Non Sequitur (comic strip)

Translated from Latin as "it does not follow", Non Sequitur is a comic strip created by Wiley Miller, usually credited as Wiley. The strip is often political and satirical, though other times, purely comedic. The strip can be found online at gocomics.com.

Originally, the comic was a single-panel gag cartoon, similar to Gary Larson's The Far Side. It grew more political in tone during the 1990s. The comic has become more traditional, with a multi-panel format and recurring characters.

Although many of the strips are stand alone, there are several ongoing plots in multiple universes that appear on an irregular basis. The largest one centers on the Pyle family that includes the Wise Beyond Their Years Danae and her sister Kate and their father.

It's also notably published both as a strip (wide format, like most comic strips) and as a panel (nearly square like The Far Side) Monday through Saturday, so a newspaper could buy it for either slot. This requires a single-panel installment to be carefully drawn so it could be cropped either way (often with the speech balloon reoriented), and multi-panel installments to be laid out so they can be broken up into two rows. Similarly, Sunday strips are laid out both for traditional layouts and with the panels stacked vertically, which also are manually reoriented by the artist.

This work contains the following tropes.

 * Amoral Attorney: All of them. All the time.
 * Beat Panel: In almost every four-panel strip, the third panel is a beat panel.
 * Canon Welding: Four recurring elements: Snarky little girl Danae, the observing everyguy, the Leisure Suit Larry-ish lawyer and Offshore Flo's Diner were merged into one story with Joe (the everyguy) at the center: Danae and her sister are his daughters, Bob (the lawyer) is his brother/drinking buddy, and Flo is his mother.
 * The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much: When the court jester commits suicide, a member of the court asks how that could be, since everyone loves him for his biting wit. Then they walk into the throne room, where the jester is on the ground with a large mallet on his back. His entire back.
 * Dark Is Not Evil
 * Deadpan Snarker: Danae
 * Expy: Some readers complained that Lucy the horse was an expy of Hobbes, albeit indirectly ("I liked it better when it was with a tiger"). Lucy agreed.
 * The Graevsytes, a family of monsters often featured in the strip around Halloween, are obviously patterned after The Addams Family and/or The Munsters.
 * Genre Shift: The comic used to consist entirely of a guy looking at odd situations, but eventually focused more on his family, especially his daughter Danae.
 * Grammar Nazi: In ancient Egypt.
 * Hollywood New England: The strip's setting is "Watchacallit, Maine", and the characters of Flo (the owner of Flo's Offshore Diner) and Captain Eddie (the fisherman who frequents that establishment) both talk with pronounced regional accents.
 * Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: Kate is the Light Feminine, while Danae is the Dark Feminine.
 * Lucky Rabbits Foot: One strip has Kate gushing about the lucky rabbit's foot keychain she just acquired. Danae points out that if she got another one, she'd be twice as lucky. And that if she got two more, she'd be... almost as lucky as the rabbit.
 * Only Sane Girl: Danae, for the strip's value of "sane".
 * Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: On the cynical side.