Webcomic / Wapsi Square

"One thing I must remember about my demons...
If I don't do exactly as they say, as they wish...
They become totally... completely... harmless."

— Monica

Wapsi Square is a "slice of supernatural life" webcomic started in 2001 by Paul Taylor, who describes it as "An attempt to combine the cute and the macabre." It follows the life of Monica Villareal, a busty anthropologist from Minneapolis, as she discovers that it isn't her that's crazy, but rather the world around her.

The comic started out as a simple slice of life comedy, but eventually grew into a much more complicated story with the introduction of an Aztec deity, three indestructible golems, and a massive, time-spanning plot to save the world. Despite the shift, it still finds time to explore the personal lives of the characters, but with a bit of a supernatural twist.

In 2013, the focus began to shift away from Monica to her friend Katherine Gilchrist and her adopted daughters, a teenage siren named Atsali and a pre-teen sentient mass of vines named Castela.

Has a character sheet.

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Wapsi Square contains examples of:

• Adventure Archaeologist:
  • Monica's grandfather was one of these. Monica herself, on the other hand would claim to be an archaeologist of the far more mundane variety. She spends most of her time either in a library, or analyzing things for the museum, and she doesn't do field work. However, that being said, she still did manage to help bring down a smuggling ring in the process of acquiring an artifact.
  • Katherine has become one of these, combined with joining The Men in Black.
• All Bikers are Hells Angels: subverted, when Monica finds a biker bar filled with mostly middle-aged white-collar workers.
• All Myths Are True: At least the Aztec, Greek and Egyptian myths as well as Atlantis have made a fair showing so far, and Bud may actually be ancient Greek based on how her accent sounds to modern ears.
• All Therapists Are Muggles:
  • Discussed several times. Most of the main cast could use professional help to overcome their issues, but the great majority of those issues deal with visions, demons, immortality, time loops, inadvertently causing an apocalyptic event, or related phenomena that the characters fear would cause them to be committed. It even has caused problems for Monica, back when she was a teenager, since she was young, confused, haunted by demons, and ignorant of the bigger picture.
  • One character who acts as a stand-in therapist for several other characters, Tina, turns out to have actually been a psychiatrist before she lost her memories.
• Alternate History: Jin has lived through numerous of these because of the "Groundhog Day" Loop, the most recent of which apparently ended in a blind panic at the Calendar Machine site and a gruesome death for Monica, and may have something to do with Jin's refusal to let herself be too friendly with the rest of the crew, particularly Shelly.
• Ambulance Chaser: Bud has an amusing run-in with one starting here.
• And Then John Was a Zombie: Shelly dies and comes back as a millenia old sphinx. Or, more accurately, the we see die is the one from the very first cycle of the time loop. Shelly 57 - the Shelly in the comic strip - spent the full length of all cycles of the time loop in the Time Forest - where time runs the opposite way - and had to watch all of the Shellys from the loops before hers die, before she returned as a sphinx.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: The personal demons are manifestations of one's doubts, fears, etc.
• Apocalypse How: A class 2 occurred in the distant past caused by the golem girls.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: I snore loud but I don't mean to.
• Art Evolution: Compare this early strip to this one. Yes, that's the same girl.
• Artistic License – Biology: Averted, surprisingly, in regards to Monica. Her short stature, ridiculously large bust, and equally large tongue are all clear symptoms of overproduction of/oversensitivity to estrogen.
  • Paul Taylor has said that a close personal friend was the basis for her body type.
• Ash Face: Bud once found herself caught in a massive fiery explosion, and came out with one of these.
• Ass Shove: Implied. Atsali is worried about her new tail from her succubus heritage so Castella just asks it nicely to hide away... and it does.
• Author Appeal: Paul Taylor seems to have a thing for big and/or strong, sexually aggressive women. All male/female relationships shown have the female as the more powerful or aggressive partner. This sounds like the Paul talking...
• Back from the Dead, the Golem Girls
• Batter Up!: Shelly seems to take a baseball bat with her to answer the door late at night.
• Beach Episode: If you could teleport, wouldn't you meet up on a sandbar somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle sometimes?
• Bedmate Reveal: Bud and Kevin wake up in the same bed after a night of drinking.
• Benevolent Boss: Monica's boss set her up with Kevin, and Heather's once ordered her to go out and have fun.
• Big "NO!": Monica's takes two (albeit short) lines when Phyx decides it's time to "tag" Nudge on this page
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The demons.
