Comic Strip / InSecurity

The Funny of Love. ^note Pictured: Sedine and Sam.

InSecurity is a Newspaper Comic Strip created by Bea R. and it premiered on Jan. 02, 2017.

It concerns two newlyweds, Sam and Sedine Kilgarriff, who live in the suburban town of Knightville, North Dakota, and the situations they find themselves in due to their differing personalities. Sam is a rather laid-back sort while Sedine has a more outrageous personality.

Think Barefoot in the Park meets Calvin and Hobbes.

This strip has NOTHING to do with the TV series with the similar name.

The strip can be found here. It is also found here and here.

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This strip contains the following tropes:

• Animesque: The look of the strip seems like it came right out of a manga series, from wild-looking Anime Hair, Alertness Blinks, Big Ol' Eyebrows, and Visible Silence, to most other Japanese Visual Arts Tropes. As if to hammer the point home, the phrase "onii-san" even makes an appearance. It gets invoked when Sam and Sedine take a trip to Japan.
• Anti-Climax: Invoked for laughs. An early 2019 storyline involved Ellie exposing a cell phone dealer's shoddy products with the company head vowing revenge. Months later, at Ellie and Hubb's wedding, he finally shows up looking for revenge...only for Ellie to inadvertently use Exact Words to get him to go away.
• Attractive Bent-Gender: A 2018 series of strips has Sedine disguise next-door neighbor Ellie Gardner as a man. Sure enough, a whole bunch of women fall for “him”.
• Berserk Button:
  • Sedine's cousin Roy Buxton has a wife named Charlene whose Button is whatever doesn't fit her definition of normal.
  • Ellie’s button is JunkIphones.
  • Hubbs's is being called fat. Roy mashes this button at every available opportunity.
• Betty and Veronica: Sedine sees herself as the Betty to Ellie's Veronica for Sam's Archie. Good thing for Sedine Ellie is such a ditz. Sedine moves past this mindset once it's clear that Ellie's not interested in Sam.
• The Big Guy: They don’t come any bigger than Hank Hubble Durum, aka Hubbs.
• Big Ol' Eyebrows: Roy sports these and his baby daughter Gabby inherited them.
• Bruiser with a Soft Center: Big, burly Hubbs who gets flustered and nervous around pretty girls, in particular Ellie.
• Butt-Monkey: Roy Buxton.
• Cannot Spit It Out: Hubbs is attracted to Ellie but he is unable to tell her so due to his being utterly nervous around women.
• Cheerful Child: Micha, the eldest of Roy and Charlene's two daughters, is rather cheery in contrast with her baby sister Gabby.
• Clean, Pretty Childbirth: Very averted. En route to the hospital, Ellie ends up giving birth in the backseat of Sam's car, and it ends up looking like something out of a B-grade horror movie. Also played straight as Ellie looks no worse for wear afterwards.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Sedine may be unashamed of showing off her goods to get men drooling, but heaven help any woman she sees as a threat to her marriage to Sam (who generally reacts with exasperation at her paranoia).
  • Sedine's reaction to the fact that Ellie, who's renting the house next door, had once dated Sam in college has to be seen to be believed.
  • Such as Sedine's jealousy that she becomes paranoid that Gabby, a toddler, is going to steal Sam from her, based on her first word being "SAM!". She justifies this by claiming that Gabby will simply wait until she is 18 to pounce on Sam.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Sedine has an odd way of seeing things.
• Cute Kitten: Sedine found a cat she named "Ow" ("Me-OW!" "See?! You - Ow!! Me Sedine, He Sam!”^note Sam: Uhg.). But he turned out to be Ellie's cat (Long story!), whose real name is Sir Pinky-Paw III von Cuteland am Rhein.
• Cuteness Proximity: Sedine just can NOT resist anything she sees as adorable. Case in point, this strip which introduced the aforementioned cat.
• "Dear John" Letter: We don't quite see what Hubbs writes to Ellie, but it's pretty clearly this. Turns out the note in question is a completely innocent 'SEE YA!', with Hubbs saying he'd be seeing her later, not leaving her.
• The Ditz: Ellie isn't exactly the sharpest tool in the shed. Never is this more apparent than in her "relationship" with Hubbs - she has no idea that he thinks she's a man named Al (and he has no idea that she's the same waitress around whom he becomes a gibbering nervous wreck), and simply believes he's saving himself for marriage when he ignores or rebuffs her attempts at affection.
• A Dog Named "Dog": The co-creator and Bea.R's husband has the pen name "Mr. Husband".
• The Dreaded: Hubbs starts out as this.
• Dumb Jock: While hardly dumb, Hubbs is a bit dim sometimes. For instance, while he knows countless football statistics, he doesn't know his own phone number.
• Evil Eyebrows: Gabby, the youngest of Roy and Charlene's two daughters, has this sort of eyebrows. In fact, it's because of these that Sedine sees her as evil.
• Fetish: Charlene has one for handlebar mustaches, to the point that Gabby was conceived when Roy re-grew his after having previously shaved it off. Upon hearing this, Gabby wishes she had some Brain Bleach handy.
• Formerly Fat: Hank Durum. It's a Berserk Button that Roy loves to press.
• Gag Nose: Both Sam and Roy sport rather prodigious proboscises.
• Genki Girl: Sedine is very excitable, much to Sam's dismay.
