie by car. The car does not appear until the moment of the phone conversation.
• Crossover: Helen crosses over into the Something*Positive 'verse here. She narrowly avoids the standard Milholland crossover greeting, and it all goes downhill from there. Some fans understandably viewed this as Helen being Put on a Bus, but the writer of Something*Positive later stated that Helen was a Penny and Aggie character and wouldn't be permanently joining his cast. But then, Penny and Aggie finished (with Helen appearing briefly in the epilogue story, mostly to make it clear that she'd decided to put the town behind her), whereas 'Something*Positive is still going, so — choose your own interpretation.
• Defrosting Ice Queen:
  • Penny, while she certainly likes male attention, has trouble early on with actual intimacy.By the end of the comic, she turns a shouting match with Aggie into violently passionate rage sex that demolishes a room and most of the girls' clothes. It's safe to say she's well past this trope now.
  • Double Subverted in regards to Charlotte. She's introduced as nutty, cold and eager to "punish" whomever she thought deserved it, but her interactions with Duane showed her getting mellower... Until The Stinger of the second chapter of the Missing Person arc reveals that she is the one who kidnapped Cyndi. But in the third chapter her motivation for doing so is implied to be related to Cyndi's actions hurting others, especially Duane, and Charlotte tells him that she is a better person for having met him.
• Depraved Bisexual: Cyndi, an extreme sadist who it's suggested can't be aroused without the idea of others suffering, and has a stated fantasy of driving someone to suicide.
• Deus Angst Machina: The Popsicle Wars lasted for over a year and piled on drama after drama after drama, sometimes, some readers felt, completely out of the blue and often with no proper resolution.
• Distant Finale: The final twelve strips take place six years after the last chapter of "The Last Summer of Youth" and explain what happened to the cast after high school.
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Jack Daniels: Somewhat appropriately, Jack.
• Dork Horse Candidate: Aggie and Duane both have to do this, though Duane is closer to the typical archetype. Duane goes through this again when he runs for re-election.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: Aggie's dream about being in love with a female mannequin. In the storyarc "There Are No Rules", Aggie is puzzled by her dream of being in love with a mall mannequin. After an argument with her ambiguously bisexual best friend Lisa about mixed signals, complicated by Aggie's feelings of discomfort over two other girlfriends making out in her presence, she makes up with Lisa at the mall and gives her a hug. While doing so, she recalls her prior history of Single-Target Sexuality with regard to men, having shared the same crush as a now out-gay friend. Then, still in mid-hug, she looks up at a suspiciously familiar mannequin..."Uh oh."
• Driven to Suicide: Charlotte, though she survives.
• Elevator Going Down: Nick and Charisma, though by that point their sexual tension had been well resolved.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Karen – although she's not above flirting with Stan, and fantasizing about stealing Marshall from Penny – repeatedly insists she'd never hurt Marshall. Subverted when she does cheat on him, with Omar.
• Everyone Can See It: As shown, appropriately, in the strip for Valentine's 2011. Even Brandi.
• Everyone Is a Suspect: Because Cyndi has so many enemies, the detectives on the case realize they have their work cut out for them.
• Everyone Loves Blondes: Penny is popular with the boys.
• Everytown, America: Belleville. Although some readers see in the comic geographic and climatic hints of Campbell's Norfolk, Virginia hometown, he has confirmed only that it's situated somewhere within the East Coast United States.
• Fashion Dissonance: A rare modern example with some of Jason's art for the strip. Several fans on the P&A forums have pointed this out.
• Faux Yay: Cyndi tells Marshall this is why she kissed Daphne to mess with her head.
• Fictional Sport: "Smackball" is referenced in the epilog, in which Brandi is a star player in the future. On the forums, T mentioned it as being something like a cross between jai alai and tennis.
