Unreliable Narrator/Web Comics

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Unreliable Narrators in Web Comics include:

  • Homestuck has a subversion. After the reader goes to Doc Scratch for some god moding help, he gives out a huge amount of exposition and his self-serving memory prompts Andrew Hussie, the creator of the comic, to break through the "fifth wall" and beat him up.
    • Not that Hussie is that reliable either. He has the tendency to do Orwellian Retcons and Gaslighting his audience whenever convenient to the plot.
  • One of the characters in Flying Man and Friends, Harbor the loon, is convinced that his belly and the bottle of eggnog he carries with him count as two separate characters. This is never refuted, so it's his word against dead silence. In one strip, he somehow detonates an atomic bomb that is never explained (and is eventually undone). The entire story is unreliable.
  • In a story arc in early Order of the Stick, Durkon is lost in a dungeon with a female dwarf named Hilgya, and he's starting to fall for her. She tells him the story of how she came to be with the Linear Guild, where she's married against her will to a cruel husband who refuses to understand her needs, so she runs away to make her own life. The panels below her narration show that the "cruel husband" was in fact an extremely pleasant guy who was thrilled to be so lucky as to be married to a dwarf like Hilgya, and whose only need out of the relationship appeared to be meeting hers. In fact, in one panel he asks if she'd like a footrub, to which Hilgya responded, "You're crushing my spirit!" It doesn't matter which story Durkon believes, though-he's shocked either way, and commands her to return to her husband, telling her that doing your duty is everything that it means to be a dwarf, even or especially if it makes you miserable.
  • The Nightmare Fuel-ish animated short arc "Twist, Twist, Twist" in Jack. "I'm in hell because I love my wife... imagine that."
  • A Sluggy Freelance strip features Gwynn showing Torg one of Oasis's knives as evidence that Riff and Zoé are dead; after speaking with a psychiatrist, he realizes that it wasn't a knife, but the necklace that had bonded to Zoé.
    • Later, we believe we are seeing Torg relating his experiences in the Digbot city to Sasha, when in fact we are seeing Torg telling Kiki a largely embellished story about relating the experiences in the Digbot city to Sasha--a recursive flashback, as it were. While it definitely seemed weird, there was nothing to indicate that what we were seeing was false until Torg got killed by a porcupine on a boomerang—and then resurrected by said porcupine, who is also a necromancer.
    • An earlier example of things being "not quite what they seem" is the Oceans Unmoving arc. When we'd last left Bun-Bun, he had just been thrown out of the time stream, so it's not unreasonable to believe that the recently-deposed "Eater of Holidays" is Captain Bun-Bun. Actually, the traitorous first mate Blacksoul is the Bun-Bun we're familiar with, and the captain we've been following is a younger version that had yet to meet Torg and the others.
    • The story about Riff sawing Gwen in half with dimensional portals, just a tall tale Torg had spun alt-Agent Rammer.
    • A few of the Christmas stories, including a "Gift of the Maji" variation in which Torg and Riff sold their shoulders to science to pay for each other's coat/flannel...but they didn't appear shoulderless to the old man Torg told the story in a bar.
    • Torg's story to the storyteller in the original Stormbreaker saga. He gives an account that's at least partially the story of Army of Darkness including telling the storyteller he had a chainsaw for a hand. This calls into question the rest of the story, some of which is obviously proven true but the rest, we're never certain how much is real and how much is Torg 'embellishing'.
    • Many of the stories Torg tells Zoe about his garden also qualify.
    • Has anyone noticed that five of the six examples listed here are narrated by Torg?
  • Megatokyo has a consistent running theme of different perceptions of reality and what events fit into which character's reality, creating what is, in effect, an entire cast of unreliable narrators -what is perfectly obvious and logical for one character is dismissed out of hand as impossible by another, if it gets noticed at all.
    • Of course, considering how often it comes up, even so far as to be lampshaded by both characters and the author, this is probably more of an Unreliable Author.
      • Also, since all of the examples above are about Pirovision being unable to see Largoland, it's worth pointing out that it works both ways.
    • Additionally, nature and circumstances of Piro and Miho's "relationship" differ greatly depending on who's telling the story.
  • In Collar 6, Butterfly and Trina give mutually exclusive versions of how Butterfly got information on Michelle's techniques from Trina, and Word of God has confirmed that this was intentional. Its unusual, in that both of them presented versions that made themselves look worse Butterfly claiming she tortured Trina, and Trina claiming she gave up the information freely.
  • What the Fu is narrated by the main character, who sometimes pads out the blind spots with imaginary scenes, which employ even broader stereotypes than the comic generally does.
  • Schlock Mercenary had one scene narrated via "The Memoirs of Jud Shafter, K.F.D.A. Commando"—not quite in sync with panels. Later this bitten him in the butt (sorry).
  • None of the Scandinavian countries are telling the whole unvarnished truth about Norway's butter crisis.