Foreshadowing/Web Comics

Examples of in  include:

"Ansem: This is foreshadowing! Pay attention to this, this will be important later on! ...FORESHADOWING!"
 * Every single time Dan of El Goonish Shive writes one into a strip, which he does a lot, there's almost always a "Lampshade Hanging" in close proximity. What is left is usually cryptic or already blatantly obvious.
 * Grace's squirrel form got . Then she says that her squirrel fur is ... and then she had some really weird dreams...
 * Susan's sword (5th December, 2002) and "tattoo" Venus (5th October, 2005) were good hints that she isn't as simple as she looks, but were proven to be plot points and not throwaway gags only in much later flashback (26th May, 2010).
 * Most of the Sleepy Time storyline was a serious take on it though. All the dreams are this and/or Character Development. Proof? This foreshadows Elliot  and This foreshadows Nanase.
 * What's seen here translated with this.
 * This arc cover is full of foreshadowing (and one Red Herring). It foreshadows.
 * In Get Medieval strip #731, Sir Gerard says: "I'd return via the Moon if that could avoid it."
 * Order of the Stick had Xykon choose his name in Start of Darkness, with a poster of a skull - strongly resembling his lich self - prominently shown next to him.
 * Order of the Stick also parodies foreshadowing.
 * The party wanders into a cave looking for an item for a Fetch Quest and discover that it's inhabited by a dragon. During the fight, the dragon mentions its mom, who thought it important to study other cultures and thus taught him to speak lizard. Later, the party wizard deduces that the Fetch Quest item they were after must have been brought there by a much older dragon. However, no character (and, surprisingly, not a single fan) thinks anything of it. Until the dragon's mom shows up over 400 strips later bent on bloody revenge.
 * V's, er, thorough and pragmatic approach to problem-solving is hinted at earlier.
 * The IFCC (Inter-Fiend Cooperation Commission) first appears as part of a one-panel joke in #380. They then appear as an important part of the plot in #632 (spoilers).
 * The police chief of Cliffport jokes that he'll remain the chief until the mayor puts his head on a pike for allowing such a ruckus in his town. Turns out that Nale did the mayor's work for him.
 * When the different parts of Haley's mind show up in her head, one ("the part that is sick of all this emo crap and wants to get back to comedy") has short hair, and very much resembles her after her Important Haircut some 300 strips later.
 * The MitD's remark in the first panel there comes into a whole new light with the eleventh panel here.
 * The case lost in this strip? It was Zz'dtri's.
 * Girl Genius strip here - it takes some conscious effort to put a mad science related heart exactly there, and if you're thinking coincidence you might have missed the fact the heart was "hit" twice and the first time Agatha was saying love. Or the piece of heart region clothing Gil loses, as if to expose his heart. Agatha touching a heart with seemingly no fear of being mangled by the combat klank, as some sort of symbol of her touching Gil's exposed heart despite Gil's antics. Gil grabbing Agatha is a distinct foreshadowing of the wedding proposal that comes before she leaves the airship. Plus 15 or so threads of you know what I mean about in the forums if you want more esoteric symbols mad love, or Agatha's love of the mad science involved.
 * Agatha's comment about her "parents" hating the Heterodyne Boys Stories portraying Punch and Judy as stupid foreshadows the reveal that they themselves are none other than Punch and Judy - they feel insulted.
 * See that portrait? As we know from other depictions and flashbacks, that's Lucrezia Mongfish. Zola walking right by it is a fake Heterodyne heir…
 * Also, about a "reported werewolf" in the royal lineage? The honour guard of Martellus von Blitzengaard (the other contender for the Lightning Crown), Knights of the Hunt, are all werewolves.
 * It gradually becomes evident to the reader that all of the major events in Narbonic have been planned long in advance. The Little Nemo in Slumberland-inspired Sunday strips, especially, hint in beautiful, complicated, cryptic ways at events to come.
 * In the middle of the series, Dave is lost in time and twenty years later meets a pre-recorded 'future Dave' who tells him a fundamental piece of information: "remember to fill the swimming pool." Years later near the end of the webcomic, this becomes
 * When Hilda Ramirez and meet face-to-face for the first time, he mockingly compliments her as "almost Death Note smart." He then proceeds to kidnap her,.
 * Strip 434 of Eight Bit Theater drew much, much especulation from the moment it was posted. Five years later... (and it's impressive that it wasn't Fauxshadowing, considering how the author loves anticlimactic jokes)
 * More recently: remember how Thief got his class change way back when? Well...
 * Now we have the (self-proclaimed) longest set up in webcomic history: started here and ended here. 1214 long-form comics for a punchline is impressive and crazy.
 * Books Don't Work Here. The author loves making the character's words come back to haunt them.
 * Every one of Robin's shirts has been exactly what she's asked for. although usually not how she meant it.
 * When Robin changes her mind about her roommate being her girlfriend (while bringing her into existence) she says that she is not friends with her in any way, and we will never know how much easier her life could have been otherwise.
 * This page has a good bit of foreshadowing in it, but then again it also kind of takes place in the future. It's a quasi jump forward in time referring to and before a redoing of a previous serious of events the readers haven't seen yet. with out time travel.
 * Looking for Group. Look at the last panel of Page 130. Now, look at Page 229. Warning: link contains spoilers.
 * Then there is this comic, Which shows that
 * And he first mentions that he's mayor of a little village up the coast in the third page, which doesn't come up for another few hundred strips.
 * In this comic of The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, King Radical is introduced as "the most radical man in the radical land". Later, it is revealed that there is
 * The author's latest story arc (Future Trading) has had elements foreshadowed since October 2009. See here. Also these
 * Toward the beginning of Sam and Fuzzy's "Noosehead" arc, Malcolm says some things that most would dismiss at first as being the ravings of a paranoid nutcase who's been breathing too many fumes, but in fact they reference key elements of the coming arc. A guest comic after the arc's completion calls attention to this.
 * Darths and Droids has Palpatine using Darth Maul's business card to contradict his claim that "I work alone" in this strip. Later on,
 * Parodied with extreme prejudice in Ansem Retort:


 * Homestuck and the rest of the MS Paint Adventures, being written on the fly, regularly turns gags or details into Call Backs; this is known in-fandom as "retroactive foreshadowing".
 * Given Homestuck's penchant for increasingly complex storylines told in Anachronic Order, as well as some mercilessly hardline Time Travel rules, things can become foreshadowing that were not even noticed at first by the fans beforehand.
 * In Gunnerkrigg Court, when Renard first sees Annie, he reasons that she must be Surma's daughter, and immediately concludes that Surma is dead. Fridge Logic? Then we see a flashback with Anja crying over Annie's transfer form, which was a weird coincidence, though in itself understandable - a reminder of her dead friend. It's explained only 28 chapters and 762 strips later, when we find out that.
 * "There were some humans and creatures living on both sides. Many of the current inhabitants are descended from those humans". That's an interesting last panel - and.
 * Annie said "And so did I wait for word from my father, unaware that  This only sounds like a simple reveal until it turns out that she quite literally meant it, that
 * In Wapsi Square, Tina's nickname for Monica foreshadowed the role she played in the fixing of the calendar machine. Monica's response to Phix's riddle did the same.
 * The very second strip shows Monica receiving an ancient Peruvian doll which Amanda says looks like a voodoo doll of Shelly. In the next strip Amanda grabs the doll's foot, and elsewhere the real Shelly feels it. In isolation this looks like a one-off gag, but actually it's a foreshadowing of all the supernatural shenanigans that would later become the strip's main focus.
 * In the strip after that Monica tells Shelly she makes decisions using a committee in her head but it doesn't have a chairperson - a possible foreshadowing of Tina, who is.
 * In Sluggy Freelance, way back in October of 1999, we saw Oasis get furious at someone, and shortly afterwards the building she was in went up in a fiery explosion. It wasn't until June of 2009, over nine years and 3000 strips later, that we found out that, when Oasis gets mad, she can start fires with her mind. There was loads of other foreshadowing between those two strips, but, if the strip's official forum is anything to go by, that revelation was still entirely unanticipated by the readership.
 * Fite!: Look at this strip, then this one.
 * Schlock Mercenary
 * "Sis, that's long enough that the thing could have flown here from Andromeda."
 * " is just another weapon."
 * Reboots from backup. Compare to what's discussed two pages later. Yup. You think Book 12 had gross things? It's about to get nastier.
 * Yaeyoefui mentioned performance of "pairs of world-movers" (freighters 8 kilometers in diameter), but Sorlie had too many scary big things on the plate and was a little too freaked out at the time to actually pay attention, so she skipped the matter as unimportant. The Oafa don't count things in pairs all the time. Later she herself found out what this was about.