Goats

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Jon: So, uh, what are you guys up to these days?
Diablo: Oh, we're just trying to save the universe.
Fish: From doom!

A web comic by Jon Rosenberg. It started in April, 1997 and stopped updating at the end of April 2010 when the author hit financial troubles, and (despite Rosernberg's promises to the contrary) seems to be effectively abandoned now. It started out as Mundane Fantastic, but with the Infinite Typewriters arc branched out into a multiversal Planet Eris. It features a diverse cast of characters having wacky, dimension-hopping, Speculative Fiction adventures. The main characters include:

  • Jon the Author Avatar, probable Weirdness Magnet.
  • Phillip a programmer who may be The Chosen One.
  • Toothgnip formerly one of Thor's chariot-pulling goats.
  • Diablo a Satan worshiping chicken who can reattach his body parts.
  • Oliver Diablo's foul-mouthed, Ax Crazy son.
  • Fish a rather sweet-natured, naïve goldfish who lives in beer.
  • Fineas Fish's badass, cybernetic alter ego, who eventually got his own body.
  • Bob and Neil a pair of aliens with a Flying Saucer.
  • Farmella a Defector From Decadence who has the Knack for dimension-hopping along the Pub Axis.
  • One Death a god of the Mayan underworld who runs a software company.
  • and many others...

The Kudzu Plot is approaching Alien Geometries territory, but here's the basics:

Jon and Phillip tricked God into turning himself into a pork chop, and ate him. Normally, this would have spelled doom for The Multiverse. Fortunately, Woody Allen hired a Mayan programming firm, headed by One Death, to write a program on his laptop to keep the Multiverse going. Unfortunately, the program has a bug that will cause it to crash when the Mayan Calendar rolls over on December 21, 2012, leading to the end of the multiverse as we know it. The race is on to locate The Programmer (who might be Phillip) prophesied to repair the program. Of course, the ones who control The Programmer will control the multiverse, so wacky interdimensional hijinks are ensuing.

Another major plot element is the three-way feud between Fineas, Toothgnip, and Oliver.

The web comic can be found on its own website, at which it ran for 1,140 strips from November 1, 2003 to April 30, 2010, with three more strips being posted in 2017. There is also a copy of the website in the Wayback Machine where the strip goes back to April 1997.

Tropes used in Goats include: