The Fuzzy Five
Appearing at first glance to be an exercise in Product Placement, but actually a funny and intelligent Embellished Webcomic about five Living Toys and their companion humans, written by Charles D. and drawn by Melissa Zayas. Find it here.
Contains examples of:
- Bland-Name Product: In this strip, Otto is using a search engine called Searchy with a suspiciously familiar colour scheme.
- Bonus Material: The strip commentary is sometimes excerpts from in-universe material. The first occurs at strip #6, with OMSU and U: A Prospective Student’s Guide, Page 27
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: e.g. here
- Coincidental Broadcast: Averted in this strip, where Claire turns off the radio in the middle of the relevant item.
- Counting Sheep: Parodied in this strip, where Claire counts copies of Otto in place of sheep.
- Cuteness Overload: Weaponised by Spirit the Fox in this strip.
- Everyone Meets Everyone: A major component of the first storyline.
- Everything's Better With Plushies: effectively the underlying assumption of the strip.
- How We Got Here: The first strip apparently starts In Medias Res, but after one frame, Spirit invites Otto to Flash Back to how it all got started.
- Lampshade Hanging: Twice in the first strip. See How We Got Here and Mr. Exposition.
- Living Toys (of course)
- Mr. Exposition: Claire lampshades her own expository speech in the last panel of the first page.
- Odd Friendship: Britnee the perky blonde and Meredith the Goth.
- Shout-Out: The Fluffton P.D. has an Officer Krupke. For extra points, the strip title is Hey, Look! Social Commentary!
- Social Semi-Circle: this strip
- Speechbubbles Interruption: A villain pops Meredith's (thought) bubble here.
- At the end of the first storyline, the box declaring the end obscures Nina Jr's assertion that no unseen force was going to interrupt them.
- Stealth Pun: e.g. "Ominous Mountain State University" is abbreviated (see above) as "OMSU and U".