Characters / Madness Combat

Every Madness Combat character is unique enough on their own to have a respective mention of associated tropes.

Voice acting credits refer to the VAs from the Project Nexus game.

For characters from the Project Nexus games, go here.

Beware of unmarked spoilers!

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Protagonists/The Anti-AAHW/Status Quo:

Hank J. Wimbleton

Hank J. Wimbleton

Hank in his iconic MC7 (Consternation) outfit.

^{Click here to see his appearance from Aggregation onwards}

Voiced by: Krinkels

The "Protagonist" of the series. Hank is partially responsible for kicking the plot of the series. Existing for seemingly no reason but to kill everything in his path, Hank is an absolute monster in combat, skilled in any weapon he can pick up.

He first started out as an ordinary guy who started a brawl over a boombox. Then, he went to kill someone named The Sheriff for unknown reasons. Dying in his first attempt, he was revived and he tried again. During his second attempt, the Sheriff activated a device called the "Improbability Drive" causing the destruction of reality and bizarre random events to happen, thus setting in motion a chain of incidents that continue to affect the series to this day.

After succeeding in killing the Sheriff, Hank then chose to hunt down the newly zombified Tricky, but was unable to succeed due to the timely intervention of Jebus. Using a suicide bomb, Hank manages to kill himself and Jebus. Hank has somehow been able to survive the past events and continued his mission, but Jebus has also survived the encounter.

In the heat of a fight between Hank and Jebus, Tricky suddenly appears and establishes himself as another more deadly nemesis for Hank. After the clown becomes empowered by his Portable Improbability Drive, he uses his new form to torment and chase Hank, vowing to make him suffer.

Seemingly growing tired of fighting, dying and being resurrected repeatedly, Hank is given a merciful end by Jebus. But he is revived once more by two new protagonists, this time specifically to fight The Auditor. And thus, he decides to fight once more...

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• Adaptational Villainy: While he's definitely not a good person in the main series, he at least fights for a good purpose, the first few episodes of the series not withstanding. In Project Nexus he turns on his companions after stopping Phobos, blasting Christoff off the tower and revealing that his goal is not to save Nevada, but rather to destroy Project Nexus, simply because he was ordered to, and stating that he always wanted to kill Sanford and Deimos.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: Hank's a Nominal Hero on a good day and revels in bloodshed for its own sake, but happens to oppose even worse entities and organizations. Not so much in Project Nexus where he's revealed to just be another brand of destructive force in the end practically eager to wipe Nevada off the map.
• Alien Blood: It's easy to miss, but like Sanford, his blood stains become black after The Auditor gives him his arm back and heals him in hell.
• An Arm and a Leg: His mutant arm gets torn off by Tricky in Expurgation, it doesn't slow him down all that much, and he later gets a new metal one. The same arm had also been mutilated by the Auditor one episode prior in Abrogation, but it grew back that time.
• Anti-Hero: He's not that much of a good guy but he's still fighting against an oppressive power in Nevada.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In a wanted poster in Antipathy, Hank is apparently wanted for distorting reality, felony evasion, public urination, and crime.
• Artificial Limbs: From Antipathy onwards, Hank has a large metal lower jaw replacement after Tricky decapitated him, mangled his head, and then resurrected him. When he's Magnified at the end of Aggregation, it becomes a more complex, heavily armored artificial replacement.
• Ax-Crazy: The very first Madness Combat had him killing thirty people over a boombox and admitting to having a good time doing it. It reaches its peak in Antipathy, where Hank is excessively brutal even by his standards.
• Back from the Dead: Hank has died at least 7 times over. And each time he died, a different (and separate) version of his S-3LF appears in Hell. Being revived by Tricky and the Improbability Drive or by 2BDamned's calculations is how he keeps coming back in more recent episodes.
• Badass Back: Attacking Hank from behind usually just means you'll die faster. At least, from Apotheosis onwards, presumably having learned from his first two deaths being the result of Jesus shooting and stabbing him from behind.
• Badass Longcoat: He sports a black trenchcoat from Depredation onwards.
• Badass Normal: Started off as a man with no powers and no super strength, but a wealth of combat knowledge and increasingly more strategic tactics.
• Badasses Wear Bandanas: In Depredation, Antipathy and Consternation.
• Bandaged Face: Well, he goes through a lot of things, but it's pretty safe to say his face isn't the only thing bandaged.
• Bandage Mummy: Slowly becomes covered in more and more bandages throughout the series as his wounds pile up; by the time of MC 5, his entire torso and about half of his head are wrapped in bandages due to him being blown up at the end of 4.
• Bash Brothers: He and Sanford (and Deimos, however tragically brief) are this from the ending of Aggregation onwards.
• BFG: In the near end of 10 he gets his hands on a GOLEM/G03LM-sized M-249 SAW. In 11, he also takes the resurrected Tricky's M60 for a few moments.
• Blind Obedience: When he's given an objective, he'll fulfill it to the exact letter, as desired by the client. He won't even bother thinking about the ramifications of it and earnestly has no clue why anyone else would care. Not even being told that his objective is quite literally synonymous with "destroy the world" gets any sort of hesitation out of him.
• Blood Knight: He always seems interested in violence. Although it's downplayed later on in Consternation when he finally gets sick of the number of times he has been revived just for the sake of killing more people. Not that he won't take advantage of the opportunity, mind you.
  • As the second part of 9.5 shows, Hank will even fight himself if the situation allows it, as it turns out that the version of him who died at the end of Consternation is still alive in The Other Place, and gets left behind at the end after fighting his Antipathy counterpart, whereupon he presumably continues his never-ending fight against the area's other inhabitants.
• Body Horror: He loses his jaw in Antipathy, and gets a mutant-like arm in Aggregation. In the former case, it gets worse after he survives a train crash, losing a top part of his skull, and yet is still able to stand up and fight.
• Bullet Time: Undergoes this in several scenes, mostly in episode 5, to frame his kills and imply his Super-Reflexes.
• Came Back Strong: Pretty much every one of his resurrections; for example, after being killed by a single L33T Agent in 4, he's shown mowing them down by the dozen after his resurrection in 5. Post-Magnification, he can ever trade blows with the Auditor.
• Chainsaw Good: In Consternation he opens up a weapons locker and sees a bunch of guns and a chainsaw, however he immediately grabs the chainsaw instead and uses it to kill MAG Agent: Torture. He uses a Chainsaw again in Chapter 2 of 9.5, specifically his Antipathy self who ironically tries to use it on his Consternation self.
• Character Tics: Even as far back as the first animation, when Hank gets frustrated from getting hit often enough, he visibly seethes and clenches his fists.
• Combat Pragmatist: Be it a piece of metal from a wall, a giant axe, or even someone else's head, if Hank can hold it, he will beat you to death with it.
• Cool Shades: His red shades seen in Depredation and Antipathy. He has them switched out for goggles to a similar effect in Consternation.
• Death Seeker: The beginning of Consternation has Tricky trying to revive him and Hank flat-out refusing. When Hank gets revived anyway he tells Tricky to knock it off. He also insists on destroying Nevada in Project Nexus even though a better solution exists and attacks Sanford and Deimos when they don't let him, creating a situation where he dies either way.
• Determinator: Nothing will stop him from killing you, not even death itself…
• Decomposite Character: There are at least two Hanks running around. One of them, sporting his Antipathy appearance, becomes the mainline Hank of the animations that overwhelms foes with sheer force but is also more of a team player. The other one, wearing his outfit from Consternation, goes on to star in the Project Nexus games, where he's comparatively Weak, but Skilled and more reliant on his weapon handling and reflexes, as well as being visibly more apathetic.
• Desperation Attack: Seems to gain a form of these whenever he gets harmed. He randomly gets stronger and faster after getting hurt; notably, in Antipathy, he seems to have this permanently until he fights Tricky at the end of the episode. (He also appears to twitch a lot in the episode, most likely as a side effect of this.)
• Divergent Character Evolution: Looked like a plain Madness Combat character at first, but then got a different look with each passing instalment.
• Dumb Muscle: Hank in Aggregation, whose transformation (at least according to Word of God) makes him mentally retarded. However, this borders on Informed Flaw: he tricks the guards into wasting their bullets on Deimos's corpse, stops two Elite Mooks with a pipe bomb he constructed, plays Rock–Paper–Scissors with Sanford to decide who enters The Auditor's tower first, and fights just as quickly and competently as ever. It's possible the Emergency Transformation just made him bigger and gave him a cool mutant arm, enhancing his fighting skills to the point that his other, still impressive stats simply pale in comparison. This has lead to the belief that Deimos intended to set it much higher, if he didn't get shot up by the possessed ATP Engineer trailing him. Then it turns out to be true in a different sense. Each time Hank dies, he is sent to That Other Place and that snapshot of his mind continues to exist there. When Hank is revived, the consciousness of his Antipathy S-3LF is retained instead of his later Consternation S-3LF.
• Elemental Punch: After touching the Auditor's halo in Abrogation he later develops an electrical punch empowered by Normality energy, capable of causing a MAG Agent's body to explode and even harming the Auditor.
• Empowered Badass Normal: Is definitely one by Abrogation after touching the Auditor's halo and absorbing some of its power, but may have been one as far back as Depredation.
• Evil Hero: He's akin to Caim from Drakengard in this regard. It's not the body count; it's how much he clearly enjoys it, clearing a path across Nevada without mercy of any kind. Project Nexus sees him shedding the 'hero' part at the end, not caring if he destroys Nevada utterly and delighting in the opportunity to kill Sanford and Deimos.
• Eye Glasses: With his "Antipathy" design, his glasses occasionally squint. In "Antipathy", it makes him look determined, while in 9.5, it makes him look uncomfortable.
• Eye Scream: It's easy to miss, but in Incident 011A, V4 gouges into one of his eyes with it's claw before ripping him in half.
• Feel No Pain:
  • He takes a lot of damage, but it barely seems to hinder him. Averted at the start of Consternation, however, where one of the static-y lines of dialogue during his death scene at the start is "PAIN > THRESHOLD". Which is somewhat justified considering half of his head is just gone.
  • In Abrogation, he is back on it to an absurd degree thanks to his new, bigger mutant form, managing to shrug off his face being burnt point-blank, being embedded into a wall, and a a knife being stabbed into his head.
• Fun With Blenders: In Incident: 001A, he happens across a giant blender after fighting his way into an AAHW building after hiding in a parcel. After more Agents and a Mag Agent V2 arrive, he wastes no time in seeing what it can do.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: With his strength, he can beat you to death in seconds. He actually has to resort to this in 10 and 11 due to his sheer size and strength making it impractical for him to wield regular-sized weapons.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Hank has a habit of tossing people around. At several points, he resorts to beating agents to death with (among other things) severed heads and whole bodies.
• Guest Fighter: He (and Nevada) show up as an extra combatant in the September 27, 2007 update of Newgrounds Rumble. He's also due to appear as an alternate character in the upcoming full release of Friday Night Funkin'.
• The Hero: He's the main character and is referred to as "Our Hero" in the earlier installments, though he does very little to live up to the title.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: At the end of Incident: 010A, he gets ripped in two by a Mag Agent V4.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Hank has suffered a couple of deaths involving this; Tricky has repeatedly stabbed him with the signpost that he originally used to kill him, and Jebus Mercy Killed him with the infamous stab, lift, and headshot from Apotheosis.
• Iconic Item: While every episode that features him goes through an entire arsenal's worth of weaponry, these are the most well-known.
  • Apotheosis introduces his Katana/Dragon Sword, taking it from a grunt.
  • In Depredation, he takes Dual Mini-Uzis from a gun locker and uses them for almost half of the animation.
  • In Antipathy, he carries both a Giant Battle Axe and a P90 which he uses in the near-end of the animation.
  • In Consternation, he picks up a Chainsaw which he steals from a weapons locker favoring it over the guns that were offered in that same locker.
  • In Aggregation & Abrogation, another Giant Battle Axe stolen from Mag Agent: V3 (now MAG-sized and named the Megahammer in Project Nexus) alongside a G03LM-sized M249 SAW.
  • In Expurgation, he gains a large modified SCR Pistol and another (much more sinister-looking) Dragon Sword.
• Iconic Outfit: His appearance in Consternation (pictured above) is his most well-known incarnation, and the default that Krinkels uses for non-canon animations.
• Implacable Man: He's been shot, stabbed, set on fire, blown up, repeatedly dismembered by a homicidal clown, and literally gone through Hell several times. Absolutely none of this has kept him down.
• Improvised Weapon: His nature as a Combat Pragmatist often sees him using whatever is within reach to kill his victims. Notably, the Antipathy version of Hank is so aggressive and bloodthirsty, that on two separate occasions (in 6 and 9.5), he used decapitated agent heads to whack his enemies.
• Informed Flaw: Hank's mental retardation from episode 9 onwards. After his transformation and resurrection, he uses intelligent tactics (MacGyvering up a bomb and tossing it at Elite Mooks after distracting them with the corpse of Deimos), uses the environment to deploy traps, hangs back to let Sanford take care of enemies armed with guns, makes use of martial arts, and keeps his gun trained on the exit when riding an elevator. He also adapts quickly to the Auditor's changing tactics. If anything, he's more careful than before his resurrection.
• Irony: The Antipathy version of Hank was where his Death Seeker tendencies began to show. He's also the one that was plucked from Hell to be resurrected in the Magnified body in Aggregation.
• Katanas Are Just Better: He seems to enjoy using his katana a lot, as it is his primary weapon in the Project Nexus Story Mode and it appears several times in the animations. Also, he prominently dual-wields Uzis all throughout Apotheosis. Another common weapon that he is seen using is the M1911A1 and it's variants. They even have Thai inscriptions on the flat of the blade.
• Lack of Empathy: Hank doesn't really care about people, as Word of God clarifies that "Hank’s interpret of caring is needing someone. Like caring after your tools", which shows in his behavior towards Sanford and Deimos in Project Nexus, where he constantly leaves them to go do his own thing, and in "Seeking Asylum", he lacks cooperative tendencies when tested. Ultimately, he ends up betraying Sanford and Deimos, and gleefully admits he's been wanting to kill them.
• Made of Iron:
  • He managed to be greatly injured, but not killed, in extreme circumstances, such as the train crash in Antipathy and having half his skull destroyed at the beginning of Consternation.
  • Even more so after he is Magnified. He's hit much more often by agents than before, but thanks to his newfound strength, regular-sized weapons no longer slow him down at all. Only a Mag-sized gun, getting his mutant arm ripped off, and a grenade being set off in his face have managed to cause any significant damage to him, and in the first two cases, he got better.
• Masking the Deformity: Hank starts to wear a bandana over his mouth in Episode 7 after losing his lower jaw in an exceptionally messy decapitation.
• Me's a Crowd: As revealed in Chapter 2 of 9.5, there's two (or even more) Hanks running around in Hell, with one being Consternation Hank and the other being Antipathy Hank. The two are both brutal combatants but Antipathy Hank is shown to be more violent and aggressive; upon seeing Consternation Hank, he immediately tries to kill him. It would seem that every time Hank's been killed and revived, a duplicate of himself was left behind; who's to say there aren't other incarnations in Hell, still kicking ass in undeath?
• McNinja: His outfits starting from Depredation invokes this trope, alongside his tendency to use a Katana and overall high agility and killing prowess. Project Nexus outright call his outfit the "Gun Ninja" aesthetic.
• Mirror Match: A variant of it pops up in Chapter 2 of 9.5, where two incarnations of Hank, his Antipathy and Consternation selves briefly get into a tussle upon meeting each other (with Antipathy Hank initiating it), the fight is interrupted by Doc picking up the wrong (Antipathy) Hank while Deimos is bringing him back to life.
• Mysterious Middle Initial: It's unknown what the "J" in "Hank J Wimbleton" stands for. Although, according to Krinkles, it stands for "Motherfucker". This could just be him Trolling, though.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Clutching the Halo morphs Mag Hank's crustacean tentacle-like appendage into a hand and gives him the power to deal out electric-charged punches. Potentially justified, considering the abilities the Halo has shown in the past.
• Nominal Hero: His personal responsibilities regarding the power struggles he finds himself in begin and end with his own interests, and those interests are fuelled by his anger and pettiness. That being said, the biggest threat to him, an agency formed in response to his rampages specifically, is also a supernaturally-led organization focused on establishing an iron grip on Nevada at all costs.
• Non-Standard Character Design: His Aggregation form has a single full arm and a "normal" floating hand, as opposed to two floating hands, and lacks the facial cross. This is presumably to emphasise the effects of Deimos' botched Magnification attempt on him.
• Offhand Backhand: Seems to be fond of this move, as he's shown repeatedly punching away enemies with one hand without looking.
• Off with His Head!: At the end of Depredation, Tricky rips Hank's head from his body then smashes it repeatedly against the ground.
• One-Man Army: Dear lord, is he ever. As of Expurgation, he's racked up a kill count of over 600 across the series, counting for almost 48% of the total body count of the series.
• Pet the Dog: A hypothetical and nigh-literal case: Hank is a Blood Knight and a Nominal Hero on a good day, but according to Word of God, if animals existed in Nevada, Hank would take his time to pet cats.
• Pistol-Whipping: When his current gun runs out of ammo, he's not afraid to beat you to death with it.
• Post-Final Boss: Hank betrays Sanford and Deimos at the climax of MADNESS: Project Nexus by shooting Christoff off the Science Tower and refuses to back down from destroying the Project, forcing the duo to kill him in order to save Nevada from destruction. However, his fight is a lot more simple and straightforward compared to the Climax Boss that is Project Gestalt and Phobos and it's more of a quickly wrapped-up twist ending.
• Power Fist: His mutant arm gets upgraded to a metal one by the Auditor in Expurgation. It's also bulletproof, and still packs every bit as much punch.
• Power-Upgrading Deformation: Hank, revived for the seventh time, is now twice his size, has no more lines across his face, and has a crustacean-like arm where his right hand used to be. And it gives him a greater advantage in his fighting skills. His arm is eventually replaced with a metal version after the Auditor upgrades it in Expurgation, and he remains a rather curious case of a character in the series having a physical arm, artificial or not.
• Psycho for Hire: Becomes one of these in MADNESS: Project Nexus. Doc hires him to destroy Project Nexus, which is shown in a flashback where Hank takes an immediate fancy to a rocket launcher Doc happens to have in his office. Interestingly enough, Hank has a very professional mindset about this job, to the point that he is determined to destroy Project Nexus even when Christoff says that it could be salvaged and repurposed towards considerable good. However, Hank may have been using the original mission statement merely as an excuse to kill his comrades - Sanford and Deimos as well as Christoff - for fun once their business together was concluded.
• Punched Across the Room: Has dished out and received this in his many appearances. Most notably in the tenth episode after his mutation where he deals the odd One-Hit Kill just by punching some guys hard enough. He becomes a victim of this in 9.5 where a retainer sends him flying out of a room with one punch.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: He wears red spectacles in an odd variant of this trope, and his numerous victims can attest to his deadliness.
• The Right Hand of Doom: After his revival in Aggregation, he gains a large mutated red arm with a claw. For bonus points, this later becomes a proper hand.
• Sanity Slippage: Like Tricky, the constant resurrections begin visibly taking their toll on Hank's mind, and it shows in how increasingly brutal his methods of murder get. Once he's been Magnified, however, he starts showing signs of calming down somewhat.
  • It's especially notable given that the Antipathy version of Hank was revived in the Magnified body, where he was at his most aggressive, and suicidal.
• Scars Are Forever: Despite Tricky fully resurrecting and healing Hank in Consternation, Krinkels has indicated that Hank's jaw is still missing beneath the mask, presumably because Tricky had already pulverized it beyond repair two episodes prior. It even shows up in 9.5 where Hank's ninja mask is damaged and we get a brief glimpse of his metal jaw.
• Signature Move: Even before the aforementioned Sanity Slippage, a frequent move of his is to just rip someone's head off and bludgeon people with it.
• Sociopathic Hero: He's a psychopath who's our "hero".
• Small Name, Big Ego: His Project Nexus incarnation has a tendency to take all of the credit whenever the team as a whole manages to accomplish something, and constantly claims that he can fight Gestalt no problem. This reaches its climax when, after he, Sanford, Deimos and Jeb defeat Director Phobos and Project Gestalt, he shoots Jeb in the back and fights Sanford and Deimos, expecting to be able to win even when outnumbered. He loses.
• Super-Reflexes: Enough that he can dodge bullets and even deflect them with a sword without even skipping a beat.
• Super-Strength: Hank, an otherwise Badass Normal, can rip a character's body parts (including their cheeks and internal organs) off with his bare hands, and impale people with blunt objects just as easily as with swords or knives. As of Aggregation, he has now gotten even stronger after being revived once more thanks to his new MAG-like or G03LM-like form and size.
• Taking You with Me: Kills Jebus and the Sheriff during his final moments in Avenger, and blows himself up to kill Jebus in Apotheosis.
• They Killed Kenny Again: Hank dies at least once in nearly every episode, surviving only in Madness Combat 1, Aggregation and Abrogation (not counting his ambiguous fate in Expurgation). He also racks up several deaths in the Incidents: out of the three that feature him, he dies in two, and the second one has him dying twice to make up for the fact that he survives one Incident.
• Tele-Frag: MAG Hank's chitinous arm is a leftover from an unknown thing trying to slither into Hell and grab one of his S-3LFs as his body was being resurrected.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works: Ever seen someone's skull being pierced by a police baton from across the room? Hank does the same with many weapons across the series.
• Took a Level in Badass: Take a look at his first fighting prowess and compare it to his current one. Hank just becomes faster and more brutal each time he comes back for more.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Deimos revives Hank, but is killed during the process. So how does Hank pay him back? Use his corpse as a decoy!
• Use Their Own Weapon Against Them: In Redeemer, he does this to Tricky with the M16 that the latter was holding.
• Voice Grunting: Unlike most characters that got voice acting in Project Nexus, Hank doesn't have any full voice lines, using mostly grunts provided by Krinkels.
• Villain Protagonist: It's easy to forget, but Hank starts the series off as a gun-toting mugger, upgrades to cop-killing hitman in the second episode, and does nothing after that to indicate that he's gotten any nobler. That said, though, he pales in comparison to the things Tricky or the Auditor has done. He fully takes the mantle at the end of MADNESS: Project Nexus though, refusing any alternatives to destroying Project Nexus even if it destroys Nevada in the process.
• Whole Costume Reference: His appearance in Depredation and Antipathy takes after Léon of The Professional with the round sunglasses, trenchcoat and beret/bandana.
• Your Head A-Splode: In Incident: 1000A, Tricky shoots a grenade inside his head, which subsequently explodes.

