Subnormality
Subnormality is a webcomic with a whole lot of words created by Winston Rowntree. Created in 2007, this comic is a Deconstruction parade, where the author deconstructs everything from video game characters to tropes themselves, such as Cannot Spit It Out. Some of his works are hilarious, some are depressing, and others are somewhere in the middle where you can't figure out what you're supposed to gain from it.
This comic is rather subjective; many readers enjoy it for the messages they receive from it, and others dislike it for how hard Winston tries to hammer in his morality. In this comic, you do just as much reading as you would if you were reading a book, it just has pictures to go with it. Somewhat of a Light Novel, except the art style is more reminiscent of western comic books than Japanese Manga.
Rowntree also writes an irregularly updated sister comic for Cracked.com called Abnormality. Its strips are narrower (to fit the website's layout), generally shorter and rarely plot-driven. Many of them are humorous infographics. they're accessible from Rowntree's author page. Abnormality has since become the name of Rowntree's column. He also contributes to Cracked's After Hours series, providing illustrations for Michael's brain.
Tropes used in Subnormality include:
- Alt Text: Occasionally.
- Alternate History: Various popular counterfactual scenarios are displayed in the Museum of the Theoretical.
- Alternate Universe: One where your size is proportional to your intelligence.
- And I Must Scream: Apparently the source of those little figurines.
- Bait and Switch: These two
- Beauty Equals Goodness: Characters with selfish and mean interiors have wrinked faces, snout noses, and/or pointed teeth. Characters meant to be bland and generic will look exactly that. Sympathetic characters, even those employed by hell, will either be beautiful or Ugly Cute. Curiously, this actually works well within the comic's style. The artist clearly enjoys drawing grotesque, insane things. One notable exception to this is the author self-insert comics, Rowntree seems to be happy to depict himself honestly. And, well, for the sake of politeness lets just say he's not exactly a super-model.
- Benevolent Boss: Deconstructed
- Blessed Are the Cheesemakers: Everything's better with CHEESE!
- Blue and Orange Morality: The Sphynx, apparently. It's fine for her to kill and eat people since she's not human, whereas a human cannibal is shown to have ended up in Hell.
- Bi the Way: One of the recurring characters, who is a demon from hell. Since she dates humans, this could also be a case of Interspecies Romance.
- Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Seen here, panel two
- Brick Joke: Sexy Theodore Roosevelt. We know. He was sexy to begin with.
- Brutal Honesty: Exemplified by a great many of the characters in "The Service".
- Casual Time Travel: Among other instances, to Ancient Egypt. "People will travel back in time to previous eras and blend in with the locals because even a theocratic Bronze Age dictatorship seems more sophisticated than their own society sometimes."
- Character Development: Exhibited by a few of the recurring characters. Compare the Sphinx here and here.
- Cute Monster Girl: Some of the demons in hell. Except when the find out the damned souls are liking it, then they turn frumpy just to screw with them. And the Sphinx, who looks awfully cute even as she thinks up new ways to devour humans.
- Deconstructor Fleet: As stated above.
- Demonization: Apparently, Margaret Thatcher is a Xenomorph who is obsessed with nuclear weapons. Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, prefers to express himself through freestyle rap. The joke being that both were run through an "exaggeration engine" thus apparently explaining their grotesque forms and bizarre behavior... only to be revealed that said engine wasn't even turned on, which only somewhat destroys the point.
- Did Not Do the Research: A minor example, but in the evolution of alternative music comic, it's weird for a guy who puts so much work into details to depict Kurt Cobain as right-handed...
- He's been accused of this again with his critique on the New 52.
- Disturbing Statistic: There's a game show called "Not Worth It" which uses this trope in its quiz questions.
- Divide by Zero: This strip features a scientist who creates an "anti-Gandhi" who is dressed in a fancy business suit, has thick red hair and a beard, and practices "violent nonresistance." The idea is so stupid that the Earth blows up.
- Easter Eggs: The almost insane number of visual eggs that are in pretty much every single comic. A very good example of this trope in action is The Metaphor's New Clothes (warning: contains nudity). You can very easily use this strip as a roadmap to Rowntree's views on politics, religion, and media.
- An even better example is The Museum of the Theoretical which has a bunch in every panel.
