Follow TV Tropes

Following

Butt Monkey / Comic Books

Go To

The following have their own pages:


Other
  • Astro City has Glue-Gun, an obvious Expy of Paste-Pot Pete. If something embarrassing happens to a villain in Astro City, odds are good Glue-Gun will be the victim.
  • Cacofonix the bard in Asterix is the village punching bag. He gets beaten up whenever he tries to sing, and quite often when he doesn't even try to sing, such as when Obelix accidentally uprooted his house. At the end of most stories he's Bound and Gagged. He tends to do better when he saves the day in some way (like in Asterix and the Normans), or when the village is doing badly — a particularly sad sequence in The Roman Agent shows Cacofonix, who has not been involved in the events of the story so far, sitting at the feast table like he rarely gets to but, because the village is now consumed with suspicion and paranoia, feeling like he's on his own. Though, at the same time, when Cacofonix is under threat of the Romans, like in Asterix the Gladiator and The Mansion of the Gods the villagers do everything to rescue and/or defend him.
  • Walter The Softy and Cuthbert Cringeworthy from The Beano have to undergo torment, harassment and bullying that would destroy any normal boy their age. To say nothing of Calamity James.
  • Bécassine: Bécassine, whose naivité and clumsiness makes her somewhat of The Woobie too.
  • An almost literal example is Kessler, a.k.a. Monkey in The Boys. The assistant to CIA Director Rayner, who over the course of the series was raped by animals twice (the first time earning him his nickname), beaten unconscious by a paraplegic athlete he tried to force himself onto, and kicked in the groin by Butcher so many times he was rendered impotent. When he's temporarily made CIA Director and tries to use his newfound authority to get payback on Butcher, it leads to his aforementioned second rape by an animal, specifically Butcher's bulldog.
  • Cubitus: Balthazar the neighbour cat. Cubitus always thinks up crafty ways to find an excuse to beat him up. Though, the cat often deserves it and Cubitus himself sometimes gets his comeuppance.
  • De Kiekeboes: Balthazar, an incompetent villain who is more a nuisance than a help to his fellow criminals.
  • Dominic and Claire: Chester, Claire's older brother; he's always on the receiving end of Dominic's antics.
    • In one of the two stories from Funnies, he keeps trying to make a phone call to Dominic's mother, only to have Dominic constantly answer the phone to Chester's frustration.
    • He doesn't fare better in other stories, one even have him getting drenched by a jet of water from a clam.
  • Peter Fox was proven to be the Butt Monkey of FoxTrot by the strip's first week.
  • Manhog from Frank. He is shown to be quite bitter about his lot in life but is usually too stupid to fix anything about it.
  • Jon Arbuckle of Garfield is an extreme example, as seen to the right. That being said, it's all but outright stated that Jon is successful enough in his career as a cartoonist to maintain a middle-class lifestyle in the suburbs, even with Garfield being a Big Eater.
  • Hacken from Hitman, perhaps the best defining moment of his crappy luck was when the characters were fighting their way out of an aquarium full of zombie sea animals (Long Story) he gets his hand bitten by a baby seal and in panic chops it of only to find out a few scenes later that these zombies aren’t contagious, cue to panel of him staring sadly at his new stump.
  • Jommeke: Filiberke, who is often ridiculed by Flip and put down by Jommeke for his often bizarre role-playing, like pretending to be a kangaroo.
  • Lucky Luke: Averell Dalton, a dumb and hungry outlaw who is always a source for Joe's irritation and anger.
  • One of the last good things about MAD after all its old regular artists and writers started dying like flies, Monroe's title character is a definite example of a Butt Monkey, with ridiculously neglectful parents, a cruel bully who constantly leaves him battered and bloody, his only friend is a nerdy toadlike kid who is the only person liked even less than him, and any spot of hope for him is usually destroyed by the end of the story.
  • Nero: Meneer Pheip, a Henpecked Husband who is domineered by his wife, but also ridiculed by the others for being arrogant and unable to speak Dutch without intertwining it with Gratuitous French.
  • Charlie Brown from Peanuts is a pretty well known example, as shown in the page image. Woodstock and Snoopy have their moments as well.
    • Word of God says that Charles Schulz based Charlie Brown's eternal pessimism and butt monkey qualities off himself. So Charlie Brown is an Author Avatar.
  • Herr Starr from Preacher is the recipient of ever-increasing quantities of humiliating violence. As a child, he has one of his eyes put out and goes bald; during the plotline of the comic, he gets raped by a male prostitute, has a large scar carved into his head (which makes it look like a giant... Uh...), has one ear shot off, narrowly escapes cannibals who eat his leg, and finally has his genitals eaten by a Rottweiler, leading to his forlorn use of the phrase "my cock is in the bitch's mouth and not in a good way".