Sanford

Sanford

Voiced by: JohnnyUtah

A deuteragonist of the series alongside his partner Deimos, who made his official debut in Aggregation (although their chronological debut was in Depredation). He and Deimos seem to be allied with Hank as they back him up and later show up with a much more important role in Aggregation onwards. After Deimos' untimely death in Aggregation, Sanford takes on a more active role as Hank's partner in arms against the Auditor.

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• Action Duo: Seems to have vibes of this with Deimos. Sanford is likely the serious badass one of the team; he seems pretty savvy on the field in handling the guns and going close combat, whilst Deimos is comparatively less so and acts a lot more comically.
• Alien Blood: His bleeding chest wound becomes black when he enters the Auditor's hell.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: According to posters, he is wanted for murder, telling lies, torturing, kidnapping, conspiring, arson, and being ugly.
• Ascended Extra: He and Deimos had a quick debut appearance in Depredation before being crushed under a building; they didn't even have names or original designs. They later became protagonists in Aggregation and starred in the .5 episodes.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: With Deimos and then Hank.
• Badass Normal: One of the few characters who is not enhanced in any way at all and yet holds his own against multiple enemies just fine.
• Badasses Wear Bandanas: His bandanna, which while not as iconic as Hank’s, is still rather good on him.
• Bash Brothers: With Deimos, and after Deimos' death, Hank.
• Boisterous Bruiser: Courtesy of JohnnyUtah's voice acting, Sanford in Project Nexus is surprisingly bombastic.
  I'M READY FOR MORE!
• Break the Badass: Sanford is put through a hard time during Expurgation. With Tricky pushing him to his limits, Sanford is more focused on surviving than actually killing his enemies. At one point, he visibly screams in agony, he loses his usual smug expression, he hides behind a riot shield and doesn't get any better until he reunites with Hank, who ends up doing the majority of the fighting from then on.
• Bring It: Does this to an ATP Soldat in 7.5, with a gesture straight out of The Matrix.
• Combat Parkour: Sanford is often seen back-flipping to dodge attacks more than any other character. He even incorporates it into his fighting style by flipping over to slam foes after catching them on his hook.
• Cool Shades: His round shades, which he liked enough that he grew a visible mouth. They also seem to function as his eyes, as they help in showing off his emotions.
• A Day in the Limelight: Well, more like a few episodes now, but became the focus of the .5 episodes alongside Deimos which recounted what they were doing during the events of Antipathy and Consternation.
• Death Glare: Easy to miss, but each time he gets hurt or Deimos is goofing around, he pulls a good scowl. Bear in mind he comes from a series where nobody normally has faces. A good example would be his one to the Auditor in Aggregation after he discovers Deimos' corpse and the Auditor sneaks up on him, or the face he pulls following Deimos' prank with an ATP mask.
• Demolitions Expert: In Project Nexus 2 he's the only character capable of handling C4 to blow up barriers. This comes in useful in the climax of the game where he reveals that he's brought along some C4 for a special occasion, which at that point is incredibly useful.
• Dented Iron: While Sanford has taken his lumps like everyone else and kept on trucking, the injuries do pile up. And it's become clear by Abrogation and especially Expurgation that he is feeling every single one. Where it's clear on his face that he's reaching his threshold.
• Divergent Character Evolution: Started off with a plain design and eventually gained his distinctive costume and look over the course of 5.5 and 6.5.
• Dodge the Bullet: Is quite good at this as is most of the protagonists.
• Feel No Pain: He has tanked a lot of injuries over the course of his appearances in the series that seem to have hardly bothered or inhibited him – his reaction to being stabbed in the ribs was to frown and take out the knife to use against his assailant. Subverted when he got shot in 5.5/6.5, as he’s clearly seen writhing in pain and acts quite weak afterwards, but he recovers just dandy once he gets a med kit, injects himself with some kind of substance and continues fighting as normal. See Made of Iron for his rap sheet of injuries sustained. Although even his ability to not feel pain seems to be reaching its threshold by Expurgation.
• Fun T-Shirt: Briefly wore a T-shirt that read "I covered wars, you know" in 6.5, before discarding it and going shirtless for the rest of the series.
• Heal Thyself: After getting gravely wounded in the course of 5.5/6.5, he just picks up a medical kit, pops on some bandages and injects himself with something. Ba-boom, he’s back on fighting form.
• Hooks and Crooks: Often uses his trademark hook on a string, with which he is very nifty.
• Iconic Item: His hook, black bandana and tea shades are an iconic part of Sanford as much as his lower lip. In Project Nexus Classic, the hook is notably Sanford's exclusive weapon, and cannot be discarded for another when playing as him (throwing it away causes it to simply return to him, allowing Sanford to reel enemies in).
• Iconic Sequel Character: Alongside Deimos, he's one of the main protagonists and is considered an integral character of the series ever since his introduction, which was in "Aggregation", the ninth episode. While he and Deimos had an early appearance in "Depredation", the fifth episode, they weren't meant to be full-fledged characters back then, and weren't clarified to be the same pair until the release of Madness Combat 5.5.
• Informed Deformity: His wanted posters say he's criminally ugly but visible mouth aside he doesn't seem much different from any of the other characters. He is probably the most normal-looking member of the main cast as of now.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: For a few moments in Expurgation, he makes use of a pilfered Riot Shield to protect himself from a barrage of M60 fire from the resurrected Tricky himself and also Hank flying at him at incredible speeds.
• Made of Iron: Though not comparable to Hank’s resumé, but considering Sanford is the only main character not to have canonically died at any point, he deserves some recognition.
  So far, in the order of injury sustained, Sanford has been:
  • Crushed by a building falling on top of him, sustaining head wounds
  • Shot in the stomach (which is usually a One-Hit Kill in the series)
  • Stabbed deep in the ribs/side
  • Shot in the hand
  • Knifed in the other hand (causing him to lose his hook too)
  • Tossed around repeatedly while still bearing the previous three wounds
  • Tossed around more in the netherworld with even worse wounds, most notably he had to tank a hit with a shield that sent him flying across a ravine. Not only that he also has weapons shooting out of his wounds as well. It's pretty clear by this point even he's reaching his limit.
    • Notably, the Makeship plush description suggests that Sanford has somehow been "marked for death" by a greater power, and that his ongoing survival is due to him being just that tenacious.
• Non-Standard Character Design: Is the only recurring character aside from Jebus that has a standard mouth, rather than just a blank cross or a toothy maw. Furthermore, it's a style of mouth usually only reserved for the non-canon joke animations.
• Not So Stoic: Usually has a stiff lower lip, and rarely shows his emotions (although he's probably one of the few characters in the series that can show emotions), although after being sent flying by Tricky in Expurgation, he's rather visibly screaming in pain. He has a look on his face that just shows he's getting visibly fatigued by the non-stop fighting.
• One-Man Army: On par with the likes of Hank in terms of fighting prowess and has the third-highest number of kills in the series.
• Pistol-Whipping: Like Hank, he's more than willing to beat you to death when his current gun has no ammo. Most notably, he uses an emptied AS Val to club an agent off-screen so hard that the weapon's grip actually ends up impaling the poor bastard's head.
• Quick Nip: Takes a brief sip from a glass he finds in mid-brawl in the second room of 5.5. He then proceeds to throw it to incapacitate a mook in the next room.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: In some parts of the series, he has a 4-inch Colt Revolver that he uses to kick ass.
• Sudden Anatomy: He suddenly grows his prominent lip out of nowhere after clothes shopping in 6.5, presumably out of satisfaction at his own appearance.
• Tattoo as Character Type: Sports a DNA strand design down his back from 7.5 onwards.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: In Krinkels's art of the characters in a more realistic style, Sanford is always depicted topless. Due to the art style, it was hard to tell in the actual animations until he got his tattoo.

Deimos

Deimos

^{Click to see his new form from DedmosRebuilt}

Voiced by: Hans Van Harken

The other Deuteragonist who fights alongside Sanford, and both seem to be on the same side as Hank. Deimos backs Sanford up and they seem to have a dynamic going – Sanford is more serious and experienced in combat whilst Deimos can be seen doing something silly at least once per episode that they feature in. He is also the only protagonist smoker, which might have foreshadowed his untimely death after he revived Hank in Aggregation, due to the Running Gag of smokers being offed in the series. He later on became the protagonist of the 5-episode spin-off series Dedmos Adventure.