- Equal Opportunity Offender
- Even Evil Has Standards: Sure, the Sphinx kills and usually eats passerby, but she would never dream of having sex with her own son.
- And serial killers can be civic-minded. "I may have killed and eaten five people, but I damn well cleaned up after my dog!"
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Characters that are meant to embody an archetype, many, many names of businesses and products in the background signage, and the awards in this comic.
- See also the No-Bullshit emporium.
- Expository Hairstyle Change: In this strip, the pink-haired girl's decision to quit her soul-crushing waitressing job results in her instantly getting her pink hair back.
- Failure Is the Only Option: The entire point of "Can't Win", where a sinner insists he'll be the one to best Hell, much to the chagrin of Devil #76. He doesn't.
- For Halloween I Am Going as Myself: As the demon girl puts it, "God, Halloween's fantastic. For one day you can wander around freely and everyone just thinks you're wearing a costume. It's really rather nice." Frankenstein's Monster is also showing up as himself on that occasion.
- Funny Background Event: Rowntree likes to fill the background with various signage and headline gags. As with Mad Magazine, these are often funnier than the main dialogue or situation of a given comic.
- Genre Blind: The man in this strip thinks it a good idea to buy a newspaper with the headline "Local Man Devoured by Newspaper Box" from a newspaper box. No points awarded for guessing what happens next.
- Godwin's Law of Time Travel: In full force in this strip. In fact, it's used as instantly recognizable evidence that time travel has occurred.
- Going Commando: Ms. Fanservice casually admits she lost her underwear while trying on a swimsuit and just decided to go without. "But is underwear even really necessary these days?... Maybe I'll just go ahead and 86 the panties in the future."
- Heroic Comedic Sociopath: The Sphynx kills humans all the time, but it's played for laughs. It helps that she seems to dine mainly on Jerkass Victims.
- Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act:
- Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Subverted, as the Horsemen presented turn out not to be the biblical ones, but the Horsemen of the "Atheist" Apocalypse, respectively Science, Progress, Reason, and Equality. Rather than heralding the end of the world, they create a utopia.
- Humans Are the Real Monsters: Expressed by many characters, especially the Sphinx. However she does mention they have redeeming qualities in Monsters Playing Poker
- I'm a Humanitarian: A guy that ends up in Hell admits to having been a cannibalistic serial killer, but denies not cleaning up after his dog.
- Implausible Hair Color: The pink haired girl... unless she's working at a soul-crushing job in which case it spontaneously shifts to a dull brown.
- Well, the first time she actually had to go out and deliberately dye it so that she could even get the soul-crushing job. After that it sort of started taking care of itself.
- Ironic Hell: Has been known to play with this one. On one occasion a misfile causes a guy to be signed up for the wrong ironic punishment, which is immediately corrected when he takes offense to being buried in dog feces (having always made it a point to clean up after his dog, even if he did kill five people). In another one, Hell's latest tenant frustrates the demon assigned to him for orientation because here, yet again, is some dipshit who thinks a single lifetime of being a dull little guy has given him the guile to outwit millenia-old beings who have honed the craft of eternal suffering; then his attempt to prove his point ends up seriously screwing his pooch.
- Jackass Genie: "I would like everything I could ever need!"
- Lampshaded: "...Oh. You're one of those genies."
- Medieval Morons: Lampshaded in this comic. "These are the pyramids had ancient people actually been as stupid and primitive as people assume they were".
- Medium Awareness: These guys know the title of the comic they appear in.
- And these guys know what trope is being used in the comic.
- Meet Cute: Deconstructed, then reconstructed in the comic of the same name.
- Monster Clown: "Heyyy kids! It's me, Sweeny the f***ng clown! Who wants to see what the inside of a larynx looks like?"
- Ms. Fanservice: Found here, here and here. Although, because she seems unaware of her effect on the opposite sex, it overlaps with Innocent Fanservice Girl. In the third one, it shows that she is saddened by the fact that every man she might like disappears. She's wearing the man's hat when she sighs at the bus stop.
- Suicide Attack: Lampooned in one strip with the demon girl; while receiving new arrivals at the Gates of Hell, she asks one - a fat, ugly guy - if he's a virgin. When he responds "yes", she tells him to wait with a bunch of other fat, ugly guys, saying that "once we have 70 of you guys, we'll need you in Suicide Bomber Hell".
