Chicanery

""WARNING: By reading this comic, you legally join Ness and the others in a lengthuous hunt for fortune. You will be required by law to see Mr. T throw people, Battles between giant objects, and things that float gracefully over the comic, begging to be defined but cannot be explained. Disaster labs cannot be held responsible for any injury or fatality involving photons emanating from this comic. Do not read while operating heavy machinery. Do not read while watching Alf. If accidentally ingested, consult god.""



Mind-flayingly bizarre Sprite Comic barely based on Earthbound. After stealing Giygas's $44,000,000 retirement fund, Pokey reunites with Ness and uses the funds to hunt for treasure. At least, that's how it starts out. What follows is a barely coherent acid trip of an adventure, as Ness, Pokey, Jeff and Mr. T battle monkeys, Mr. B Natural, soul-stealing photographers, the Eagleland education system and pretty much everything they meet.

Chicanery can used be found at (the now defunct) Disaster Labs, but much of the series is still available on Comic Genesis. and Archive.org.

This webcomic provides examples of:
"Jeff: Hi!
 * Abnormal Ammo: Jeff's homemade bullets. See There Is No Kill Like Overkill below.
 * Animated Adaptation: Chicanery #138 and #139
 * Badass Bookworm: Jeff.
 * BFG: Mr. Saturn carries around a "modified DeathCo magnum" that's twice as big as he is.
 * Breaking the Fellowship: The protagonists have been split up after willingly inhaling knockout gas, with Ness lost inside a Cube parody with a psychotic Pip; Mr. T trapped in a cross between an upscale hotel and a snuff film; Jeff and Pokey locked within a dark, blood-splattered basement... and Mr. Saturn cheerfully counting corpses.
 * Brother Chuck: Paula appears exactly once, during a flashback to Jeff's memories of the events of the first game.
 * Bruce Campbell: Kidnapped by Ness, Mr. Saturn and Pokey as part of a plan to hold the world hostage with a nuclear-armed mecha. It Makes Sense In Context.
 * Bullet Catch: Ness can do this with his mind - and then fling it back and blow your leg off.
 * Click Hello: Jeff skips the "click" and goes straight to "blow you messily in half".


 * PEW!*


 * SEVER!*"

"Tough Kid: I'll see YOU after school, geek!
 * Cloudcuckoolander: Half of Mr. T's dialogue consists of quotes from The A-Team. At one point, his tendency to randomly throw people/animals/inanimate objects into orbit leads Jeff to commit him to a sanitarium.
 * Combat Pragmatist: Jeff and Mr. Saturn find themselves confronted by the Boss Rush teleporter room from Mega Man. Rather than battle every opponent, Mr. Saturn fires his gun into each teleporter, killing anyone on the other side.
 * Comedic Sociopathy: More than you could possibly imagine.
 * Completely Missing the Point: Jeff is a sniper who prefers shooting people at point-blank range.
 * Adding to this, his preferred type of ammo is noisy and flashy, practically requiring it to be shot at point-blank range to be effective at all.
 * Cut Short: The series appears to have stalled completely, with the last update being over 2 years ago.
 * Designated Heroes: ...Though to be fair, they do save the world a couple of times.
 * Dada Comic
 * Did You Just Scam Cthulhu: Pokey finances the gang's adventures using Giygas' retirement fund.
 * Dynamic Entry: Mr. T from appears out of the middle of nowhere to save Ness & friends from Doomsday the giant policeman, running him over.
 * Jeff kills the soul-stealing Photo-man by leaping in through a window and shooting him in the back of the head with a rocket-propelled bullet.
 * Ness marks his debut appearance by phasing in out of hyperspace, slaughtering a group of performing actors in the process.
 * Enemy Mine: Ness's gang (piloting TV's Frank) and Rigid Shaft (inside Dr. Andonuts's mecha) end up working together to stop all life on Earth being wiped out by a concrete donkey.
 * Eye Scream:

Pokey: NOT ANYMORE!


 * spork!*

Tough Kid: OWOWOWOW"

"Ness: Wanna trade?
 * Fate Worse Than Death: Ness and Pokey are put on trial for skipping class. Pokey is sentenced to death by firing squad, while Ness is sentenced to Ragnarok Online.

Pokey: Hell, no."

"Rigid Shaft: Crap. It's Ness. Standing in filth as usual. I aint fighting that guy. He has stuff that will instantly kill me, if not make me cry uncontrollably or feel strange.
 * For the Evulz: Ness & pals end up cloning and torturing the mayor to death simply to pass the time.
 * Fridge Brilliance: There's a number of Pokey the Penguin references in dialog. Pokey tends to say these most of the time. YES
 * Go Karting With Bowser: Pokey and Ness are the best of friends in this series - Pokey being The Dragon in EarthBound was apparently part of a scheme to steal Giygas's money.
 * Heroic Comedic Sociopath: Ness and friends will merrily slaughter anyone with little to no provocation.
 * Humongous Mecha: "The 2000" TV's Frank is online! Go forth and smite evil!"
 * The entire Covert saga is about Dr. Andonuts constructing a giant mechanical Bruce Campbell. And then both robots go at it for a while.
 * I'm a Humanitarian: After Jeff kills the Photo-man, Ness and the gang eat him before it's too late they change their minds.
 * Jeff and Pokey cheerfully devour the "recently liberated viscera" of the Hamburglar while trapped inside a basement.
 * Mr. B. Natural's giant corpse is used to feed orphans.
 * Killer Rabbit: Pip. Pip and his high-speed, rotating buzzsaw teeth.
 * Mind Rape:

[several panels later]

Shaft: Waaahhhh."

"Jeff: This is it... The 3219 armor-piercing, drill-tipped, rocket-propelled, nuclear-powered, high velocity bullet with pneumatic shaft explosion dampener, buzzing flagellatory membrane, and a miniature camera so you can see the look on his face before you go through it."
 * Mind Screw: The whole damn series.
 * Mission Control: Rigid Shaft is equipped with a "Cellular Brain" to keep him in touch with his superiors - unfortunately, it also tends to make him roll around on the floor screaming whenever someone contacts him.
 * Mr. T: Using the Earthbound sprite that looks like... well, Mr. T.
 * Nigh Invulnerability: Mr. T is shown to be capable of withstanding chainsaws, jackhammers and repeated hammer blows to the head without visible injury. In fact, most of the protagonists seem impervious to major damage - not even being on fire can faze them.
 * No Range Like Point Blank Range: Jeff's favored method of execution.
 * Orphaned Series: Work on the comic eventually ground to a halt in 2008. Disaster Labs itself went offline in 2010, taking the archives with it, though most of the comics can still be viewed here.
 * Overdrawn At the Blood Bank: Levels of gore will run from Pretty Little Headshots to G.E.D. grading machines randomly spewing blood to Killer Rabbits surfing on knee-deep pools of blood using the savaged corpses of their victims.
 * President Action: Apparently, Jet Jaguar.
 * Redshirt Army: Dr. Andonuts' clone army - created from a random person picked up off the street by Pokey.
 * Running Gag: Any nuclear explosion will have Hello Kitty's face in it. Why? Because.
 * Schedule Slip: A two year gap exists between #133 and #134. The same length of time passes in the comic itself while the protagonists are left standing in the same spot, eventually growing extremely long hair and beards.
 * Screw This I'm Outta Here: Ness & chums are forced to work with Rigid Shaft to prevent the Endofthe World As We Know It - but once The Lifestream shows up, the protagonists simply call it a day and walk Segway off.
 * Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness - Pokey, Ness, and Jeff. Some other characters tend to dip into this as well.
 * Shouldn't We Be in School Right Now: Averted - Ness and Pokey are arrested for their extremely long absence from school and are forced to gain their GE Ds before they can continue their adventures.
 * Shout Out: Far, far too many to list.
 * Solve the Soup Cans - Ness gets challenged to a game of Return to Zork's Survivor, which is one of these. Defied, as instead of playing the game Ness launches into a lengthy explanation on how broken the game is and solves the puzzle by kicking it at the ones who challenged him when he's finished.
 * Sonic Scream: TV's Frank can stop lasers and defuse missiles with his trademark "EEEUUC-OOEEOO!" Somehow.
 * Sprite Comic
 * Stable Time Loop: Averted - Ness and Pokey attempt to gain their GED by modifying the school records, but are warned of the consequences that will occur by their future selves. The pair subsequently change their minds and leave... causing their future counterparts to be painfully destroyed in the resulting Temporal Paradox.
 * There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Jeff's philosophy to designing "ludicrously deadly" bullets.

"Pokey: "Ha ha! Take that, boring intermission!""
 * Took a Level In Jerkass: The formerly kind, altruistic heroes from Earthbound are now profit-driven sociopaths. Partially inverted with Pokey - he has reigned in his omnicidal, reality-destroying ways and become more interested in gaining wealth.
 * Trauma Inn: "All he needs is a night of rest in a bed. Sleep has been known to cure anything! Even death!"
 * Trigger Happy: Mr. Saturn loves that gun.
 * Unsound Effect: "Brains refusing to function noises!"
 * Wall of Text - Subverted, one comic starts off going into Mr. Exposition mode, but the second panel with a text wall has Pokey bringing in Pip to eat the text.


 * What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made On Drugs
 * Widget Series
 * World Gone Mad: Takes Earthbound and pushes it from "offbeat" to "scrawling-on-walls-with-blood-and-fecal-matter psychotic"
 * You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Mr. Saturn says this while disposing of a temp worker.