Webcomic / Hello From Halo Head

"Hey that's a name. Kinda has a ring to it."

Created in June 2020 and currently ongoing, Hello from Halo Head is a webcomic by batshaped on Twitter that explores the multitudes of a person's response to trauma, it's also cartoon animal adventures. It's a trauma comedy, a traumedy. The webcomic follows an angel who creates a brightly colored world to entertain her demon companion. Tensions rise between the two and the denizens of the new realm, with hints of a darker plot under the cartoonish surface.

You can read the story so far on its own website, Twitter as well as on Tapas. Although it's recommended to just use the website instead, as it's actually updated, as for the others, the author lost access to the Twitter event and stopped updating Tapas.

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Hello from Halo Head contains examples of:

• After Action Patch Up: Both Clair and Pepper end up doing this to Chloe at different points.
  • Pepper does this for Achilles after the latter cuts his hand during an argument.

• All Animals Are Dogs: Every character with a tail, regardless of species, will wag their tail when happy or excited.

• Amusing Injuries: When Chloe trips on Pepper’s conversation pit, leading to a bleeding nose.

• Beleaguered Boss: Clair, sort of. She isn’t exactly the boss, but she is in charge of Halo Head, and is often on the receiving end of Chloe’ and Mars’ hijinks.

• Beware the Nice Ones: Clair has the patience of a saint, she really does. But when she's pushed too far, she shows her spiteful side. Usually this just amounts to letting Chloe stew in her own problems but she has gone as far as deliberately introducing residents she know Chloe will hate.
  Clair: So what do you think [of Peachykeen]?
  Chloe: What the fuck, Halo Head? I thought you picked these people with me in mind. That thing is loud and weird and gonna freak everyone the hell out.
  *Beat*
  Chloe: Wait... you have a sense of humor?
  Clair Oh... something like that.

• Big Entrance: Chloe usually enters Clair's lighthouse by shoving both front doors hard enough to slam against the walls.

• Bottle Episode: Pepper "persuades" Mars to spend all day in the lighthouse with Achilles. As a result, they spend #339 to #351 trapped in there together (Clair is in there as well, but asleep the whole time).

• Can't Live with Them, Can't Live Without Them: Mars is constantly trying to ditch Achilles once he turns into a "little freak." When he actually does disappear, she starts to wonder where he went, while claiming she isn't bothered in the slightest.

• Cartoony Tail: Chloe has a pointy devil-like tail.

• Censor Suds: When Chloe decides to cool off by bathing in a hot tub full of ice, the blocks of ice preserve her modesty.

• Characterisation Click Moment: Achilles was initially an introverted straight man, but ever since Mars shoved him to the ground, he wanted nothing more than to be abused by her.

• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Speech bubbles, possessions, even sound effects are similar colors to the person they belong to:
  • Chloe: Purple
  • Clair: Cream
  • Mars: Red
  • Achilles: Blue
  • Pepper: Yellow
  • Peachykeen: Green

• Constructed World: Halo Head (the place) and probably its non-human inhabitants were created by Clair.

• Control Freak: Clair just wants what's best for Chloe, but her well-intentioned meddling often ends up pushing her away instead.
  • After seeing the staircase to lower worlds, Pepper seems to be turning into this, with even less success.

• Crush Blush: Achilles, whenever Mars is nearby.
  • When Achilles starts listing all the ways Mars would be good at hurting him, she starts blushing herself.

• Cryptic Conversation: Achilles' encounter with Ares is almost entirely this. Lampshaded by Pepper.
  Pepper: You weren't once like "Hey, what the hell does that mean?!"

• Cute Monster Girl: Chloe. Although her personality might not be as cute.

• Dark and Troubled Past: Clair created Halo Head to distract Chloe from a traumatic memory. When Chloe is thinking about it, her left eye opens slightly.

• Defiant Strip: Chloe strips down to cool off when it gets too hot in Halo Head. It takes an absurd amount of yelling, chasing and begging from Clair to get her to put her clothes on again.

• Deliberately Monochrome: The flashbacks to Chloe's traumatic past are colored this way.

• Devilish Hair Horns: Chloe has them, in contrast with Clair's angelic appearance.

• Didn't Think This Through: Pepper tries to help Mars launder some money by lying about catching some fish. It's only when Clair asks to see them he realizes he doesn't actually have any fish to hand. To his credit, it only fails because Clair woke up at exactly the wrong time. When Achilles said she was sleeping, Pepper didn't realize he meant she was sleeping right behind the desk.

• Dude, Not Funny!: Clair reacts this way when Pepper tries to lighten the mood during his introduction with a "What do you want, bitch?" After Mars brought out the worst in Chloe, and Achilles turned into a masochistic pervert, Clair nearly breaks down on the spot. She lightens up when he walks back his joke, but is still very clearly unimpressed.

