ThisAchewood strip starts off with Ray reading that scientists discovered Pluto was just a big piece of snow. "Ain't no planet at all!" Fast forward two years to when Pluto's status as a planet gets revoked for real...
Anecdote of Error: Luntsha’s retort that Shimei and her group are just jealous that she and Atshi won’t date them, and their reactions thereof, become even funnier when Nishkose says that she actually would date Luntsha if she didn't have a girlfriend back home, meaning that she is either lesbian or bisexual.
Awful Hospital: With the advent of the "Everything is Cake" meme, the Old Flesh (which broke down and evolved to form the Perception Range) being represented by a birthday cake became quite a bit funnier.
An animated short features the crew of the MythBusters attempting to build a cannon out of duct tape in order to fire a pig. While the "cannon made out of duct tape" sounds like a Flanderized "silly Mythbusters build," the Mythbusters did a "duct tape" special much later. And guess what they actually built?
Another Awkward Zombie comic has someone using a dog whistle that only Link can hear because he has huge ears; this was made before Twilight Princess.
This comic fits the trope in terms of the US release date of Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney. In the comic, Apollo asks the judge for more chairs for the witnesses, who are all crammed into the one-person stand along with the defendant. In the aforementioned crossover, there's a long witness table in Labyrinthia's courtroom since you interrogate multiple witnesses at the same time.
The fact that Mega Man can't duck or crawl, but instead do a completely useless slide is a Running Gag. In Super Smash Bros., he not only can duck, but his slide actually counts as an attack.
The comic features an arc involving the Pokémon craze. No biggie, but the arc ends with the death of the fad. Figures it would be the one late-'90s fad to NOT die within a year.
A minor one, but the comic is currently on a Tue-Fri-Sun update schedule as of October 2010. Amber posted a comic with the tagline, "It's like a Friday cliffhanger, but on a Tuesday!" Then she got sick and couldn't update on Friday, so it was a Friday cliffhanger.
Fans frequently liked to joke that Clover of the Felt was a leprechaun, due to the fact that he's small, green and associated with luck. Then the comic revealed the Felt are actually leprechauns.
In this◊ Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff update, a typo renders "hot dog" as "hot god". This takes on a new meaning in Homestuck, when Jade reaches God Tier, fusing with Jadesprite and gaining dog ears in the process, to which fans have called "Dog Tier". It should also be noted that that SBAJH strip predates all of Homestuck by nearly a month.
Speaking of The Elder Scrolls, the troll alphabet is the Daedric one, only with the letters flipped upside down. Andrew has admitted that he just picked it at random from a website documenting fictional alphabets. It turned out to be a lucky pick - the Daedric alphabet is, in the games, used by the Dremora, a grey-skinned, horned, shaggy-haired Proud Warrior Race with a Fantastic Caste System who hail from Another Dimension. In other words...trolls.
Dave's mini-Coming-Out Story is both sad and an in-universe example of Hilarious in Hindsight, considering how Dave spent many years suffering from internalized homophobia due to his abusive, inscrutable, macho warrior of a brother (who produced gay puppet porn)... only to meet Dirk, the alternate universe counterpart of Dave's Bro, who is gay. Quote Dave:
DAVE: i think...
DAVE: there is a SLIGHT chance...
DAVE: i may be the biggest idiot in the world
DAVE: when it comes to understanding some things about my bro
Another strip parodied the "progression" from Darth Maul's double-bladed lightsaber in The Phantom Menace and Anakin's dual-wielding of lightsabers in Attack of the Clones with having characters draw quadruple, quintuple and septuple lightsabers...
David Morgan-Mar: This comic was published over 2 years before Episode III was released in May 2005. Need I say anything more than "General Grievous"? I'm ready for those royalties, George.
This animated comic of a Kirby parody comic series shows Kirby eating a Nintendo Switch, and loving it, though he still thinks it's not as good as the Nintendo GameCube. Shortly before the Switch's release, people started tasting Switch cartridges and they always say how terrible they tasted.
A Running Gag in the script is Psycho Mantis' utter refusal to believe in the supernatural despite ample evidence to the contrary, up to and including the spirit of the Sorrow showing him the spirit world. In Metal Gear Solid 4Psycho Mantis' spirit was forcibly implanted into Screaming Mantis and when Snake defeats the latter, the former's spirit manifests and is eventually banished back into the grave by the Sorrow's spirit.
