Non-Indicative Name/Web Comics

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Non-Indicative Names in Web Comics include:

  • 8-Bit Theater has the "Goblin Punch", an attack that is actually a kick to the groin from a very non-goblin monster. It was named by "the greatest crypto-zoologist in all of Red Mage history: Blindy O'Sightless."
    • Dataspheres are square/cubic (sort of). Blame that on pixels.
      • Conversely, an earlier strip had a Summoning Cube that looked like a sphere.
    • There's also Fighter pondering how we drive on parkways and park on driveways.
  • Many webcomics have this type of name. 1/0, for example, has nothing to do with impossible mathematics.
    • The name does get explained in a footnote as having to do with the impossible nature of existence (i.e. "Everything (1) coming from Nothing (0)"), but that's still arguably oblique.
  • The Big Bad of The Wotch is named Xaos (pronounced Chaose), but is an avatar of order (while the protagonist is one of chaos).
  • In Chasing the Sunset, there is the magister Malvenicus * Dramatic Thunder * , who is a rather normal looking guy.
  • Averted and conversed in this Daisy Owl Strip.[context?]
  • Girls with Slingshots contains plenty of girls, but few slingshots. The name does, however, crop up in reference to an alcoholic beverage in one strip, a tongue-in-cheek concession by the creator to those baffled by the ambiguous title.
    • In the back of the first printed collection of the webcomic, the creator writes that it began with a few sketches - guess what they were of - and that after drawing a few of these, people began to ask Danielle Corsetto when those "girls with slingshots" would have their own comic strip. The kicker is that she then adds that she was drawing slingshots "...because I couldn't draw guns very well."
  • Irregular Webcomic is this on one level (it's one of the most consistently updated webcomics out there) but not so much on others (it's a very unorthodox style of webcomic, what with the numerous unrelated plotlines and such).
    • When the comic was on hiatus between October 2011 and April 2015, it was no longer irregular (updates every Sunday) nor a webcomic (new content was new text annotations, released regularly every day).
  • The Order of the Stick: Miko Miyazaki isn't a Miko, and Lord Shojo is neither female nor adolescent, though both "Miko" and "Shojo" can be written with kanji that don't have the common meanings, and Japan doesn't exist in the OoTS universe.
  • Buttersafe has very little to do with butter, or the safety of it.
  • MS Paint Adventures has been made in Photoshop since day two.
    • Problem Sleuth is about weird puzzle shit and RPG mechanics.
    • The characters in Homestuck got out of their homes quite some time ago.
      • Lampshaded in Homestuck when the trolls compare their cultural naming conventions of movies. Troll movie titles are very long and Exactly What It Says on the Tin, down to describing each individual character, plot element and how many kisses and murders there are. When John points out to Karkat how stupid this is, Karkat justifies it by saying that troll movies have been around for much longer than human movies.
      • Each of the heroes has a Title consisting of a Class and an Aspect, like Heir of Breath. Some of the aspects are non-indicative, like Breath (which effectively means wind) and Light (chance or probability). The titles, though, are almost completely non-indicative. A Prince is not a leadership role, but rather someone who brings destruction to their aspect, or by means of their aspect. A Witch is creative, a Bard is passively destructive, etc.
        • If you have the right Title, you can have a secondary ability that makes your Aspect more literal. For example, a Page of Breath can use wind to perform CPR, and a Sylph of Light can cure the blind.
  • Wright As Rayne is, in spite of its name, about Badass Normal superhero Alex Rayne being part of a one-sided Freaky Friday Flip with teenage girl Dorothy Wright. Apparently Rayne As Wright doesn't have the same ring to it.
  • Penny Arcade generally features home console or PC releases.
  • Route 148 doesn't really have anything to do with any roads other than that people use them to travel by.
  • The name of the journal comic The Devil's Panties has absolutely nothing to do with its content. At conventions, the booth banner declares, "It's not Satanic porn, honest!"
  • xkcd looks like an acronym for something. In fact, it doesn't mean anything; it's just a string of random letters that the creator, Randall Munroe, liked.
  • The full title of the Remix Comic Jet Dream is Jet Dream and her T-Girl Counterspies, inherited from the original comic book feature, Jet Dream and her Stunt-Girl Counterspies. However, in the Remix Comic, "Jet Dream" is the name of the organization, not the lead character, whose name is Harmony Thunder. She's occasionally referred to as "the Jet Dream Queen" as partial justification, but in truth, the title was chosen because photoshopping out the letters "STUN" made for a quick and dirty title change that also fit the main theme of the series.