• Ear Notch: Achilles has one. It's implied to have darker origins.
  Achilles: [Looking at the drawing Clair made of him] Wow, it's perfect! ...Except you forget my ear notch.
  Clair: Oh yeah, that was a mistake.
  Achilles: Can you fix it?
  Clair: Theoretically, yes, but it'd be... Oh, you meant the drawing?
  • Later:
    Ares: Oh, you're one of us.
    Achilles: I am?
    Ares: [Pointing to her missing ear] Sure. Far I'm concerned, anyone who's been through THAT is a friend.

• Earthy Barefoot Character: Clair and Chloe. Everyone else is a Barefoot Cartoon Animal.

• Egopolis: Subverted. While "Halo Head" started out as a nickname for Clair, the place wasn't named in her honor.

• Everyone Can See It: Both Pepper and Chloe point out Mars' barely hidden feelings for Achilles. She reacts with characteristic anger.

• Extreme Omnivore: Chloe:
  • When Chloe first arrives in Halo Head, Clair keeps trying to get her to change things in order to leave a mark on the place. Chloe responds by trying to eat a passing butterfly while a panicked Clair tries to wrestle it out of her hands.
  • Later Clair gives Chloe a pack of seeds saying "I'm sure you can figure out what to do with this." Chloe immediately starts snacking down on them.
  • When all the other characters are too busy (or manipulative) to spend time with her, Chloe starts contemplating whether she should eat a chrysalis she found in a tree.

• Flashback Chloe has these to a traumatic event from her past. The audience is only shown vague shapes, though.

• Friendship Moment: When Chloe and Mars first meet:
  *Mars and Chloe stare at each other*
  Mars: The fuck you starin' at, bitch?
  Chloe: Oh thank God you're cool! Let's be best friends!

• Furry Confusion: Lampshaded in this exchange between Pepper (a dog) and Mars (a cat) about Achilles (another cat).
  Pepper: I'm the one who came along and found him all beat up - alone - outside...
  Mars: Great work. You should start a cat rescue.
  Pepper: I'm the one who took him in, cleaned him up...
  Mars: Dewormed him...
  Pepper: Made him a bed, got him some food...
  Mars: Spayed him, neutered him...
  Pepper: We had a very rough night.
  Mars: What do you want? "Pet owner of the year" award?
  Pepper NO! I WANT YOU TO BE A MORE RESPONSIBLE PET OWNER!
  Pepper: ...Never mind, I really hate this analogy.
  Mars: Yeah, you ruined it. Start over.

• Furry Reminder:
  • Mostly Achilles:
    • When Clair draws a picture in front of Achilles, he feels compelled to bat at the pen.
    • In #152 Clair pets Achilles' head, causing him to purr.
    • In #252 Achilles in lying down like a real cat while comforting Pepper.
  • Other characters:
    • While showing Achilles how to climb a tree, Mars walks along the branch on all fours like a feral cat.
    • While Achilles is comforting Pepper after the reveal that Halo Head is a layered world, Pepper affectionately licks his face, before claiming it was to not waste meat juice.
    • When having a nightmare in #242, Pepper whines like a dog.
    • Peachykeen can hang upside down from tree branches.

• Girls Stare at Scenery, Boys Stare at Girls: When Mars is at the very top of a tree, admiring the view, Achilles is on a lower branch admiring her.

• Guardian Angel: Clair is probably this. Unfortunately, Chloe isn’t interested.

• Guilty Pleasures: Once Mars warms up to Achilles, she actually starts playing into his masochism (provided he pays up). That doesn't mean she isn't incredibly embarrassed to be seen with him.

• Hidden Depths:
  • Despite his "eccentricities," Achilles has a real passion for tending to flowers, particularly rosebushes. He also organizes Clair's files in a way that makes more sense to her than the system she created herself.
    Clair: Y... You're some kind of freak.
    Achilles: [Smiling] That's what people tell me.
  • When Chloe is contemplating whether to eat a chrysalis she finds in a tree, she uses language and metaphors that imply she's smarter than she lets on.

• High-Pressure Emotion: When Clair is pushed too far, her normally beige outlines are replaced with red, giver her a much harsher appearance.

• Holy Halo: Clair has one. Subverted in that while she isn't divine in the traditional sense, she did create Halo Head and is heavily implied to have created all of the other villagers.

• Ignored Epiphany: A somewhat dark example. Every time Chloe tries to remember a particular traumatic event from her past, Clair will say something or do something to distract her.
  [Chloe is staring into space with her left eye slightly open]
  Clair: You're doing that again. I can tell.
  Clair: I'll try to find you a good influence this time [Pepper].