• Filler Strip: Various guest-artists showed up when the original artist would take vacations, often with varying levels of popularity. The strips themselves were considered canon, several of them going over minor characters that hadn't appeared in the strip in great detail - or in the case of Randy Milholland's strip "Omega Sisters," was actually the first real appearance of Helen, Charlotte, and Tharqa. However, "Minjung", featuring a pair of kids in Korea who had no known link to the P&A characters, was so hated that T Campbell was forced to admit it in the forum, and said he was "trying to learn a lesson" about it, despite he himself loving it. It didn't help that it was slow-moving, the art was simplistic, and that it took place in the middle of some very intense storytelling. Most other Filler Strips have actually been in-continuity and with current characters, just drawn by other people. Jason Waltrip worked on one of the early filler strips before he later stepped in to take over the comic itself.
• Formerly Fat: Karen's Freudian Excuse for her evil behavior is the insecurity produced by her former homely appearance, in particular by the weight she loses at the beginning of the story. When she is feeling introspective she imagines looking at the fat version of herself again, once going so far as to imagine drowning her fat swimsuit-clad alter ego.
• For the Evulz: Everything Cyndi does. Her parents eventually realize she's a genuine sociopath and have her committed to a mental institution.
• Four Lines, All Waiting: The cast of regulars was downright monstrous by the time of The Popsicle Wars and veered from plot to plot at breakneck speed. Though they were dramatically pared down after the conclusion of the arc, it slowly crept back up in the years afterward.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: Several.
  • With the Pennies it's Penny (choleric), Sara (melancholic), Michelle (phlegmatic), and Katy-Ann/Brandi (sanguine).
  • With Aggie's gang it's Aggie (choleric), Lisa (sanguine), Daphne (melancholic), and Fred (phlegmatic).
  • Subverted when Karen tries to create her own version of Penny's gang. Cyndi appears phlegmatic but is in fact a conniving backstabber, Samantha and Charlotte are anything but sanguine, and Meg decides she's over the whole game.
• Freudian Excuse: The characters who commit the most morally reprehensible acts (Karen, Helen, Charlotte) had unhappy childhoods in one way or another. Averted with Cyndi, who appears to have decent parents.
• Friends with Benefits:
  • Stan and Brandi were in this state on and off for over a year.
  • As were Stan and Cyndi until she started to show her true colors.
  • And later, Stan and Lisa.
• Funbag Airbag: Aggie ran into Karen's breasts during "Dinner for Six"... and was worried because it turned her on a little bit. According to Word of God, the fans were meant to take this as the clincher as to whether she liked girls; see Show, Don't Tell
• The Fundamentalist: Charlotte, and that's only the most visible of her issues.
• Girl Posse: A long-running plot that eventually concludes with "The Popsicle War" is the chain of girl posses that dominate the social hierarchy of the area. It started before the strip with Meg’s, was destroyed by Penny’s posse who replaced hers in dominance, and then Penny’s posse was replaced in popularity by Karen who actually deliberately recruited members to be “shadows” of Penny’s group of friends (and one of them is even Meg.) Of these, while Penny’s group stay friends afterwards it’s clear the social hierarchy is no longer run by someone in this chain of people and the girl posse era has ended.
• The Glasses Gotta Go: Part of Penny's makeover of Karen. She followed this up with laser eye surgery.
• Gone Swimming, Clothes Stolen: Rob did this to Lynda and her friends during the flashback to how they met.
• Good Angel, Bad Angel: Done numerous times.
• Good Parents: Both Aggie's father and both of Penny's parents are overall good and reasonable parents. Though they tend to occasionally get smacked with the general Adults Are Useless cluelessness when the comic needs to do a plot where the parents involvement would be an obstacle.
• Granola Girl: Aggie.
• Hard Truth Aesop: Aggie tries to convince Karen to "just be yourself"; Karen shuts her down.
• Hollywood Board Games: In "Everybody Loves Duane", Duane's Black and Nerdy nature gets highlighted by, among other things, telling someone he and his dad are planning to play their brand new Super Scrabble. Said someone is a girl currently trying to invite him on a date.
• Hotter and Sexier: "Behind Closed Doors"
  • And the final arc "Summer of Youth," in which almost all the major characters are exploring their sexuality.
• In Vino Veritas: Jack goes from quiet to belligerent when he's drunk. Helen becomes extremely talkative and sexually active after getting drunk at Karen's parties. Katy Ann starts blurting out her repressed sexual urges the first time she gets drunk, finally begging for Jack (who isn't actually there) to ravish her as she starts to strip down.