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• Action Duo: With Sanford. Whilst Sanford seems more straight-laced and an experienced tough nut in fights, Deimos is comparatively less skillful; he relies more on big guns, gadgets, and being the more technical one of the two. He also does the speaking with Mission Control and performing any of the computer stuff they need to do. In terms of characteristics, Deimos is also a bit more comical about things, much to Sanford’s visible chagrin.
• Alien Blood: Bleeds some kind of black goop during his adventure in Hell. Other Hell residents have been shown with the same black blood, so it's not a unique trait to him.
• And I Must Scream: In the Dedmos Adventure mini-series, Deimos is trapped in some sort of strange limbo where very little makes sense, and he gets mutilated near-endlessly.
• Anyone Can Die: Proves this trope when he gets abruptly killed off by one of the Auditor's enhanced Engineers in Aggregation.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: According to his wanted posters, Deimos is wanted for murder, lying, thievery, conspiring, betraying the cause, and for being a smoker.
• Ascended Extra: He and Sanford had a quick debut appearance in Depredation before being crushed under a building; they didn't even have names or original designs. They later became protagonists in Aggregation and starred in the .5 episodes.
• Badass Longcoat: He picked one up in 6.5 and has since worn it as part of his defining ensemble.
• Badass Normal: Like Sanford, he is not empowered in any way yet can tear through waves of enemies. May no longer be the case after gaining reality warping powers, assuming those stick with him after escaping hell.
• Back from the Dead: 2BDamned helps him escape hell at the end of Dedmos Adventures.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: When working with Sanford.
• Bash Brothers: With Sanford again. The .5 episodes (9.5 excluded) have the two of them working as a pair to tear through hundreds of AAHW Mooks, complete with several displays of comedic camaraderie between the two.
• BFG: He seems fond of these as he’s always the one out of Sanford and himself to pick one up and use it. His Project Nexus appearance also displays his stats as implying a preference for large and automatic weapons.
• Body Horror: His body get constantly mutilated in Dedmos Adventure. By the time of Dedmos Rebuilt he's missing his jaw (leaving his dangling tongue and upper teeth on display), most of his face has been torn off, and his torso is covered in huge black rents.
• Born Lucky: In 7.5, Deimos gets temporarily blinded by a flash-bang to the face. By sheer dumb luck, not only did Sanford cover his eyes at the right time so he could fight off the Mooks who threw it first, but Deimos also barely misses getting shot whilst he is stumbling around. He also misses getting crushed by a building (again) in 5.5 and seems unperturbed by his close shave.
• Came Back Strong: Happens at the end of Dedmos Adventure, “DedmosRebuilt.fla”. Not only does he finally get the upper hand against his tormentors, he’s able to warp hell at his command.
• Chain Pain: He gains the ability to manipulate the chains that have been tormenting him throughout the Dedmos Adventures to strike down or immobilize enemies.
• The Chew Toy:
  • The Dedmos Adventure mini-series is an entire side-series dedicated to documenting his suffering, having him undergo brutal mutilation and Body Horror in some unknown Eldritch Location that is implied to be hell.
  • Beyond even the mini-series, his frequent brushes with death (before his actual demise, at least) were a common source of levity. In the animations, he's been crushed by a falling building with Sanford, brutalized and tossed through a wall, nearly crushed by a falling building for the second time, is subjected to a flashbang, and nearly shot in the head twice. In Project Nexus 2, his bad luck continues as he's the only one injured to the point of immobility after a nasty truck crash in the opening level, with several of his ribs being broken and leaving Sanford to patch him up.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: He loves to goof around an play pranks, but in the end, he's just as deadly a fighter as Sanford and Hank and can definitely hold his own in a fight.
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • Alongside Sanford, they are the stars of the .5 episodes.
  • He gets a personal five-part series called Dedmos Adventure.
• Defector from Decadence: His wanted posters refer to him as a "traitor" and state that he "cannot reformat" (as opposed to Sanford's "Will not reformat"), implying that he used to work for the AAHW until betraying the cause for an unknown reason and joining Hank and the Anti-AAHW.
• Dishing Out Dirt: By the end of the Dedmos Adventures, he gains the ability to kill enemies and seemingly teleport using large slabs of stone, and has repaired lost flesh by replacing it with rock armor.
• Divergent Character Evolution: Like Sanford and Hank, he started off with a plain design before gaining a unique costume in real-time during the events of 5.5/6.5.
• Dodge the Bullet: Is quite good at this as are most of the protagonists.
• The Dog Bites Back: After all the (literal) hell that Deimos goes through, he’s finally able to get the upper hand in Deimos Rebuilt.
• Dramatic Irony: Of the main characters, he is the only one to smoke and does so often. His new rock form in DedmosRebuilt includes some stone over his mouth, meaning it'd be damn hard for him to smoke.
• Elemental Armor: A twisted variant in that he gets covered in tough rocky armor in DedmosRebuilt.fla, but he didn't exactly have much choice or control over it since it's now permanently fused to his body.
• Faster Than They Look: In DedmosRebuilt, he gains a new form where his jaw, chest, and hands are covered in rocks. While one may expect him to be a literal Stone Wall or a Mighty Glacier, he quickly proves that he's even more agile than before, can throw fast and strong punches, and can even jump and dash while in the air. And being half-rock does not hinder his ability to avoid bullets at all.
• Finger-Snap Lighter: Rather humorously, Krinkels never bothered to animate lighters for Deimos in early episodes, which granted him the power to spontaneously create a flame from his thumb to light his cigarettes. Even after other smoking characters are shown with lighters, Deimos retained this ability.
• Fighting Clown: Thankfully not literally; he's prone to goofing off a bit mid-fight. Even at the end of Dedmos Adventure, where he's been put through the grinder, once he manages to get his bearings, he becomes outright jubilant and actively mocks most attempts to hurt him.
• Genius Bruiser: Is the Smart Guy in the duo of him and Sanford, and is no slouch when it comes to fighting.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: The only protagonist smoker, he lights up at least once per episode. Subverted later as he dies rather horribly, so not to break Krinkels’ Author Appeal and Running Gag of smokers dying because of their habit. As of Dedmos Adventures, he now has a stone jaw, which would likely make smoking in the future rather difficult. Notably, he actually isn't shown smoking in Project Nexus, instead making a lot of fast food references, and coincidentially he doesn't die as he and Sanford vastly overpower Hank when he turns on them. He's shown smoking in the cinematic trailer, though.
• Grenade Launcher: Picked one up in 6.5 and seemed to rather like it.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Does this in Aggregation with Hank’s body when he needs to carry it around as part of his mission.
• Heel–Face Turn: It's mentioned on a few occasions that Deimos was a former member of the A.A.H.W, similar to Doc. The extent of his service, as well as his rank within the Agency, is unknown, but he seems to possess intrinsic knowledge to some of their facilities. For example, knowing the code for the spike gate in the Soldat Production Facility in 7.5, and for knowing where the Magnification Chamber was located and how to use it.
• Hollywood Silencer: Uses a silencer on his pistol in 7.5 and in his default weapons in Project Nexus' campaign.
• Iconic Sequel Character: Alongside Sanford, he's one of the main protagonists and is considered an integral character of the series ever since his introduction, which was in "Aggregation", the ninth episode. While he and Sanford had an early appearance in "Depredation", the fifth episode, they weren't meant to be full-fledged characters back then, and weren't clarified to be the same pair until the release of Madness Combat 5.5.
• Made of Iron: Deimos has been shown to have a higher pain tolerance than Sanford, with him being quicker to shrug off having a literal building dropped on him. In Dedmos Adventures, despite slowly dissolving in the Other Place, and Word of God explicitly stating that he felt "all kinds of pain", he doesn't seem to slow down, and is still as efficent as he was in life.
• Meaningful Name: Deimos is the name of the smaller of the two moons orbiting Mars, and is named after the god of dread and son of the god of war. Deimos the character is the shortest of the crew, but is no slouch when it comes to showing off his skills, and inspires an aura of dread throughout the series due to his status as a smoker indicating it's not a matter of if he'll die, but when.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: When he got resurrected, some hell inhabitants appeared in Nevada right after him; some background posters imply that this is because he moved too much while in hell.
• Non-Standard Character Design: When he gains his new rock form, his facial cross is still made of straight lines, even though his new form is introduced in the same episode that changes the general character artstyle, which notably gives characters' facial crosses a sketchy look. So him keeping an old design element ends up making him more non-standard.
• Pintsized Powerhouse: Played With. While he has the standard size of a Madness Combat character, DedmosRebuilt has him facing a bunch of Giant Mooks who are twice his size, making him pint-sized from their point of view. He easily beats them all to a pulp with his newly augmented physical strength. Krinkels has also confirmed that Deimos is the shortest protagonist, even if it can't be seen because of the art-style.
  • He is visibly the shortest of the three protagonists in the cinematic trailer, but it doesn't stop him from being just as badass as Sanford or Hank.
• Playful Hacker: Compared to 2BDamned's more cynical personality, Deimos is visibly more light-hearted.
• Playing with Fire: He has the inexplicable power to generate fire from his thumb, using it to light up his cigarettes. This is a visual gag based on how characters would just light cigarettes with their thumbs because Krinkels hadn't made an asset for lighters, but once he did he gave Deimos that ability as a visual gag. One piece of art depicts his fire power contrasted to the Auditor's, alongside Jeb and Hank's electric powers.
• Plucky Comic Relief: Seems to be this out of the protagonists. He has more intentional Funny Moments than Hank or Sanford, such as his dressing up in a Mook mask to prank Sanford or wanting to go clothes shopping in the middle of a gunfight. Too bad he didn’t have the Plucky Comic Relief immunity...
• Reality Warper: Displays this power during Dedmos Rebuilt, either by his own hacking attempts or as a result of 2BDamned's assistance. Notable examples of this include accidentally turning Fellow09 into a Giant Mook, summoning large stone slabs and spikes in combat, and directing the hooked chains that dragged him through Hell earlier. Whether or not this power is restricted to hell is unknown.
• Sanity Slippage: Through the Dedmos Adventures series, Deimos is subject to some extremely gruesome tortures, making him increasingly unstable. In Powerless.fla, he punched the ground out of frustration and he seems very angry to see an engineer before shooting him. By DedmosRebuilt though, Deimos appears to be back to his old self, as he appears to have a lot of fun beating up the giant mooks in his way and can easily avoid the same chains that were impaling him earlier.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: As the Plucky Comic Relief of the main group and being more laidback, he suffers this treatment. He gets better, however.
• Signature Headgear: Sports a black visor which he picked up along with his Badass Longcoat when shopping in 6.5.
• Stealth Pun: He's noted to light up a cigarette at a moment's notice, and as a result of later events, is heavily associated with sharp objects on chains, both tormenting and assisting him. In other words, a chain smoker.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Seems quite fond of explosives, ranging from Grenade launchers in 6.5 and one of the incident shorts to being the one to carry the bomb in 7.5.
• Super-Reflexes: Surprisingly considering he's partially stone, he seems to get this ability with his new rocky form where he can avoid punches from behind and can backflip-kick some big mooks.
• Super-Strength: He was already pretty strong (though not as strong as Hank or Sanford). He gets even stronger with his rocky form where he can deliver some brutal punches that can deform mooks twice his size with no effort.
• Walking Armory: He's fond of the Glock 20, and makes use of the PM-9 SMG and M203 launcher in Madness 6.5, while in Madness 9 he dual-wields HK G36 rifles. Along with that, his starting weapon in Project Nexus is an optimized HK MP7 and a silenced Beretta M9. He is also shown to have a fondness for explosives.
• Wrestler in All of Us: Briefly busts out a trio of Professional Wrestling moves in the non-canon ROMP.FLA (specifically, a German suplex, a pedigree, and what appears to be a chokeslam).
• You Can't Fight Fate: Deimos' fate was practically sealed when he smoked a cigarette, and was doomed to die. He lived longer than most, but he ultimately perished, though he was quickly resurrected by Doc.

Doc

Doc/Dissenter/"2BDamned"

Voiced by: Gianni Matragrano

First seen in DedmosRebuilt, Doc (or "2BDamned", after the handle he used in Dedmos Adventure) is an enigmatic individual that's responsible for reviving Deimos from hell, as well as likely being the one that upgraded him. He's probably a member of the Anti-AAHW, although the exact details are hazy. What is known is that he's Sanford and Deimos's boss, and possibly Hank's too.

---

• Awesomeness by Analysis: His primary impact on the setting's conflicts are less about raw strength. Instead, he's more focused on setting up the when and who to make sure things don't go to hell in a way that he's not a fan of, and has learned how to safely hack and override The Other Place to bring people back to Nevada proper. Reaches its apex when he manages to prevent Nevada's destruction at the hands of an omnipotent Machine by imprinting one of his most skilled contacts with the S-3LF of the first person to ever exist.
• Back-Alley Doctor: He doesn't actually have any kind of license, but he's very skilled at putting people back together, no matter how many pieces they were in when they show up on his doorstep. In fact, when Christoff isn't using the Halo to resurrect himself, it's Doc who ends up doing it.
• Bandaged Face: He visibly sports several bandages behind his mask, though it's unclear if they're covering an injury or are just there for fashion.
• Big Good: Being the boss of Hank, Sanford, Deimos and all the other members of the group, he's the closest thing the series has to one.
  • He plays this trope much more clearly straight in Project Nexus, in which he directly oversees your operations and gives direct orders at times and ultimately being the one to have you enmesh with the Nothing and stop the Mandatus.
• Car Fu: He rams into several vampires with his car in the "Fickle Friends" mission, before telling you to get in. It's as badass as it sounds.
• Closest Thing We Got: In MADNESS: Project Nexus 2, Doc talks with the Arena Player Character on the second bus ride about their situation against The Machine. The PC asks him if enmeshing the Mandatus again until they find a proper solution to stop The Machine would actually work. Doc responds that they have to believe it will, implying that they don't have any other options.
  • He ends up pulling this with resurrecting Hank during the span of Aggregation because of how time-sensitive the situation is. Since there's more than one S-3LF that reads as Hank, he just pulls the first one his equipment can find.
• Cold Sniper: If DISSENTER is anything to indicate, he's got some good aim, able to give a Soldat using binoculars a Moe Greene Special.
• Combat Pragmatist: Very much so. While Hank, Sanford and Deimos will just run in guns blazing and annihilate anyone in their way, Doc is shown to be much more cunning and subtle, making him the only protagonist so far to use a tactical approach to a situation instead of relying on sheer firepower alone. He's also not above using Car Fu to quickly dispatch a few vampires.
• Continuity Nod: In Consternation, an Agent is found nailed to a ceiling with the words "DISSENTER BE DAMNED" written next to him. Doc uses "2BDamned" as a chat handle when talking to others in Purgatory, and his Day in the Limelight short is called DISSENTER.
• Cool Mask: One with red lenses, and what looks to either be a flashlight or doctor's head mirror on the side of his face.
• The Cracker: Hacks a Soldat's console to trick him into using an explosive rocket on a door all of his comrades were huddled around.
• Delinquent Hair: While he's normally bald (as seen in the series proper), artwork by Krinkels, one of the Madness Combat-themed site skins for Newgrounds and Project Nexus depict him with a mohawk.
• Drives Like Crazy: The patch notes for MADNESS: Project Nexus 2 openly call him the worst driver in Nevada, which means that he's somehow worse than the psychotic clown that jumped a train off its tracks. Before being patched, it was possible for Doc to accidentally run you over at the end of "Fickle Friends" in a manner that was as frustrating as it was hilarious.
• Genius Bruiser: Doc's preferred method of combat is slow-paced, but manipulative and devastating. In "DISSENTER", he kills an entire squad of AAHW coming after him through simple misdirection. He hacks into their communications, gets their artillery to fire on their own men, takes out the remaining straggler with a grenade tossed from behind cover, and uses the artillery's path of trajectory to calculate where they are relative to his own position before firing on them with a silenced rifle. Doc is so good at this that he doesn't even have a single shot fired at his position, and takes out all the men without any of them even seeing him bar the artillery.
• I Have Many Names: The chat in the Dedmos Adventure subseries has him use "2BDamned" as a user handle, he signed a taunting message to an AAHW agent as "BIG D(issenter)", and both Krinkels and MADNESS: Project Nexus 2 gives his name as "Doc".
• Ironic Nickname: Per invoked Word of God, "Doc" isn't a real doctor.
• Last Episode, New Character: Downplayed, since he comes in at the end of the Dedmos Adventures.
• Mysterious Employer: He's the one that brought Deimos back to life, and seems to be responsible for Hank's resurrection in 9.5.
  • Throughout the Arena Mode of Project Nexus, he'll appear to give orders to the player, being responsible for most of the bus missions. He's unable to explain much until it's already happened or about to happen, leaving the player in the dark about what they're doing. He's much more open about his plans once he finds you have a Ripple-Proof Memory after completing your first run and why he has you do everything you've done.
• The Smart Guy: Implied. Given what we've seen so far of him in action, 2BDamned prefers a strategic and defensive fighting style over the direct and face to face fighting style employed by the rest of the cast, and he has also shown to be knowledgeable about how the universe of Madness works as a whole, given how he is able to extract Deimos from the afterlife with a strange terminal.
• Resurrective Immortality: Not himself, as far as we've seen, but he can pull this for anyone he feels satisfied doing it for. And unlike the technology used by the A.A.H.W., which is usually either unstable Dissonant technology that warps the target's mind every time it's used, or Sleepwalker imprints which just make a copy of someone's S-3LF by teaching a clone how to act like them, Doc's tech pulls the original soul directly from the Other Side using their corpse as a conduit.
• Troll: The messages he sent to the Soldat on overwatch hint at a degree of schadenfreude on his part.
  We need you to frag the door.
  It'll totally work :D
  (the Soldat fires a 'spicy rocket', blowing up all but one of his teammates)
  Agenda:
  -LMFAO
  -Dumbass
  signed: BIG D(issenter)

Antagonists:

Jesus/Jebediah Christoff

Jesus/Jebus/Dr. Jebediah Christoff

Voiced by: Joshua Tomar

The self-proclaimed "Savior" of Nevada. Almost as badass as Hank and with plenty of seemingly-divine power to make up the difference. Super-Strength, Flight, telekinetic bullet shields, zombification powers, disintegration Eye Beams, and even the ability to come Back from the Dead are just a few of the reasons you should start praying when you see this guy.