• Gonk: Gabby, Roy and Charlene’s youngest child, is not the cutest baby around, possessing Big Ol' Eyebrows, a hairstyle that looks like devil horns, and a perpetual scowl. This has not stopped her from establishing a career as a toddler model.
• Hemisphere Bias: Averted. One shot of the Earth centers mostly on Asia. Or maybe just Japan.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Sam is the Huge Guy to Sedine's Tiny Girl.
• Imagine Spot:
  • When Sedine asked Sam about what their Spirit Animal forms would be like, he saw himself as a stoic St. Bernard and Sedine as a yapping Chihuahua.
  • There's also the imagine spot that has Sam and Sedine imagining clones of the other. Sedine imagines a bunch of Sams pampering her, while Sam imagines a bunch of Sedines fighting over him.
• Leaving You to Find Myself: Hubbs does to Ellie a little over a year into their relationship.
• Loony Friends Improve Your Personality: Hanging out with Sedine has gotten the otherwise agoraphobic Charlene more willing to go out to the outside world. She also becomes less obsessed with normalcy.
• Mama's Boy: Hubbs is very much this.
• Manchild:
  • Considering the fact that Sedine is hardly mature, she is very much a Woman Child.
  • This is one of Roy's defining character traits.
    • When Charlene takes the kids to visit her mother, Roy almost immediately reverts to the intellectual and emotional level of a five-year-old, including sticking a fork into an electrical socket (because he can't remember why it's a bad idea), then interrupting Sam and Sedine's date night screening of Casablanca to demand that they entertain him (after which he becomes The Thing That Would Not Leave - so Sam and Sedine leave instead).
    • When Charlene insists that he cut his mullet, he charges into Sam and Sedine's house, climbs onto the top of a door as if it were a ledge, and refuses to come down, even saying "You can't make me!" Charlene's anger is further stoked when Gabby hands Roy her bottle and he keeps drinking from it.
• Mistaken for Gay: Sam’s parents regard the relationship between Ellie (as “Al”) and Hubbs with pride. When Ellie drops the Al disguise, they think she's a trans woman, and they celebrate her bravery.
• Mistaken for Pregnant: In a 2019 storyline, Sedine mistakes herself for pregnant when she tries on a summer dress and notices her stomach is bulging a bit. She decides that the only logical explanation is that she's expecting, and she tells everyone within earshot (Sam last of all) and jumps right into "eating for two". Two weeks of curiously rapid expansion later, she goes to a doctor for a "pre-natal checkup"... and is told she isn't pregnant, she's just put on weight. (Though she loses the extra weight as quickly as she gained it.)
• Motor Mouth: As Roy tells Sam, ever since his elder daughter Michaela learned to talk, she hasn't stopped for a moment. When he tries to read her a story, she interrupts with questions after every sentence.
• Naked Apron: This strip shows Sedine sporting this, but the only thing on Sam’s mind is the prospect of baking a cake.
• New-Age Retro Hippie: Sam's parents are stereotypes of the militant far-left, vehemently opposing anything capitalist or potentially environmentally damaging and expressing their disappointment that Sam didn't go to college and identifies as a heterosexual, cisgender male. Sam finds them embarrassing, and Sedine's arch-capitalist mother despises them, so sparks always fly when both sets of parents visit for Thanksgiving.
• Older Than They Look: Sedine is twenty-two but can easily pass for sixteen (she certainly acts it).
• Only Sane Man: While Sam DOES have his quirks, compared to everyone else in the cast, especially Sedine and her cousin Roy, he's the voice of reason.
• Pair the Dumb Ones: The ditzy Ellie hooks up with Dumb Jock Hubbs.
• Parental Marriage Veto: Sedine's mother and Sam's parents refused to let them get married (Sedine's mother because she thought he didn't make enough money, Sam's parents because they don't want them to "overpopulate the ecosphere"). The two ended up eloping.
• Perpetual Frowner: Gabby has never been shown to smile once.
• Shotgun Wedding:
  • Roy and Charlene's wedding, with a heavy emphasis on "shotgun".
  • Ellie brandishes a shotgun when she tells Hubbs she's pregnant.
• Shrinking Violet: Charlene can be rather shy when she’s not being obsessed about normalcy.
• The Shut-In: Charlene DESPISES the idea of being outside. Sedine tries to get her out to spend time with her. It went about as well as you'd expect. That is, not at all.
• Statuesque Stunner: Ellie is taller than Sedine, a fact that Sedine is none too pleased about.
• Stepford Smiler: Sedine's father, in total contrast to her money-obsessed tirade factory of a mother, does his best to grin his way through their family gatherings, especially at Thanksgiving when his wife gets into screaming matches with Sam's New-Age Retro Hippie parents.
• Sweet Polly Oliver: Ellie, or rather, “Al”, becomes Hubbs’ football teammate.
• Tiny Tyrannical Girl: Despite being the shortest character in the strip, no one can argue Sedine is in charge.
• Wet Blanket Wife: Ellie becomes this after Al is born. She discourages Hubbs from enjoying his hobbies because she thinks they're too dangerous for their son. She gets so bad that Hubbs ends up leaving her.

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