• Brain Bleach: "Remind me to wash my brain with bleach later would you!"
• Bring My Brown Pants: See Mugging the Monster below.
• Call-Back: A strip from December 2009 featured a reference to the dialogue in the very first strip back in 2001.
• Came Back Wrong: The destruction of the Calendar Machine seems to have utterly broken Jin's mind; although she seemed reasonably sane up to that point, she's explicitly referred to as schizophrenic at least once after.
• Celestial Deadline
• Cerebus Syndrome: Changing from a slice-of-life comedy, to a save-the-world drama and back to a supernatural slice-of-life comedy with a new generation of characters; dropping over half its supporting cast in the process, and leaving multiple unresolved subplots, though it has shown signs that the threads will be addressed in time.
  • And now, at least two characters have Rape as Backstory.
• Changing Clothes Is a Free Action: Jin is able to do this to both herself and Monica through some creative use of teleportation.
• Chekhov's Gun: Monica's grandfather, Tepoz (surprisingly), the glyph language
• Chiaroscuro: Used in a particularly dramatic moment in the library.
• Chirping Crickets: It even used the sound effect cricket cricket.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Once the Cerebus Syndrome kicks in, the majority of the cast from the first few years, including several major characters, are completely dropped with no explanation or followup, leaving several plot threads dangling unresolved.
• Clothing Switch: Tina and Monica once switched outfits due to a slight teleporting mishap.
• Comfort Food: Pizza is the universal comfort food, even to the point where your demons won't bug you when you are eating it.
• Coolest Club Ever: Cerberus Club
• Cool Gate: The portal cloth is interesting on its own, but it really becomes a cool gate when it is attached to Shelly. If you enter it, you come out the other cloth, but you have to be able to teleport on your own to use it. It still does have its uses though.
• Cosmic Retcon: An in-universe Reset Button that resets time back to the same point. The next reset is due in 2012.
• Cowboys and Indians: Shelly often found herself playing this as a kid. She took the suction cups off of her toy arrows.
• Creepy Doll: Tina's muñeca para el Dia de los Muertos looks somewhat unsettling.
• Creepy Child: Shelly's conscience looks like one and she knows it.
• Cute Little Fangs: Endemic in the cast; pretty much everyone has them. Largely justified, as many of the cast is not human, one of the ones that started out human is the Jaguar Girl, and the other lost all her teeth in a car accident and was given the wrong set in reconstructive surgery.
• Cute Kitten: Selenium, except for this instance any real-life cat owner would relate to. He does double duty as Amanda's shredder.
• Dagwood Sandwich: Monica has been known to eat these.
• Demoted to Extra: Notice the fairly small overlap between the site's current cast page and the one above? In the slice-of-life years, Tina was a moving prop, Katherine was just a weird Drop-In Character, and Tep was such a joke that he wasn't added to the cast page at the time until after the Heather arc, when she'd been there for months already; essentially, Monica and Shelly are the only two left of the original cast. Even Shelly hadn't been very prominent among Monica's friends until the Heather arc and her Important Haircut boosted her popularity.
• Description Cut: They are a staple of the humor. This strip is a good example.
• Distracted by the Sexy: Monica + Little Black Dress = ...well yeah.
• Does Not Know His Own Strength: Bud, being the most destructive of the three golem girls, has worried about this on a regular basis.
• Doing In the Wizard: "Magic" is eventually Hand Waved as an unknown form of quantum manipulation.
• Embarrassing Old Photo: There's a scene early on where Monica is embarrassed by a bunch of her teenage photos where she's wearing nerdy glasses and hair. Later on she shows one to her friends and they think it's cute.
• Epic Fail: Tina describes a previous time she had to run the coffee shop with an arm in a cast. Somehow she managed to back over her wrist while trying to parallel park.
• Even Evil Has Standards We may be demons, but we have rules!
• Expressive Hair: This happened a lot in the early strips, especially with Shelly.
• Extra Parent Conception: Katherine was revealed to be a fusion of six unborn children. Assuming each had a different father that brings her number of parents to a dozen.
• Face Palm: Dietzel does this from time to time.
• Falling into His Arms: Happens to Monica after a biking accident here. However, in this case, it is purely comedy, and it is not played for romance in any way.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Starting out with Aztec deities, increasingly becoming this as more supernatural characters and themes are added, including Atlantis.
• Flashy Teleportation: "Poit"ing. That's its sound.
• Flat-Earth Atheist: explicitly averted by Monica, who considers all the weird things and people around her to be phenomena that science just hasn't studied yet.
• Fluffy the Terrible: Bud and Brandi tamed a creature that could have inspired the Kraken. They named him Stinky.
