Fourth Wall Mail Slot - Television Tropes & Idioms

Let a little email into your heart, and it'll clog your arteries.

Sometimes, characters will answer questions from readers (though sometimes the questions are only meant to seem as if they came from readers, such as in Family Guy), as if the Fourth Wall had a mail slot. This is particularly common with Webcomics, since the nature of the medium makes it easy to set up multiple pathways for audience feedback, such as a Shout Box, a blog-powered News Post, or a Message Board.

One reason that webcomickers have given for answering questions in-character is to not give as many spoilers, since then the answers are limited to what the character knows. The Fourth Wall Mail Slot is also a handy gimmick for sketching quick Filler Strips to prevent Schedule Slip, though many webcomickers keep it separate, as a bonus extra. Some don't even make the in-character Q&A into a comic, leaving it as plain text instead, or with just a small illustration. Occasionally this is used to reveal All There In The Manual-type information about the storyline that hasn't been mentioned in the comic yet.

Naturally, given all these advantages, it's not surprising that webcomic artists will sometimes blatantly make up stuff to push through the slot. ...wait.

See also No Fourth Wall, Post Modernism. Compare Character Blog.

Examples

Anime and Manga

Akira sometimes answers letters in the "Lucky Channel" section of Lucky Star, which is usually grounds for her to regress into her excessively negative persona.
The manga version of Bleach has "Radio Kon", in which Kon and various guests answer reader mail. In her appearance, Tatsuki isn't aware of the whole Fourth Wall business, and wonders why people are sending in these personal questions.
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha had a few included in magazines that feature it, where cast members would field common fan questions. The Megami Sound Stages has various cast members that appear in the series answering, and an Animedia article had Hayate doing it on her own.
Axis Powers Hetalia does this. One Christmas Episode started off as a combination of this and gift art from the author-artist before France entered the picture.
Eyeshield 21, D Gray Man and Ouran High School Host Club have these in between chapters in the tankoubon.
- D.Gray-man actually had a hilarious crossover bit with this, when a question intended for their Fourth Wall Mail Slot wound up in the inbox of Gintama creator Hideaki Sorachi... who then attempted to answer the question semi-seriously. You can read about it here.
A regular feature at the closing of every Nana volume. The characters even show knowledge of Manga of other publishers.

Comic Books

This was hardly invented by webcomics:
- One of the earliest examples: the Fantastic Four used this trope many times in the early years, even making the mailman into a humorous stock character.
- Marvel Comics "superhero" Deadpool has been answering his own letter page for years. Then again, the comic and the character himself are both severely lacking in the fourth wall department.
- The British version of the Transformers Comics had a letters column run by Soundwave, and later Grimlock. (Who would often angrily try to explain away his defeats from previous issues.)
  - Similiarly, the British comic based on the film series has a letters column run by Starscream, who is not pleased when readers send him mail about how much they like the Autobots.
- Similarly, back in the days when DC Comics had lettercolumns, a couple of books used to have the characters, not the editor, answer the mail (for instance L-Ron, the wacky Robot Buddy, on Justice League International). More recently Legion Of Super Heroes vol. 4 took this to the next level; its occasional attempts to bring back the lettercol are done in comic format, with the Legionnaires reading out the letters and discussing them.
- Deadpool isn't the only Marvel character who has answered his own fan mail either; in the early 1980s, the letter column of the Uncanny X-Men comic was answered by a designated character each issue, resulting in things like Wolverine claiming that Rogue dyed—well, bleached—her trademark white streak into her hair.
  - Though the bit about Rogue was, apparently, Word Of God, and not just Wolverine snarking — at least back then...
  - This has recently been brought back in the letters page of New Exiles.
- The Sonic The Hedgehog comics tended to do this with various characters.
- Even Princess Toadstool did it a few times in the Nintendo Comics System.
- The Italian Official Nintendo Magazine one time did it with a Boo, a Lakitu, Professor Oak and Tingle.
- In the Cerebus letters pages, a regular correspondent mentioned Cerebus throwing a baby off a roof. In a later issue, Astoria betrates Cerebus for that action. He replies to her (and to the letter writer), pointing out that he threw the baby from the front steps; he threw an old man off the roof. Next issue had a letter from the original correspondent feeling crunchy for having been corrected by Cerebus himself.
- The letters page of British Anthology Comic 2000AD is answered by the editor. The editor happens to be Tharg The Mighty, a green skinned alien from Betelgeuse on a mission to bring Thrill Power to the planet Earth. Some have claimed that he is fictional, seeing as other comics of the era often had fictional 'editors' or 'hosts', but this is clearly false.
- The current Hellcat miniseries has a letters page known as Hellpcat, which is more like an advice column than a traditional letters page. But Patsy Walker still answers it in character.
Vertigo Comics' Fables series did it one notch better. They ran a contest for the most interesting questions, and in issue #59 "Burning Questions" they answered them by making each of the answers a fully-canon vignette.

