Web Comic / Jack The Grey Reef Shark

"There is always a bright side, no matter how small."

Jack the Grey Reef Shark is a web comic created in 2018 by Zavraan. The story follows the titular character, Jack, who travels across the ocean to find a suitable habitat for his school. Due to a food shortage and the threat of being hunted by humans, his current habitat is becoming unfavorable. He will face many perils, many adventures, and many tragedies. But knowing that his lover, Mainda, is waiting for him to return, Jack refuses to give up.

---

• Aerith and Bob: Most of the sharks have traditionally human names such as Jack, while others have practically unheard-of names such as Mainda, or alternate spellings of common names such as Aeron.
• Alternate Animal Affection: In the absence of kissing, sharks have three ways to show affection: neck-crossing, nuzzling, and of course, love bites. With the latter being something that sharks actually do.
• Anyone Can Die:
  • In the very first chapter, Ben tells everyone that Mo was skewered by the sailfish that he caught. Even though Mo is later revealed to be alive and that Ben simply scared him away, the readers won’t know this until the very last chapter, and so he becomes the Sacrificial Lamb that tells readers that anyone is fair game to meet a terrible end.
  • Karen is a doting, albeit overprotective, mother who cares for her child alongside her mate. She’s also pregnant with at least two more pups. Surely nothing terrible will happen to her, right? WRONG! Karen becomes one of the many victims of shark finning.
  • Jack meets Jay and Ken along his journey and develops such a bond with them that they end up becoming a Power Trio. The three of them stick together through thick and thin for quite a while. Surely we’ve established that these are the three amigos that’ll be together until the end, right? WRONG AGAIN! The trio falls to two with Ken's death.
  • Ironically Ben's death is probably the least bad, and it was a total accident no less. While Jack is trying to reason with Ben and explain that the humans are responsible for the food crisis, the cargo freighter that they're under has a fire that causes the anchor to come loose... right on Ben's head! Whether he was crushed by the anchor itself or the immense pressure of the deep ocean, his odds of having survived are slim to none.
  • In the main story, we learn that Jack had three siblings—Connor, Ashly and Zack—who were killed by fishermen. We get to meet said siblings in the prequel. And even though they’re Doomed by Canon, it doesn’t make their deaths any less heartbreaking. To add salt on the wounds, Jack’s siblings never recognize him as their brother (Though they accept him as one)
• Crapsack World: With fish populations dwindling due to overfishing, the sharks in the story end up facing a food crisis. Most of the sharks don’t know who’s responsible, and those who do realize that they cannot compete with humanity due to their extreme intelligence and their technological advancements. So the most they can do is try to find a place that hasn’t been harvested by humanity.
• Cruel and Unusual Death:
  • Karen becomes a victim of shark-finning, which is basically the equivalent of cutting off a human’s arms and legs and then leaving them to die in the forest. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the pups she bears die with her all while her husband and son watch her body sink to the seafloor!
  • Ben cheats in his bet against Jack by biting off a Mako shark’s tail and stealing his freshly-caught sailfish. He then finishes him off by biting into his throat. This seems to be Ben’s favored killing method, as he does the very same thing to Sage in the prequel.
• Devious Dolphins:
  • While Jack and Greg are attempting to hunt a pod of dolphins, an orca interrupts the hunt and prompts an immediate retreat by the duo.
  • When Jack attempts to help Kathlin cut a rope that’s stuck around her neck, he comes up with an idea that gets them chased by rough-toothed dolphins.
• Easter Egg:
  • The author routinely puts different species of fish somewhere in the background and encourages readers to guess what species they are.
  • During Jack, Jay and Ken's prank on the sperm whales, one of them yells out "It's no use!"
• Feuding Families: In Chapter 5, we learn that there is a 4-way feud between the schools of Aidan, Carl, Reagan, and Kenneth. (Tiger, Bronze Whaler, Bull, and Lemon sharks respectively). The feud is a result of the food crisis with one of the schools vying for control of food distribution. It was initiated when Aidan attacked several of Carl’s schoolmates out of hunger.
• Gilligan Cut:
  • When Jack is trying to help Kathlin remove a rope wrapped around her neck, he gets an idea, and it results in Jack and Kathlin being chased by rough-toothed dolphins.
  • Chapter 4 has another one of these:
    Ken: “This is going to be great!”
    Also Ken: “This is going to suck…”
• Greater-Scope Villain: The humans responsible for the food crisis and the decline of shark populations. Jack explains his plans for dealing with them and saving as many sharks as he can from their traps. But little does Jack realize just how big the fishing industry is, so he has a lot of work to do to achieve this.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Jack is aware of humanity's perception of sharks as these vicious monsters, but with food running low and sharks being butchered nonstop, it’s no surprise that he thinks the same thing about them.
• Interspecies Romance: Jack is a grey reef shark while Mainda is a spinner shark.
• Karma Houdini: The fishermen (Except for the ones in Chapter 5) all get away with their actions, and are never seen again after the scene is over. Then again, Jack would be at a huge disadvantage if he tried to avenge them, and even if he could, that would add more fuel to the fire for humans to see sharks as enemies.
• The Law of Conservation of Detail: The author loves to play with this trope:
  • Karen’s hatred of requiem sharks comes from when one of her pups was killed by a silvertip shark. We later learn that Ken had sisters, and readers will be able to put the pieces together that Megan is the one who killed Karen’s pup.
  • Ben brags about how he got his scars from fighting a tiger shark. It is never explicitly mentioned, but the hints are there that Aidan is the tiger shark that Ben fought.
  • We also meet Reagan, the leader of the bull shark school. Aidan doesn’t name-drop Ben, but he calls him a member of Reagan’s school.
  • Even the background animals that we see. For example, the manta ray that the sand tigers come across in Chapter 2. That very same manta ray returns at the end of Chapter 4 to guide Jay to the Galapagos Islands.