• It Doesn't Mean Anything: Stan, out of habit, gives Penny a goodbye kiss when he winds up in her bedroom over night.
• It's Fake Fur, It's Fine: Not fur, but related. Aggie is giving fashion advice and says that wearing leather is wrong, but that wearing pleather - which looks and feels exactly like leather - is fine.
• Karma Houdini:
  • Meg and Samantha for their roles in Karen's schemes and Sam's role later in Cyndi's. In Meg's case it could be argued she just wanted revenge on Penny and once she got it she was over it and ended the feud on her own.
  • Charlotte's mother. Word of God on the forums was that Charlotte had no physical evidence of the abuse and her psychological state unfortunately damaged any testimony she could make against her mother. Though one could argue that Ms. Simms is doomed to continual suffering in her own ways, she's still escaping justice.
  • Charlotte and Tharqa never faced direct consequences for a bomb scare attempt and a false rape accusation, though Charlotte's situation as a whole finally came to a head in "Cyndi and Charlotte". T later explained on the forums that while Tharqa didn't receive any direct punishment for the events in high school, her general attitude from those events shaped her into a rather miserable and unloved individual as an adult. This is hinted at in the epilogue as nobody wants to talk to her at the reunion while she desperately seeks attention.
• Keeping the Enemy Close: Discussed and defied when Meg, after humiliating Penny in front of a boy she likes, invites her and her friends to a Slumber Party. Penny accepts, explaining afterward to her friends that Meg is practicing this trope, but that she plans to use it against Meg. At the party, Penny takes embarrassing candid photos of her and shares them with her classmates, thereby ending Meg's reign as queen bee.
• Kick the Dog: While not depicted in the strip, in response to a question about whether or not Cyndi tortured animals as a child, T. jokingly mentioned the history of her ant farm was troubling.
• Kick The Son Of A Bitch: Happens at last to Cyndi, delivered via Charlotte.
• Last-Minute Hookup: Plenty in the epilogue, which takes place six years after the final high school strip and thus provides plenty of time for the characters to mix and mingle with each other and otherwise.
  • Michelle and Marshall are apparently at least involved with each other six years later. They never even spoke during the entire series.
  • Yun-Sung and Duane, who never even met on panel and lived in completely different parts of the world during the main series. Plus Yun-Sung hadn't been seen since her Aborted Arc.
  • Daphne and Fred both got completely new characters as their respective significant others.
• Laxative Prank: Penny and Aggie blackmail Cyndi to destroy Karen's reputation by spiking the alcoholic popsicles at her parties with something that tastes bad. Cyndi instead spikes them with laxatives, the first hint on panel of her enjoyment of inflicting pain. Samantha ends up in the hospital as a result.
• Lets Wait Awhile: Marshall's attitude to Karen's constant badgering him for sex, clearly stemming from his own trauma related to the emotional abuse inflicted by his mother who places her sex life above the needs of her child and blames him whenever her relationships sour.
• Lipstick Mark: Nick, in an Imagine Spot, imagines himself with a lipstick mark on his collar and trying to explain it to his daughter as he deals with his struggle over dating again.
• Locker Mail: Aggie tries to get Duane a date with Penny by leaving a note and concert tickets in her locker from a secret admirer. Unfortunately, the vagueness in the description of said admirer makes the plan go awry.
• Love Dodecahedron: Prominent in the "Out Front" arc, with Cyndi seducing Duane (who is in a "book club" with Charlotte, a crazy bible-thumper), Stan, Jack (who's dating a non-crazy Christian named Katy-Ann), and Sara (who is a lesbian).
• Love Letter Lunacy: Aggie makes a complicated love letter scheme to arrange for a date with Duane and Penny. It fails horribly and because Sara sees Aggie doing it, Sara assumes Aggie herself was trying to meet with Penny, setting off Sara's long shipping. Later on, Penny calls Aggie out on this when Aggie accuses her of turning down Duane because she's racist.
• Makeover Montage: Karen’s shows just how extreme Penny’s attempt to change her was, even including surgery.
• Manipulative Bastard: Karen's role in the Popsicle Wars. After that story, Cyndi takes over her role. After she leaves the strip the role is thankfully left empty.