• Forced Transformation: Castela's butterfly friend Reginald turns out to be a half-fey boy that a fae girl he turned down for a date turned into a butterfly.
• Force Feeding: Bud demonstrates the incredibly complicated technique of force feeding through teleportation.
  • Tepoz also did this to Monica using a large turkey. And what goes in...
  Monica: "Oh, those poor people at the sewage treatment plant.."
• Funbag Airbag: It happens to Shelly in this strip.
• Gay Conservative: Heather is a conservative lesbian folk singer.
• Genre-Busting: It is difficult to describe what genre the comic is currently in. It describes itself as a "Slice of supernatural life."
• Genre Shift: Started as a slice-of-life comic, then took a supernatural turn that now dominates.
• Golem: Bud, Jin and Brandy, Tepoztecal.
• A Good Name for a Rock Band: Fermented Banana is named after an unfortunate mishap by Monica.
• Grilling Pyrotechnics: Invoked by Shelly as part of a plan to meet with and get revenge on a certain attractive police officer here.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: Everyone but Jin has been unknowingly trapped in one of these, due to a malfunctioning Mayan calendar machine for at least eighty-one thousand years. Jin is trapped as well, but she knows what's happening and appears to be going somewhat mad from it.
  • More recently, Shelly has been shown to be stuck in a much stranger version of this trope.
• Ground-Shattering Landing: Bud once tried to roller skate down the stairs. She is indestructible. You can imagine the rest.
• Gut Feeling: "I find that when a body part starts making decisions, one must proceed with caution."
• Hands-On Approach: The first meeting between Shelly and Justin occurred off-screen when he invoked this trope on the receiving instruction end in her kickboxing class. Eventually, she figured out that he wasn't as inept as he acted.
• Hard Head
• Heroic BSoD: Shelly went through one of these after being trapped in another world as a sphinx for 80,000 years, while no time at all passed for her friends. She got better surprisingly quickly.
• Hot Librarian: Phix
• Humanity Ensues: The golem girls, Tina
• Hurl It into the Sun: Bud's method of disposing of the calender machine
• I'm a Doctor, Not a Placeholder: Monica is an Anthropologist, not a Psychiatrist. She even throws in a "Dammit Jin" for good measure.
• Imagine Spot: Katherine imagines seasonally inept Vikings.
• I'm Not Afraid of You
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: A group of smugglers with automatic weapons can't hit Monica at all, even at rather close range. We later find out that there is a slightly more complicated reason than just bad aim.
• Innocent Innuendo: Used in this strip. The next strip reveals that they were actually talking about yoga
• It's Not You, It's Me: This is inverted when Monica uses this phrase to start a relationship. The inversion is then promptly lampshaded.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Jin to Monica's grandfather, with the added twist that if she didn't let him go, Monica would never exist to be the focal point of the ritual to destroy the calendar machine. Made substantially worse by the fact that he was the love of her life and she's had to let him go every time she relives the cycle.
• Knee-capping: In a March 2011 comic there's a distant flashback that shows Jin, before she became part of the Chimera, being shot through the back of the knee with an arrow. Squick.
  • And then hamstrung for good measure.
• Kraken and Leviathan: Bud and Brandi have a pet named Stinky who seems to be the Kraken.
• Kudzu Plot: A very extreme example, to the point where many fans are starting to doubt Paul's ability to keep the massive number of plots on track.
• Laser Hallway: A one shot gag shows that apparently there are a few lasers involved in the museum's security system.
• Later-Installment Weirdness: It started out as just a girl in her hometown and her hijinks with her friends, but after a couple years, it became mystical with a little bit of the mundane stuff happening still. Like Monica learned to teleport and didn't think anything of it.
• Layman's Terms: Shelly gets an impromptu vocabulary lesson here.
• Literal Cliff Hanger: One sequence has Shelly hanging from the edge of a billboard. Luckily the long fall is only an illusion. She will land on a rooftop not visible due to the angle. Possibly inspired by Harold Lloyd's Safety Last, which used a similar technique.
• Little Black Dress: Putting one on Monica results in Distracted by the Sexy.
• Lost Technology: Golems. And the Lanthean computer.
• Magical Realism: Most of the time, especially in the early strips it seems like just a slice of life strip. And then the Mexican deities started showing up.
• Magic from Technology: The Calendar Machine
• Magnetic Girlfriend: Kevin makes this observation here.
• Man of Kryptonite: Well, Cute Monster Girl Of Kryptonite; Castela is made of plants that are the Kryptonite Factor of The Fair Folk. She also has antipathy towards fae - a huge problem when a fae princess attends the same school.
• Mathematician's Answer: Shelly gives one when asked where she got her tattoo.
• Mayincatec: Aztec and Mayan Mythology. Possibly subverted by Jin, who has impersonated deities common to both pantheons and may have had some contact with Egypt and Greece as well, through Phix.
