Narbonic



""Young lady, you fail to grasp the basic principles of mad science. Common sense would be cheating.""

- Professor Lupin Madblood

"Evil has never been this cute!"

Answering an innocent job offer, Dave Davenport is drawn into a shocking spiral of vice, crime and moral depravity. Hopelessly ensnared by a madwoman's feminine wiles, can he return to the world of sanity before it is... too late? Narbonic skates over some surprisingly serious territory, but with such a light touch you will probably be too busy laughing to notice. Formerly on a subscription site, the story ended in late 2006, whereupon the entire archive was made free.

You can view both the regular version and the Director's Cut (wherein cartoonist Shaenon K. Garrity explains the previous-comic background of the major characters, and comments on each strip). (And finally please refrain from reading the spoilered text below if you intend reading this comic at some point in the future or are following the Director's Cut in real time.)

Immediately after the end of Narbonic, it was followed by Skin Horse, recently revealed to be set in the same universe.

"Helen: Where exactly did you get that mallet? Mell: Whaddya mean? Mallets just happen."
 * Achievements in Ignorance: Dave, who can fix anything. At the very beginning of the strip, he is able to reconstruct a fully functioning weather-control device
 * Affably Evil: Helen and Mell do pretty unpleasant, not to mention unethical and irresponsible, things pretty much constantly. But they're so darn charming its easy to forget.
 * And Then John Was a Zombie
 * Animorphism: inverted with Artie, a gerbil transmogrified into a human
 * The Annotated Edition: The comic has a rerun with strip-by-strip commentary, which started when the strip itself ended.
 * Anti-Villain: The protagonists!
 * Art Shift: Every year has a Dave-in-Slumberland strip whose art style is based on that of Little Nemo and Dreams of the Rarbrit Fiend. These contain coded clues for what will happen in the following year of strips.
 * Back from the Dead: Dave. No, this isn't a spoiler.
 * Bad Future:  One of the residents there   gives him a subtle clue about how to fix the future.
 * Beta Couple:
 * Big Bad Ensemble: The last arc has
 * Briar Patching: "If that's the way they want it, I'll just have to cope with living on a tropical island with two scantily-clad women."
 * Bold Inflation: Two plus two words: ANTONIO SMITH (FORENSIC LINGUIST).
 * He would kill you for writing his name in all caps.
 * Unless he's wearing the fedora.
 * Broken Faceplate: The state of Dave's eyeglasses symbolizes the state of his sanity. For most of the comic's run, his glasses are intact but represented as opaque. Towards the end when Dave finally realizes the great secret responsible for much of his life's path, his glasses are suddenly represented as clear, showing that he can see clearly now.
 * Butt Monkey: Madblood and Dave for much of the comic. They still don't have anything on
 * Brain Uploading:
 * Brotherhood of Funny Hats: The Dave Conspiracy-- Their "hat" is being named Dave. Not only is every member a Dave, every Dave is a member!
 * Daves who are ejected from the Conspiracy must introduce themselves as, and respond to, David. Others even take to calling them David, unconsciously, without any prodding!
 * Card-Carrying Villain: unusually, this applies to the protagonists
 * Chekhov's Gun and Chekhov's Gunman: Several examples.
 * Chronically Crashed Car: Dave's cars can't ever catch a break.
 * Cloning Blues:
 * Clue From Ed
 * Companion Cube: Foot, of sorts. Acutally intelligent enough to speak, and an object of (temporary, we hope) desire for Mel. "Oh! He's so coldly destructive!"
 * Con Lang: A throw-away gag in the epilogue.
 * Contractual Genre Blindness AND Genre Savvy
 * Cool but Inefficient: a hallmark of mad science, as pointed out by Mell: see Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better
 * Cosmic Deadline: The final story arc.
 * Costumer: the Victorian Sunday feature
 * Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Helen never actually appears stupid (she is a mad scientist afterall) but she does almost always act as a Affably Evil hyperintelligent version of The Ditz.
 * Deconstructor Fleet
 * Destructo-Nookie:
 * Do Not Adjust Your Set: Done by Professor Madblood
 * Easter Egg: A story of Helen's origin can be found (two or three words at a time) attached to the filenames of the individual strips. The compiled story can be found here.
 * Elaborate Underground Base: played straight with Helen's lair, but subverted as well. Madblood brags about his "underground lair", but it's revealed that "underground" means "living in Mom's basement".
 * Helen's "underground lair" is actually a storm drain. They just do a really good job fixing it up.
 * Embarrassing Middle Name: Helen, Dave , and Mell.
 * Entertainingly Wrong: In this strip, Dave comes to the entirely logical but incorrect conclusion that Lovelace is actually Professor Madblood.
 * Evil Laugh
 * Fake-Out Make-Out, sort of
 * Filk Song: This has become a running feature in the comments section of the "Director's Cut" re-runs. For example, this strip inspired one reader to compose "In The Dungeon We'll Rot" to the tune of "You're The One That I Want" from the movie version of "Grease".
 * Seanan McGuire's "Oh Helen", sung by Tony, is about Dave's love for...Helen.
 * Foreshadowing: Almost everything in the comic. Side characters, oddball filler arcs, offhand comments, almost everything comes into play later.
 * For Want of a Nail:
 * Freak-Out: All mad scientists go through this when they first go mad. Hellen's, told in an Easter Egg spanning literally the entire strip's run (hint: Look at the filenames of the strips) involved her turning a bunch of pasta into a deadly bioweapon.
 * Note that, of the scientists who mentioned the settings and casualties of their initial freakouts, Helens was the most destructive. The competition included a nuclear power station.
 * Furry Fandom: Some elements are heavily parodied in this strip.
 * Geeky Analogy: Dave does this a lot; since he works for a mad scientist, his analogies with Star Trek and Marvel Comics are usually highly appropriate.
 * Gender Bender: First once to test a theory about the Third Law of Gender Bending, later used as a sexual roleplay device.
 * Generation Xerox: Not only is Helen a literal "xerox" of her mother, but her life and personal tastes parallel hers in several ways, occasionally to her angst.
 * The Victorian Narbonic storyline may or may not be part of canon, but there are at least two ghosts to testify to a Helen, Mell, and Dave living over a century ago having similar mad science adventures.
 * Go-Go Enslavement
 * Go Look At the Distraction: Happens to Dave during the "Lovelace affair" plotline.
 * Good Angel, Bad Angel: Played with -- not only is there Good Angel, Bad Angel, but there's "Social Life", "Mad Scientist", "Self Esteem", "Fear of Women", "Biological Clock"... And the characters can all see their own, and the angels can see each other -- and socialize after work.
 * Gratuitous Italian: The Italian spoken by the in the Victorian storyline oscillates between nearly normal and positively Jabberwockish.
 * Half-Human Hybrid:
 * Hey, It's That Guy!: Shaenon Garrity litters the Mad Symposium of "Professor Madblood and the Lovelace Affair" with cameos of mad scientists from other webcomics.
 * Also the physicist and the webcomic artist who Artie meets at the dinner? Ink Suit Actors of Paradigm Shift creator Dirk Tiede and his future wife.
 * Hoist by His Own Petard (subverted)
 * Huge Holographic Head
 * Hulk Speak: Foot
 * Humanity Ensues: Artie is not happy about his acquisition of Shapeshifting abilities.
 * Hyperspace Mallet: Mell's easy access to Hammerspace has been lampshaded once or twice.
 * Especially when she takes out an actual mallet.
 * Hyperspace Mallet: Mell's easy access to Hammerspace has been lampshaded once or twice.
 * Especially when she takes out an actual mallet.

