Painting the Medium: Difference between revisions

* Jim Steranko was fond of this; one issue he did had [[Nick Fury]] making his way through a booby-trapped facility. The page was laid out like a maze, requiring the reader to solve it in order to read. The panels weren't even oriented to each other, which reflected Fury's disorientation.

* In a short sci-fi story appearing in the Swedish edition of ''[[The Phantom (comic strip)|The Phantom]]'', a group of humans are attempting to subvert an alien world so they can seize control. The only thing the aliens care about is The Thinker, a heralded being who, according to their faith, thinks the universe into existence; the humans reason that if they can sedate The Thinker with a stunner, they will reveal him as a fraud, and the resulting chaos from the revelation will make the planet easy for conquest. They succeed in the assault... and the following two pages are filled with ''empty frames''. In the last page immediately after, The Thinker wakes up again, realizes he's forgotten what he thought about, and thinks about something else.

* ''[[Zot]]'' features an issue dealing with Terry's lesbian urges and her dilemma of whether to confess her feelings to Pam, an open (and widely mocked) lesbian. The final page features Pam greeting Terry, only for her to shamefully walk away. {{spoiler|Next comes a page of letters to the writer, or if you're reading the trade paperback, author commentary. Flip the page, and you see the ''real'' last page, where Terry changes her mind and rushes back down the hallway to say 'Hi' to Pam.}}

* ''[[Deadpool]]'' was also the only character who thought and spoke in yellow boxes or balloons, when everyone else used normal white. Now major characters like [[Iron Man]] and [[Spider-Man (Comic Book)|Spider-Man]] have started having their own distinct boxes and bubbles.

* ''A Man For All Seasons'' features the character The Common Man, who is dressed in a black body stocking and opens the play by ranting about the lousy character he's been given to play. Through various costume changes he then becomes a variety of small parts, allowing the play to avoid needing separate actors for all of them. The last is Thomas More's executioner.

* ''Picasso at the Lapin Agile'' opens with Albert Einstein ariving that the eponymous cafe, only to be told he's not supposed to be their yet because the cast has been listed in the program in order of appearance and two other characters are supposed to arrive before he does. Einstein leaves and later returns, acting as though the previous exchange never occurred.

* In the first published edition of the script of ''[[Lady in the Dark]]'', the musical [[Dream Sequence]]s (but not the childhood flashbacks) were printed in red, as was a snippet of the [[Dream Melody]].

 

*** The setup process ''Red Alert 2'' pretends to have hacked into the Allied network, requiring you to use your CD-key to disable the security measures. The installation itself plays out as a slideshow briefing.

*** It also takes the liberty of informing you that a Navy SEAL team has been dispatched to your location.

** In an interview with the developers, they said worked on the idea that you were a "telegeneral" leading your troops through communications links from a control centre—you're supposed to be sitting in front of a computer guiding your forces in the manner of someone playing a real-time strategy game.

*** The actual interface shows up in ''Renegade'', and the idea of "battle commanders" comes up a few times throughout the series.

* In ''[[No More Heroes]]'', when Travis gets a call on his cell phone, it comes through the Wii Remote's speaker instead of the TV's speakers. As such, the volume is (in theory) lower and thus you're holding the Wii Remote to your ear as Travis holds his cell phone to his. (In practice, the voice coming through the remote is surprisingly loud—Sylvia has [[No Indoor Voice]].)

** That's not even going into everything that happens once you finally make it to the final ranked battle. The poor, unfortunate fourth wall gets painted, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again, and then the pieces get repainted. It's the most divisive ending since the MGS2 Ending.

*** The latter two ''[[Sly Cooper]]'' games also allowed you to do this.

* The Humor NaviCustomizer Part in the ''[[Mega Man Battle Network]]'' series has at least one joke in each game it appears it that paints the fourth wall, if not outright breaks it.

* In the iOS game ''The Heist'', you regularly recieve phone calls from the PC's partner in crime. During said calls, the game actually mimics the iPhone "incoming call" interface to give the illusion that you're recieving an actual phone call. The final call even has the partner using Facetime. However, this has the drawback of looking silly when you're playing on an iPod touch...

* The ''[[Paper Mario]]'' series in general gleefully demolishes the fourth wall at every opportunity, but there's one notable part in ''The Thousand-Year Door'' where a doppelganger [[Grand Theft Me|steals your identity and voice]], and you have to guess his name in order to get it back. If you already ''know'' his name {{spoiler|Doopliss}}, you would think that you could just enter it into the name-entry screen and [[Sequence Breaking|sequence break]] the chapter, but the doppelganger has ''removed one of the letters needed to spell his name in the screen and hidden it'' and you need to find the letter in a chest first before you can give the correct answer.

* ''[[Fahrenheit (2005 video game)|Fahrenheit]]'' has a [[Press X to Not Die|quick-time event]] where the on-screen cues light up like a Christmas tree, and it becomes impossible to win. This represents the way the main character has panicked and is franctically hammering on a keypad. There's also a scene where the solution is to fail a series of quick-time events, since they're for making the main character shake off a horde of glowing hallucinatory spiders and he's being interrogated by the police.

* In ''[[Mass Effect]]'', the various starting menus and character creation scenes are invariably part of some in-universe computer system. Also, the [[Bullet Time]] effect in ''Mass Effect 3'', in addition to being used for standard action sequences like the shootout with Dr. Eva, pops up whenever Shepard suffers health damage or is stunned by attacks.

** Andrew used this trope [http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=4&p=001756 way back here] in ''[[Problem Sleuth]]'' as well. Instead of doing damage directly to the [[Final Boss]], PS ''attacks the HP bars themselves.''

** AD also uses one of his [[Stat Meters]] to beat up an enemy at one point.

* [http://www.dieselsweeties.com/archive/2411 This] ''[[Diesel Sweeties]]'' strip, where one of the characters laments that they're just standing around talking about ''[[Star Wars]]''

{{quote|"My God, we're living in a webcomic."

* ''[[Pibgorn]]'' [http://www.gocomics.com/pibgorn/2003/06/12/ Colored fonts]

* ''[[The Phoenix Requiem]]'' [http://requiem.seraph-inn.com/viewcomic.php?page=60 Colored speech bubbles]

* ''[[Derelict (webcomic)|Derelict]]'' [http://derelictcomic.com/?strip_id=20 Symbols, or an alien alphabet, in dialog]

* ''[[Bird Boy]]'': [http://bird-boy.com/volume-1-page-5 Runic dialog]