Dragon Mango
Dragon Mango is a "possibly funny" webcomic, set primarily in the Kingdom of Fafnir. When the human population was nearly wiped out a thousand years ago, the Dragon Slayers arrived to save them. Now a modern-day Dragon Slayer is anxious to prove her worth and restore her family's honour.
Did I mention that her first challenge is to escape the pile of rock candy she just released from her dragon-shaped pinata?
The comic is in a Japanese style, though drawn by Canadian artists. The storyline ranges from deadly serious to absurd, often on the same page, and has several arcs that are starting to come together. It's liberally sprinkled with pop culture and anime references, with quite a bit of very original humour. The artwork, especially in the early comics, is a bit inconsistent, so don't be put off by the first comics being mainly in black-and-white. Colour and animation are used for the more important scenes.
Dragon Mango is written, drawn, and produced by Mark Sprague, Crystal Kearns, Adam Lockhart, Doug Middleton, and Karen Hayman, who together comprise Unpredictable Fish. A new comic is published every Thursday.
- Big No: Spoofed in this strip, when Pumpkin's father returns after a four-year journey into faraway lands and gives Mango a rare treat, called a "sweet swirl stick", which Cherry eats in one bite.
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"Wow, you're right, that was really good! Is there any more? |
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- Cold Iron: Elves are extremely vulnerable to iron, but can learn to resist it through Training from Hell. Afterwards they use iron armors as a Power Limiter. Half-Elves are completely immune to it, likely due to their human half's iron-based blood.
- Door Step Baby: Spoofed; the alchemist Cupcake explains that she doesn't know exactly what race she is, because her adoptive mother and mentor, Chocolate Explosion, found her lying in a box on the doorstep. Her immediate reaction upon seeing the box: "I didn't order this!"
- Engineered Heroics: The Dragonslayer deal.
- He's Back: The Oracle. Initially she looks like a confused seer and Harmless Villain, but as soon as she learns the one bit of information she lacked, she figures everything out instantly, gets her Vision back in full force, and promptly orchestrates a Thanatos Gambit.
- I Am Not Left-Handed: The elf Eclair wears a heavy iron armor breastplate. Iron usually causes them massive pain; Eclair turns out to be wearing it purely for the weight and pain handicaps.
- Impossible Item Drop: Parodied; Mango receives a suit of fashion plate mail for swatting a mosquito, then wonders how killing a bug made armor appear. (Answer: it was a drop bug.) She later has to assure her mother that she didn't hack anyone for it.
- Mix-and-Match Critters: One of the many main characters summoned a hippogryff -- half-hippopotamus, half-griffin.
- Money Spider
- Monster Protection Racket: The Dragonslayers do this. With the added twist that they are the dragons.
- My Death Is Just the Beginning: A shapeshifted fortune teller explains she's doing this -- and her enemy is too overconfident to care.
- Our Gryphons Are Different: They're really cute. (And half-hippo).
- Power Limiter: Eclair is always seen wearing armor, which fits her concept as she is a swordfighter. But it's also made of iron, which hurts and weakens an elf (which she is) by its mere touch! She is also a graduate of swordfighting style with an insanely dangerous training method (most students either flee, die or go insane long before completing training) focused on enduring the touch of iron. When she goes up against an extremely powerful enemy, she drops the armor to unleash her full potential.
- Schmuck Bait: Free Meat! In the middle of a large red target. Next to a "Free Meat" sign. Directly under a sixteen-ton weight. And poisoned.
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Claw: You let the princess eat raw meat off the floor?! |
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- Suspiciously Specific Denial: Bleu Berry and her father Goz (a dragon) get into a heated row. When she counters his threat to tear her to little pieces and feast upon her entrails by pointing out that if he does, he might never have an heir, he threatens to eat one of her friends instead. In response, she makes a presentation to her class on how to defend against dragon attacks entitled, "Discussion Intended to Educate Defence Against Dragons" (DIEDAD), which includes a diagram of an "entirely hypothetical dragon" labelled, "Generic Dragon - Not Particularly Based on Anyone's Dad".
- Thanatos Gambit
- Training from Hell: Lord Sherbert teaches the Sherbert School of Incredibly Dangerous Swordplay. He is said to have "more fatalities than graduates", but an Elf who makes it through can withstand wearing an iron armor without even twitching from pain, while a simple direct contact with iron can kill an untrained Elf.
- His current pupil, an alumnus from another such school, asks for more: When he learns the girls are in danger, he asks Sherbert to crank it Up to Eleven so he can quickly graduate and rush to their help. Even Sherbert is surprised.
- Webcomic Time
- Worthless Yellow Rocks: The goblin king refuses a sack of gold and demands something useful like a chicken or a box of donuts, saying that they have literally whole walls made of the that "worthless gold". War is averted with a happy ending when the true worth of gold is explained to him (and almost immediately goblins are reclassified from monsters to people by surrounding nations)