"Helen: A control group? You mean dozens of other young women released into the wild to slowly go mad, only to be hunted down and vivisected by my mother, just as I would have been if I hadn't bought myself a rifle? Why Mell, that would be HIGHLY unethical."
 * : Dave
 * Idiot Ball: Dave plays a fool to Artie's straight talk, but only when it's funny.
 * I'll Tell You When I've Had Enough!: ...mocha talls, damnit.
 * Indy Ploy: Helen's typical approach ("It's times like these I almost question my usual strategy of doing whatever dumb thing pops into my head.")
 * Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: Madblood gets no respect.
 * Inside a Computer System: Where  goes to rescue.
 * Intellectual Animal
 * In the Past Everyone Will Be Famous
 * Indulgent Fantasy Segue: Dave confessing (or not) his feelings for Helen.
 * Inferred Holocaust: Played for in-universe Fridge Horror when Mell and Dave speculate about the control group for Helen's mothers experiments on mad science.

"Present Dave: I have no problem believing this is me."
 * Informed Ability: Dr. Narbon's only major scientific accomplishment (mad or otherwise) is her longitudinal study of her daughter-clone Helen Beta. Everything else, she snitches off Helen's work. This is brought a few times, naturally. She's pretty good at the Evil Overlord gig though.
 * Instant AI, Just Add Water: Lovelace
 * Involuntary Shapeshifting: Two examples - Artie (shapeshifting into a human whenever he hiccups), Dave (given a Gender Bender drug against his will by Helen to test a hypothesis).
 * Ironic Echo: Especially noteworthy since.
 * Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: As Mell points out, Madblood has armed his robots with laser weapons that expend a rare moon crystal for power...which get one shot per crystal and must be manually reloaded like an antique pistol.
 * Kiss Me, I'm Virtual:
 * Large Ham Title: Antonio Smith, Forensic Linguist!
 * Law of Conservation of Normality
 * Like a Badass Out of Hell:
 * MacGuffin Delivery Service: subverted
 * Mad Scientist: Helen, Madblood,
 * Mad Scientist Laboratory: The main setting.
 * Man, I Feel Like a Woman
 * Meanwhile in the Future
 * A Million Is a Statistic: Played for laughs in the epilogue.
 * Milkman Conspiracy: A vast yet conspiratorial organization which consists of guys only named Dave.
 * My Little Panzer: In "A Week of December 18th Story", a parody of A Christmas Story, little (future Mad Scientist) Helen's Christmas toy of choice is the BioBeam 8000 gamma irradiator with 5-liter containment chamber, cesium 137 radiation source, optional remote monitoring station, and a thing on top that tells the time. This is apparently a real piece of equipment.
 * Naked on Arrival: When you get kicked out of the afterlife into the mortal world, you're naked. Happens to both Caliban and Mell.
 * Names to Run Away From Really Fast: Professor Lupin "Wolf" Madblood, Helen Narbon Sr.
 * Nerd Glasses: Dave, and the cartoonist.
 * New Tech Is Not Cheap: Taken Up to Eleven, with a time machine requiring the energy of an entire universe.
 * No Doubt the Years Have Changed Me: Parodied when says something to this effect, then interrupts himself so he can use the "hologram" part for a Princess Leia impression.
 * New Tech Is Not Cheap: Taken Up to Eleven, with a time machine requiring the energy of an entire universe.
 * No Doubt the Years Have Changed Me: Parodied when says something to this effect, then interrupts himself so he can use the "hologram" part for a Princess Leia impression.

"Dr. Fowler: "Yes, that was simply a killer pesto wasn't it, Narbon?""
 * No Fourth Wall
 * Noodle Incident: Plenty, but the most literal one was when Helen first went mad in an Italian bistro and caused nine casualties.

"Artie: So what we've seen up to now is Mel: Hells yeah. Not even I wanna meet in a dark alley."
 * If one reads the side story, added a word or two a day in the filenames, the tale of that Italian Bistro is told.
 * Not So Different: Poor Artie causes a lot of chaos, despite being the token good member of the cast.
 * Not So Harmless: Helen comes across as a slightly goofy, hopelessly inept mad scientist playing to all the tropes (and a Hollywood Nerd).

"Dave : I'll never have lesbian sex again, dammit!"
 * Oral Fixation Fixation: Dave
 * Ordinary High School Student: Dave
 * Otherkin: Inverted with the "acaudials" Artie meets on the internet, sapient animals who believe themselves human.
 * Out-Gambitted: Madblood, constantly, by Helen. Has enough moments involving other people to manage being both the Butt Monkey and a Magnificent Bastard at the same time.
 * Painting the Fourth Wall: Madness gets its own font, a particularly curly, flowerly script that just screams derangement.
 * Photographic Memory: Artie, supposedly, but it's not a plot point.
 * Power Perversion Potential:

"Dave: "So sanity's not coming off too well?" Girl: "I'm just not seeing much of a difference, is all.""
 * Psycho for Hire: Mell.
 * Punch Clock Villain: Dave, at least in the beginning.
 * Rasputinian Death: It wasn't enough to kill Dr. Narbon.
 * Reunion Revenge: Helen plans one, but calls it off.
 * Rule of Pool
 * Sanity Has Advantages: Played with. One girl who's been seen in the bar Dave frequents comments that the first time she met him, he was driving androids to Canada, and the second time he was licking the barroom floor.