In Mary Cagle's journalyonkomaLet's Speak English, one of Mary's coworkers asks why she doesn't try to submit her work to a publisher and become a full-time mangaka; in an aside, she admits that she could never be a professional mangaka because she prefers having time to sleep — mangaka typically have to deal with notoriously tight schedules. She later ended up being approached by Hiveworks to produce her own OEL manga series, with the title of — wait for it — Sleepless Domain.
In an early storyline of L's Empire one of the main characters was hypnotized into watching My Little Pony. Aside from the fact that this was a little over a year before My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic came out, one of the authors is now a brony.
Political cartoonist Matt Bors made a strip in 2013 against America's use of drones, with Malala Yousafzai telling President Obama that they fuel terrorism; a fake pundit responds she's wrong, as "one of them won a Nobel Prize, and one didn't." Guess who won the Nobel Prize the following year.
Manly Guys Doing Manly Things: Commander Badass decides to not go as Tywin Lannister for Halloween, citing that it's not worth shaving his head for a costume no-one will get. The TV adaptation of the series, which was in pre-production when the comic was released, turned into a global phenomenon and made Tywin a household name.
The first Shirt Guy Dom filler for Megatokyo promises there will never be another one again. Compare with this list.
And this infamous strip, whose mockery of the bogus release date for Duke Nukem Forever was funny in 1999 when the game was a year and a half late, but only grew more so as the game grew two years, four years, eight years, nine years, only to loop back around to Hilarious in Hindsight when a demo of the game, now out of development hell, was released at PAX.
This strip became a lot funnier when a few years later Tycho actually did miss a portion of PAX due to the birth of his child.
This strip gets funnier when you realize how the reaction was for the Metroid game shown at E3after it was released.
Their somewhat out-of-left-field reaction to Sonic Generations is way funnier now that Bubsy is not only getting a new game but Sonic's own official Twitter account reacted tothe news. On top of that, the new Bubsy game was announced while Sonic Forces was upcoming, and the latter game also features Modern and Classic Sonic— so the comic could've plausibly taken place there instead.
This strip has a squirrel with a cigar and a T-shirt that says "Fuck you" getting turned down for Conker's Quest, for not being "accessible" enough to kids. Eventually, Conker's Bad Fur Day came out, and the squirrel probably would have fit right in there.
The very existence of the webcomic Pokémon-X is much funnier after the announcement of the Pokémon games Pokémon X and Y.
ThisPvP comic from 2002. The characters were trying to figure out a way to get in on the retro 80s craze, and the only IP they could possibly secure was My Little Pony. They noted the impossibility of using it to appeal to nerdy guys. Flash forward to My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, and it becomes It Will Never Catch On.
This comic where Martin, Angus, and Faye discuss Martin's comfort with his ex Dora dating Tai is a bit funnier now than it was at the time. Angus said to Faye, "I'm just saying, if you have to break up with me, at least leave me for a girl." Pintsize followed with "Leave him for a robot. A girl robot!" After Faye and Angus broke up, Faye's next romantic partner was Bubbles, who is in fact a girl robot.
Rain: Emily Caston has a lot in common with Amity Blight, who debuted about a decade later. Both are introduced as mean preppy characters, but warm up and work to make amends after befriending the protagonist. Both also learn to defy the parental pressure that made them meaner, and both end up dating said protagonists.
The Dexbusters' experiment concludes that Machamp can throw a thousand punches in half a minute instead of two seconds like its Pokédex entry says. In Pokkén Tournament, Machamp's Limit Break Dynamic Fury has it indeed throwing a thousand punches in two seconds!
One comic shows a Mr. Mime acting loopy in a Daycare because it "never had a childhood", a reference to Mr. Mimes being unable to have Mime Jr. as offspring unless they hold an Odd Incense. This was changed starting in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet so that Mr. Mimes will always produce Mime Jr. Eggs even without the Incense, so the case for this particular Mr. Mime is more amusing.
Mae Dean, the woman who used to spend her entire food budget on ramen and thought "butter dipped butter" was a meal, has since graduated from a cooking academy.
Mae Dean also was listening toThe Hobbit on CD in 2003 because "[t]he way I figure it, having it read to me by an old British man is about the closest to a Pete Jackson movie we're ever going to see of it."
