Serial Escalation/Web Comics

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Examples of Serial Escalation in Web Comics include:

• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: How far can we stretch Rule of Cool and Rule of Funny? What crazy-awesome foe can we throw at Dr. McNinja this time, and what over-the-top, adrenaline-soaked method can he use to bring it to its knees? How epic can a moustache be? Can a moustache get more epic if we put it on a dinosaur?
• Casey and Andy: What madcap new invention will they come up with next? How many different ways can they find to blow themselves up? Will Bob be there too?
• In Eight Bit Theater you can notch three arrows to one bow and then notch three arrows to two bows and then you can add more bows than a two armed human could possible carry.
  • On a different note: just how much time can the author put between setting up a Brick Joke and having it come back? At first, they happen within about 350 strips or so. Now we're seeing jokes come back after nine years.
    • Particularly notable since THAT brick joke was from the first battle Fighter and Black Mage faced (a giant) TO THE FINAL BATTLE before it came back. Yes, almost literally the entire comic!
• The fight against Demonhead Mobster Kingpin in Problem Sleuth. How will our heroes top their last utterly ridiculous, over-the-top and incredibly awesome attack? Answer: Sepulchritude.
  • Andrew Hussie has gone on to use Homestuck as a vehicle in which he can turn shit Up to Eleven, and then turn it Up to Eleven again without resetting it from the first time. Repeatedly. He's actually said that the entire ending of Problem Sleuth would be considered a regular Homestuck panel by now, and he's probably right.

Andrew: There was only one sure thing I knew when starting HS. That was that this thing would go batshit insane in ways I couldn't begin to imagine. In fact, it was practically the mission statement.

• • In a more meta-example, there was the AlterniaBound Flash update on October 25, 2010. When it went live, the traffic crashed the site, which was expected given how heavily anticipated the update was. What wasn't expected, however, was it also crashing the mirror site Hussie uploaded it to.

Andrew on Twitter: ok i quit putting stuff on the internet forever because THE INTERNET CAN'T HANDLE ME

• • The exact same thing happened exactly a year later with the End of Act 5 update on October 25, 2011. As much as Hussie and his team tried to be prepared for the inevitable, the Newgrounds mirror - not to mention the entire Newgrounds site itself - was torpedoed WITHIN MINUTES OF IT BEING POSTED.

Andrew: Well, that didn't work.

• • This trope also applies to the the flashes. First they were nothing more than simple short animations with catchy but basic music. Then walkaround games were introduced, and the flashes just kept getting bigger and more impressive (helped by very hard-working music and art teams), culminating in Cascade, fifteen full minutes long and containing quite possibly as many Crowning Moments Of Awesome as all the other flashes combined.
  • Five words: Chekhov's Literally Every Single Story Detail. How many incredibly minor items or jokes from thousands of pages ago will suddenly become plot relevant?
• How many Shout Outs can Second Empire cram into this Comic? Into this chapter? into this page? Into this panel? Into This. Single. Sentence?
• Schlock Mercenary did it here, which invokes this trope once you realize that the object they were intimating would be used to ram the Andromeda Galaxy was THE MILKY WAY GALAXY! That's not impressive at all, they're already on a collision course! In a few billion years or so, without intervention. Of course, it was a joke - they aren't going to wait this long and staged a massive invasion.
  • "I have a team of accounts whose sole job is to count the accounts who keep track of my accountants."
  • Big Dumb Objects escalated out of hand, until Eina-afa (which is big enough to contain Mars, Luna and Europa, and even some of old freighters collecting dust in storage there have cost best expressed in terms of "exactly how many years of income from a whole prosperous star system").
    • Then they notice some discrepancies in old star maps and a reanimated Oafa helpfully clears the confusion about what the previous galactic civilization did to the now-absent stars: used as a source of mass for planet-scale construction. Stars in the wrong places, however, are evidence of "gravitic warfare on a grand scale".
    • The extragalactic Worldfleets are thousands of habitats larger than Eina-afa (who hid to preserve what's left of their galactic civilization rather than run away like they did, and started earlier in galactic civilization cycle).
    • …and then the Pa'anuri return.

Petey: The Pa'anuri learned from those fights as well. They have warships now. Admiral Devereaux: Warships? But... Pa'anuri are so big. Big-big. Like... planet-sized. Petey: I hope you're ready for yet another expensive education.

• • • • • This was soon topped by «Tactical note: our enemy creates stars to use as dead-man's switches» .
        • Then there's Pa'anuri hypercannon, mounted directly onto the "core generator" in Andromeda as the only thing with enough of juice to repeatedly open intergalactic wormholes. Specifically, the "capacitor" node storing energy Ennesby eyeballed as "Type IIn supernova" (and Kevyn translated to "five times the lifetime output of Sol"). The part of hypercannon structure where they were at the moment was 6 light minutes or so from this node — about the radius of Venus orbit.
• Irregular Webcomic has just taken Wolverine's Bad Ass-ness and Coolness Up to Eleven here (read the annotation just how crazy this is). A lot of the idea originates from xkcd.
• The entire run of Sam and Fuzzy ^{[dead link]} is one big long chain of how much weird stuff can fit in one story line. We start with an anthropomorphic teddy bear and a demon possessed freezer. Then add a secret agent taxi driver, a ninja mafia, an alien invasion of a major US record label (WTF?!?). Oh yeah, and The King is alive on a remote island somewhere. It starts getting into MindSccrew territory pretty quickly.
• Warbot in Accounting: Just how hilariously depressing can Warbot's life get? Arguably, this early one.
• Sluggy Freelance: What can we reference from our 10+ year history in this story arc? What character did we forget to give a month's worth of development?
• Mob Ties: How drunk can Sidney Burns get? How strong can Sidney Burns' punches be? What insane, awesome, or funny antics will the cast be up to this issue? How many Shout Outs can the author fit into an issue? How big is this Issue's Wham! Episode going to be?
• Sonichu: How blatant mixed messages about minorities and women can Chris make? How much more will the Schedule Slip? How overpowered can Mary Sues become?
• Bittersweet Candy Bowl, How much of a beating can Alejandro take and still be okay? Confrontation did not answer the question.
  • Daisy has 18 extracurricular activities while being an "A" student in a schedule full of Honors courses.
• Looking for Group: How many lines can Richard cross?
  • How can we make Richard maim/kill/fwoosh his enemies this time?
• VG Cats: Leo and Aeris had an argument that resulted in Leo being aborted from time. However, this is immediately trumped in the next strip: he comes back.
• From Bug: "Hey, check it out. 7 girls 5 cups."

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