    • And finally, to add insult to injury - literally - at the crescendo of his crusade of vengeance against Jesse Custer, he is handed prank binoculars and winds up addressing his troops for his final battle with black circles inked around his eyes.
    • Though one wonders why a trained military man, who never goes unarmed, who is the second most powerful man in the entire WORLD...could get overtaken by a male prostitute.
  • Quick and Flupke: Agent 15 is always the foil of Quick and Flupke's jokes.
  • Under Gail Simone Red Sonja has become one. Despite her unmatched martial skill she gets exiled, plagued, kicked into the mud, rebuffed by bouncers, rejected for sex, and spanked mid-combat. While a departure from earlier characterizations, this makes her a much more identifiable hero.
  • Brainy Smurf of The Smurfs is the village's butt monkey.
  • Erica Pierce from Solar, Man of the Atom is a rather unlucky woman. First off, she was with Solar when he had his accident in the reactor which gave her powers as well (she doesn't notice...at first), she later tries to have sex with the titular Solar but is turned down, Solar takes Erica with him outside the universe where she ends up cracking up do to her self-esteem issues, she tries to kill Solar due to the previous trip, Solar later on goes haywire which results in the universe being sucked into a black hole, she survives along with Solar, both of them being sent into a new universe. In the new universe, it's revealed that Erica (a another one albeit the same) has a abusive husband who impregnated her, said baby coming to life with powers similar to Solar, the baby ends up killing herself due to its power which traumatizes Erica even more, and finally she kills her husband in a fit of rage. She is then killed by the Erica from the previous universe, who takes her son Albert with her into hiding.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • In Spy vs. Spy, Whenever the Grey spy makes the scene, the black and white spies lose every time. When she isn't present, though, whenever one spy wins, the other looks fitting for this trope. But since the victor alternates, this randomly switches.
  • Suske en Wiske: Lambik, who is always beaten up, falling down or ridiculed by the others for being vain and arrogant.
  • Captain Haddock, Cuthbert Calculus and Thomson and Thompson are the Buttmonkeys from Tintin.
  • Tom Poes: Olivier B. Bommel, whose impulsiveness always gets him in trouble. Marquis de Canteclaer looks down upon him because Bommel is beneath his noble heritage and Officer Bulle Bas always suspects Bommel to be the suspect of every possible crime.
  • Even The Transformers has a few in its setting. The dorky Autobot psychologist Rung is first introduced being as a friendless model-ship-building nerd getting beat up in a bar and thrown across a table. He's been mugged in an alleyway for effectively no reason by Brainstorm, threatened by Fortress Maximus, shot in the face by Swerve, forced to listen to Swerve apologize for 147 straight hours while in a coma, picked up by Swerve to beat an enemy spy unconscious, and everyone forgets his name. The Decepticons get Nautilator, whose who is a both a complete loser and subject to a lot of comical mistreatment thanks to the fact that he's an underwater excavation specialist and part of the Decepticon aquatic strike force who both rusts and swims like an AMC Gremlin. He fulfills his function by accidentally sinking himself to the bottom of the ocean and stumbling across useful salvage while begging to be rescued by a team that would rather forget he exists. Both the TFWiki and our own have compared Nautilator to Doctor Zoidberg, which says a lot.
  • Transhuman by Jonathan Hickman has a group of literal butt-monkeys. That is they are supposedly the showcase for a new type of genetic modification designed to give you superpowers, yet upon being sent to recapture a group of escaped, enhanced intelligence monkeys, they are captured and anally raped these monkeys live on TV. People make jokes about this, even to their faces, for the rest of their lives. The genetic modifications eventually have horrible side effects as well.
  • Urbanus: Dikke Herman, an obese child with glasses and buck teeth who is frequently and sometimes (but not always) undeservedly the victim of other people's violence.
  • Filler Bunny from various Jhonen Vasquez comics was created purely to entertain the audience by being tortured. Appropriately enough, at one point he has a monkey climb up his butt.
    • Don't forget Todd (Squee) from Jhonen's comic Squee; throughout the series, he gets frequently harassed by space aliens who want to probe him, a gigantic dust mite, and his cyborg-Grandpa; his parents continuously ignore him, the worst offender being his dad, who constantly says stuff like, "I haven't smiled since the day you were born" (at one point he's even seen watching a video of Squee's birth being played in reverse); his classmates constantly pick on him and laugh at him for no apparent reason whatsoever; his only real friends are Shmee (his stuffed bear), Pepito (the son of Satan), and Johnny (Nny); heck, at the end of the series, his parents place him in a mental institution!
  • Violine has Kombo, an African witch-doctor and reluctant ally to Violine, who always causes or gets in trouble.
  • In the German comic Werner: Meister Röhrich.


Top