J started out as just another combatant in the boombox brawl, and though he put up more of a fight than anyone else, he was eventually taken down by Hank. After that, he took up the role of the Sheriff's strongest bodyguard, and earned his keep for a not insignificant amount of time. Following the Sheriff's death, J struck out on a vendetta against Hank, only to get sidetracked by several other, more pressing threats throughout Nevada…

Eventually, Jeb was able to put a bullet through Hank's head for what he believed to be the final time, and refocused his efforts on the bigger threat: the Auditor. Taking up the mantle of the protagonist, he wages a one-transhuman war against the AAHW... and promptly gets himself Killed Off for Real by helping to destroy the Auditor's Improbability Drive.

---

• All for Nothing: Ultimately, his sacrifice at the end of Inundation didn't pan out: sure, the Improbability Drive is gone, but the Auditor survived, picked up the halo from his corpse, and remains the last man standing at the end of Expurgation.
• Amplifier Artifact:
  • His halo is the source of his Superpower Lottery, which is humorously shown when Tricky tries to wear the sliced upper half of Jesus' head in an attempt to gain his powers, to no avail. The Auditor successfully harnesses the halo's power after taking it from Jesus' corpse, though.
  • In Project Nexus, his halo was originally a "dangerous Nexus artifact" placed under quarantine. When he put it on, it gives him the powers of flight and disintegration ray.
• Anti-Hero: Zig-zags between Good Is Not Nice and full-on Knight Templar. He believes in Pay Evil unto Evil, but doesn't revel in the bloodshed like some characters and emphasizes overwhelming force for a quick, painless kill.
• Back from the Dead: Four times, and unlike Hank, who is revived by either the Higher Powers or the Improbability Drive, Jesus revives through his halo's powers. His fifth death from Normality Restoration appears to be final, however.
• Badass Bookworm: As Doctor Christoff in Project Nexus.
• Badass Creed: He begins Inundation with this. Made even more awesome by the fact that he's firing a sniper rifle in between sentences:
  Jesus: I purge the wicked. The impious madness must end. I shall be the instrument of Armageddon. It has gotten out of hand. The end has begun.
• Badass Longcoat: His white trench coat.
• Badass Preacher: Styles himself after one.
• BFG: The TAC-50 he wielded at the beginning of Inundation bordered on being as big as he is, if not even bigger.
• BFS: His signature melee weapon is the Binary Sword, a massive sword that's nearly the same size as he is.
• Big Damn Heroes: At the end of Consternation, he suddenly comes onto the scene and kills the agents surrounding the incapacitated Hank. He also kills Hank, but it's more of a mutually-agreed Mercy Kill at that point. He even curb-stomps Tricky following this.
• Blood from the Mouth: After the Auditor infects him with a virus using the Improbability Drive in Inundation, he starts coughing up blood periodically as it slowly weakens him.
• Cool Shades: Sports some starting from Apotheosis until Antipathy, as he takes them off after Consternation and they aren’t seen again.
• Cool Sword: His Binary Sword. It can be summoned to his hand using his halo, and it can cleave even normal swords in half. It has '316' written on it in binary code, possibly to refer to the Bible passage John 3:16:
  "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life."
• Combo Platter Powers: All of his powers come from his halo, but they don't share any theme. He has super strength, flight, and telekinesis; he can spawn weapons, shoot disintegrating beams, turn dead people into zombies at his command, teleport, and shoot electricity; and he has four different kinds of magic shields.
• Cosmic Keystone: His halo is referred to in Abrogation and Project Nexus as a "Keystone Fragment". It grants him and whoever wears it a tremendous amount of power, provided they can keep a decent hold of it.
• Dark Messiah: His general imagery. Even his followers consist mostly of zombies revived by his powers.
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • Inundation lets him take centre stage for the episode after he killed Hank in the previous episode.
  • Episode 1.5 of Project Nexus Classic is also this, as he's the protagonist of the campaign.
• Deflector Shields: Can summon blood red barriers to cover himself at will, which can repel, catch, and even return back bullets fired at him. Originally - in the very first Madness Combat cartoon - this shield was in the shape of a crucifix, with a sheer black color.
• Disintegrator Ray: He can shoot a laser from his eyes or his hands that desintegrates any mook it touches.
• Determinator: Much like Hank, he clearly feels damage, but he doesn't fight any weaker because of it.
• Divergent Character Evolution: Starts out as a simple enough character with a halo and goatee, before eventually gaining facial features, bandages and extra bits to his costume.
• The Dragon: To the Sheriff in Madness Redeemer and Avenger, acting as his bodyguard. In Madness Interactive, he's even fought right before the Sheriff.
• Dragon Ascendant: After the Sheriff was killed off, Jesus becomes Hank's main opponent for Apotheosis and Depredation, at least until Tricky came in.
• Dragon-in-Chief: Jesus is much more of an imposing threat to Hank than the Sheriff, who just runs away and leaves his men to do the fighting. Jesus actually faces Hank head-on.
• Drama-Preserving Handicap: The Auditor infects him using the Improbability Drive during Inundation, which weakens Jesus and his supernatural powers over time as he periodically coughs blood. By the time he actually encounters the Auditor, his powers have weakened to the point that his deflector shields are barely big enough to protect his face.
• Empowered Badass Normal: In Project Nexus, he was already fighting at Hank's level as a regular human. But once he got his hands on that halo, he became almost untouchable.
• Eye Beams: He can shoot disintegrating blasts from his eyes that kill enemies in one shot, but it seems he can do so only sparingly.
• Flight: One of the powers granted by his halo is to defy gravity and levitate. He can fly fast enough to move towards a machine gun torrent while avoiding every single shot.
• Friendly Enemy: Crosses with Worthy Opponent for Hank since Depredation, considering Jesus doesn't use many of his deadlier powers against him and even seems to enjoy a fair fight with the guy. Hank is also mildly pissed at Tricky for randomly killing Jesus during said episode. In Consternation, Hank even allows him to Mercy Kill him, in a manner that seems to have been mutually agreed.
• Funny Background Event: He appears briefly in one during Antipathy, raking leaves by the railroad side and watching the abandoned half of Tricky’s Runaway Train grind to a halt next to him with relative indifference. At this point, he has apparently given up and quit his work for the AAHW.
• Fun T-Shirt: In his brief cameo in Antipathy, he is seen raking leaves without his halo while wearing a shirt that reads “I’m Jebus, lol. This is as dressed up as I get.”
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: He was kind of this in his very first appearance, as after Hank has gone about half the episode just beating up a random mob of guys over a boom-box, Jesus suddenly appears and they have a battle. Some of his later appearances at the ends of episodes can be this especially when he winds up killing Hank. such as at the end of Redeemer, Avenger, Apotheosis, and Consternation.
• Good Is Not Nice: Peace will not come to Nevada through pacifism...
• Hammerspace
  • Seems to be in command of this as part of his supernatural powers, as he is capable of summoning his S&W and Binary Sword from nowhere and putting his other weapons away somewhere else.
  • A particularly strange case is his sniper rifle from Inundation. He needs to disassemble it to put it away, but the barrel, nearly as tall as he is, just kind of sinks into a void on his back.
• Hand Cannon: His main firearm of choice is a Smith & Wesson .500, previously it was a good ol' Deagle. Interestingly, he makes use of both in Incident:110A.
• Healing Factor: Seen in real-time in 6.5, where it seems his halo allows him to stay alive even after losing his goddamn head, and once he puts everything back into place, he just pops the halo on and everything’s good as new.
• Heroic Sacrifice: His final death is essentially this – he goes out in a last stand against the enemy after damaging the Improbability Drive enough to force a Normality Restoration.
• I Have Many Names: Not said explicitly by Jeb himself, but he can go by: Jesus, El Jesús, Jebus, The Saviour, and Dr. Jebediah Christoff.
• Killed Off for Real: After being hit by the Normality Restoration blast at the end of Inundation, his corpse is seen in the next episode and he hasn't appeared since. Krinkels himself stated that he has “gone the way of the Sheriff”, meaning he won’t be coming back for the rest of the main series.
• Knight Templar: Jesus's goal seems to be to end the chaos in Nevada, but his way of going about is to attack anyone causing a ruckus, even if it's for a well-intentioned cause like stopping the AAHW.
• Kung-Fu Jesus: He's not the actual Jesus, but he doubles up on the asskicking so we'll let this one slide.
• Light Is Not Good: He may look like the Messiah and wear his white Badass Longcoat topped with a halo, but he’s more for blowing your brains out than forgiving sins.
• Looks Like Jesus: Jeb started as the JC, and kept the hair and beard even after the retcon.
• Made of Iron: Thanks to his halo, he can even walk around without his head. Even when weakened by the Improbability Drive in Inundation, he keeps fighting while coughing up lots of blood out of sheer determination, and can still stand up and fight even after getting his face blown in by a rocket launcher.
• Mercy Kill: Saves Hank from a cycle of constant death and resurrection by Tricky in Consternation.
• Mind over Matter: Displays some pretty powerful telekinesis with which he proves capable of throwing heavy objects at people, throwing PEOPLE at people (assuming he doesn't rip them in half or smash them to the ground into bloody bits), and even taking the goddamn roof of a building off in some of his fights.
• Necromancer: Jesus can revive dead people to become zombies under his command. He never uses this ability again after Depredation.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: In Inundation, he can shoot disintegrating beams from his eyes or his hands, which is something he never did before.
• Non-Standard Character Design: Though he started as a somewhat distinct Madness character with his goatee and halo, by the time of his most recent appearance in Inundation, Jesus noticeably has a very different look from the other characters: His skin has a gradation of shades unseen on other characters, and he has freaky bloodshot eyes and a visible mouth. Very few other characters have all of these traits, which makes him stand out quite a bit.
• One-Man Army: Notice a pattern yet? Thanks to his supernatural powers, Jesus is even more incredible than the protagonists when he truly lets loose, as seen in Incident:110A.
• Pistol-Whipping: Gets into it as much as the rest of the protagonists, like stabbing an Agent with an emptied FN FNC.
• Pointless Band-Aid: Whilst not entirely pointless since it might be patching up an old wound (remember this is a world where bandages heal everything, apparently), he has a little plaster stuck on his head from Depredation onward.
• Power Floats: The halo empowering Jesus always hovers above him, even when his head is cut off.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: When the shades are off, he has a rather intense-looking, bloodshot pair of these. Fitting, since he can disintegrate people by shooting Eye Beams from them.
• Retcon: The character was initially the Jesus Christ, put in just for a laugh, but later got retconned into a separate character that just happens to look like Jesus and considers himself the saviour that Nevada needs.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: In the middle of 6.5 after putting his head back on, he puts up a note supposedly informing the Auditor “I QUIT” and goes off to rake leaves in his cameo in Antipathy. He obviously changed his mind by the time of Consternation, though.
• Shock and Awe: In Madness Combat 1 and Depredation, he sometimes shoots electricity from his hands.
• Significant Monogram: JC.
• Sniper Rifle: Has an enormous one that’s nearly the same size as him, which he uses in Inundation.
• Start of Darkness: Project Nexus Episode 1.5 shows an origin story. The head researcher of Project Nexus before his conscience caught up with him, he sabotaged the project and murdered everyone responsible under the pretense of justice. While this was certainly what they deserved, his sanity took a nosedive after taking the powerful halo artifact for himself and started flying around shooting black energy bolts from his eyes.
• Steven Ulysses Perhero: He's a guy with a messiah complex and a halo-shaped Amplifier Artifact, and he looked like Jesus Christ even before getting his hands on it. "Jebediah Christoff" is a very fitting name.
• Super-Strength: Even when not using telekinesis, Jesus is very capable of picking up heavy items like crates and lobbing them across the room to take out enemies.
• Superpower Lottery: With his halo, Jesus possesses the ability to levitate and achieve high-speed flight, disintegrate people with Eye Beams, telekinesis powerful enough to rip people in half and grind them to bloody splatters, project energy shields to repel bullets, and even a Healing Factor powerful enough to shrug off death. Is it really any wonder he gets hit by Drama-Preserving Handicap just to get him to go out by the way of the Sheriff?
• Sword and Gun: Next to Hank, he is fond of this trope in battle using his favourite weapons.
• 10-Minute Retirement: After his death in Depredation, he tries to quit his "job" and takes up groundskeeping for his cameo in Antipathy. This doesn't last long, and he's back in action from Consternation onwards.
• Teleportation: He has the ability to teleport. But he rarely uses it.
• Unscrupulous Hero: Unlike Hank, who's motivation and personality boils down to "Blood Knight", Jeb honestly wants to leave the world a better place. He's also a borderline Knight Templar and as willing and able to murder mooks by the hundreds as every other Madness Combat character.
• Wall Jump: Does one in Inundation to skip climbing a ladder.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: His halo is the source of his extensive list of powers. It is also the reason why he has such a massive messiah complex.
• Worf Had the Flu: In Inundation, Jesus is badly outmatched by the Auditor despite his supernatural powers and threat level, but he is already weakened by the Improbability Drive long before their duel.
• Worthy Opponent: As the series progresses, it seems he begins to become this to Hank and vice versa. It all comes out in the finale of Consternation wherein Jesus intercepts a fight to rescue Hank, then promptly performs a Mercy Kill on the latter.

The Sheriff

The Sheriff

The sheriff of Nevada who was Hank’s target for assassination in the second and third episodes (respectively, Redeemer and Avenger). He is a cowardly, pretty much useless figure of authority whose only real power was by the title and the mysterious Improbability Drive he activated in Avenger, which inadvertently started off the whole breakdown of reality throughout the series. He gets Killed Off for Real by Hank, and even Krinkels said good riddance.

However, he does make a reappearance in Project Nexus, and returns in the sequel with a much more intimidating design and proactive demeanor.

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• Arc Villain: Of the Sheriff saga, comprised of Madness Redeemer and Avenger.
• Back from the Dead: He’s coming back in MADNESS: Project Nexus, bearing scars from Hank’s assassination. His description: “Having been left for dead, he only came back tougher.”
• Cowboy: His name and ten-gallon hat are indicative of this kind of take on his character. His redesign in Project Nexus 2 seems to have incorporated more of the stereotypical cowboy design with boots, spurs, a shotgun, and a revolver.
• Cowardly Boss: Despite his more intimidating demeanor in Project Nexus 2, he still spends much of his mission fleeing from Sanford and Deimos, only engaging them directly once he's cornered.
• Cower Power: He constantly runs away and sends grunts to stall for time as Hank hunts him down. He also hides behind his flunkies and his desk when eventually cornered by Hank.
• Dirty Coward: All he ever does is run away from Hank, regardless of how many people he has to throw under the bus in the process. Even his more proactive self in Project Nexus 2 spends much of his fight hiding behind cover and running before completely folding and begging for his life upon being defeated.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Set up as the Big Bad in the beginning, but he's killed early on and the other villains in the series pick up where he left off.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": He's only ever been referred to as "The Sheriff", even after many other characters have been given unique or normal names.
• General Failure: All those 1337 agents and grunts, an Improbability drive, and even Jesus as his bodyguard, and yet he is easily the weakest and most useless character to have ever antagonized Hank thanks to his cowardice.
• Killed Off for Real: Hank blew his face off with a shotgun, and since Krinkels hates him, he won't be Back from the Dead any time soon. This is subverted in the second Project Nexus. He survives Hank's first attempt on his life, bearing visible scars, and survives his boss fight as well.
• Leitmotif: Project Nexus 2 gives him "Deputized", which combines the series' electronic music with a traditional Old West guitar, complimenting his western theme.
• Mysterious Past: It is never known how he came into power or gained the Improbability Drive. The former is at least explained, given how he helped Jeb kill Phobos and uses Nexus City's industrial district as new faction. He also was originally a mattress salesman.
• Non-Action Guy: He only has one on-screen kill to his name, and it's a friendly fire incident. Project Nexus 2 subverts this by giving him a dedicated boss battle.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: Subverted, being the weakest non-civilian in the series, but awesomely double subverted in MADNESS: Project Nexus 2. Unlike his original self, he actually engages Sanford and Deimos in direct combat and in general acts much more authoritative. It does help that he's given a more intimidating redesign.
• The Sheriff: Only by name, though, as he does very little to live up to the responsibilities his title implies.This seems to have changed by Project Nexus 2, though. Funnily enough, he was still called Sheriff despite only known for being a mattress salesman.
• Sweat Drop: Does this when getting cornered by Hank.
• Took a Level in Badass: When he appears in Project Nexus 2, he’s been decked out with a more stereotypical cowboy look, SWAT-grade armour, and new guns. He’s quoted to be a ruthless protector of his people during the Zombie Apocalypse with a new edge after coming Back from the Dead. Unlike his mainline self, he's also willing to fight directly when cornered.