Landon's mom, Harriet, believed Larisa to actually be "a succubus that'll give birth to the antichrist". Fast-forward to the Divine Comedy arc: Larisa makes a deal with the devil to save Sandra and will become a succubus if she succeeds because it'll be a waste of her talents to be anything lesser than that. Jury's still out on the antichrist bit, though.
Shortpacked! had a 2006 plotline where Galasso tries to convince his employees to sire a child with his daughter, so that he can have an heir to his "empire" of toy stores. At one point, he goes to Robin- a woman, mind you. After hearing Galasso's request to notify him "the instant you have achieved impregnation", Robin responds by saying she's "fairly confident that's impossible." Seven years later, thanks to Rosenthal's tech skills, Leslie impregnated Robin.
And this 2001 strip wherein Torg and Riff need lederhosen and pliers to party with Charlie Sheen, but Sasha tells them he's been sober for months, so they try to find Robert Downey Jr., a belt sander, and a Portuguese man-of-war. Over the next decade, guess which got his career back on track and which became a walking punchline?
Sonichu mentioned that he had a dream of seeing his creator, with long hair in the mirror in one issue. This ended up coming true, as the creator later came out as a transgender woman. Also, an author's note in Episode 20 says "I would rather suffer a painful gender-change operation than ever be a homo," and in Episode 21, Chris punches a guy for calling him "Madam Chrissy"◊ while shouting "I am a man!"
Also in Episode 21, Chris says that the "gene-like molecule" that makes a person gay was discovered in June 2015, and scientists developed a gay vaccine with the help of a time-traveling Chris. In June 2015 in real life, a US Supreme Court ruling legalized same-sex marriage.
Pokémon Sun and Moon would introduce Togedemaru, an official "Electric Hedgehog Pokémon". Also Sophocles, a major trainer with a Togedemaru, is named Chris or Chrys in multiple languages.
Stand Still, Stay Silent: Part of the premise of the comic, which started publication in late 2013, is that Iceland was the first country worldwide to close its borders to prevent entry of The Plague on its territory, and later spent an unspecified amount of time only letting The Immune people travel in and out of the country. In early 2019, the real Iceland got a small measles outbreak from a non-vaccinated adult visitor. A satirical article written soon after had Iceland react to the event by banning the entry of non-vaccinated visitors.
Supermegatopia: The comic's Green Lantern Expy is named Limelight, which is the name Green Lantern Jessica Cruz would take.
Tower of God: In a complete reversal of something that was Harsher in Hindsight: On the 20th floor, Ja Wangnan has been loaning money from a Loan Shark to take the tests to ascend to the next floor, never succeeding. He's desperate enough to take up a final offer of a loan where, if he fails and can't pay it back this time, he's to go on a "skeleton diet", meaning the Loan Shark is going to harvest and sell his organs. In spite of the Black Comedy involved, this is still quite serious... Except if you reflect back on it later when it has turned out Wangnan has a Healing Factor he didn't even know about that would probably have allowed him to survive it, which would surely have been incredibly confusing to everyone involved. In principle, he could even have made that deal and paid the price with his organs multiple times!
Unsounded: An Inept Mage tries to attack Duane with a pymaric that summons a huge spectral tentacle monster — which turns out to be completely benign. Four chapters later, it's revealed to have been a Gentle Giant pymaric, on clearance from the Happy Tentacle Love Hotel. Duane, fortunately, never learns that he was assaulted with a sex toy.
In a 1998 cartoon where Irwin ended up in the computer system of the space station Mir, he said at one point "I can barely believe this thing stays up." Two years later, the station was decommissioned, deorbited, and burned up in the atmosphere.
In this 2009 Sunday strip, a Star Trek crossword has as #6 down, "Brain connection with fingers to face". The actual answer is Vulcan mind meld, but considering what Captain Picard is now famous for...
In thisVirtual Shackles comic, one of the 'problems' the Kinect can't fix is the boy's ethnic friends. A month later, Gamespot reported that Kinect's facial recognition software has trouble with dark-skinned people.
The Whiteboard: Doc really had no idea just how 2020 was going to go, did he? "One of those kinds of years", indeed, as anyone who wasn't living under a rock for the entirety of 2020 no doubt remembers. Natural disasters, pandemics, zombie tropical storms, zombie Covid-infected minks...
This comic worked less well once the third Guitar Hero game featured "One" by Metallica and further tracks became available as DLC, but then they released an entire game devoted to the band.
. Almost four years later, guess what Captain Ukitake of Bleach's shikai resembles