• The Masquerade: Not very pronounced since every single character but Liz is a Muggle, but it's there, although mostly for Mythology Gags that can be easily written off by someone not familiar with Cool Cat Studio.
• Maybe Ever After: For the titular characters. Also counts as a Fast-Forward to Reunion ending.
• Meaningful Echo: "pretty people get to do what they want!" Karen, when she finishes appropriating Penny and Aggie's social power, having gotten them to give her makeovers, and when Penny and Aggie successfully destroy her popularity at the end of the Popsicle Wars arc.
• Mistaken for Gay: Karen thought Aggie was a lesbian for a full year after misinterpreting a comment she made shortly after they met; Sara thought so, too, for a much shorter stretch (not clear how long - possibly right up until Lisa told her she wasn't) due to Love Letter Lunacy. Of course, since then Aggie's sexuality has actually moved in that direction, so perhaps they weren't that far off.
• Mistaken for Racist: Thanks to Aggie blowing up at Penny over Aggie's failed scheme to hook Penny and Duane up, Penny was labeled a racist by parts of the student body, especially Samantha.
• The Mole: Sara finds out that two of her co-stars on her reality show are plants.
• Mood Whiplash: For a particular example, the comedic tone of the Popsicle Wars suddenly swerved straight into sexual abuse and rape...then back to humor again. Within one day.
• Most Writers Are Male: Once Gisèle moved on to... "bluer" pastures, practically every new outfit could be relied upon to draw a firestorm of mockery of the creators' sense of women's fashion.
• Most Writers Are Writers: Penny's mother is a columnist for a parenting website.
• Ms. Fanservice: Brandi and Cyndi, as drawn by Jason Waltrip. Their breasts have received a notable expansion since he took over.
  • One page during Gisele's run was altered after the page was posted to reduce Aggie's cupsize due to several readers noticing they seemed unusually large (and joking that her breasts inflated when she was angry).
  • Played with in Karen's case; she starts wearing more alluring clothing as the series goes on, but at the end of "Popsicle Wars" she borderline flashes her dwindling group of friends in a desperate attempt to have them still find her attractive.
• My Eyes Are Up Here: Rare male example with Karen and Marshall.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: When Stan confronts Cyndi about her attempt to deceive his best friend Jack, and other classmates, into thinking she wanted to sleep with them, he taunts her for not thinking big enough, so as to imply she's lost her touch and shake her confidence. Instead, she says "You're right. You're so right," and giggles ominously. Stan himself admits in the next strip that he made things worse.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Calvin Machrie, the director of the school play, physically resembles Colin Mochrie of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, while his personality and directing style are patterned after those of Mochrie's recurring "Hollywood Director" character.
• No More for Me: Nick's reaction to his coffee cup upon witnessing Penny and Aggie entering the house together. As friends.
• "Not If They Enjoyed It" Rationalization: Karen goes into a locker room shower to have sex with Marshall, who has to push her out physically. She then begins to give him a hand job without his consent, and although he doesn't resist, he makes his discomfort clear; even so, he stays with her afterwards, and initiates sex a few months later. Both people are still implied to be incredibly messed up but depending on one's interpretation there may be an implication that Karen should be excused for it because she's insecure and Marshall's resistance is "only" because his mother was a poor role model and a neglectful parent.
• Odd-Shaped Panel: Brandi apparently hit Xena so hard that even the panel buckled from the force of the blow.
• Offscreen Breakup: The title characters. "August" ends with their relationship in serious doubt, but with Aggie's promise to keep working at it. In the coda, a new, supporting character mentions, six years after the fact, that they indeed broke up during senior year.
• Off the Wagon: Katy Ann discovers Jack's beer stash and despairs that he's done this already after promising to stay sober. As it turns out, the beer was over a year old and he'd had no plans to ever consume it, as it was a memento of his friend Rich who left town.
  • Happens for real later when Jack feels conflicted over his lust for Brandi and feeling more and more unworthy of a "good girl" like Katy Ann.
• Pity the Kidnapper: When you think that Charlotte kidnapped Cyndi as a twisted expression of her own self-hatred and hatred for her abusive mother, she's pitiful enough. Then when Cyndi talks her into slitting her own throat, well...