• Imagine Spot:
  • When Clair stops Chloe from eating a butterfly, she goes on an angry rant about Chloe not respecting the time and work she put into creating Halo Head. Chloe spends the time imagining what would happen if she forced Clair to eat the butterfly instead.
  • Chloe sees a mysterious shape on the horizon and thinks Clair has introduced a new villager to Halo Head (it's Mars standing on Achilles' face). She starts picturing what her new neighbour looks like, before imagining her neighbours in a more "cutesy" style.

• Interspecies Friendship: The six regular residents of Halo Head come from four different species (human, cat, dog, fruit bat), so this is a given.

• Ironic Echo: Pepper and Clair share these moments with each other a few times.
  • When Pepper was giving advice to Clair is that you can't make anyone do anything, and at a certain point you gotta say: "Okay. Good luck with that." Clairs ignores it and concludes that she has to try harder, no matter how many tries it takes.
    Clair: If it takes a thousand tries.
    Clair: I just have to try harder.
    Pepper: *sighs*
    Pepper: Okay. Good luck with that.
  • When Pepper tries to brings it up with Clair the next day, she tells him that he caught her in a private moment, and prefers if he doesn't mention it to anyone else.
    Clair: You caught me at... a private moment.
    Clair: It's none of your business, or anyone else's. I'd appreciate if you didn't mention it to anyone.
    By #258, Pepper has to make up an excuse on the spot where he and Achilles was last night, so he utilizes the same words Clair used against her, almost from word to word, and guilt trips her in the process.
    Pepper: Look. You "caught us in a private moment".
    Pepper: Which is no one else's business.
    Pepper: You of all people should understand that.

• Karmic Thief: When Pepper gets a little too nosy while Chloe is at his house, she stuffs one of his books down her shorts because he was being "boring and an ass".

• Layered World: Halo Head is this, sitting above worlds that are similar to "our" Halo Head but bizarrely incomplete. It's implied that "our" Halo Head is not the first iteration.

• Literal Metaphor:
  • Lampshaded by Achilles after discovering the staircase to different worlds:
    Achilles: Guess I could take my chances in one of the places down there...
    Achilles: Do I really want that... ?
    [A tiny version of Achilles appears in his thought bubble and clutches his ear]
    Inner!Achilles: Yes!! You want this!!
    Achilles: Welp, nothin' like an extremely literal visual metaphor to help you figure out what to do!
  • When Pepper is trying to concentrate on his book in #160, Achilles is literally occupying his thoughts.
  • After yet another failed attempt at wooing Mars, Pepper advises Achilles to "take the lead." Achilles interprets this as wearing a leash (i.e. a lead) and offering Mars the handle. Much later after Achilles has been missing for days, Mars finds the leash and fears the worst. When she catches up to him, she's still clutching the leash. Immediately after, she finally gives him the punch he's been waiting for for so long, having "taken the lead."
  • When Mars starts warming (slightly) to Achilles, she pulls him up to a tree branch she's sitting on because he can't climb himself. Mars and Achilles, sittin' in a tree...

• Literal-Minded: Achilles can't understand metaphors or sarcasm at all.
  Pepper: Achilles! What are you doing on the ground?
  Achilles: I mean... not much.

• Lost Food Grievance: When Achilles first discovers his Casual Kink, he attempts to instigate one of these to get a rise out of Mars. She sees through it, though, and decides to bail.

• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Mars and Achilles respectively.

• Meaningful Look: Both the girls have one eye closed. Chloe her left, Clair her right. When Chloe's left eye is open, it's because she's remembering the traumatic event that prompted Clair to create Halo Head as a distraction. When Clair finds out that Chloe spent the night with Pepper instead of her, Pepper finds her later crying with both eyes open.

• Minimalist Cast: Lampshaded:
  Mars: I heard you were good at solving problems.
  Pepper: Haha, aww. Chloe said that about me?
  Mars: I never said it was Chloe.
  Pepper: Dude there's like five people on Halo Head and you only hang out with one of them.

• Naked People Are Funny: When Chloe gets too hot she strips down to her birthday suit.

• New Friend Envy: Clair begins to resent Pepper after Chloe spends the night at his place.
  Clair: I've told her a thousand times she could stay with me
  Clair: I've told her a thousand times I'd help her
  Clair: [turning to Pepper] Why did she go to you?

• No Name Given: Despite being the first characters introduced, Chloe and Clair aren't named until over 50 strips into the comic's run.

• Only Sane Man: Achilles was initially presented as this, until that ill-fated moment with Mars shoving him onto the ground, due to her losing the crab race with Chloe, turning him into a "little freak", becoming harshly subverted. Then Pepper would inherit the role from him.

• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: If either of the girls has both eyes open, it's a sign they are not okay.

• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Mars is the physically strongest character in the cast, despite being the size of a child.

• Please Put Some Clothes On: Clair to Chloe when the latter is running around naked, minus the "please" part.

• Precision F-Strike: The only time Clair swears, at least harsher than "hell" or "damn", is when she catches Chloe hanging upside-down from a tree branch poking a beehive.
  Clair: I think things will be just-WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?
  Chloe: Do you want me to answer that or are you just like, yelling to yell?

• Recurring Camera Shot: The inside of Clair's lighthouse and its variant is shown from above with a character looking up toward the reader more than once.

• Refining Resources: Non-video-game example. The main method for making money in Halo Head is for villagers to collect natural resources (usually fish) and sell them to Clair. Subverted in that Clair only instituted the system to keep Chloe busy, which doesn't work at all.

• Reverse Psychology: Clair tries this when Chloe is running about in the nude. It nearly works, but as Chloe is putting her clothes on again, Pepper praises Chloe for giving Clair a win. Cue Chloe ripping them off again and Clair has to start over.

• Ridiculously Cute Critter: The comic already has a pretty cute style, but #378 reveals that Chloe sees her neighbours as even cuter than they already are.

• Rule of Symbolism: Batshaped created the strip as a way to document her own mental health journey. As a result the strip is dripping with symbolism:
  • Whenever Chloe tries to remember her Dark and Troubled Past, Clair always tries to stop her. After a particularly nasty row early on, Chloe announces she's leaving Halo Head. The next time we see her, she's encountered a literal wall built by Clair.
  • Chloe quickly strikes up a friendship with Pepper. When Clair finds out that Chloe confided in him instead of her, she's crestfallen. At the end of the reveal, when the speech bubbles have mostly disappeared, a picture of a broken heart is prominently visible on the wall next to her.
  • When Chloe wakes up in Pepper's house, the skylights resemble two eyes with Ocular Gushers, foreshadowing Pepper catching Clair crying with both eyes open out of jealousy and betrayal.
  • Pepper opens his kitchen drawer to discover he still has Achilles' can opener. It sticks out starkly against Pepper's things in much the same way Achilles himself doesn't fit in with the rest of Halo Head.
  • Chloe remarks that she's "not some boring bitch that takes shit all serious," obviously referring to Clair. As she does so, she walks in front of Pepper's clock, making it resemble a halo.

• A Scar to Remember: Mars gives Achilles a black eye. He's excited to show it off, too.

• Self-Harm: Played for laughs with Achilles. He can't stop talking about hurting himself to the point where other characters are sick of it.

• Shout-Out:
  • In #164, Chloe seems to be doing an Awesome Face.

• Skeptic No Longer: By #222, once Achilles shows Pepper the same staircase off the island to prove that what he was saying was in fact real, Pepper starts to question what is real anymore, and seemingly develops Bathmophobia (the fear of stairs).

• Squick: Chloe has this reaction when Peachykeen pulls a peach out of Hammerspace (without breaking eye contact, no less!) and offers it to her.
  Chloe: Uh... where the fuck did that peach come from?

• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Pepper working with Mars to launder $900 so he can hide the fact He Knows Too Much from Clair.

• The Shrink: Pepper is usually the go-to guy when someone needs some insight, help with their problems, or just be a shoulder to lean on.

• The Friend Nobody Likes: Achilles initially at first with Chloe and Mars, due to his nerdy appearance and extreme and obvious masochism, but becomes downplayed as his friendship with Pepper develops.

• Threat Backfire: See Too Kinky to Torture below.

• Too Dumb to Live: Chloe's antics often veer into this. From poking a beehive while covered in sugar water to bathing naked in a tub full of ice.

• Too Kinky to Torture: Achilles is this for Mars and occasionally others. She mentions that she would like to beat him up for constantly following her, but that he probably would enjoy it too much. The only expectation to this is Peachykeen, as to him there's no way to make it fun.
  Mars: You know I can fuck you up way worse right?
  Achilles: Uh-
  Achilles: ...Prove it?
  Mars: Maybe I w-
  Mars: Wait no fuck.

• Toxic Friend Influence: What did Clair expect when introducing Chloe to someone who is similar in personality and temperament to her?

• Unusual Halo: Clair's halo will often change shape when she's moving quickly and will often emote with her.
  Pepper: You okay, dude? Your lifesaver's sweating.

• Visual Pun:
  • Achilles is a cat who is obsessed with hurting himself. Appropriately his fur is colored black-and-blue.
  • Peachykeen is a fruit bat whose head is a literal peach

• World Shapes: Halo Head is flat, with stairs leading down to lower levels.

• You Are Not Ready: Said word-for-word by Ares when she realizes Achilles isn't seeing things her way.