Checkerboard Nightmare

''Hello All The Traps Wikipedia! It's me, Checkerboard Nightmare! You may remember me from my hit webcomic, Checkerboard Nightmare! What you may not know is that it's always been my dream to be on TV. In fact, I almost had my own series, but those executives were too small-minded to recognize the brilliance of my pilot script for Hard Action Squad and the Space Valkyries. And if you've read my comic, Checkerboard Nightmare, then surely you know that I'm all over the traps. All The Traps: booby traps, trap doors... booby traps... ''

''What's that? All The Tropes? Is that even English? Oh, stab me in the face with lasers, I gotta go! Remember to read Checkerboard Nightmare!''

Bad Chex! Back in your box!

Ahem.

Checkerboard Nightmare was Kris Straub's first webcomic. It tells the epic story of Checkerboard Nightmare and his Sisyphean quest to improve the readership of his webomic, Checkerboard Nightmare.

As you may have noticed, Chex is a bit of a Shameless Self Promoter, and the comic likes to abuse the Fourth Wall. The premise, coupled with Chex's complete aversion to coming up with new ideas, gave the comic a platform for very thorough satire of Web Comics.

Aside from the title character, the central cast consists of:
 * Lyle, the quintessential Straight Man and Chex's defense attorney.
 * Vaporware, the obligatory "wacky" cast member: a robot who dreams of killing all humans and enjoys choking people.
 * Polkadot Dream, the obligatory girl: the bona-fide star of her own webcomic, and Chex's unrequited love interest.

In 2005, the comic came to an end. Then Kris Straub revived it and retooled it as an irregularly-updated, strictly gag-per-day affair; the last strip of this incarnation was posted in 2007.

Then somebody bought the website and pointed it at a link-harvester site. But some of the strips made it into the Wayback Machine before that happened.

"Chex: All I have to do is take a bunch of webcomic conventions that people know, parade them in my strip--not even really do anything with them--and in acknowledging them, make myself out to be a master satirist!"
 * All the Myriad Ways: An unexplained time-travel accident causes Chex's past self to get stranded in the present. Upon realizing that the many-worlds hypothesis is in effect, present-Chex simply kills past-Chex.
 * Animated Actors
 * But You Screw One Goat!: The revelation that has had relationships with (sentient but non-anthro) cats completely overshadows the revelation that
 * Call to Agriculture: Vaporware's brief career as a strawberry farmer.
 * Canon Welding: In the final strip
 * Cerebus Syndrome: Lampshaded--it's known as Canonitis and it's a potentially-fatal illness.
 * Character Title
 * Cloudcuckoolander: Chex.
 * Creator Breakdown: Straub has admitted Chex's anger in the strip's later years mirrored his own feelings, and that he ended the comic to prevent it from getting poisoned by his bitterness.
 * Crossover: Too many to list them all.
 * Crush! Kill! Destroy! / Kill All Humans: Vaporware's stated goal is to exterminate humanity. Mostly he just settles for choking Lyle.
 * Deliberately Monochrome: Initially the comic was black and white, then switched to color when Chex visited some other comics. Eventually settled on black and white inside Chex's comic and full color outside the comic.
 * Eldritch Abomination: Subverted. We're led to expect a sanity-shattering Lovecraftian monster when we're told that the Unraveled is beyond human comprehension.
 * Final Battle / Battle Royale With Cheese: The first comic ends with an all-out brawl between the main cast, the entire Universe Of Failure, and every character Chex had ever wronged.
 * Follow the Leader: Chex seems to be incapable of originality.
 * Go Mad from the Revelation: Shrodinger the Cat. He can see every possible reality at once, and has been driven insane by the knowledge.
 * Ice Cream Koan: Anything the Unraveled says.
 * Jerkass: Chex. He may simply be legally insane.
 * Lampshade Hanging: Gets a lampshade hanging itself.


 * Meta Fiction
 * The Monolith: They're like vermin, actually.
 * No Fourth Wall: This comic doesn't just break it; this comic took the fourth wall out behind the shed and shot it. Then burned the body and snorted the ashes.
 * Turned on its head during a storyline where Vaporware decides to rebuild the fourth wall, causing Chex and a bunch of characters from various self-referential franchises to try to stop him.
 * Only Six Faces
 * Perverse Sexual Lust: As it turns out, Dot owes most of her in-universe readership to this.
 * Shameless Self Promoter: Chex may very well be the patron saint of this trope.
 * Straight Man: Lyle.
 * Totally Radical: Do Chex's attempts to appeal to trendy teens all fail miserably? Right as ass they do.
 * Tropes Are Not Good: Vaporware decides that his killing humans shtick is hacky and played-out, and that the only other narrative role available to robots--navel-gazing about his humanity or lack thereof--has also been done to death. He chooses neither, and becomes a farmer. (Nobody tell him that that's a trope too.)
 * Unmoving Pattern: All over the place.
 * You Mean "Xmas": "X-Holiday".

"Chex: I've been thinking about the nature of the self-aware comicstrip lately. Chex: Normally, whenever a strip runs out of ideas, it becomes self-referential. Chex: I've been self-referential from the beginning. Chex: I think I've been giving my readers the wrong impression. Vaporware: I don't."

- March 16, 2001