• Popular Is Dumb: Subverted with Penny, who is an extremely intelligent student with the same PPSAT score as Aggie.
  • In fact, the entire beginning of the comic was Aggie harassing Penny because she assumed by her appearance that Penny and her friends were shallow idiots.
• Precision F-Strike: The characters use strong language fairly frequently, but it's been seen uncensored only twice, both "fuck you," first from Helen to Penny, while she's on the bus to Boston, then Daphne to Sara after they break up.
• Put on a Bus: T. has stated in the past that certain characters, such as Rich and the entirety of the Injustice Gang (aside from Charlotte) were departing, but since then all of them came back for major or supporting roles in some of the 2010 storylines. Cyndi in particular moved into a role as a major villain in the strip. Helen was literally put on a bus...to Something*Positive.
• Put on a Bus to Hell: T has declared that Cyndi will never again be seen in the strip after being locked up in a mental hospital by her parents. Considering the horrible things she did, it's not very surprising.
• Rape as Drama: Charlotte's (false) accusations against Sara and Charlotte's own (implied) backstory. Strangely, the rape accusation against Sara was only played for school drama - no teachers or police ever get involved despite the accusation being plastered over the walls of the school and the internet. Furthermore, the worst thing that seemed to happen is students made fun of Sara (for being a lesbian - not for being a rapist) and later forgot about it. However, the slander resurfaces, by implication, in "The New Reality" when Hilary, Sara's peer director in her reality show, threatens, in retaliation for Sara calling her a "bully," to expose the "scandalous Internet rumors" about her, on the air. However, this never came to fruition since Sara managed to beat her to the blackmailing punch.
  • While that was the extent of it in Penny and Aggie, the first strips of QUILTBAG reveal that the video is still haunting her enough that she's legally changed her surname to distance herself from it.
• Reading the Stage Directions Out Loud: Penny does this while rehearsing Macbeth.
• Rebus Bubble: Either "Aggie likes girls" or "Aggie performs open-heart surgery on Venus."
• Relationship Upgrade: Sara and Daphne, after many tumultuous plot twists, eventually upgrade into lovers. Brandi and Stan finally decide to become exclusive after having a Friends with Benefits relationship for over a year. The title characters after being teased for years finally shipped in the final story arc.
• Revealing Hug: A strip with Aggie hugging Lisa leads to that character suddenly realizing she might like girls.
• Romantic False Lead: Rich to Penny (as well as a few of her other early relationships). The best example is a bit complicated, but starts with him wanting her to run away with him. Twenty of Penny's possible future selves show up (ten who went with him, ten who didn't), and vote 13-6 (one opted out) not to go with him. Penny goes anyway. All but one of the possible future Pennies fade away, except for the one narrating the story to a future version of Aggie, who is giving her a foot massage.
• The Runaway: Helen post-"Popsicle War." She hated her life so much she ran away to a completely different web comic.
• Scenery Censor: Various pieces of clothing, stealthy panel frames, word balloons, and even the characters own carefully positioned (but not deliberately positioned) hands conceal Penny and Aggie's bare crotches after their most powerful rage sex ever leaves them completely nude below the waist.
• School Play: Macbeth, a clear metaphor for the course of "The Popsicle War."
• Sex Montage: "Behind Closed Doors."
• Sexy Santa Dress: Brandi donned one of these once.
• Silent Bob: Jack. But NOT Michelle.
• Shout-Out: The T-shirt in this strip is from Questionable Content.
  • The two girls discussing the "code of e-silence" are Tiffany and Crystal from Luann. T.J. from the same strip later showed up to one of Karen's parties, despite T.J. being an adult (though T.J.'s of questionable enough character that it's not unrealistic for him to be trolling a party full of underage girls).
  • Charlotte's mother bears some striking similarities to Carrie's mother.
• Show, Don't Tell: T Campbell is a major proponent of this, eschewing Info Dump and other forms of exposition like crazy. It gets unfortunate when a good chunk of fans have to go onto the forum to debate just what people are thinking or saying. The fact that we tend to only view snippets of dialogue, rather than large explanations, only makes it worse.