Tricky

Tricky the Clown/Dr. Hofnarr

^{Click here for his appearance before death}

^{Click here for his demon form}

^{Click here for his skeleton form}

^{Click here for his skeletal demon form}

^{Click here for his appearance as Dr. Hoffnarr}

Voiced by: Wallium (Tricky), Swain (Dr. Hofnarr)

A deadly clown with a bloodthirsty streak a mile wide. Originally one of the Sheriff's men, Tricky was effortlessly cut down by Hank, but given new life by the "higher powers" to continue the fight. Since then, he's become one of Hank's most dangerous adversaries, sporting nearly Reality Warper-level power thanks to his Portable Improbability Drive and an unquenchable lust for violence and suffering.

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• Achilles' Heel: The Portable Improbability Drive is the only reason he's still going. The only time he even slows down between Depredation and Consternation is when Hank damaged it by shooting demon Tricky in the face, and Jesus destroys it to take him down for good until the Auditor ruined it.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: He is green to denote his status as a zombie.
• Angrish: Most of the dialogue that undoubtedly belongs to him involves terse, rage-fuelled demands or just utter nonsense, even if he's writing a poster.
  "MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER AAAAAAAAAHHHHH FAB BLAG DOOR FORN DOOF MURDERFACE ZOOP :-|"
• Arc Villain: Of the appropriately-named "Tricky the Clown Saga", lasting from Depredation to Consternation.
• Arch-Enemy: To Hank. In all episodes he appeared in (save for Inundation, Aggregation and Abrogation since he's dead) he comes to oppose him. He's killed him 3 times, and Hank's killed him 5 times.
• Ascended Extra: Was originally a one-off joke in Redeemer before being brought back as a main antagonist.
• Ax-Crazy: Tricky really puts the "Madness" in "Madness Combat". Even compared to everyone else, he comes off as unhinged and bloodthirsty. Exaggerated in Expurgation and 9.5, where he devolves from merely unhinged to outright feral.
• Back from the Dead: Many, many times. It’s like he just doesn’t want to stay dead…
  Tricky: YOU DO NOT KILL CLOWN! CLOWN KILLS YOU!!!!!
• Barred from the Afterlife: Because of how overloaded with Dissonance he is, "CANNOT KILL CLOWN" is less of a boast and more of a warning that he's straight-up not allowed in any afterlife under any circumstance. Though he tends to cause issues in The Other Place regardless, its a drop in the bucket compared to what he does when forcibly locked inside the Auditor's Hell by accident.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Tricky might look and initially act like a standard mook dressed up as a clown and do silly antics, but make no mistake that he is both a dangerous villain who is completely unhinged even compared to the other characters.
• Blood Knight: Tricky's main motivation is the fight. He's seen reviving Hank multiple times just to fight him again, giving a weapon to him in order to make things more fair, and alerting Sanford of his presence instead of just killing him on the spot.
• Bouncing Battler: In 5.5 when he sees Sanford and Deimos, he decides to approach them by bouncing off the floor and ceiling like a rubber ball to launch himself into battle. He does the same thing in Incident 1000A to burrow into the ground so that he can kill MAG Hank and reach the helicopter Sanford and Deimos are in.
• Brought Down to Normal: After Jesus destroys his Portable Improbability Drive at the end of Consternation, Tricky reverts from a flaming demon back into a regular-sized zombie and is easily dispatched with a sword to the face.
• Came Back Strong: Every time Tricky's been killed and revived, he's always come back more powerful than he was before.
• Chainsaw Good: In 9.5 Part 2, Tricky comes out with a chainsaw to utterly slaughter a Retainer.
• Combat Sadomasochist: Zigzagged; While he kills for fun and admits he'd let people tear him apart for free, he still seems to hold genuinely hateful grudges against people who were hurting him before he became a zombie.
• Cool Mask: Wears a metal hockey mask-like plate on his face starting from Apotheosis. It has been heavily damaged over the course of the series, but has still so far stayed on him. The MAG skeleton that appears toward the end of Expurgation bears an identical mask, which Hank punches in and immediately tears off afterwards to unveil its face.
• Cranial Processing Unit: In a non-robotic example, Tricky decided the safest place to stash the Portable Improbability Drive was in his demon form's head. It backfires when Hank gets his hands on a shotgun and shoots Tricky in the face with it, damaging the Improbability Drive. And later, it was destroyed by Jesus.
• Deader than Dead: After being killed physically several times over, he seemingly meets a permanent end when Hank and Sanford kill him in the Auditor's Hell, destroying his manifestation in the living world as well. With the Portable Improbability Drive long gone, the Auditor having the last known Drive inside of himself, and considering Tricky's hijacking would most certainly turn the Auditor away from reviving him again for any reason, it's very clear that the clown has "gone the way of the Sheriff".
• Dem Bones: In Expurgation, after merging with the Auditor, he takes on a skeletal version of his previous demon form in the living world. In the Auditor's Hell, he appears as a more conventional skeleton, and summons an army of skeletal mooks to attack Hank and Sanford.
• Demonic Head Shake: A somewhat Downplayed example. After activating the Improbability Drive, Tricky has a constant head twitch that never leaves him unless he's dead.
• Divergent Character Evolution: Downplayed. He began as a relatively ordinary Madness character distinguished only by his hair and clown makeup. It was only after becoming a zombie that he started to pick up his iconic gear and look. Even then, he still looks fairly similar to a regular Grunt in comparison with his fellow main characters.
• Drunk On Power: After being repeatedly empowered by reality-warping properties of the Improbability Drive, Tricky sets out to cause as much chaos as he can with it.
• Eldritch Abomination: He becomes a giant, flaming demon at the end of Antipathy upon activating his Improbability Drive, a form that he keeps over the course of Consternation before Jebus kills him. In Expurgation, when he's resurrected again, he appears with a skeletal version of this form.
• Evil Former Friend: In MADNESS: Project Nexus, it's revealed he was once a contemporary of Doctor Christoff who went insane at some point after the events of Project Nexus 1.5. By the time Christoff finds him again, he's completely bonkers and beyond all reason, and doesn't have any qualms with trying to kill his old colleague.
• Evil Laugh: In Expurgation, while hijacking one of the demon's bodies, he lets out a brief one before shooting at Sanford.
• Evil Redhead: Has two tufts of poofy, red hair, and is one of the few characters to sport hair at all. He's also an Ax-Crazy Monster Clown that serves as one of the main antagonists of the series. As Dr. Hofnarr, he had black hair, but he wasn't evil back then.
• Eyeless Face: His exposed jaw invokes this, as is with other zombies.
• Fair-Play Villain: Surprisingly, he doesn't fight dirty. He always waits until his opponent is prepared before attacking them, such as when he gave Hank a pipe to fight against his stop sign in Antipathy, and when he tapped Sanford on the shoulder before attacking him in Expurgation.
• Fanboy: As Hofnarr, he was a big fan of "Slaughter Time", a game show in which contestants fought each other to the death, and the last one standing was the winner. How big of a fan was he of this show? He marked his calendar so he wouldn't miss an episode, and as Tricky he attempted to make his own version, called "Murder Time".
• Feel No Pain: Hank shot him in the face; this just pissed him off. Hank lopped off about three inches of Tricky's head; this killed him for about 4 seconds, before Tricky pulled a Russian Reversal, resurrecting himself and killing Hank right back. Tricky didn't even bother to tape his skull back together after this.
• Fighting Clown: Quite literally - he's both a clown and one of the most dangerous fighters in the series.
• Flight: Briefly flies (or just does it In a Single Bound) in the non-canon Incident: 1000A
• From Nobody to Nightmare:
  • From a random powerless guard to, in Krinkels' words, the "Unstoppable Nevadean Champion". As Ax-Crazy as Tricky was, he was still just a Mook with fancy makeup and therefore subject to basic laws of reality the same as anyone else. This, of course, changed when the Improbability Drives came into play, and then went straight out the window when Tricky got his own Improbability Drive. Comes to a head in Expurgation, where he immediately throws the Auditor out of the Big Bad seat, takes over the Auditor's Hell, and becomes a body-hopping God of Evil.
  • Taken even further in MADNESS: Project Nexus, where it's revealed he was once Doctor Hofnarr, an old colleague and ally of Christoff's who hit a pretty big Sanity Slippage.
• Fusion Dance:
  • He merges with the Auditor in Expurgation and becomes a new version of his demonic form with the latter's powers. Although we see that the Auditor is still his own separate entity.
  • The Demon from the non-canon short Incident 111A was meant to be the result of this fusion. The creature's design ended up being used in another context for Incident 111A.
• Genius Bruiser: Don't be fooled by his infantile humor or his preferred way of brute force; according to Krinkels, Tricky is canonically the smartest character in Madness, which would include very smart characters such as 2BDamned or The Auditor. Given how in Project Nexus, he was one of the scientists who worked on Project Nexus, it makes sense.
• Goofy Print Underwear: In Project Nexus 2, he often wears nothing but a lab coat and cartoon heart-print boxers. This might have been as a result of going insane when he was Dr. Hoffnar.
• Hijacked by Ganon: His corpse ended up being sucked into the Auditor's body which revives him, as the Auditor bore an Improbability Drive inside of him. Naturally, considering how colossally batshit insane Tricky is, he immediately seizes control of the Auditor's body and also ends up taking control of the Auditor's Hell, becoming the Big Bad of Expurgation. Subverted at the end, however, when Hank and Sanford destroy him… and the Auditor takes center stage again right after.
• Humanoid Abomination: Being a zombie aside, he's immensely powerful and psychotic and has the power to warp reality to his favor. He starts to lean more towards Eldritch Abomination in his demon form and fully becomes one upon fusing with the Auditor.
• Killed Off for Real: Seemingly meets his final end in Expurgation, with his Hell-self being punched out and his Nevadean self's head exploding.
• King Mook: In Expurgation, he's pretty much a stronger version of the skeletons he summons, albeit with reality-warping powers.
• Iconic Sequel Character: He's one of the main antagonists of the series, serves as Hank's main rival after Jebus and is one of the most memorable characters in the series, but he's introduced in "Redeemer", the second episode.
• Improbable Weapon User: His signature weapon is the "!" stop sign, which he uses as a staff/bludgeon or a spear. Interestingly, it started out as a weapon Hank used in order to kill him with, after which Tricky supposedly wanted to "return the favor" by toting it.
• Insane Equals Violent: Very, very much so. He's batshit insane even by Madness Combat standards, and is one of the most violent characters in the series.
• Laughably Evil: He's hilariously over-the-top and crazy that it's pretty hard to take him seriously. Even in Expurgation, where he's hijacked the Auditor's body and sets out to do lots of damage with it, he can elicit a few funny moments.
• Lightning Bruiser: He can flash-step across large stretches of land and tear your head off when he gets there. In Expurgation, when Sanford shoots a SPAS-12 Shotgun at him, Tricky smashes himself into the ground to dodge it before launching Sanford away with a single swing of an Poleaxe.
• Leitmotif:
  • "Clown Song of Death", and pieces of its melody, have shown up to reference his influence on a situation.
  • "Calliope" is considered synonymous with Tricky, but this instance is associated more with Fan-Works rather than the main series.
  • MADNESS: Project Nexus 2 gives him "Fucking Crazy", a tune that starts out silly and whimsy, but slowly turns to the more dramatic electro music more commonly seen in the franchise.
• Masking the Deformity: By Episode 4, Tricky the undead Monster Clown starts wearing a crude steel mask over his Undeathly Pallor and facial wounds. The mask gets damaged as Tricky gets more and more obviously inhuman; he discards it in Episode 7 after becoming a massive demon.
• Meaningful Name: It's pretty Tricky to kill him without him coming back to life. His real name, "Hofnarr" is Dutch for "court jester", foreshadowing who he would become.
• Me's a Crowd: In a similar vein as Hank, 9.5 Chapter Two reveals that he has at least two versions of himself running around in Hell, one that looks like his zombie form without the green skin and another who looks like a smaller, red version of the skeletal monster from the beginning of Expurgation. In contrast to Hank, however, they seem to actually work together and team up against him.
• Monster Clown: Monster Zombie Clown.
• Monstrosity Equals Weakness: His form after absorbing the Improbability Drive is considerably more powerful, yet less effective due to the difficulty it has moving around in any indoor area, forcing him to become an Advancing Boss of Doom until he downsizes himself.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: Already durable before getting the Improbability Drive; after getting it, he can survive damn near anything by resurrecting himself whenever he dies.
• Ninja Pirate Robot Zombie: He’s a zombie Monster Clown wielding a stop sign who can warp reality and turn into a flaming demon if he so chooses.
• One-Winged Angel:
  • After seemingly being cornered and killed by Hank near the end of Antipathy, Tricky suddenly activates his Improbability Drive and turns into a literal Monster Clown of a flaming demonic variety.
  • He gets another one in Expurgation at the living world, which resembles a skeletal version of his previous form with glowing red eyes rather than just white. And he also happens to have Jebus' halo to cap it all off. His body isn't flaming this time, though he does still have a "clown wig" made out of fire.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: Thinks of himself as the only one who has a right to kill Hank. He repeatedly objects to Jesus' interventions in their fights, and in 9.5 Chapter Two, when he sees Hank battling the Retainer, he swoops in with a chainsaw and brutally slaughters it.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Whilst having the same appearance of green skin and huge, bloody teeth like the other zombies in the series, Tricky somehow has still retained a sense of his original identity as he goes around doing his own thing, chasing Hank and being as batshit insane as he was before.
• Playing with Fire: After turning into his demonic form, he can breathe streams of fire and set Hank alight by touch, as well as morph into a mass of flames.
• Practically Joker: A malevolent, psychotic clown in bright colors who constantly attacks an anti-hero who primarily wears black and will not die easy. Sound familiar? Bonus points for sounding much like the Joker in his secret audio file in 9.5 Part 2, as well as having a conversation with his boss about a topic of startlingly small significance, manically cackling all the while.
• Psycho for Hire: Tricky was originally contracted by the Sheriff to be one of the guards at his base.
• Rasputinian Death: A noteworthy example. He's been shot numerous times, impaled then zombified, got his scalp sliced off, had an axe smash into his face, ended up losing his own Improbability Drive implanted inside of him, then got stabbed in the face... and then came back to life after getting his corpse absorbed, before getting killed in both the living world and in Hell.
• Reality Warper: Starting somewhere around Depredation, Tricky is able to use the Improbability Drive to both increase his power and render his many deaths "invalid", among other things.
• Repetitive Audio Glitch: His voice lines in Project Nexus 2 make use of this combined with Voice of the Legion to give him an ominous air despite his shrill voice.
• Resurrective Immortality: The Improbability Drive lets him revive himself after he dies as much as he wants. It's only after the Drive is destroyed that he can be killed permanently and even that doesn't fully stick thanks to the Auditor absorbing his corpse.
• Sadist: He only wants to make Hank suffer, reviving him multiple times just to kill him again.
• Sanity Slippage: Seemingly undergoes this over the course of the series, presumably as a result of resurrecting himself constantly without fixing the absurd head trauma he tends to undergo. Tricky somehow manages to become even less sane after getting revived again in Expurgation. Before, he at least wanted to toy with Hank, but now he seems dead set on just killing him as painfully as possible.
  • Even in Project Nexus 2, he began as a scientist who worked alongside Jebus before his experiments began to twist him into something more closely resembling his usual self after they parted ways.
• Say My Name: "HANK! HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANK!"
• Scary Teeth:
  • All Madness zombies have them – Tricky isn’t an exception, though his mask usually hides them.
  • Exaggerated in his demon forms, where his teeth are almost the size of Hank's head.
• Spell My Name With An S: Not Tricky, but his past self, Hofnarr. He has at least four different spellings (Hoffnar, Hofnarr, Hoffnarr, Hofnar) of his name, none of them being consistent, though "Hofnarr" seems to be the most consistantly used.
• The Starscream: He served under the Auditor for a while as a guard or henchman, but Tricky eventually turned on him after he got his hands on the Portable Improbability Drive, seemingly to pursue his own objectives.
• Stealth Pun: Tricky is the only recurring cast member aside from the Auditor that remains unplayable in Project Nexus, instead being exclusively an AI companion that is ignored by the character swap rotation. Meaning that he is, much like in the animations, completely uncontrollable.
• Suddenly Voiced: Alongside most of the main cast in the second Project Nexus.
• Super-Speed: Thanks to the Drive in his skull, he has enhanced speed that allows him to easily out-manoeuvre Hank and clears a distance of a few buildings in a manner of seconds to retreat.
• Telephone Polearm: For a while, he used the stop sign that Hank impaled him on as a weapon.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: When the Auditor accidentally absorbs Tricky in frustration with Jebus's halo rejecting him, Tricky proceeds to make the Auditor explode (albeit without killing him somehow). By doing this, Tricky also takes control of the dimension that was inside the Auditor.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Without the Improbability Drive, Tricky is little more than a slightly above-average mook who can be taken out with a few well-placed hits. With the Drive, he's a lightning-fast, murderous and near-untouchable Hero Killer.
• Villainous Breakdown: Goes through one in Expurgation where he becomes absolutely feral as he tries to kill Hank and Sanford.
• V-Sign: Often depicted doing this with one or two hands, depending on how excited he is.
• Winds of Destiny, Change!: Tricky is basically a cheater who uses hacks to win. If not for the Improbability Drive, Tricky would have stayed dead long ago.

