Fun With Acronyms / Webcomics

• Deviant Universe has R.A.P.T.O.R. (Resistance Against People Terrorizing Our Race) and A.R.E.S. (Aggression Reigns Ever Supreme).
• Dominic Deegan has a variant when Luna reunites with her sister Amelia, the "Pleasure Princess of Sin City", as the two are not on good terms:
  Luna: So nice to see you too.
  Lovely house you have.
  Unbelievably nice.
  That dress suits you.
• Earth, 2068: Just about anything Phil or Vermillion have named is an acronym. Other characters are not fond of this.
• Enemy Quest has the Human Visitor Affairs Office, or HVAO. Their job is to keep the peace between humanity and the alien Visitors, and to study the Visitor's culture and mannerisms.
• In Fisheye Placebo, there is the Bureau of Information Technology and Civil Harmony. Also known as the B.I.T.C.H.
• Fans! adjusted the Federal Bureau of Investigation into the Fantasmagorical Investigation Bureau, or FIB.
• EVIL stands for the Elite Villains Institute of Learning. It also features such organizations as ASS (Academic Superiority Society) and FOWL (Future Opressors of the World at Large).
• The secret anti-alien organization in It's Walky! is called SEMME... which does stand for something, but the author has yet to reveal what. It's pronounced like "semi", creating useful pun fuel. In one strip, part of the E on their building is blown off, prompting Walky to start calling the organization "SEMMF".
  • I'd think there'd be more pun fuel if it were pronounced how it looks.
  • The author once claimed to have forgotten what SEMME stood for (having invented it in his childhood).
• On The Wotch, one character guessed that the first two letters of the radical feminist group D.O.L.L.Y. stood for "Daughters of", but the rest was never determined and the leader was defeated just before she could reveal its full meaning - and turned into a dolly as punishment .
• In a 1990s Penn State in-joke (because PepsiCo seemed to have a great deal of influence at the college), The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! once had a giant monster called the People-Eating Poly-Sorbate Insectoid.
• Vampire Cheerleaders/Paranormal Mystery Squad:
  • Stephanie chose the name, "Paranormal Mystery Squad" because the initials signified that they were an all girl group of cryptid hunters. Get it?
  • There's also PETM^note (pronounced "pet 'em"), which stands for: People for the Ethical Treatment of Monsters. As their name implies, they're a monster rights government agency. Except under Marcy's leadership, they end up being Obstructive Bureaucrats, who're more concerned with monster rights than public safety (as their name also implies, they're a Take That! at PETA).
• The KA Mics had the Semi-Mystical Otherworldy Gates or S.M.O.G. Nothing deep about the name though, the author took the acronym from a running gag he was part of on one of Nitcentral's humor threads.
• Mr. Mighty in Everyday Heroes is a member of The Society of Amazing, Valiant, and Extrememly Unselfish Superheroes ... S.A.V.E.U.S.
  • According to the cast page, Mr. Mighty has previously worked for the Team Hoping to Uphold Decency (THUD), the White House Advanced Personnel Protective Office (WHAPPO), the American-Mexican International Group Of Superheroes (AMIGOS), and the Group Of Official Do-Gooders United In Suppressing Evil (GOOD GUISE.).
  • The villains have their own group, the Mid-Western Alliance of Hired Assassins, Henchmen, Anarchists, Highly Anti-social Hackers, And Hideous Abominations (MWAHAHAHAHAHA).
• Spoofed in this spoilerific entry for "anti-HEROES", a comic which seriously ripped off the art style of The Order of the Stick.
• Sluggy Freelance
  • The 'Notification of Unified Kindness' Envelopes as the ultimate weapon within the Dimension of Peace.
  • Also, from this strip, we get Recording Editable Content Application Peripheral.
  • And before that we get 4U City's Maternal Obedience Maintenance Medicating Y-Frames and the Chem-Lab Review and Assignment of Personnel Riff teaches.
  • Defied: In "Falling", Riff declares that the Synthetic Hybrid Optimal Destruction Digbot Infantry Exoskeleton is not acronymable.
  • Demons Against Drunk Summoning is a slightly more convoluted case. It's reminiscent of Mothers Against Drunk Driving — and while the words don't mention any parents, they spell "DADS".
• xkcd kicks it up a notch with the International Choice of Urinal Protocol. Think about that for a second.
  • A straighter example is this strip, where Douglas Hofstadter's autobiography reads, "I'm So Meta, Even This Acronym".
• The Perpetual Aquarium had the fish take the Comprehesive Assessment and Report of Progress, or CARP. This was lampshaded when one of the fish comments that basing a year's progress isn't CARP, it's C——, and, when interrupted, comments that he likes anagrams.