• Not Evil, Just Misunderstood:
  • The overall theme that the book tries to sell is that sharks are not as dangerous as people think they are. In fact, as apex predators, they are a vital part of the ocean’s ecosystem.
  • Conversely, this could also be what Jack’s perception of humans turns out to be. Because at first he fears and despises all humans, but that’s simply because he encountered all the wrong ones, and he eventually learns that there are at least some good humans out there.
• Obliviously Evil: Most of the humans are portrayed in this way. The fishermen in the story are simply doing their job and probably do not realize the damage they are doing to the ocean by overfishing and killing off shark populations or the fact that the sharks they kill have friends and loved ones.
• Power Trio: Jack, Jay and Ken
• Predation Is Natural: Larger shark species naturally hunt smaller species for food. And the sharks in Jack the Gray Reef Shark are hardly an exception. Though Jack is trying to steer everyone away from this so preserve shark populations.
• Red Shirts:
  • Jack comes across a string of dead sharks who have all had their fins cut off, showing from the sharks’ point of view how brutal and horrifying shark-finning is.
  • A Legend from the Start has four members of Jack's school that weren't present in the main story: Austin, Blake, Jody, and Sage. You know why? Ben killed them to show Jack what happens to those who go against his rules.
• Threatening Shark: The purpose of this story is to deconstruct this trope and play with it so as to shed light on the fact that sharks are not as dangerous as humans believe them to be, and that they have more of a reason to fear us than we do them.
  • Inverted with Jack and nearly every shark in the story. Jack is our all-loving hero who wants nothing more than to be left in peace with his friends and loved ones. Humans are the ones who are the main threat throughout the story.
  • Ben is the only shark in the story who plays this completely straight. He takes over Jack's school and rules through intimidation.
  • Zig-Zagged with Greg. When Jack first meets him, he expresses his desire to eat Jack. This turns out to just be Greg having a sick sense of humor. In reality, Greg is Fun Personified and doesn't like the taste of shark meat. But when Jack refuses to let Greg eat a seal that's been trapped in some ghost netting, Greg attacks him and forces him to flee. Greg regrets this immediately afterwards because all he really wanted was a chance to eat after going hungry for so long.
  • Subverted with Aidan and his school, who hunt Jack and corner him on a small reef, but they eventually give up after Carl’s mere presence convinces them to stop.
  • Also subverted with Carl, who attempts to kill Jack for supposedly meddling in the conflict between the different schools. But after a humpback whale interferes, Carl comes to his senses and agrees to join the cause.
• Truth in Television: All the threats Jack faces throughout the story are threats that sharks face in real life
  • Famine - Due to overfishing throughout the ocean, many fish populations are on the decline, which means sharks are losing their main source of food.
  • Pollution - Sometimes, when they DO get a meal, the food they ate was contaminated due to pollution. Even tiger sharks, who are infamous for eating garbage, cannot satisfy their hunger with it, they simply eat it because they can’t find anything else
  • Hunting - An estimated 100 million sharks die per year on average due to hunting. Thankfully, the perception of sharks has grown more positive in recent years and measures are being taken to preserve their populations.
• Unseen Evil: Up until the moment Jack’s siblings are killed in A Legend from the Start, humans are portrayed in this way: an unknown creature that the sharks don’t know how to deal with.
  • Downplayed in the main story, where we never see any human faces. And any we do see are concealed by scuba gear.
• Your Tradition Is Not Mine: A common theme that comes up throughout the story is the idea of breaking the traditional rules of nature, which Jack and his friends believe is a necessity if the sharks are to survive through the food crisis:
  • Sharks naturally do not care for their young because they honestly don’t need to. From the moment they’re born, sharks are able to swim and hunt for themselves, which is the whole goal of parenting in the first place. The most the mother ever does is find a safe place for the pups to be born, but after that, they’re on their own. Jack, however, was raised by his parents. But since this isn’t “natural” for sharks, Jack’s parents were accused of breaking tradition and kicked out of their school after it resulted in a hammerhead attack.
    • Another case of sharks caring for their young comes from the sand tiger school, where Karen and David have taken in their son Tyler, and have two more pups on the way that they will care for as well. But unlike Jack’s first school, the other sand tigers seem to accept this behavior.
    • Susan is yet another example of a mother shark who raises her children, and again, nobody who knows about it seems to mind, which could very well mean that breaking tradition is becoming a trend in the shark world.
  • When Mainda becomes friends with Jack, her schoolmate Lynn tries to tell her that what they are doing is breaking the rules of nature. Since Mainda is a spinner shark and Jack is a gray reef shark, they’re supposed to only care about their own species. Mainda, however, refuses to cut ties with Jack, and instead does so with Lynn.
  • Jack’s siblings try to warn him that learning skills that they do not normally use, like the spinner shark’s jumping technique, are a waste of time and energy. And, like Lynn, they are against Jack and Mainda’s friendship because they believe that they should “take care of [their] own”. However, it seems that they are the only ones who have a problem with it, as the rest of the school has come around to accepting Mainda as one of their own and even support her and Jack’s romance later on.
  • Competition is the law of the land when it comes to food in the shark world, so when Jack proposes the idea for the feuding schools to unite rather than compete, it is met with some harsh criticism to say the least. But eventually they realize that Jack’s proposal is extremely helpful.
  • Ben also claims to be one who values tradition over feelings, and goes to extreme lengths to keep the natural order, but even he ends up breaking a few of those rules, such as being the de facto leader of a school of which he is not their species. But when anyone else decides to break the rules or go against his wishes, he punishes them.