Gone With the Blastwave
Gone With The Blastwave is a webcomic created by Kimmo Lemetti. It follows a group of soldiers fighting (for reasons they're more than a little hazy about) in a ruined city of a post-apocalyptic world. It "is not a very serious comic", having a lot of Black Comedy - the author advises you to "think of it as a some kind of a parody" of more serious post-apocalyptic settings.
It doesn't update very often at all, but not so much because of Schedule Slip as because the author has decided not to try for a schedule - it's a side-project, and the update arrangements are unashamedly on a "whenever-I-feel-like-it" basis.
Was on a hiatus for almost a year, but returned with the author promising an update once a month, twice a month if the readers bribe him. As of April 2022, it hasn't updated since December 2020.
It can be found here.
Tropes used in Gone With the Blastwave include:
- After the End: The whole setting. Presumably, it may only be the city, though the monologue on the first page makes it sound more worldwide.
- Amusing Injuries: "Friendly fire you goddamn son of a b-"
- Armed Farces: A good number of the characters we run across clearly don't have any idea how to do their jobs properly. Played to the extremes with The Green Army as their ranks seem to have consisted entirely of these people.
- Artist Disillusionment: The artist makes it clear in the FAQ that they're doing this for themselves and not the fans, they dislike getting so much attention and they feel little affection for the comic so updates aren't going to be very often. The page regarding fan translations seems to actively dissuade them.
- Badass Longcoat: What everyone; Red, Blue, or Yellow, would be if they weren't all crippled by varying degrees of stupidity, disinterest, or incompetence.
- The Bet: Many, but in here, it's mundane, since everyone is probably quite bored from the lack of direction and hope in general being stuck in a ruined city.
- Black Comedy: The whole thing, really.
- Body Count Competition: The Reds appear to be constantly using this as a way to amuse themselves. According to this comic, it also determines rank.
- Car Fu: Do tanks count?
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The three known factions in the war are simply called the Reds, the Blues, and the Yellows. The story follows a group of Reds. The Reds and Blues aren't really characterized much more than that, though - they seem fairly interchangeable. The Yellows are said to have superior firepower, and speak a different language, but still seem to be just as lost as the other two sides.
- Comedic Sociopathy: Its a black comedy with sociopathic soldiers, what did you expect?
- Deus Ex Machina: Lampshaded here.
- Dope Slap (And Dope Gunbutt): strips 40 and 46, respectively.
- Driven to Suicide: Arguably the one point where it momentarily stops being black comedy and starts becoming a bit depressing.
- Due to the Dead: Subverted Trope. Think of it like a last service to the army!
- Everything's Deader with Zombies: Lampshaded; the zombies are just civilians in makeup and tattered clothing. They dress like that in order to frighten soldiers away from their campsites. They even place bets on whether or not it will work.
- Expressive Mask: Page 50, "25 Essential Expressions Challenge". They're mostly head tilts.
- Forever War: We don't know how long the war has been going on, but it has obviously been long enough that the participants don't know why or how it started, or why it has to continue. Heck, if the one-shot spin-off comic's title is to be taken literal it will continue on a on-and-off basis for at least 250.000 years.
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- Flat What: General reaction to Crosshair guy being a wolf. Luckily, it's an April fools joke.
- Waaaait, so wouldn't that make him/her Sniper Wolf?
- Gas Mask Longcoat
- Gas Mask Mooks: Every character is one of these. The marks on their helmets seem to indicate their job specification, and are the only way to tell them apart.
- Page 50 filler shows "25 essential expressions" of these guys... such as they are.
- Glorious Mother Russia: Or some kind of eastern European, for actors in the movie.In the comic, the soldiers act and have and have names like Americans.
- Grey and Gray Morality: None of the factions are presented as obviously right, although since we're never even told what the war is about, this might just be lack of information. The individual soldiers often seem to be more driven by a desire to avoid boredom than anything else.
- Head Pet: One of the characters has a giant moth perched on his helmet in strip 24. He tried getting it to leave, but it just wouldn't. Now he just takes it in stride. Bit of a Non Sequitur Scene, as it never shows up again.
- Highly Conspicuous Helmets
- Improbable Aiming Skills. One of the two original soldiers is really, really good at his job. He's had time to practice.
- No Sense of Direction: Just about everyone is completely lost, and everything they do just seems to make them even more hopelessly lost. Something of a Running Gag: "How the hell did we get lost in a city?!"
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- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: How did they take the tank down?
- One-Way Visor: In "GWTBW 250K" only.
- Only Sane Man: The Machine Gunner they first meet seems to be more or less the most competent character.
- Sociopathic Soldier: Almost all characters appear to, more or less, fall into this category. And when we find out that soldiers get promoted based on their "body count", it pretty much seems like this is whomever's-in-charge's idea of his/her troops as well. Pretty are no cases of types 1. The characters tend to show disregard for both their own lives and the lives of others, including teammates. They are often bored out of their minds.
- The Movie: A half-hour short film, which can be accessed on page 49. Adaptation Distillation, as there's not much of the black comedy and is simply depressing post-apocalyptia.
- Fantastic Drug: A.T.A.C. syringes, which Gunless is hopelessly addicted to. Sniperguy bumming one off him signals his Despair Event Horizon at the very end.
- Land Mine Goes Click: One scene has the two stumble into a minefeild; Gunless just runs across, trusting to blind luck.
- Sniping the Cockpit: A Red sniper does this to a moving plane, causing the plane to crash into a crowd of enemy soldiers. However, it was done only as a stupid bet out of boredom.
- Too Dumb to Live: According to some doodles by Kimmo, a Green fraction was at one point involved in the war, but thanks to their own stupidity and incompetence (using cardboard boxes as bomb shelters and mistaking their own spies (who was wearing Paper Thin Disguises nonetheless) for enemies) they lost very early on.
- Attempting a Rocket Jump, for fun.
- Unsound Effect: Can you name any other comic where the SFX "-bullet sound-" appears?
- One of the aforementioned doodles involving the Greens also gives us the self-explanatory "SHOTGUN!" sound effect, exclamation point included.
- We Have Reserves: On a local scale. The soldiers seem to take this sort of attitude towards each other.
- Oh, not just on each other...
- War Is Hell: For a few characters, certainly. For example, when one of the main characters asks whether he's "the only one without a death wish," the answer he gets is simply "Yes." A lot of them seem to have seen so much that they've become completely desensitized to it all, and are bored to death even when they're killing or at risk of being killed.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Subverted in the end.
- With Friends Like These...: Here you are.