"Only one man has ever survived my ur-gerbils. He is behind me. You are in front of me."
 * Scary Shiny Glasses: Dave is an odd example - his eyes are covered sporadically by his glasses throughout most of the comic and only go totally clear once  The elder Doctor Narbon also wears glasses obscuring her eyes in all of her appearances in the comic
 * Science-Related Memetic Disorder: Mad genius is an actual genetic condition, and Helen manages to find a cure for it... but with the side effect of decreasing the subject's intelligence and amplifying their Weirdness Censor to an astonishing degree. It also.
 * Sense Freak:
 * Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Among other things, Dave . In a more plot heavy moment
 * Sex Dressed
 * Shameful Strip: After Nick Cricetida is knocked unconscious, he awakes in the villainess's bed naked.
 * Shout-Out: When the mutant gerbils escape they are killed by a lop-eared rabbit with a switchblade - Bun-Bun from Sluggy Freelance. Also, a more subtle one: the Crabtree Grant to Women in Mad Science.
 * Pretty much any film with a mad scientist gets a reference at some point or another. Here, the teleporter has a sign barring entry to flies.
 * Shout-Out/To Shakespeare: ANTONIO SMITH, FORENSIC LINGUIST! (mis)quotes Shakespeare constantly. Helen's name is a reference to Helena de Narbonne in All's Well That Ends Well.
 * At a mad scientists' convention, a supercomputer is asked to sing 'Daisy, Daisy'.
 * It later takes an opportunity to say: "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that." Later still,
 * To Babylon 5 when Helen declares:

""And thus he falls for Villain Fallacy #2: Letting the harmless comic relief run free.""
 * Artie's product number, RT-5478, is a reference to Shaenon's birthday.
 * Small Girl, Big Gun: Mell, to a tee!
 * Space Is Noisy: lampshaded
 * Spanner in the Works


 * Stepford Smiler:
 * Talkative Loon: Dana, as well as
 * Tap on the Head: subverted; Mell can't do it properly because she's used to going straight for the kill.
 * : The end of the "Victorian Narbonic" storyline, though it's a slight subversion.
 * The Mad Hatter
 * They Called Me Mad
 * Time Skip: Three months, at the ending. Others are implied to take place in-between storylines, keeping the comic as a whole roughly in real time.
 * Time Travel
 * Tongue on the Flagpole: The parody of A Christmas Story briefly shows a young Dave Davenport yelling "I'm thtuck!"
 * Took a Level in Badass:  is something of a subversion. He becomes a potent demon slayer when he reappears in the comic, and has a wicked axe to boot, but has no better luck getting dates than he did in his earlier appearances.
 * Totem Pole Trench: Done (unconvincingly) by a bunch of superintelligent hamsters with a trenchcoat and a paper plate face.
 * Truly Single Parent: Helen is Dr. Narbon Senior's clone.
 * Unholy Matrimony:
 * Video Wills: it wasn't a will, but Dave's 46-year-old self made a hologram to show his 26-year-old self when the younger Dave showed up via Time Travel. He knew what to say because he remembered what his younger self heard 20 years ago.
 * Villainous Breakdown: Every Mad Scientist goes through one of these when they first go crazy.
 * There are benevolent Mad Scientists, who presumably don't go through one of these, but they're barely touched upon, as the Mad Scientific Community at large views them as tremendously creepy.
 * Villain Protagonist
 * Virtual Ghost
 * The Walls Are Closing In: When Mell is sent on a mission to kill, she falls prey to this after commenting, "Huh, weird floor." Her captor comments that there wasn't time to come up with something original, since Mell made it farther than expected.
 * Wham! Episode
 * Weird Trade Union: Both henchmen and killer androids have their own unions. (That last one was actually Artie's fault.)
 * Weirdness Censor: Dave's brother Bill is an extreme example — rather than merely reinterpreting weirdness as mundane things (for example, treating Artie as a normal gerbil) he does not perceive weird things at all (for example, he just can't see Artie).
 * Notably,
 * Weirdness Magnet
 * With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Mad scientists are utterly brilliant and can do things that should be impossible... but their genius is tied to their madness, which makes them volatile and destructive. It's probably also the reason that none of them has ever actually achieved World Domination.
 * Xanatos Roulette: Helen may or may not (See Indy Ploy above) have planned everything that happens in the strip's run.
 * You Didn't Ask: They don't even need to ask the question.