• The Faster-Than-Light Travel drive in the Freefall universe is called the Dangerous And Very Expensive drive.
  • The name was suggested by a reader after the writer decided he had to call it something so he might as well call it DAVE.
• The Trustworthy Room test from Tower of God requires to gather rooms and teammates, though with a high risk of losing ones room. So Ja Wangnan and Nia decide to do it the gentlemanly way: Operation S.I.R., Stay In the Room.
• Irregular Webcomic! has the Secret Action Squadron Team of Cryptid Hunters. There's also Russian double agent Valentina Irina Ranevskaya Galina Ivana Natalya Iriyushka Anastasia Sonyechka Marinochka Ineslenka Tatyana Hvorostovskaya. As you might expect, she's usually referred to by her alias, Virginia Smith. If you wonder where she got that alias, read her name again.
• In the Jet Dream Remix Comic, the T-Girls represent NATO's Joint Elite Team, Division of Raiding-Expert Aeronautical Maidens (J.E.T. D.R.E.A.M., or usually just "Jet Dream.") Their "little sister" team is Junior Echelon, Teen T-Girls, Elle-Boys, and Esprit-Girls (Natural!), or J.E.T. T.E.E.N. Both organizations must deal with the sinister schemes of Zoned Extortion and Removal, Occidental (Z.E.R.O.).
• Erfworld has Lord Stanley the Tool's elite hobgobwin knights, the Knights In Stanley's Service. They are, of course, a reference to the band KISS; their "war paint" is the makeup KISS wears onstage, and their name is a reference to the old moral panic-driven legend that KISS stood for "Knights In Satan's Service" (which it didn't).
• The GIGAHERTZ, or Gizmonic Institute Graphical Automated Hyper-Enhancement of Reality through Teleportation and, uh... Zoom, from The Way of the Metagamer.
  • Responded to with the Clayton Forrester Volumetrically Displayed Entertainment and World-Taking Over Device, or, uh... CFVDEWTOD (khfhvhdootodd?) for short.
• Penny Arcade played with it:
  General: We call it the Kinetic Ingestion Regulator Bio-Yorganism.
  Meta Knight: Yorganism?
  General: Y is kind of a tricky letter.
  • Gamers Against Exercise, a theoretical support group founded by Gabe who support traditional, controller-based gaming. Especially funny on a shirt.
  • They're the Trope Namer for the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
• PHD explained how to create those.
• Precocious has Time Advancement Device Associated With A Relative Position. T.A.D.A.W.A.R.P.
  • A comic-within-the-comic has Max worry about girls giving him gifts with C.O.O.T.E.E.S, Camera-Outfitted Observational Trackers, Embedded Espionage Systems.^note those last two words were cut off in the comic and are only known through Word of God
• Homestuck has Nepeta's planet, the Land Of Little Cubes And Tea. (LOLCAT)
  • Jake English gets a Land Of Mounds And Xenon. In case you're wondering...
  • And then later, when Caliborn takes over the narritive and is retelling the story, he can't remember the name of Dave's planet, and so invents his own. What does he call it? Land of Someone's Handicraft I Took (LOSHIT).
  • The kids' chumhandles are TentacleTherapist, TurntechGodhead, GardenGnostic, and (formerly) GhostyTrickster. This is also the case with several of the trolls' nicknames. This remains post-Scratch, with the handles being GutsyGumshoe, TipsyGnostalgic, TimaeusTestified, and GolgothasTerror.
  • Not to mention the Exiles, who all have several titles all making the same two-word acronym. Usually after something significant happens to them, they take on a Meaningful Rename (after being exiled to Earth, the Parcel Mistress became the Peregrine Mendicant).
• The Crossover Wars had their DRACO (Dimensional Reality Arcane Crossover Organizer)
• El Goonish Shive being a Word Salad Title, it's no wonder that according to some fans,
  "EGS" really stands for "Extremely Gratuitous Shapeshifting"
• Sarah Zero has the Privacy Investigation Schadenfreude Secret Service
• Freaking Awful Puns has scared away some potential readers with its acronym.
• Skin Horse:
  • Played with.
    Violet: And you're U.N.I.T.Y.
    Unity: Yep!
    Violet: The Upgradeable Necrotic Independent... what?
    Unity: We don't talk about my acronym.
    Violet: Sorry, did I touch a nerve?
    Unity: Well, you know. People died and stuff.
    Violet: People died... because of your acronym.
    Unity: The committee meetings, man! It was law of the jungle!