Film

In the Christmas special, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, you would have the narrator reading mail that have questions for Santa. Questions that kids would really ask. However, the audience would hear the kids' voices and not the narrator's. During the movie, the voices would randomly appear sometimes as if they were with the audience.

Live Action TV

Tool Time, the Show Within A Show of Home Improvement, had a segment called the "Male Bag" for (fictional) viewer mail.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 frequently answered viewer mail, oftentimes, due to the nature of the show, from kids. It was quite often adorable, but just as often it clearly grated on the host's nerves (especially Mike).
- Similarly, Svengoolie also did this.
The entire point of the show Mail Call.

Newspaper Comics

Doonesbury does the "reader mail" bit periodically.
- Lately it's been regulated to an annual thing, usually happening the first week of the year. It's a bit of an aversion in that the questions are usually about the production of the comic itself and not the storyline. Also, while the letters are real, the answers are usually blatantly false (like the time someone asked why the strip had no Hispanic characters, and Mike replied with a list of prominent recurring Hispanic cast members...none of whom had ever been seen before.)
Pretty much the entire premise of Ask Shagg: a Ridiculously Cute Critter answers children's questions about the animal world.

Tabletop Games

In the long-since-ended Adventurer's Club magazine (a house organ for Hero Games), the earlier letter columns are "written" by lunatic supervillain Foxbat. After Foxbat's apparent death in the artwork for Champions II, a different character took over the job of answering the mail ... but it wasn't as funny.

Video Games

When playing Nethack on some Unix systems, if the player happened to receive a new email while playing, a mail daemon would appear in-game and deliver a "scroll of mail" to the player's character with the email.
BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger has unlockable comedy scenes in Story Mode called Teach Me! Ms. Litchi! where Litchi teaches Taokaka how to be a vigilante. This segment is unrelated to the storyline, and it doesn't give gameplay tips, but it does explain how the world of Blazblue works.

Web Comics

This strip is an early example from Narbonic.
Sorcery 101 has a parallel Fourth Wall Mail Slot webcomic called Ask Danny.
834n has one in a thread on the Message Board for his webcomic, Parallel Dementia.
Ash Upton of Misfile has her own email address; her answers in the "Ask Ash!" section of the website are text, not comic strips.
Same with the "Ask Evil Princess Sara" section of the website for 8-Bit Theater.
- Red Mage also has one, known as "twinkin out with red mage."
Although it bears a superficial resemblance, the Ask Dr. Eldritch! weekly letter is actually a Speculative Fiction spoof of advice columns that just happens to have an associated photowebcomic.
Stickman And Cube does this in this comic. All the letters they get are, however, thoroughly pointless.
Order Of The Stick has done a couple of viewer mail strips
Flipside has an entire Interview Section for characters to answer questions posted on the message board.
Achewood's typically subversive version of this was an actual problem page where readers mailed in their genuine sexual and personal problems. This was always accompanied by the disclaimer that, since the advice was being dispensed by Ray (a cartoon cat who, even if he were real, would probably not be the best person to take advice from) it would probably be best for the correspondents to not make any life decisions based on his answers.
The Ask Kyo section of InHuman, though it is a separate guestbook instead of an actual side comic.
Every so often, Something Positive will have Choo-Choo Bear, the lovable boneless cat of Davan, answering fan questions, usually in an insulting way, while he lords his obvious superiority over us insignificant beings (and especially the worthless hack who writes him.)
- Sometimes giving cut-shots to exactly how he (and/or the author) feels about some of the weirder questions - most infamously "What if the cast are furries" panel.
Adventurers! has a few filler strips that feature the comic's author answering questions from fans.
Honeydew Syndrome has characters answer readers' questions in the extras section, though only the guys from chapter 1-5 have been subjected to this so far.
Most of the characters, even secondary characters from The Last Days of FOXHOUND respond to fan mail.
Nodwick subverted this; although the characters have answered mail on two occasions, it referred to the characters rather than the author, indicating presumably that they were made up for a joke rather than being actual fanmail.
Errant Story has the occasional "Errant Commentary" pseudo-filler strips which feature Sara and Bani answering questions, lampshading everything, and abusing the fourth wall.
Codename:Hunter has done this as an intermission.
Keychain Of Creation also features this, though it's managed by using the Fair Folk who, in-setting are thoroughly aware that 'all the world's a stage' and in-comic become antagonists because otherwise they wouldn't exist. I'm not making that up.
Last Resort [1] has done this at various points.
El Goonish Shive resident Mad Scientists / Exposition team does it on Q&A pages, without stopping their part of dramedy or experiments.

