BLAM / Webcomics

Webcomics have their share of Big Lipped Alligator Moments, too. Dada Comics have many more of these per capita, so they won't be listed here.

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• The appearances of the Halloween Monster in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!.
  • Later no longer applies, as it becomes a tradition to use this monster every Halloween, making it a running gag instead.
• Heroes Of Lesser Earth, on this page, Martin has swapped out his permanent flying ability for Animate Dead. It's played just once for laughs here, and he never uses it again.
• In Questionable Content:
  • The random death metal interlude here, drawn to commemorate the 666th strip.
  • Pintsize attempts to recreate the magic for strip #1337. It didn't work very well.
  • Another BLAM occurs in Questionable Content when three characters, two of them female, appear with mustaches. This is not explained or referenced on the site, though the creator did later say that it was a reference to the fact that it was published on Cinco De Mayo.
  • Hannelore walks home, encounters random yodeler with fairy wings and a badly behaved reindeer.
• The strip featuring Fruit Pie the Sorcerer in The Order of the Stick.
  • Word of God is that the idea for this strip came to the author in a fever dream.
  • And "A Brief Intermission", a "Let's All Go to the Lobby" parody. However, this later received a call back in this strip, which revealed that sentient movie theater snacks was just one of the many worlds created by the Gods that were destroyed by the Snarl.
• This strip early on in Penny Arcade where Tycho is a giant turnip in a sweater. No comment is made about this, and it never happens again.
  • In the book collection this strip appears in (Attack of the Bacon Robots!), Tycho explains that Gabe threatened to draw him this way until he bought a Dreamcast.
• "Surprise Ending" indeed: "Je suis de retour!"
• Between the end of Chapter 2 and the start of Chapter 3, Everyday Heroes had a filler of... pictures of mermaids and dragons drawn by the author's grandkids. Unfortunately, after Webcomics Nation died, it apparently took this page down with it since it wasn't uploaded to the new Everyday Heroes comic site and only shows up on the Wayback Machine as a broken image.
• Homestuck:
  • During the end of Act 4, The complete destruction of two planets is interrupted by a video game... with singing Squiddles??? It's explained that they're subconscious manifestation of the Horrorterrors half an act later, offering the protagonists a dream-state separate from the rapidly-Crapsackifying Derse and Prospit, but this still doesn't explain the appearance in the End of Act 4 flash.
  • Andrew Hussie's Author Avatar mourning over the death of a character from Hook. Which resulted in the largest "THIS IS STUPID" yet.
  • Some of the earlier flashes have a "Trickster Mode," where pressing certain keys will distort the flash into something else. Effects include giving John a Link outfit, Ness and his buddies making an appearance in a secret room, going into Problem Sleuth's office, and a brightly-colored John with a lollipop stuck in his hair floating near the corner of the screen. The candy-themed alternates specifically show up, as does the Final Fantasy room, but nothing else about them is ever mentioned again, and Trickster powers do not seem to have any connections with what is demonstrated on the mode itself. In fact, their design was even ret-conned to resemble Cherubim more.
    • The point is, if it's Homestuck, and it mentions 'Tricksters', then yes, it is this trope.
• In a comic that is otherwise a fairly ordinary retelling of Final Fantasy VI, we get to the boss battle with the two magitek knights in the Figaro desert. One of them appears to be... Cecil?
• Tragic Deaths has one in the first story arc. It's even lampshaded by Petalklunk.
• In Our Little Adventure, Julie sang about the glory which is Megaman in order to prove herself and get the pendant. This didn't work well, though she got the pendant anyway due to a much more efficient look through her thoughts.
• Peter and Company has a scene where a sentient unicycle crashes a party, makes a show of how egotistical it is, and then rides off to who knows where, never to be spoken of again. Word of God is that it's an inside joke. Still, there are less silly ways to have a unicycle make a cameo.
• Another literal invocation from Regular Guy here.