The Auditor

The Auditor

The one who manages the Improbability Drives, keeping the world in a state of madness by essentially hacking reality. He is something like a Living Shadow, able to morph around space and obstacles or phase through almost every form of attack. He can also summon any type of weapon for him to use; whether it be swords or guns.

After Jesus' death, the Auditor takes his halo for himself, granting him even more abilities as well as enhancing his personal powers, giving him the ability to enhance mooks into superhuman threats capable of being an actual threat to the protagonists, as well as cast flaming darkness capable of disintegrating things and people much like Jesus. He can also consume people's bodies — whether it be living or dead — to increase his size and power.

It is Hank's, Sanford's, and Deimos' goal to take him down, and end the Madness. At first, this seemed to be achieved at the end of Abrogation, thanks to Tricky being absorbed and causing his body to explode. However, in Expurgation, he manipulates Hank and Sanford into destroying Tricky so that he can regain control, apparently killing Hank and Sanford in the process. So, for the time being, The Bad Guy Wins.

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• Anarcho-Tyranny: His end goal seems to be to tighten his grip on Nevada while ensuring that the madness goes on continuously under his discretion.
• Assimilation Backfire: He learnt the hard way that eating a clown named Tricky usually ends in the latter possibly taking over your body and likely death.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: As he grows stronger in the course of Abrogation, he grows in size until he’s at least three times larger than even magnified characters.
• Bad Boss:
  • He slices a random grunt in half simply for being in his way after finding some of his underlings slacking off. Given how fast the other grunts stay away from him even before that, one gets the impression his underlings don’t fancy crossing him.
  • After getting the Halo and it beginning to reject him in Abrogation, he absorbs a couple of living Agents into himself without a shred of hesitation.
• The Bad Guy Wins: By the end of Expurgation, the Auditor reigns supreme with seemingly everyone who could possibly stand up to him either killed off or temporarily out of the way.
• Battle Aura: In his first appearance, he seems just to be a pitch-black Madness character, only spawning his flaming aura when he tries to snipe Jesus. His flames begin as translucent grey, then turn fully black like his body, and as he grows stronger he eventually starts to gain a red outline.
• BFG: His GAU-8 and some other stuff he pulls out. He’s fond of these.
• BFS: Seems to favour this after he gets stronger in Abrogation to match his growing size. It seems to be an Energy Weapon made of the same stuff he is made of (whatever that is…)
• Big Bad: He controls everything behind the scenes, making sure the agents are fit enough to fight the protagonists, and that the improbability devices stay on.
• Big Brother Is Watching: Looking at the posters of him staring down his agents and telling them to work clearly shows he’s one of these kinds of guys.
• Big "NO!": Has a big one during his defeat in Abrogation.
  Auditor: What?
  Tricky: HELLO AGAIN!
  Auditor: NO!
  Tricky: YES!
  Auditor: NO! NO! NO!
  Tricky: YES! YES! YES!
• Cannibalism Superpower: After he gets Jesus' halo, the Auditor displays the ability to consume bodies (living or dead) to grow stronger and larger, first shown at the end of Aggregation. He later resorts to abusing this in order to heal himself from the damage caused by his incompatibility with the halo he uses as well as Hank's halo-empowered attacks. It works for a while, but it backfires on him later when he makes the mistake of trying to do this with Tricky's corpse.
• Card-Carrying Villain: His handle is BIGBADAUD999, implying that he outright considers himself an evil guy but also the Big Bad.
• Casting a Shadow: His dark, fiery appearance generally invokes this trope, and once he gets Jesus' halo, he starts casting darkness flames.
• The Chessmaster:
  • From his computer, he has watched nearly every event in the series unfold and aptly responded by doing subtle things like increasing the strength of his underlings between episodes.
  • Powerless to defeat Tricky in Expurgation, the Auditor heals and improves Hank so that he can defeat Tricky instead, while the Auditor watches from the sidelines. The end result is that he comes Back from the Dead, gets the halo back, and gets his three most cumbersome enemies dead with little effort.
• The Cracker: In a sense that he is hacking reality itself with the Improbability Drive to cause chaos in Nevada and bring everything under his control.
• Dark Is Evil: He appears to be made of pure darkness, sprouting pitch black flames. He's also the Big Bad and the leader of the main antagonistic group of the series.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: As a combined result of Tricky overloading him from inside and a Normality Beam to the back.
• Didn't Think This Through: His ability to adapt to the unexpected contrasts with his tendency to create the unexpected problems he has to fix:
  • His reaction to Jesus trying to tamper with the Primary Improbability Drive in Inundation was to fire a rocket at him. When he was next to the Improbability Drive. Needless to say, it begins the Normality Restoration process.
  • Tricky hijacks his body in Abrogation thanks to him not considering the possibility that a Monster Clown empowered by an Improbability Drive could take advantage of him.
• Dimension Lord: He's the embodiment of a dimension that looks like hell.
• Dramatic High Perching: Loves doing this to anyone he’s up against. Most obvious in Abrogation when he raises a tower fortress in front of the heroes just to invoke this.
• Enemy Mine: In a desperate bid to rid Tricky from his body, he communicates through posters to Hank and Sanford, saying he'd spare them if they kill the clown. As one may expect, he doesn't deliver.
• Expy: Shape of a black silhouette. Obsessed with controlling a power that does not belong to him. Needs to consume people in order to keep it contained when said power starts rejecting him. Are we talking about the Auditor or Father?
• Evil Versus Evil: The Auditor hasn't gotten along with either of the series' other prominent antagonists. Expurgation was essentially one big game of The Auditor and Tricky trying to one-up each other.
• Fusion Dance: In the non-canon Incident 111A, the strange Nightmare Face demon is stated by Krinkels to have been a rejected prototype of what Tricky and the Auditor would look like after fusing together.
• Gatling Good: He uses a Gatling to snipe Jesus in Inundation with some pretty decent accuracy, showing his proficiency for firearms (and his love for More Dakka).
• Genius Loci: In Expurgation, and through Krinkels' Curiouscat page, it is revealed he's actually an embodiment of a sapient Eldritch Location that functions identically to Nevada's typical Hell.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: In his official debut at the conclusion of Consternation, his glaring red eyes are the last thing seen in the gloom as the screen fades out. A similar thing is done at the end of Aggregation.
• Godzilla Threshold: In Expurgation, he empowers Hank, one of his main enemies, because it's his best shot at getting Tricky out of the picture.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Served as this for the series up until Inundation. Jebus, Tricky and (To a lesser extent) the Sheriff all carried out his orders and did the fighting while he observed it all from his office. From Inundation onwards, he actively engages in the combat as well, becoming the center Big Bad.
• Guns Akimbo: Summons two MP5Ks to kill Jebus with in Inundation. Unfortunately for him, Jeb reflects the bullets, and unfortunately for Jeb he has Intangibility.
• Hero Killer: He kills Jesus, and indirectly causes the death of Deimos.
• Horror Hunger: In Abrogation, he decides eating other people is the perfect remedy for the injuries he sustains. And he's not particularly picky about whether they're dead or not.
• Humanoid Abomination: He is in the vague shape of a normal Madness character, only entirely pitch black and looking as if on fire. He also has straight up supernatural powers which aren't explained at all that make him easily one of the most dangerous combatants in the series. Because of this, it seems likely he is beyond whatever qualifies for "human" in the Madness world. MADNESS: Project Nexus outright confirms that the Auditor is not a normal Nevadean, being an Employer, who are sapient dimesions that manage Nevada. It's also been stated that the Auditor's form is just what other Nevadeans see him as, since his true form is incomprehensible to most Nevadeans.
• Hypocrite: In one of the blink-and-you'll-miss-it background posters in Expurgation, the Auditor accuses Tricky of having "ruined Nevada". Nevermind that he himself was responsible for the Improbability Drives that turned Nevada into what it is, which by extension makes him personally responsible for creating TRICKY.
• Iconic Sequel Character: Despite being the series' Big Bad and the one in charge of all of the mooks trying to kill Hank since the beginning, he's only revealed in "Consternation", the seventh episode in the series.
• Intangibility: Part of his Nigh-Invulnerability; he shows moments of being this (best example in the beginning of Abrogation). It seems to be an extension of his Voluntary Shapeshifting powers and something he has to consciously put on, as he can be hit and grappled with by catching him off-guard.
• Knight of Cerebus: Yes, even in a work like this. The Sheriff is a Dirty Coward, Jesus is an Anti-Villain at worst, and even Tricky is Laughably Evil in between his more monstrous moments. The Auditor has little comedic moments, and establishes himself as a true threat by permanently killing Jesus, and leading to Deimos' death.
• Laser Sword: His dark red-glowing sword in Abrogation which seems to be made from the same matter as him.
• Living Shadow: Seems to be this, as he can flatten himself to look like one and give his enemies the slip.
• The Man Behind the Man: Following the sagas of Hank going after the Sheriff, then Jesus and Tricky, it seems the Auditor has been the one pulling the strings and heading the AAHW to go after Hank and co., comfortably watching everything happen within his desktop lair and throwing a few upgrades in for his mooks to make things more interesting.
• Mind Control: It seems Jesus' halo either granted or amplified this, as he goes on to possess two Elite Mooks and enhances them so he can send them out whilst he’s busy.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: He gets his most powerful powers from Jesus' halo, after the latter's death.
• Never My Fault: In a poster in Expurgation, he blames Hank and Sanford for Tricky's return despite the fact that he absorbed him and this is what resurrected him.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Two moments. His first is when he shoots out his own Improbability Drive and critically damages it so it begins the Normality Restoration. His second is when he carelessly absorbs Tricky’s corpse, thereby killing himself. Ultimately subverted, as he gets better from both.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: Nearly so. He is capable of being hit solidly if one catches him unaware, but otherwise whenever bullets come his way or he’s being charged, at he simply disappears and reappears somewhere else completely unscathed. Abrogation shows he is vulnerable to Normality Beams/electricity, though, and in Expurgation, the back half of his body appears fractured, showing that Tricky controlling him did a number on him.
• Non-Standard Character Design: He has only the vague shape of a Madness character but lacks the usual ‘Madness lines’ on his face and has two visible, red glowing eyes. His smooth, almost liquid-like way of moving and animations also set him apart from the rest of the characters. May be justified as he doesn’t seem to be a “normal” character.
• Oh, Crap!: Has a big one when he accidentally absorbs Tricky and the latter seems to come back to life inside him.
• Phlebotinum Overdose: Absorbing corpses makes him stronger. Absorbing Tricky's corpse made him explode and allows him to take over his dimension.
• Phlebotinum Overload: That halo clearly did not enjoy being worn by the Auditor. As soon as Hank manages to grab it, it empowers Hank instead and compromises the Auditor's compatibility with it. Instead of throwing it away, Auditor instead tries to remedy it by absorbing people into him.
• Playing with Fire: His appearance and the effects of his powers display fiery animation.
• Reality Warper: Using his Improbability Drive, he proves capable of hacking into reality and modifying people in a simple program. On his own, he is shown to be capable of spawning weapons at will without any apparent limit and morph around attacks and space alike. After he gets Jesus' halo, he can cast flaming darkness to either disintegrate things or enhance mooks into deadly fighters, consume corpses to grow in size and power, and even modify the landscape such as creating towering fortresses out of the ground for him to stand on top of.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: His color scheme positively screams this trope. Even moreso in Expurgation, where his back half is riddled with red markings and scars.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: As one of the few Madness characters to have visible facial features, these only serve to further the appearance of the Auditor being unnatural.
• Sanity Slippage: The posters in Expurgation show him getting more and more desperate to get rid of Tricky.
  "KILL HIM. STOP HIM. I MIGHT EVEN LET YOU LIVE. HE CAN'T BE INSIDE MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE:213"
• Satanic Archetype: He's a manipulative shadowy figure Hell bent on corrupting the world around him to serve his goals.
• Shadowed Face, Glowing Eyes: His entire body is made of a pitch black fire-like substance, and his only facial features are glowing red eyes, rather than having the usual face-cross that most Madness Combat characters have.
• Sinister Silhouettes: His very first appearance is as one of these, coupled with his glaring red eyes.
• Spontaneous Weapon Creation: One of his unique personal powers. He can summon both melee weapons and firearms, and even a rocket launcher once, with the weapons themselves adjusting to the Auditor's size (such as when he starts to grow larger in Abrogation). Strangely, however, the very first weapon he uses, the Gatling gun in Inundation, is one he had stored in his room, instead of being something he summoned.
• Superpower Lottery: His Voluntary Shapeshifter powers grant him Intangibility and the ability to travel at high speeds regardless of terrain. He can summon any type of weapon he likes. And that's before he gets Jesus's halo…
• Swords Akimbo: He first fancies this kind of fighting style, but moves on to a BFS when he grows stronger and bigger.
• Teleport Spam: The main reason he’s so hard to fight – whenever he sees an attack coming his way, he simply vanishes and sneak-attacks back.
• Villainous Breakdown: Seems to happen to him during his ongoing Phlebotinum Breakdown in Abrogation, as he is shown somewhat panicking after he realises he can be hurt by Normality Restoration energy, leading to him scrambling madly for sustenance to retain his form and grow larger. By the time Hank and Sanford catch up to him, he has foregone trying to be sneaky with his Teleport Spam tactics and possessed minions and instead uses brute force tactics while constantly, almost desperately, soaking up tons of corpses until he makes the fatal mistake of consuming Tricky's.
• Villain Teleportation: The only character with personal superpowers not granted by something else, one of which is this trope. It even fulfills the black and smoky criteria to show he's a very villainous example. Like his intangibility, it also seems to be connected to his Voluntary Shapeshifter powers, as even as he fades out of sight, it is clear he cannot instantly cross long distances (he is shown physically travelling every time he wants to go somewhere).
• Voluntary Shapeshifter: The Auditor is capable of morphing his form very fluidly as a means of dodging attacks or travelling, but Abrogation shows he is capable of transforming into other forms – e.g. a fire-breathing dragon’s head and a fist – to attack others. These forms are still made of whatever dark blobby stuff he’s made from, and the former shape still retains his red eyes.
• Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises: Though he has no irises to speak of, his eyes expand like dinner plates when he accidentally absorbs Tricky.
• Winds of Destiny, Change!: The Auditor has repeatedly used his Improbability Drives to tilt the scale in his favor, including things like infecting Jesus with a virus to slow him down, continuously reviving Tricky in his battle with Hank, and remotely "upgrading" the AAHW's troops to become stronger.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: Tricky inheriting his powers in Expurgation was something he didn't intend, but the Auditor helps Hank and Sanford to defeat Tricky and they appear to be unconscious or dead when they succeed, allowing him to come victorious in the end.

