Disembodied Eyebrows



"Don't forget the eyebrows that hover mysteriously over my head!"

- Ruff Ruffman, Fetch With Ruff Ruffman

In comics, webcomics and animation, eyebrows are very important to conveying expression, so it's important that they be seen. To this end, they sometimes actually float several inches above the character's head, or are otherwise clearly unattached. This may be a feature of the art at all times, or it may signify that the character in question is just that surprised. A subtrope of Unusual Eyebrows

If they're on the face but showing through the hair, that's Oddly Visible Eyebrows.

Anime and Manga

 * Lampshaded in FLCL, where it turns out that Commander Amarao's eyebrows are actually fake, and made of nori [dried seaweed].
 * Amuro's eyebrows even work as a shield to protect the wearer from the head-pulling thing Haruko does.
 * They're not even fake, inked eyebrows. They are actual seaweed, scanned and inserted into the anime, making the whole shebang look even more wrong.

Comedy

 * A Paul Merton routine had him explaining to a potential job applicant that interviews always measure a person by the height of their eyebrows on their hand, and thus the ideal candidate would have eyebrows floating five inches above their head (in true Paul Merton style, this escalated into a discussion of someone's eyebrows being so high they got attached to the front of a train passing over his head).

Comic Books

 * Comic artist Phil Foglio is rather fond of these.
 * Amulet has Miskit, prominently featured on the cover (and the page image).
 * Drawn in a similar style to Miskit from the Amulet example are the Bone cousins, from Bone. Fone Bone in particular will sometimes be drawn with several sets of eyebrows; all of them disembodied.

Commercials
"Joey: Man, this is weird. Ever realize that Cap'n Crunch's eyebrows are actually on his hat?
 * Cap'n Crunch. They're on his hat.
 * Friends gives us this exchange:

Chandler: That's what's weird? Joey, the man's been captain of a cereal for the last forty years."

Literature

 * In some scenes in the picture book Hanna Hippo's Horrible Hiccups, a book in the "Animal Antics A to Z" series, the title character is depicted as having disembodied eyebrows. Possibly seen with other characters in the series as well.

Newspaper Comics

 * FoxTrot had its distinctive (-:333 (best approximation).

Web Comics

 * Travis in Subculture has eyebrows which cross onto his hat at times.
 * Narbonic, particularly early on.
 * Fuzzy from Sam and Fuzzy, even lampshaded at one point.
 * Mr. Sin embodies the trope - even forgetting to put his eyebrows on.
 * Schlock Mercenary gives these to several beings that aren't supposed to have eyebrows, apparently to make them more expressive. Ennesby the floating robot head could feasibly have unattached eyebrows, and at one point mentions rolling himself down the stairs with them. The cloned lawyer-serpents and cyclopic Uniocs have no such justification, and one of the latter takes these to their logical extreme when he gets half his head blown off.
 * The titular character of The Book of Biff. He has a similarly disembodied mouth.
 * In One Over Zero, Terra's eyebrows are suspended over her general head-area (she's an earthworm). This is eventually explained. (Her facial features aren't attached very solidly either, but they are attached, at least.)
 * In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob, Bob himself, certainly (his rectangular eyebrows are sometimes visible above his head even when viewed from the rear), Princess Voluptua's antenna eyebrows, and the other castmembers intermittently.
 * Done in Gunnerkrigg Court when
 * When visible, eyebrows in Order of the Stick stick out from the characters' heads most of the time.
 * In Air Force Blues, eyebrows float on the forehead, usually right on the hairline.

Western Animation

 * Yin Yang Yo and possibly ¡Mucha Lucha!.
 * Fetch With Ruff Ruffman lampshades this when two of the second season contestants make a puppet of the host to use in a show. "Don't forget the eyebrows that float mysteriously above my head!"
 * CGI example: Characters in Bionicle:The Legend Reborn have their eyebrows sitting on top of their helmets, rather than being attached to their faces.
 * Ed from Ed, Edd n Eddy.
 * Sometimes he also has a disembodied eye, though thats probably just a style thing.
 * Actually, if something large enough smacks him, it appears whatever eye was hanging off his head falls seperately of him.
 * Cyborg from the Teen Titans cartoon was often shown with an unattached eyebrow on the robotic side of his face.
 * Done with Jenner in The Secret of NIMH.
 * The Snorks.
 * Most of the characters from Phineas and Ferb suffer from this.
 * Many of the characters in Word World
 * One Danger Mouse episode had DM negotiating with an alien. The alien agreed to leave in peace in exchange for Penfold's eyebrows. Penfold refused, but DM simply reached down and grabbed the floating eyebrows to hand them over. Penfold was very cross afterward, but DM assured him he'd grow a new pair.
 * The main character of El Tigre has this happen to him from time to time.
 * At one point he raised them so high that they fell off and floated to the ground.
 * In My Friend Rabbit, not only do the characters' eyebrows float, but Mouse's whiskers float as well.
 * Used with several of the dinosaurs in Harry and His Bucket Full of Dinosaurs
 * Seen with several of the animal characters on Will and Dewitt
 * Al Alligator on the Playhouse Disney / Disney Junior short series Can You Teach My Alligator Manners?
 * Fanboy and Chum Chum. All of the characters. It's the most noticeable with Sigmund, whose eyebrows are pitch black and rather thick, while his complexion is pale and his hair is white.
 * Duckman sports a pair of these, along with eyes that are evidently attached to his glasses rather than his head.
 * Trogdor from Homestar Runner.
 * Angel the bunny from My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic. Well, his whiskers, but still….
 * A number of Manny's tools have them on Handy Manny.
 * Several of the characters on Disney Junior's animated adaptation of Guess How Much I Love You exhibit disembodied whiskers, depending on what angle they're shown from.
 * Seen on some of the animals on Justin Time, a children's series on PBS Kids Sprout.