• Mayfly–December Romance: Can definitely apply to any relationship between an immortal or extremely long-lived being with a regular human, such as Jin and Alan or Phix and Monica's boss.
  • Though Jin is now mortal herself, so not so much.
  • Looks as if it may apply to sphinx Shelly and Justin, until we learn that he is in fact an amnesiac immortal himself.
• Metal Detector Checkpoint: Monica has a bit of a problem with the metal detector at the airport. She made sure she had nothing metal on her person only to set off the detector with the underwire in her bra.
• Missing Mom: An important part of Shelly's backstory made even more important when Shelly actually meets her mom and learns that she deliberately faked her own death to invoke it.
• Monster Clown: There are few things scarier than a dog in a clown mask.
• Ms. Fanservice: Monica and the Golem Girls (especially in their first appearance). Nearly every female character gets a turn at least once. Done very tastefully, especially for webcomics, and not too often at first; though it gets increasingly common and risque later on.
• Mugging the Monster: Mugger pulls knife. Heather pulls gun Mugger wets himself.
• Mundane Fantastic
• Mundane Utility: Shelly was given some clay dolls by her mother and told that they would be important in the future. They crack walnuts really good. On top of that, Bud has an interesting way of making popcorn.
  • Tepoz can create any alcoholic drink you can imagine.
    • Actually it's much simpler and open ended than that, he can create 'anything' with alcohol 'in it' or in some cases summon, which was his explanation originally of how he bamfed Bud, Jin and Brandi into Monica's kitchen originally as well as how he was able to poit into existence an entire turkey's worth of mexican mole into existence for Monica, the stipulation being that her grandma used alcohol in the sauce.
• Never Bring A Knife To A Gunfight: A mugger finds himself on the wrong end of this trope in this strip.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Monica's first "poit" comes out of friggin' nowhere. (She'd previously been poited by others, and presumably just picked up the technique somehow.)
• No Antagonist: Despite the save the world plot and complex, overlapping plans, there is no clear antagonistic figure.
• Noodle Implements: Alan once mentioned a rather creative use of a toilet seat and a rubber chicken.
  • And Shelley once told the weird boiler-room girl, "Squire, I need you to collect supplies! We need: 40 gallons of mayo, 13 kiddie pools, 34 jock-straps, 2 barrels of pyrodex, one shovel, and a dozen avocados!" ^note The next panel was Phix in the library screaming "SHELLEY!"
• Noodle Incident: We never do find out how Tina managed to run over her own wrist while parallel parking...
• Not What It Looks Like: Kevin walks into the room and sees this.
• Only Smart People May Pass: Subverted with the question Phix, the keeper of the Bibliothiki, asks Monica and Shelly.
• Ontological Mystery: Tina, who has only news clippings to remember her life with. She was a psychiatrist and the daughter of a drug lord, as well as a close friend of Jin's. She remembers none of this.
• Our Demons Are Different: although they can be pretty nasty, they are frequently not actually evil.
• Our Monsters Are Different: The Chimera, Phix, and an increasing number of others. Including cute monster orphans.
• Out of Focus: Everyone. The original cast was Monica, Amanda, Shelly, Jacquelyn, Owen, Darin, and Dietzl, and this was the core cast for years, with even the relatively early additions Tina and Tepoz not making the cast page until long after their introduction. Only the first three are even on the current cast page, and Amanda mostly because of her role as the original Foil.
• Ping Pong Naïveté, Justified as a coping mechanism.
• Playboy Bunny: Bud and Brandi once wore this sort of outfit during their perpetually drunk phase.
• Playing Sick: This comic has Dietzel recommending that Monica do this.
• Posthumous Characters: The Lanthian priests.
• Priceless Paperweight: The trope is discussed in this strip when Brandi mentions that the portal cloth they just acquired wouldn't make a very good table cloth.
• Rape as Backstory: Recently revealed to be the case with Monica and Georgette.
  • Also happened to Jin, Bud, and Brandi as part of their torture when they were being turned into the Chimera.
• Room Full of Crazy: Used as a partial flashback to Monica's rubber room days.
• Rump Roast: Monica's rejection of her inner demon Doubt sets Doubt's ass on fire. Doubt eventually finds a way to get her own back on Monica. Nose flicks!
• Secret Test of Character: Never used straight, but the golem girls once mistook something for one. Another time, Bud pretended to mistake Monica's actions for a secret test of character.
  • Phix's riddle. She always asks the same riddle to which *any* answer is technically correct, because the answer chosen always reveal an important aspect of the person who answers it.
• Self-Mutilation Demonstration: Jin uses a variation to show that she is indestructible here.
• Sequential Symptom Syndrome: Two consecutive strips involve a doctor telling Heather about a specific symptom of a concussion, and Shelly experiencing that symptom off screen.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Jin comes home from Mexico to find out that despite the destruction of the calendar machine, she can never regain her mortality.