Mooks:

AAHW in general

AAHW

An organisation of armed agents under the command of the Sheriff and as revealed later, the Auditor, who are more often than not cannon-fodder for the series’ protagonists to tear through indiscriminately. They come in a few varieties:

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• Alien Blood: ATP engineers and ATP soldats have yellow blood, presumably due to the upgrades they receive to make them better soldiers.
• And I Must Scream: A few A.A.H.W units appear to be stationed in the Other Place/Hell, to keep Hank in it as long as possible. It's been shown that quite a few do not like their situation, and one Soldat even says that, while they can't escape the Other Place, they can stop Hank. It's also been implied that they are either being slowly dissolved into Hell, or are being resurrected and forced to keep trying to kill Hank over and over again, failing each time ^note It might even be both; many of the agents in Part 9.5 have their facial skin missing, or other visible scars on their bodies; notably, the only Madness characters to have visible scarring are those who've been killed and brought Back from the Dead, while canon material from Project Nexus 2 refers to resurrected Nevadeans as having been "partially dissolved" in The Other Place.
• Artificial Human: Many members if the Agency are simply formed by the Employers, mainly the Auditor, out of the dust of Nevada itself.
• Blind Obedience: DISSENTER implies that they obey orders without thinking twice, no matter how dumb the order sounds. Though they're not under any mind control, it would seem that they're loyal to a fault. While this makes them devoted soldiers, it can be a problem when a hacker sends them fake orders on their communication devices. They won't even question an order telling them to fire a rocket near their own teammates.
• Cannon Fodder: Their main role in the series is to get mowed down by the dozen at the hands of the main characters.
• Cool Mask: The ATP Engineers, and some of the MAG Agents like MAG v2 and v3.
• Demonic Possession: Two ATPs and two Agents have been subject to this by the Auditor in order to ‘enhance’ them. In this state, they have glowing red eyes and good enough reflexes to challenge the protagonists even when unarmed. One possessed ATP even succeeds in killing Deimos.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: They are the Agency Against Hank Wimbleton. It's not that difficult to see who they're fighting against.
• Fun with Acronyms:
  • In their original introduction, the AAHW stood for the Agency Against Hank Wimbleton in a considerably more humorous slant on their role as Hank's adversaries and victims.
  • Meanwhile, ATP stands for Accelerated Training Program.
• Giant Mook: There are giant variants of them in DedmosRebuilt.fla who aren't indicated to be related to MAGnification.
• Hive Mind: Essentially function as one. They charge into battle without fear and obey the Auditor without question.
• Implacable Man: Mooks directly empowered by the Auditor need plenty of body damage to be taken down, whether by being blown away by an explosion, being decapitated or having their head riddled by dozen of bullets.
• Monster Threat Expiration: Each type of agent puts up the strongest showing in their first appearance before being brought into line with the previous Cannon Fodder varieties. The first Agent in Apotheosis held his own against Hank for a few seconds before going down, the first Engineer managed to actually wound Sanford, and the first Soldats in the main series put up a massive fight (well, for this series) against Sanford and Deimos. Conservation of Ninjutsu may also be in effect.
• Mook: Masses of faceless combatants that barely slow the hero down? Ayup.
• Nebulous Evil Organization: The AAHW's only stated purpose so far seems to be to lord over Nevada and oppose the protagonists.
• Out of Focus: They only appear for a short time in Expurgation, being largely replaced by Tricky's Skeleton army.
• Propaganda Machine: The walls of AAHW bases are adorned with posters promoting the AAHW's cause and demonizing the protagonists.
• Rasputinian Death: It takes one to kill an Enhanced Mook. Take one L337 Agent for example: After coming back to life from being hooked in the chest, he gets shot in the head 4 times, sliced in his left eye and stabbed through the chest. Hank had to rip off his head to finally end him. Another l337 Agent was impaled by a spike door and had his face riddled with dozens of bullets from a Vigneron M2. The ATP Engineers got the least Rasputinian deaths, simply blown away by an explosion.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: The Agents and Soldats, who all wear black suits with white shirts and ties. A few of the MAG Agents even get in on this, being enlarged Agents.
• The Soulless: Though they're intelligent and able to think mostly for themselves, they ultimately serve the will of their creator and lack the sense of self necessary to form a S-3LF, barring a few implied exceptions.
• Super-Reflexes: Although nowhere near as good as the protagonists, the ATP engineers and Soldats are noticeably more able to put up a fight against the protagonists and dodge some attacks. Possessed Agents also show this, but this may be due to their enhancements.

Grunts

Grunts

The plain character design, most commonly used for grunts.

Ordinary, unadorned mooks with little combat skill outside of handling melee and some light weapons. They were most common from episodes 1 to 4 after which Agents become more popular.

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• Badass Normal: Rarely, but under the right circumstances they can be this. In one of the Incidents, one grunt managed to take down MAG Agent: Torture by himself in one of the incidents, though only after many of his colleagues died fighting Torture and because he was lucky enough to have the right weapon for the situation.
• Cannon Fodder: More than any other AAHW unit. Grunts' main purpose seems to be to get mowed down in droves by the protagonists.
• Cruel and Unusual Death:
  • Most Grunts that appear post-Apotheosis suffer unusually terrible fates at the hands of Hank and company.
  • Two Grunts have their internal organs ripped out by Hank in Consternation.
• Demoted to Extra: Their appearances became dramatically less common after Apotheosis. They are prominent in the second half of Antipathy, as it takes part in a training facility, but Grunts barely appear apart from that, and are even absent from some main episodes.
• Mooks: As their name suggests, they're little more than basic thugs meant to provide a minor challenge to the protagonists.

Agents

Agents

An agent with black shades.

Also known as 1337 agents, these make up a substantial part of the AAHW and are sometimes referred to as a sector of their own (also called the 1337 crew). They first appeared in Episode 4 (Apotheosis) and are meant to be more trained than grunts.

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• Cool Shades: All Agents have them. They start off as black shades, but after each time the Auditor upgrades them to be stronger, they seemingly get redder.
• Elite Mooks: Extremely Downplayed. The Agents are of a higher rank than Grunts and while they fare marginally better than them in combat, they still get effortlessly mowed down by the protagonists.
• Expy: They're (quite obviously) based off the Agents from the The Matrix franchise (such as Smith) with their shades and suits.
• Hand Cannon: Originally in their introduction in Depredation, they were mostly armed with Desert Eagles that have a black finish before slowly getting a more varied arsenal later on in the series. This was phased out after Antipathy, where Desert Eagles started becoming less common.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Or in this case, red shades. Their black shades get progressively replaced with red as the series goes on as a consequence of the Auditor upgrading them. Subverted in that it does not make them more threatening than before.
• Replacement Mooks: It isn't long before the Agents replace the Grunts as the main fighting force of the AAHW.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: All agents wear suits and ties, usually accompanied by a pair of shades.

Zombies

The standard Zombie. Not pictured: other Zombie varieties

Reanimated corpses, usually of Hank's victims. They generally accompany Jebus, as he's the one who reanimated them as zombies and thus under his command attempt to attack Hank. They debuted in Madness Combat 1.

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• Amazing Technicolor Population: They always have green skin.
• Early Installment Character-Design Difference: In the first three episodes of the series, the zombies had lighter shades of green skin, their clothes weren't tattered, and they didn't have mouths. The general design (Pictured above) wouldn't appear until "Apotheosis".
• Elite Zombie: Agents raised as Zombies in the main series qualify as Soldier Zombies as they retain enough intelligence to use guns. Not so much in Project Nexus Classic, where they, along with zombie Engineers and Soldats, behave the same way as regular zombies aside from being tougher.
• Eyeless Face: Their exposed jaws invoke this.
• Feel No Pain: An Agent zombie in Depredation barely flinches in response to being hit by a stray bullet.
• Lip Losses: When Jebus reanimates them, they lose their "lips" AKA the skin covering their teeth.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: Project Nexus Classic calls them "Zombehs" while the sequel calls them "Zeds".
• One-Hit Kill: In Project Nexus, if you get grabbed by a zombie, then unless you mash fast enough, they'll kill you with a bite.
• Our Zombies Are Different: In the main series, Jebus reanimates the dead as zombies using his halo. In Project Nexus, they're an experimental product of the titular project, making them Artificial Zombies.
• Put on a Bus: Zombies have yet to reappear in the main series after Depredation as Jesus stopped making them.
• Zombie Apocalypse: Implied to be happening in Incident: 010A, as a civilian is running for his life from approaching zombies.
• Zombie Gait: All they tend to do is shamble slowly and mindlessly toward potential victims; naturally, this means they tend to go down fairly quickly.

ATP Engineers

ATP Engineers

Mask-wearing soldiers with more weapons expertise and weirdly yellow blood which may or may not be a result of the enhanced genetic testing behind their creations. They are far more equipped and skilled than the other classes, and act as superior units. They first appeared in Consternation although the first chronological-to-canon appearance was the one at the end of 5.5 who shoots Sanford.

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• Alien Blood: As with all ATP units, Engineers have yellow blood.
• Cool Mask: All Engineers wear a unique octagonal mask with a strange yellow visor. It's actually pretty durable, too, with it resisting knife strikes during a few episodes.
• Establishing Character Moment: The first Engineer in the entire series (chronologically at least) makes their threat known by instantly shooting Sanford in the gut.
• Evil Minions: The Engineers' main duty seems to be managing the tech of the AAHW.
• Informed Attribute: Despite their rank title, they are rarely seen doing any kind of engineering. Their role as far as the viewers can observe seems to consist of being slightly more competent mooks than the agents.
• Mook Lieutenant: In addition to technological skills, Engineers are also stated to specialize in leadership and collectively function as intermediaries for the Auditor to the rest of the AAHW.
• Radio Voice: Starting from DedmosRebuilt, they have somewhat audible voices, but it's heavily distorted and deep through their masks, making them sound similar to the Combine.

ATP Soldats

ATP Soldats

First introduced in 7.5, these are another yellow-blooded class of elite AAHW who are supposedly more aggressive than the Engineers and just as armed up. They are recognizable for their single eyepieces with yellow lenses.

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• Adaptational Badass: While Soldats in the animations vary between dying as quickly as other AAHW units and putting up a few seconds of resistance, the Project Nexus games give them Tac-Bars and corpus blocks, meaning you absolutely will have to put in effort to kill every single one.
• Alien Blood: Like Engineers, Soldats bleed yellow blood.
• Bilingual Bonus: "Soldat" means "soldier" in some languages.
• Cyber Cyclops: Their eyepieces give them this appearance; it's unclear if they have two eyes behind it, or if it's their only eye.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: According to Word of God. If they were instructors they would either teach you how to be more Soldat-y or throw you off a cliff.invoked
• Elite Mooks: More aggressive and much more skilled at combat than the rest of the AAHW units. A few of them even manage to score minor hits on Hank.
• Eye Scream:
  • In DISSENTER, a Soldat suffers a Moe Greene Special from 2BDamned via Scope Snipe to their binoculars.
  • Sanford pushes the eyepiece and rips it up and off of one Soldat's head in 11.
• Super-Soldier: One of the screens describing the AAHW's promotion path in 7.5's reveals they were created to provide them with more fighters. Appropriately, they're shown to be much more skilled than other AAHW units, with a few even landing minor blows against Hank and a batch of them surviving for a time against Deimos and Sanford.
• Throw Down the Bomblet: Concept art for their Project Nexus 2 incarnation indicates that they make heavy use of grenades and flashbangs in combat. Mostly an Informed Attribute in the animations, where they're only seen using flashbangs during 7.5, and even then only one gets used.

MAG Agents

MAG Agents

MAG Agent: Torture. Not pictured: other MAG Agent varieties

Huge, genetically modified experiments who have been magnified to about thrice the size of a normal character. They use their bulk and brute strength against the protagonists, as well as enormous weapons crafted for their size. There are many different kinds of MAG agents and it seems the AAHW has means to produce them en masse. The first MAG agent (known as Torture) was seen opposing Hank in Consternation.

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• Absurdly Sharp Claws: The MAG agents have visible and razor-sharp nails, though they are hardly, if ever, seen using them in battle. The only examples of this are in two non-canon Incidents: in Incident: 010A Mag Agent: V4 shoved their fingers into Hank's head, and in Incident: 011A MAG Agent: Torture's claws are used to grapple onto a poor Grunt's face so it could be hoisted into midair and ripped apart.
• A Day in the Limelight: MAG Agent: Torture appears as the protagonist of an Incident.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: All of them are Sharply-Dressed Giants and are relatively high on the totem pole when it comes to Mook threats for the protagonists.
• Berserk Button: MAG Agent: Torture does not like disharmony. To the point that it will make him go on a rampage against other members of the AAHW.
• Breakout Mook Character: MAG Agent: Torture tends to appear frequently in side material, fan-made animations and fan art, due to leaving a lasting impression as the first MAG Agent and his very unique design.
• BFG: Because of their giant size, some of them are armed with equally large firearms that could probably be mounted on a tank.
• Cool Mask: Many MAG Agents have intimidating masks covering their faces, such as V2's teeth-filled one, V3's duck-billed rebreather, V4's digital visor or Gestalt's tusked, dragon-like faceplate.
• Cool Shades: MAG Agent Torture also sports a pair, since he just looks like a bigger 1337 Agent.
• Facial Horror:
  • MAG Agent Torture has a pair of massive iron stakes rammed in an 'X' through his face. A bit of artwork by Krinkels himself further emphasises this, depicting him with a gaping hole through one cheek that leaves half of his teeth exposed and several stitches across his face.
  • In the official animations, Torture dies when Hank drives a chainsaw into his face repeatedly until it reaches his brain. Unsurprisingly, this also leaves his face even more horribly torn up.
• Feel No Pain: The MAG Agents have insane endurance allowing them to survive being riddled with bullets (disregarding them as a minor nuisance) and melee has nearly no effect on them. Special mention to MAG Agent: Torture, who not only already has two enormous stakes shoved through his skull but shrugs off Hank unloading an entire magazine point-blank into his face like nothing even happened. It takes a chainsaw to the head to finally end him and Hank had to be thorough.
• Giant Mook: The MAG Agents are about three times the size of a regular Agent. While their increased size makes them somewhat more durable, they generally don't fare any better than the AAHW rank-and-file when fighting the heroes.
• Goggles Do Nothing: Mag Agent V5 wears a pair of goggles, but they don't seem to do much beyond blocking one or two melee attacks.
• Hand Cannon: Some of the MAG agents are armed with scaled-up handguns, which are shown to have equally scaled-up power behind every shot.
• Heavily Armored Mook: The non-canon Mag Agent: V5 from Incident: 110A is covered from head to toe in armour just like an G03LM. Jebus ends up taking him down by pulling part of his helmet off, cutting his skull open, and tearing his brain out of his head.
• Made of Iron:
  • MAG Agents generally take a lot of punishment to put down - Torture effortlessly resists having a full clip from an automatic shotgun emptied into his face at point-blank range, with Hank needing to drive a chainsaw into his face and basically reduce Torture's head to mince to take him down.
  • The non-canon MAG V5 only goes down after Jebus drives his sword through his eyes, wrenches the top of his skull off, and telekinetically rips the brain out of his head before crushing it against a wall.
• Non-Standard Character Design: MAG Agent: V3's facial cross doesn't have lines of equal lengths: the upper line is unusually short despite V3's size. Because of this, V3's cross is completely hidden by his mask and can only be seen◊ by looking at the animation's Flash files. Appearing to lack a facial cross by itself also gives him a non-standard design.
• Pistol-Whipping: After emptying his gun and having to contend with Hank being annoying by latching onto his Mossberg 500 shotgun, Torture sends Hank flying with a punch. Then sending him flying even further by using his shotgun as a golf club.
• Retractable Weapon: V5 takes out an retractable glaive when facing Jeb in Incident: 110A.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Averted. Due to the size of the shells, and Torture making a point to use long-distance slug rounds, he's still able to pressure Hank at a sizable distance.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Torture stands out even further from his brethren for being the only MAG Agent that actually uses a larger firearm - the V2s and V4 are only ever seen wielding giant pistols, while V3 and the non-canon V5 favour melee weapons.
• Super-Strength:
  • MAG Agents are generally much stronger than the normal agents, with Torture easily punching through a steel girder and V2 easily ripping a large tank-like structure out of the ground before trying to crush Jebus with it.
  • In Incident: 011A, Torture punches several mooks into walls hard enough that they're reduced to red smears on impact, as well as tearing several apart with his bare hands.
• Worf Had the Flu: Based on a quick shot in Inundation, Mag Agent V3 was only around 38% complete when the Auditor prematurely activated him. This likely accounts for how Hank was able to kill him so easily, even with a power-up from the Auditor.
• Your Head A-Splode: At the end of Incident: 011A, a grunt shoots a grenade inside MAG Agent Torture's head. Do the math.

