Running Gag/Comic Books


 * In Bone, the insult "Stupid, stupid rat creatures!" is a Running Gag, as is one of the rat creature's fondness for quiche and the other's insistence that monsters should act a certain way.
 * Peanuts and its TV specials were fond of these, although always with some sort of variation. Lucy pulling the football away, Charlie Brown crashing his kite, etc.
 * Dagwood in Blondie: Always making his decuple-decker sandwiches, always running into the mailman on his hurried way out the door.
 * In Beetle Bailey, whenever General Halftrack sends his officers a written instruction, it will always have one tiny spelling error that completely changes the meaning of the orders ("buns" instead of "guns", "gag masks" instead of "gas masks", etc.). Someone will point out what the general meant to say, but then someone else will - always, invariably - ask: "But who dares to tell the general that he's done a mistake?" Nobody dares, and in the end, the officers always do exactly what it says in the instruction, even though it makes no sense.
 * Often, General Halftrack is depicted witnessing the end results of his subordinates' interpreting his orders in some absurd way, and his reaction is always the same: "Now what?"
 * In Young Justice, whenever Robin would state the obvious, another character would say, "Obviously you've been trained by the world's greatest detective." If memory serves, even Batman got one in once.
 * Groo the Wanderer has to be one of the kings of this trope: from defining "mulch" at every opportunity (or just randomly defining it for no reason at all) for five years straight, the titular character's ridiculous exclamations ("Hah! You take me for the fool I am!" "As any fool can plainly see."/"I can plainly see that!", "Groo does what Groo does best!", "Did I err?", etc.), ships sinking the instant Groo gets anywhere near them (unless his dog is with him), the name of the Sage's dog, Groo getting chased out of the city by every single person in the city, Drumm continually wanting to know "What pirates?" (and, later, alternating that with "You never bought me a house..."), Groo's dog never quite realizing how stupid Groo actually is, Captain Ahax going insane every time he's exposed to Groo (since the latter has a habit of continually sinking the ships under the former's command), "Must be stupid."/"Must be Groo."... and that's not even touching the 25 years worth of running gags in the letter columns.
 * Every issue also had a.
 * In Pearls Before Swine, Stephan Pastis has made a habit of setting up puns that are beyond lame. As of late, this has been lampshaded almost every time with Rat demanding that Pastis quit cartooning.
 * Even Watchmen gets one in: Rorschach repeatedly breaking Nite Owl II's door.
 * Which becomes subtly important later as it gives them more time when.
 * Deadpool is not an X-Man. Or a mutant.
 * Speaking of X-Men, how many times has Jean Grey died and been resurrected six months later?
 * Twice, actually. Though there have been a number of fake-outs, fake Jean's, and other such nonsense, but every hero goes through that.
 * Tintin
 * Thomson's and Thompson's introduction: "Thompson, with a p, as in Philadelphia [the p is never pronounced with a p sound], Thomson, without a p, as in Venezuela";
 * Captain Haddock's obscure "obscenities";
 * Snowy's alcohol problem;
 * The fact that Prof. Calculus is hard of hearing and therefore can never hear a sentence correctly;
 * Captain Haddock's inability of keeping his monocle intact;
 * Tintin and Haddock's inability to hide from Castafiore and her singing;
 * In The Broken Ear, San Theodoros' constant (once every 10 minutes at one point) revolutions, and a bumbling assassin's inability to kill Tintin;
 * Thompson and Thomson's tendency to dress in outlandish and completely out-of-place ethnic costumes in order to "hide undercover";
 * People trying to call someone and getting Cutts the butcher, or vice versa.
 * In a history of the making of Tintin, the author states that Snowy himself started as "a literal 'running gag.'"
 * Asterix
 * The hapless pirates get sunk once every issue. Sometimes twice. In one book, they give up the pirate life to open a (boat-shaped) restaurant. It gets trashed.
 * And every sinking is drawn to resemble, in some way, The Raft of the Medusa, a famous painting by Théodore Géricault.
 * Caesar's tendency to refer to himself in the third person. This was a reference to Caesar's Commentaries on the Civil War and the War in Gaul, where he constantly refers to himself in the third person, to the point that the reader can lose sight of the fact that Caesar isn't writing history but self-justifying propaganda.
 * The ways the village keeps Cacofonix from singing.
 * Obelix's constant attempt to get a taste of the magic potion.
 * Asterix is of "undeterminate age".
 * Scott Pilgrim gives us Knives Chau: 17 years old.
 * Zits: Jeremy's inability to perceive of his brother's presence until he's just leaving.
 * Get Fuzzy: Bucky Katt's well-documented and forever-undying hatred of monkeys, and his occasional plans to eat one.
 * In classic Strontium Dog, Wulf had a habit of replacing some random word in a figure of speech with the word cucumber, such as "Ve are cool as der cucumber" or "He ran as qvick as der cucumber".
 * Every once in a while, a crazy person dressed up as a 616 Marvel superhero will be seen being arrested in Ultimate Spider-Man, usually screaming a catch-phrase related to that character.
 * Batman:
 * Every time someone meets him for the first time, they inevitably comment that they thought he'd be taller.
 * This even extends to other members of the Batfamily, such as Dick Grayson (who, to be fair, is a good four inches shorter than Bruce, so it's obvious when he's dressed as Batman that he's shorter than the original guy) and Tim Drake (it's mentioned in Young Justice).
 * Ever since Orient Men tried unsuccessfully to fix an Eskimo's broken radiator, the Eskimo kept following him all over the world and appearing at the end of nearly every episode, asking random bystanders whether they can fix his radiator.
 * A little background for this one: In Midnight Nation, it turns out that Lazarus Came Back Wrong, and was told by Jesus to wait until Jesus would return. Lazarus mistakenly thought that Jesus would be coming right back after having a little dinner with 12 of his best friends... that didn't work out so well, and 2,000 years later Lazarus is still waiting. So, the actual gag is that whenever someone around him says "Jesus" in reaction to something, Lazarus responds by asking, "Where?"
 * Artist Leinil Yu has been known to sneak Howard the Duck into everything he draws, especially during huge spreads with lots of heroes where Howard won't be as easily noticed. Nobody knows why except Leinil.
 * The DCU's Invasion! miniseries frames several of its scenes as television newscasts. Whenever a reporter tries to interview one of the heroes, the hero invariably replies with, "Get that @%&£$€# camera out of my face!"
 * Newspaper comic Cow and Boy runs on running gags. this strip has a fraction of them in it.
 * In Marvel Star Wars, comics written and set after The Empire Strikes Back but before Return of the Jedi have Luke and Leia, mutually attracted, often start to touch or talk about their relationship before they are interrupted. Usually by the plot. It happens with some regularity, and good thing, too.