  • At least until Mayahuel "rewrites her code" while in the process of curing her mental instability.
• A Simple Plan: The tendency for simple plans to go horrible wrong is lampshaded in this strip. Said simple plan results in being shot at and bringing down a group of smugglers in Cairo.
• So What Do We Do Now?: Monica seems to have this problem. Tepoz lampshades it. And, it turns out that she's not the only one.
• Spit Take: Monica here.
• Symbol Swearing: The strip managed to find a way to subvert this trope. What looks like just slightly unusual symbol swearing here is actually a language known by very few people that becomes a plot point later on.
• Take My Hand!: Monica and Amanda try to haul Shelly back up onto a platform in this strip. They drop her. she doesn't fall very far.
• Talk About the Weather
• Tears of Remorse
• Teleporter Accident: Monica is capable of teleporting, but isn't particularly good at it. As a result, she tends to suffer comical but harmless mishaps such as poor arrival placement, upside down on arrival, and switching clothing with the person traveling with her.
• Temporal Paradox
• Tempting Fate: Taunting mother nature is a bad idea.
• Tender Tears: Why can't he just tell her he loves her?
• That Came Out Wrong: Rare double example.
• There Is Only One Bed: Used here with Shelly and Owen who have known each other since grade school.
• Tomato in the Mirror: An increasing number of "normal" characters are turning out to have supernatural origins or similarly fantastic backstories; few of which are aware of of their own nature until The Reveal.
• Total Party Kill: the end of the previous Calendar Machine cycle. It's not described in any great detail, but previous!Monica died horribly.
• Undead Tax Exemption: Bud and Brandi are able to acquire modern birth certificates and social security numbers despite being immortal clay golems who predate most known civilizations. However, it is made believable in that it was done by Jin, who has been playing political manipulator in multiple countries for over a thousand years, and probably has more than enough contacts to make someone exist (or cease to exist).
• Underboobs: Shelly doesn't exactly wear much when playing basketball with the guys.
• Unnamed Parent: For most of the series, Jin's Mother is only known so far as "Jin's Mother". She was later revealed to be "Mayahuel".
• Unsound Effect: It once used the sound effect cricket cricket.
• Unstoppable Mailman: The mail will still arrive, even in a nasty snowstorm.
• V-Formation Team Shot: Used in this strip.
• Vicious Cycle: The calendar machine puts the world through cycle after cycle, resetting time every time it hits 2012. Jin retains her knowledge through all cycles, and has seen over 80,000 years worth of this cycle.
  • The cycle is now broken after Monica, Shelly and the golem girls disabled and crushed the calendar machine into an itsy little cube which was then hurled into the sun.
• Visible Silence
• Wait Here: Discussed and promptly played straight in this strip.
• The Watcher: Mayahuel to Monica, disguised as her dead Mexican grandmother.
• We Are Not Going Through That Again
• Weirdness Magnet: Justin mentions to Shelly that he is this and invokes I Just Want to Be Normal, implying she's not the first supernatural girl attracted to him.
  • He later goes into Too Much Information territory by mentioning his werewolf ex who liked to be tied to the bed so she could have sex with him while transforming.
• Wham Episode: Shelly finding an old power source... made of plutonium. Within a few frames, she DIES of radiation poisoning. She gets better... sort of.
  • March 3, 2021. Wapsi Square exists in the multiverse of Magic: The Gathering.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: When the nature of the comic shifts from slice-of-life comedy to supernatural drama and back again a lot of the character arcs and background threads are just dropped without any resolution but it seems some threads are twisting back for progress and resolutions.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: The golem girls played this role once. They were tortured until their wills were completely broken, then they were turned into a weapon. They ended up rampaging and destroying most of the world. Since then, civilizations have been rebuilt, and they have had their free will returned.
• Wrench Wench: Shelly worked at a garage earlier in the strip's run.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Jin, to Tina. They had apparently once been close friends until Tina's death in the same accident that Monica's family thought was attempted suicide; the "new" Tina has only what she (i.e. her demons) could gather from the news about her identity to remember her old life by.
• You Have to Believe Me!: Despite her years of living a life that she knows would make anyone think she's crazy if she revealed any of it, she blurts out to Justin that she's a Sphinx without actually doing anything to prove it, like transforming into a huge lion-bodied mythical being. Predictably, he reacts badly.

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