Skeletons

Skeletons

The most common kind of skeleton.

An army of skeletons that spawned in Expurgation when Tricky took control of the halo after being absorbed by The Auditor and overloading him. They aren't much different in strength than the AAHW units but they seem more bloodthirsty.

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• Alien Blood: They have black blood.
• Cool Mask:
  • By the end of Expurgation, they wear metallic masks to protect their faces. The masks have two pointy fangs but it seems to be just to make them cooler.
  • The giant skeleton wears a metal hockey mask, just like Tricky did starting from Apotheosis.
• Dem Bones: Well, they are skeletons. Their bodies don't look different than the other characters due to the art-style, but they have skulls for heads.
• Fake Ultimate Mook: The giant skeleton looks like he's gonna be a problem for Hank and Sanford, but Hank beats him rather easily, and all the skeleton manages to do is punch him once. The skeleton's metal mask barely provides any protection, since it can just be removed.
• Feel No Pain: A few skeletons get wounded, but ignore it. Justified, since they're seemingly undead.
• Flight: Two random skeletons have the power to levitate.
• Giant Mook: One of the last skeletons is almost three times bigger than the others.
• Glowing Eyelights of Undeath: They are skeletons with glowing red eyes that stop glowing when they are killed.
• Mook: They serve as Tricky's minions.
• Non-Standard Character Design: Alongside Tricky in his demon or skeleton form, they are the only characters in the series whose head isn't oval-shaped.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: They are evil black skeletons with red eyes. Later, they also sport Tricky's red clown hair.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Their skull's eye sockets are red, fitting for such bloodthirsty monsters.

Retainers

Retainers

A larger-than-average mook (almost as large as a G03LM) who are distinguished from their brethren by their masks (which are cybernetically attached to their heads through two wires connecting their masks to a metal plate on their head) and the jacket they wear. They possess psychic powers, which enable them to fly, teleport, and use psychokinesis.

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• Ambiguously Human: While they look like larger-than-average Cyborg Nevadeans, their supernatural powers and heavy association with The Other Place leave their exact nature ambiguous. Supplementary material from Project Nexus 2 makes it even more unclear, with the Retainers being depicted as something entirely separate from the main "Generations" of Nevadeans.
• Back from the Dead: Implied. One of the code lines at the end of 9.5 Part 2 refers to a damaged Retainer being "reactivated"; while it's not confirmed to be the Retainer killed earlier, they are the only Retainer shown to have been killed/disabled on-screen so far.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: Just one of them is powerful enough to completely overwhelm Hank in battle, something that no other generic enemy has ever done.
• Combo Platter Powers: They can fly, use psychokinesis, teleport, manipulate Hell's stone to create weaponised spikes, and heal supernaturally fast.
• Cool Mask: One that looks like they've got angrily glaring eyes.
• Cyborg: Heavily implied. Their mask is connected to their face through a pair of wires that attach to a metal plate on the side of their head.
• De-power: Retainer #909's telekinetic powers seem to be missing in 9.5 Part 2, which Krinkels implies to be down to the Retainer's exhaustion.
• The Dreaded: Implied. Several graffiti of "FEAR RETENTION" are scattered about the place in 9.5, while several of the AAHW posters warn the trapped Agents to "Fear Retention." In addition to this, there are periodic appearances of warnings of a Retainer's approach.
• Gas Mask Mooks: Their mask closely resembles a gas mask, and it makes them look quite intimidating.
• Giant Mook: They're around the size of the G03LMS, making them around 1.35 times the size of a normal Madness character.
• Healing Factor: Hank shoots the Retainer at one point, and the bullet wounds simply heal in seconds. He quickly figures out that the healing factor is useless if you impale a sharp object into the Retainer and leave it there, but it takes Tricky dicing it up with a chainsaw to actually kill it.
• Humanoid Abomination: While they look like regular Nevadeans, they're only even seen within The Other Place and possess straight-up supernatural powers. Supplementary material outright sets them apart from regular Nevadeans and heavily associates them with The Other Place, all but stating that they sure as hell aren't 'regular' Nevadeans.
• The Jailer: Their job is to keep Hell's inmates in Hell indefinitely. Some canon material explicitly calls them "Wardens" of The Other Place, fitting their role and name.
• Made of Iron: They can No-Sell being shot by bullets. Hank driving a sword through a Retainer's forehead then jerking the blade around in the wound has little effect beyond annoying them. Even Tricky ramming a chainsaw through their throat doesn't put one down immediately, with the Retainer trying to continue fighting until Tricky chops them into multiple pieces.
• Make Sure He's Dead: 9.5 Part 2's description reveals that this is their job - they're tasked with "retaining" Hank in The Other Place to prevent him further meddling with Nevada, presumably by either killing him or otherwise incapacitating him there ^note This may also extend to other individuals in Hell, as they're also stated to work to "obfuscate the trace signatures visible to the most enlightened on the Nevadean side of the coil". This is implied to reference to how 2BDamned resurrects Deimos and Hank by locating their S-3LF signatures in Hell and pulling them back into Nevada.
• Mind over Matter: They are able to levitate other people and inanimate objects with their minds. They tend to use this in combat by telekinetically hurling chunks of stone or spikes at their enemies.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: While Jebus and Tricky were at least willing to give Hank a fair fight (Jebus by having his zombie mooks on standby and Tricky by giving Hank a weapon to defend himself), the Retainer gives Hank zero mercy, and completely wipes the floor with him.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Invoked - their masks not only have lenses that make them look like they are glaring angrily, but the lenses are coloured red to look even more intimidating.
• Remember the New Guy?: They have presumably antagonized Hank every time he's died and went to hell, but weren't shown properly until 9.5. Justified, since this is the first episode that actually focused on Hank and his journeys through Hell.
• Spike Shooter: The Retainers are capable of generating spikes from the rocks of Hell, which they can then fire like flechettes toward their opponents. They're lethally accurate, and powerful enough to turn Tricky into a pincushion. Curiously, these also seem to appear whenever a Retainer travels through and emerges from a wall or similar.
• Super Powered Mooks: The Retainers are shown to be capable of flying, teleporting, and telekinetically manipulating objects during their first appearance. Their second also demonstrates that they can generate and launch spikes made of Hell's rock at their enemies, and possess a Healing Factor that can undo bullet wounds within seconds. On the more mundane side, they are also shown to be supernaturally strong and durable.
• Super-Strength: One of them effortlessly punches Hank across the room and through a stone wall, and is later seen to crush an ATP Soldat to paste by teleporting overhead and then half-landing, half-stamping on it.
• The Worf Effect:
  • The Retainers' first introduction has one of them show up with absolutely no fanfare, just like any of the other AAHW mooks Hank has been carving through up to this point. Unlike the Agents, the Retainer completely wipes the floor with resident badass Hank, with the latter being unable to leave any lasting damage whatsoever on the former.
  • On the receiving end of this in 9.5 Part 2 - Tricky summarily butchers the Retainer with a chainsaw in the space of a few seconds, though it does put up a fair fight against Hank and Tricky beforehand.
• You Are Number 6: The Retainer menacing Hank in 9.5 Part 2 is referred to only as "Retainer #909". Presumably, a similar numerical designation is used for other Retainers.

Other:

Boombox Man

Boombox Man

The first of Hank's hundreds of victims, and arguably the character who put the entire series into motion. He was just standing under a tree listening to "The Chicken Dance" on his boombox when Hank decided to kill him for said boombox.

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• Back from the Dead: When Jesus shows up on the scene, he raises the Boombox Man as a zombie. He doesn't fare any better.
• Off with His Head!: After being zombified, Hank kills him again by punching his head off (and then riddling his headless body with bullets just be sure).
• One-Shot Character: Has only appeared in Madness Combat 1.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Literally just a Nevadan holding a boombox who ends up being Hank's first kill. And from there, the Madness Combat series was born. And all the destruction and violence that happens and escalates throughout the series, all started from this guy making the grave mistake of shoving Hank over when he tries to grab it.

Rich

Rich

A grunt who initially worked for the Sheriff and won "Employee of the Month". He physically appears in Incident: 011A as one of the grunts trying to stop Mag Agent: Torture, and in MADNESS: Project Nexus, in which he runs Nexus City's power grid.

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• All for Nothing: In MADNESS: Project Nexus, he's been working at the power grid for 30 years, and tells Hank how to shut it down: By pulling the 3 levers behind him. By doing so, as Rich himself puts it, his life's work has completely gone down the drain.
• Always Someone Better: According to Krinkels, between Rich, Jebus, and Tricky, Rich is the superior employee. In MADNESS: Project Nexus, he was so good at his job in the power grid, that he took over the jobs of the other employees.
• Employee of the Month: How we're introduced to him in the series. Namely, his poster hangs on the walls of the building. Burger Gil's also had him as their Employee of the Month for a while, until they were informed they couldn't make a non-employee Employee of the Month, forcing them to give the title to Victor.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: He gets his lower body crushed by Torture in Incident: 011A with his own desk while fighting him with his knife.
• Time-Passage Beard: In the 30 years that pass between the Project Nexus games, Rich has grown a beard that he's been unable to shave.

The Hot Dog Vendor

The Hot Dog Vendor

A twice-seen character in the canon episodes who is just a simple civilian selling hotdogs around Nevada, wearing a sauce-stained apron. So far, he is one of very few characters that has been seen in multiple episodes and not died.

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• Almighty Janitor: He appears in the non-canon Incidents 011A and 101A as a janitor who has to clean up the carnage left behind by a MAG Agent’s rampage. In the latter incident, he comes in after clearing up the MAG only to find another mess waiting for him. Guy needs a raise.
• Cower Power: Perhaps one big factor to his survival in the series, as he’s wise enough to duck out of there when the bullets fly.
• Gasp!: Implied (since nobody is voiced in Madness) when he comes across the carnage at the end of Incident: 101A.
• Innocent Bystander: He's notably survived his canon appearances because both times the rampaging protagonists actively chose to leave him be. This suggests even they see him as this and thus aren't going to go out of their way to kill him.
• Seriously Scruffy: Downplayed. His apron is always stained. He is probably too busy serving (and trying to stay alive) to worry about a little sauce. And judging from his non-canon appearances, he barely gets a break between shifts to get the stains out.
• Uncertain Doom: We don't know if he was still in the Auditor's building or if he left before it got destroyed by a normality beam.
• Unlucky Extra:
  • All the poor guy wants to do is to sell hotdogs in peace, but each time he tries his customers get killed.
  • He doesn't even get a break in the non-canon Incidents, such as when he is left to clean up the site of a massacre with a single mop in one incident, only to return at the end of the next to another bloodbath to clean up right after he's done cleaning the last.
  • Though despite his misfortune, he's usually able to walk away from perilous situations alive unlike most of the cast.

Scrapeface

Scrapeface

A grunt used in an experiment by AAHW scientists to see what would happen if someone in Nevada were to have their hands separated from their bodies. As his sole appearance in the canon short An Experiment reveals, separating a grunt's hands from their body causes them to go insane and scrape their body all over different surfaces in a desperate attempt to reconnect their hands while the reality around them becomes distorted.

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• An Arm and a Leg: Gets his hands separated from his body, and from there he slowly scrapes himself out of existance.
• Facial Horror: Tends to happen when you literally scrape your face against the walls. Enough scraping removes the flesh from his face and exposes the skull underneath.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Before the experiment began, he was an ordinary Nevadean. All it took to turn him into a disgrace to all laws of reality was to pull his hands far enough away from his body.
• Limited Animation: Invoked. Even though Madness Combat is a 2D animated series, once Scrapeface is tortured for long enough, he gains glitch-like powers and moves like a bugged 3D model by hovering while his body is completely static.
• Made of Iron: Despite having most of his face ripped off and later being reduced to nothing but his waist and feet, he keeps on fighting with no real response.
• Meaningful Name: Certainly after scraping his face against the walls.
• One-Shot Character: Only appears in An Experiment.
• Reality Warper: Getting separated from his hands causes him to distort and glitch the world around him, and his death causes the laboratory to explode.
• Sanity Slippage: Losing his hands causes him to scrape his face against the walls, and once he get them back, he kills the ATP Engineer in a fit of rage before scraping himself against the ground and up the wall hard enough to be reduced to his waist and feet.
• Power Incontinence: He has trouble controlling his reality-warping powers because of his pain, causing glitches all around him.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: The answer to the question of "What would happen if a Neveadan were separated from their hands?" is the the thing that was not meant to be known in this case, as it resulted in a whole damn facility being destroyed in a glitchy mess, in a far more reality breaking way than anything else we've seen.

Mustached Guys

Mustached Guys

Their normal look

^{Click here to see their upgraded forms}

Mysterious beings that Sanford and Deimos encounter in the non-canon short "Romp.fla". At first, they seem ordinary, even with their faces, which by the standards of this world are certainly odd, but the further the duo go, it's clear that these guys are trouble.

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• Humanoid Abomination: These things certainly aren't normal humans, ESPECIALLY after they receive the "Betrayal Upgrade".
• Madness Mantra: YOU ARE BETRAYED!
• Nightmare Face: Upon receiving the "Betrayal Upgrade", their mouths open, revealing horrific smiles and their eyes turn black with red pupils.
• Non-Standard Character Design: Their design is similar to the characters in the four shorts Krinkels made in 2007. Notably They lack the facial cross generally shared by Madness Combat characters, instead sporting proper faces in the form of visible eyes and a visible mouth, and they have mustaches.
• One-Shot Character: Are exclusive to "Romp.fla".
• Self-Deprecating Humor: They're based on a fan's comment that noted how due to the way Krinkels draws Nevadan skeletons, even the most natural open smile of any character in the series would unintentionally be batshit terrifying. The credits of Romp.fla makes sure to chew out the person that pointed this out.

Mustached Star

Mustached Star

The leader of the Mustached Guys Sanford and Deimos encounter in "Romp.fla". Nothing is known about it, other than the fact that it claims Sanford and Deimos are "betrayed", but by whom?

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• Big Bad: Of "Romp.fla", as it seems to be in control of the Mustached Guys and is definitely responsible for them fighting the protagonists.
• Dark Is Evil: It's pitch black, and serves as the episode's antagonist.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: As the Mustached Guys kill Sanford and Deimos, the short ends with this thing staring directly at the camera.
• Reality Warper: Can manifest onto walls and open star-shaped holes in the ground at will.
• Slasher Smile: It's mouth turns into this upon giving the Mustached Guys the "Betrayal Upgrade".

The Higher Powers

The Higher Powers

Mysterious, as-of-yet unseen beings which seem to have a hand in the series by resurrecting key characters and possibly directing the actions of the Anti-AAHW. They are associated with the white lightning bolts that are seen reviving others, and have been alluded to a few times by Krinkels himself. MADNESS: Project Nexus's Arena Mode implies that the Machine and the Maker are members of the Higher Powers.

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• The Ghost: They have never been seen in the series, but their workings in the world of Madness are evident. Subverted in case the Machine and the Maker are Higher Powers, and given the Maker is referred to as the Highest Power, it's implied that there is a hiararchy. It's also been stated that the Employers, the group that the Auditor belongs to, that they too are Higher Powers.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Even more elusive than the Auditor was, the Higher Powers seem to have been pulling the strings to let the series’ trademark violence and chaotic bloodbath continue by reviving characters and handing out behind-the-scenes commands. They have about the same amount of awareness, if not more, than even the Auditor has of the workings of the Madness world. In MADNESS: Project Nexus, it's outright confirmed that the Auditor is only one of a group of Employers, who administrate Nevada to their own whims. However, even they are only just servants of an even greater Higher Power, The Machine.
• Jerkass Gods: A common interpretation of them – after all, they used their omnipotence to resurrect Tricky and allowed him to begin his reign of terror and torment upon Hank and Nevada; they did the same to Hank even when he didn't want to come back to life because of the aforementioned clown’s tortures.
• It Amused Me: The stated reason they continuously resurrect Tricky and Hank for most of the series.
• Mission Control: They might be this to the Anti-AAHW, assuming they're the people in contact with Sanford and Deimos, giving them orders on the latter’s PDA.
• Shock and Awe: Their powers manifest as lightning bolts which fall from the sky to strike whoever they want to bring back.

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