• In one strip of Darths & Droids (done on April Fools Day, that context can get lost when reading the entire series), during the Attack of the Clones sequence, Padme "dies" in the desert. The scene then abruptly shifts to screencaps of the scene from The Princess Bride where the Grandson argues with Grandpa over Westley's death (only now they're arguing about Padme's). To make it even more confusing, Grandpa has the yellow speech balloons that indicates he's the GM, while the Grandson has the white speech balloons of a roleplayer. And the Grandson even calls him "Grandpa". (Is the GM a grandfather?!) Keep in mind, this strip is supposed to be about a bunch of players at a Tabletop RPG.
  • This is apparently a reference to the campaign the players ran (offscreen) between Episode I and Episode II, which applied the same idea to The Princess Bride as the main comic does to Star Wars. Even in that context it still makes little sense.
• This was one result of Dan of El Goonish Shive declaring that he's bringing silly back. One such incident involved Sarah calling for the Demonic Duck for absolutely no logical reason, leading to a bizarre exchange that ends with the duck jumping out of the car, and the conversation picking up exactly where it left off.
• Drowtales had a random dwarf dressed as Santa Claus with "Merry Christmas Elven Bastards" carved into his cannon. Besides being a rather bizarre fourth-wall breaking moment outside of a chibi page (where such things usually occur), he never shows up again after this page. Word of God is that it was a joke since the page was published around Christmas.
• The Mulberry comic "Jack the Ripper" has Jack's attempts to download illegal patches invoke the presence of some cartoon all-stars hoping to talk him out of it. Mulberry squishes the characters before they can actually go find Jack, and she never tells anyone that she met them.
  • Word of God says this scene was originally part of a Brick Joke, with different characters coming later to lecture Jack, but the second scene would have disrupted the flow.
• To celebrate the 1500th strip of The Whiteboard, a big can-can line appears out of nowhere on Red's paintball field with most of the main cast, leaving behind some debris in the last panel along with a very confused Pirta.
• Sonichu has the Family Guy "skitch".
  • Also, the reenactment of a scene◊ from Beavis And Butthead for no purpose other than Author Appeal.
• xkcd:
  • Pretty much any strip that involves Beret Guy. Even in a series known for zaniness and little plot continuity, he and his train of thought are so over-the-top strange as to delve straight into BLAM territory.
  • Ron Paul evolving into Tron Paul in the 5-part "Secretary" comic. The rest of the mini-series is within the bounds of reality. That bit definitely isn't, but no explanation is given, there's little point to it besides the pun, and once Paul turns back into a mild-mannered geezer, no one says anything about it. Actually, the senators apparently forgot about the entire hearing-with-a-psycho they just did because wow the whole building is a giant ball pit now, hooray!
• Dragon Ball Multiverse: The beginning of the tournament's second day is celebrated with a musical performance by the Star Wars Cantina Band. Pan and Tapion enjoy the musical interlude, Bra, Frieza's Family and Babidi do not. Zen Buu thought it was so bad that he demanded that they give their instruments to him so he could play.
• Mass Effect 3: Generations:
  • The so-called “Neo Medi-gel” is mentioned once, with absolutely no explanation of what it is, when it was made, etc. and promptly forgotten again, doing nothing but disconnecting the comic from canon even further.
  • Also, the so-called “vorcha bats” which are presumably husks… as are quarian spider husks, never seen or hinted at in any of the games.
• Awful Hospital is full of these, typically when either the author or the readers intervene directly. Most notable examples:
  • >SEDUCE HAMBURGER. This lasts five pages.
  • April Fools. (According to the next page, Fern zoned out apropos of nothing and canonically hallucinated this entire sequence.)
  • OH GOD YOU AGAIN WHERE IS THIS.
• Dot X has the chapter "Colds Holder," where Speedy, Gell, Sparx, and Hurricane try to move a really heavy fridge. Gell takes Sparx's hat. A Squarebot was weighing down the fridge. This is never mentioned again.
• Whomp! has an example with Barfield, a three-page storyline with neither a proper beginning nor a punchline, about Norm, a sad old man sitting out by a bar in a field lamenting over his miserable life. Surreal stuff happens, and Norm later finds out that he's been unconscious and hallucinated the whole thing. The story is never explained, and never shows up again.
• Girl Genius: Ghostly submarine pirates. Dr. Rakethorn says that he has so many questions, and to be honest, so do we. The Lampshade Hanging in the next strip implies that there were plenty of released experiments, but that only raises further questions.

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