Web Original

The Strong Bad E-mails from Homestar Runner are a rare example of this becoming most of the website.
Most Abridged Series have special "non-canonical" videos (never mind the fact that they barely have any canon in the first place) where they answer You Tube comments.
Zero Punctuation did a special one-off Mailbag Showdown, showcasing some of the hate mail Yahtzee got after his less than rave review of Super Smash Bros. Brawl and correcting the spelling.
The Star Trek official website — when they had an official website, that is, had a number of "in character" mailbags, including two at one point running concurrently, answered by a Klingon and a Ferengi, who would at times take swipes at each other in their columns! Then they got rid of them and went with a refugee from that gangster planet from the original series. It wasn't as funny. The one-shot answered by Captain Pike, however was pure comedy gold.
- Link, unless it's gone entirely?
Parodied in the machinima Smashtasm.

Lamp: "Dear Lamp, what is your philosophy on women?" Well, women are people, so obviously, they wear socks. Next question.

I myself have actually done this, I've got a channel on Youtube that focuses on Atheism, and a few times I had people send letters to Xenu and/or Satan. (I won't put a link, that seems too much like self-promotion, or something)
Friends of Foamy has multiple episodes featuring this, with Foamy getting more and more irritable with each one. They even allow Pillsy and Germaine to sit in for one of them.
The Bio Shock 2 viral website There's Something in the Sea includes a working PO Box number for the (unseen) protagonist, Mark Meltzer. Fans who have tried writing in have received copies of the drawings in the puzzle box.
- Most of the letters appearing directly above Mark's filing cabinet are, in fact, written by fans.
- They have also received stuff like membership forms for the "International Order Of the Pawns" and a coded message by Lutwidge that took the cooperation of more than a dozen people to decipher.
Parodied in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.
Dr Tran Fanmail, though it's the Narrator who answers the letters, not Tran.

Western Animation

In the kids science show The Magic Schoolbus, there is a "Producer Says" segment at the end of each episode, in which a fictional producer of the show receives fictional phone calls from fictional kids complaining about how some things that happened on the (fictional) show couldn't happen in real life. This was a way of defusing the more fantastic aspects of the show so as to keep to its educational agenda.
VeggieTales used to use this quite often, as a framing tale for the moral-tastic shorts.
Parodied in CatDog where a fan mail segment was done on the very first episode. As expected, they are told that they didn't receive any fan mail yet forcing them to answer Dog's question. At the end, however, they discover that Winslow hid all the fan mail from them.
During the run of Transformers: Cybertron, the Hasbro website featured Ask Vector Prime columns. However, they rarely updated.
- Wayward of Insecticomics fame later took up the mantle, originally answering the actual questions in Deadpan Snarker format, then answering questions sent to her directly after she ran out of Hasbro's questions.