• Skyward Scream: Katy-Ann lets out one when she finds Jack's beer stash after his promise to stay sober.
  • Charlotte's mother when she finds out about her daughter's imprisonment.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss: The title characters, here.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Randy Milholland of all people said that Helen's character arc depressed him to the point that he would have to stagger the crossover. As of this point in time, Helen has gained a fair bit of confidence, and perhaps, a new friend, but has not yet returned home.
• Slipping a Mickey: Cyndi tries this twice on Stan, getting success the first time.
• Snow Means Death: The only time we see snow in the comic? During Aggie's Near-Death Experience.
• Soda Can Shakeup: Aggie pulls this prank on Penny by having Daphne distract Penny just as she's bought a can of soda from a school vending machine, then shaking the can so that Penny stains her designer clothes when she opens it. In response, Penny devises a number of humiliating Revenge schemes, none of which she gets the opportunity to launch.
• Sorry, I'm Gay: Aggie considers this as a possible response to turn down a guy.
• Stalking is Love: Subverted in the flashback with Lynda and Rob. Rob pranked her mercilessly, and Lynda reacted...how most humans would react. They eventually hooked up when he was sensitive during a time of need instead of her having to accept him.
• Stuffed into a Trashcan: Lynda did this to Rob in the past when he just pranked her one too many times.
• Subordinate Excuse: Stan, to Rich.
• Suicide Dare: In an episode, Cyndi does this indirectly with her morally conflicted kidnapper, Charlotte, using Reverse Psychology.
  [Suicide's] not an option for you. I mean, if you were gonna do that, you already would have. The knife is right there. You're just gonna have to live with what you've done.
• That Liar Lies: "Stop lying, you liar!" (Karen to Charlotte)
• Theme Naming: Sara and Michelle, Nick and Charisma, Stan and Jack, Fred and Daphne.
  • Also, the main characters - "aggie" seems to be a slang term for "marble", and kids often play marbles for pennies.
• There Are No Therapists: Subverted in "Hunger," when it is revealed that Michelle has been seeing a psychologist to treat her eating disorder. But given what the rest of the cast goes through, she's not the only character who could use some help.
• Those Two Guys: Bob and Elmer.
• Three Is Company: "Dinner for Six" pushes this to the extreme.
• Time-Passes Montage: Parodied over several strips of Penny standing stock still until the heat death of the universe after Sara informs her of her belief that Penny and Aggie are experiencing Unresolved Sexual Tension.
• Transparent Closet: Sara, though only to Penny, Lisa, Cyndi, and Katy-Ann — everyone else was completely oblivious until being told even after her gay makeover, which included a Venus symbol necklace.
• Unrequited Love: Aggie to Marshall. Initially, Daphne to Sara, which causes tension between them when Sara is accused of raping Charlotte and the spurned Daphne chooses to believe it. Michelle to Rich.
• Webcomic Time: The most extreme so far is taking three months and two chapters to tell the events of a single day.
• Wham Episode: The ending of "Mister Smiles", leading into the "Missing Person" arc. In particular, Chapter 3, "Cyndi and Charlotte".
• Wham Line: "Will you just! Kiss her! Already!" - And the central dynamic of the strip is fundamentally changed.
• Will They or Won't They?: The titular characters, a dynamic that remained prominent for much of the strip, especially in the post-Popsicle Wars years. A hint of this showed up in the conclusion of "20 2020 Pennies", which showed Penny and Aggie in one potential future as a couple. This potential future even got a few subtle shout outs, and the author noted that that future's Penny was bisexual, though refused to elaborate outside of the strip. The entire final story arc dealt with the topic head on. In which they finally "did"...and then broke up during senior year. The epilog showed their reunion after six years from the break up, and then closed the strip on a cliffhanger as to whether they would get together again.
• Wingding Eyes: Penny, Stan, and Aggie's reactions to the principal announcing the director of their school production of Macbeth.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Sam definitely seems to think she's in a Disney Channel movie; Lisa, a Diablo Cody film.
• Zeerust: The Distant Finale, set six years in the future, shows several of the female characters wearing outfits of this type to their Class Reunion. Sara even lampshades this by telling Daphne, "The retro-future trend was made for you."

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