  • In a later arc, we meet G.O.D.O.T., an AI whose primary function is a military-grade backronym generator. It turns out G.O.D.O.T. went mad trying to work out what U.N.I.T.Y. could stand for, which is presumably the point at which people died.
  • It turns out that Unity came up with her own acronym, which pissed off Godot to no end. It's something Sweetheart said: "Unity's Nice, I Tell You."
• From Wasted Talent, Jam's suggestion for an agriculture program.
• BOOBS (Basic Organizational and Operational BaSeband) of Ask Boobs, a Tumblr-based Tron webcomic. The origins of her name are explained in this comic. She's, er...appropriately named.
• Dork Tower has a Take That! to Michael Bay, advertising that people should use the hashtag #TAINT (Teenage Alien Imposter Ninja Turtles) for his TMNT movie.
  • Dork Tower also has the group Matt started called Gamers For Personal Hygiene. At first Igor questions this acronym since "it doesn't spell anything," but then a very smelly geek walks by and he makes the sound effect "GFPH!"
• In this Captain SNES: The Game Masta comic, we discover that Dalton is recruiting villains from different video worlds. His name for the team? The Daltonian Hyper-Oceanic Piratical Extortion Squad.
• The Packrat has the Memorymoog Acoustic Death Ray, a Death Ray powered by a Memorymoog polyphonic synthesizer.
• White Dark Life has the Boyfriend Invented for Lonely Ladies, Naturally the character is named BILL.
• Bruno the Bandit once started a unicorn rights group which fit this trope.
  • During Bruno's crime wave in the "Whistle of Time" arc, the nobility runs a commercial asking for people to sponsor the nobles he robbed, calling them "S.O.B."s (Sad Victims Of Bruno).
• Paul in Weenie Licked calls Rosey Crony of Cuteness, or "COC".
• From Schlock Mercenary:
  • From the eyetree quest storyline, there are the two Bradicor males Really Old Dude, or Rod, and Very Old Guy, or Vog, both of whom are millions of years old.
  • Lt. Flinders and Enesby were ordered to come up with a manual of operations for the Toughs to standardize actions. This strip shows the results: Toughs Handbrain Of Operations: Senior Officers, or THOOSO; Toughs Handbrain Of Operations: Platoon Officers, or THOOPO; Toughs Handbrain Of Operations: Grunts, or THUG (treating the double O as a U, not letting language stand in the way of a memorable acronym); and the master volume that combines the previous volumes into one work: Toughs Handbrain Of Operations: Master.
    Enesby: THOOM, if you will.
    Comodore Tagon: Well played. I think we all will.
• Clockwork: Mercia Fortress's Robot Buddy prototype is called Mercian Artificial Intelligence: Labour (Build 0), shortening conveniently to MAILO, pronounced like "Milo".
• In Hoofstuck, Rainbow Dash gets the Land Of Youth And Longing.
• In Ozy and Millie, Millie tries to protest against apathy, but loses interest in making the sign and uses one that says "Down with apat". This draws attention from the Accociation for Perfectly Arranged Tablecloths.
• In the Narbonic Sunday strips, there was a competition to give MIT Student Dave Barker a new title, now that he had graduated and become a transport planner. The winner was Newly Educated Master of Expressways, Sideroads and Innercity Streets. Or "Helen's NEMESIS" for short.
• In Skyvein, VISN is one of the many acronyms (short for the Visual Information and Surveillance Network).
• The Petri Dish has the cyborgs BOB (Brains On Board) and Irene (Intelligence Relays Enhanced with Neural Encoding). There's also an organization whose initials spell FART.
• Ennui GO!: Key Manati's space program is called the Aeronautical Society for Science and Space EXploration.
• The titular League of Super Redundant Heroes is often shortened to LOSRH, or 'loser'.
  • One strip had several villains form "The Brotherhood of Adversaries and Deliciously Devious Intentionally Evil Super Villains." Or B.A.D.D.I.E.S, for short.
  Villain: All in favor of not letting Steve be in charge of naming things?
  Other villains: AYE!
  Steve: You guys suck!
• Dregs: Chub and company are employees of Allied Regional Sewerage Engineers. Bandy wears a cap with the acronym printed on it.
• Sleepless Domain: A Magical Girl informational pamphlet gives five tips for staying safe on patrol, summed up by the acronym "P.A.R.T.S.": Patrol in a familiar area, Awareness is key, Rest when you're tired, Team up for safety, and Stay home when needed. According to the Alt Text, somebody wanted to word the first step as "Find a cool place to patrol", but was turned down for obvious reasons.
• Vegfolk Fables: The Zeta-Fused Geodesic and the Personal Integrated Safety S'''hield provided by the Professor.

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