- No Name Given: One of the central characters, initially pictured with pink hair, has always gone unnamed, and according to the artist in one comments string, always will. Her official moniker is Pink Haired Girl, abbreviated as PHG.
- Most of the other characters have been named, but only very subtly. Sometimes so subtly that their names are only found in the titles of the comic's image files—a good example: Ms. Fanservice is named Justine, seen only in the filename of this comic.
- Odd Friendship: The Sphinx and Pink Haired Girl. It's working out quite well for them.
- Organ Autonomy: Played straight here, here, and a variation can be found here.
- Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions / Belief Makes You Stupid: Let's just say that Winston is definitely one of those Atheists.
- Periphery Demographic: Discussed In-Universe in a strip on the omnipresence of subtle weirdness, which gave that page its picture.
- Platonic Prostitution: Played with in this strip.
- Pointy-Haired Boss: The Emperor Of The Universe is the ultimate pointy-haired Bad Boss. "YES!!! AN OPPORTUNITY TO INFLICT SUFFERING!!"
- Post Modernism: Experiments with everything from Genre Savvy characters (as seen here) to bizarre, artistically-inclined layouts, and Deconstruction of say, videogames. If this comic doesn't qualify as "Post-modern" then somebody has redefined "Post-modern" behind my back.
- Protagonist-Centered Morality: In-universe. The Pink Haired Girl states outright that she's okay with the Sphynx killing people as long as the Sphynx is nice to her personally.
- Psychological Horror: Used for plot basis on occasion, notably in Ethel Blackmoore; Horror Fiction Lady of the Night, A Christmas Eve in the Future and Choose Your Own Adventure.
- Shout-Out: A subtle one- the letters hanging from Princess Washburn's skirt (IEAIAIO) is the title of a song by System of a Down.
- Her skirt itself is very reminiscent of The Yellow Kid
- The first panel of Monsters Playing Poker is a Picture Pastiche of C.M. Coolidge's "Dogs Playing Poker".
- The time machine in this comic. Do the math and you'll see that 142 kilometers per hour equal 88 mph, and that's if you didn't see the flux capacitor.
- Shown Their Work: Moscow Metro is portrayed rather accurately, with proper Russian words and even with an allusion to a cult Russian film. (Though only the country of residence, Canada, seems to be known about the author, not the country of origin... So, it might be not “work” at all.)
- ...or maybe he went on vacation there.
- One of the other comics on Virus Comix site is about a Russian comicbook artist who is working in secret on a 1000 page masterwork. It's "Based On True Events", possibly signifying that this is Rowntree's actual history.
- Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: Meanders all over the scale, often multiple times within a single comic.
- Stable Time Loop: A man is selected by his religious organization to travel back in time in order to conduct an experiment in storytelling. He eventually comes to the realization that he was the founder of this religion.
- Terrible Interviewees Montage: It doesn't get more terrible than the Dating (Russian) roulette: Six speed dates in a row, you have to settle on ONE mandatory date without seeing the others after you make your choice or being allowed to pick someone you already rejected. Hope you don't land on the bullet!
- The is no bullet. The organizer keeps reusing the same five horrible people over and over, "accidentally" matching two contestants at interview number six who then bond over their shared experience and become new friends, running away together before meeting the so-called bullet.
- Those Wacky Nazis: Neo-Nazi Time Traveller Adventures!
- To Serve Man: The monsters- most notably the Sphinx- have a taste for people and are not remorseful about it.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: Best Friends Who Hate Each Other variety gets lampshaded.
- Vocal Minority: Gave that page its picture.
- Wall of Text: The most prominent feature of the comic. It's even lampshaded in the title. This one has to take the cake.
- When I Was Your Age: Parodies the "Uphill Both Ways" line in this comic. Turns out it is possible to walk to school and back uphill both ways, if you have a ridiculously tall house.
- Wrench Wench: Ms. Fanservice appears to like a good lawnmower as much as a skimpy outfit.
- You Bastard: Rowntree still appreciates it when bastards read his webcomic, though.
- Your Costume Needs Work: At Halloween, Frankenstein's Monster gets criticized because he's "trying too hard" to get his costume right.
- You Would Make a Great Model: This strip, which does feature a deserted warehouse. The girl in question is turned into a figurine for the Franklin Mint.
