Evan and Dan are just two friends try to survive high school. Made harder when your teachers are supervillains and your homework is to take over the world. This comic started out as a zany Affectionate Parody of the superhero genre, but has become more serious in recent strips. It still manages to retain much of its earlier humor, though! Check it out at Drunk Duck.com
Has a sequel series in the form of Generation Bad.
Tropes:
- Abusive Parents: Evan's father, a Super Supremacist Magneto Expy, who treats Evan with disdain for not inheriting his Superpowerful Genetics.
- Academy of Adventure: The titular Bad Guy High.
- Achilles' Heel: Clownonite.
- Affectionate Parody
- An Ice Person: Mr. Frosty. Aka Frosty the snowman. Yes, that Frosty the snowman. In this comic, he's become a super villain and plots to freeze the whole world into a perpetual winter so he'll never melt.
- Anti-Climax: In one timeline, without Evan to intervene, the Physical God known as Imperactus was only defeated by the Heroic Sacrifice of all the world's heroes. But when Evan is sent back to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, Imperactus is instead easily defeated by a simple attack from a hero that comes out of nowhere.
- Arm Cannon: Evan builds one into his robotic hand after his real hand gets burnt off by Evil Overlord Dan.
- Atrocious Alias: Many characters, but especially the members of the Embarrassing F-men (who have incredibly lame powers to match).
- Attention Whore: Thatman.
- Ax-Crazy: Evan after he finds out Dan is Super Dan even to the point he outright kills Super Dan .
- Back from the Dead: Peter, Super Dan.
- Bad Future
- The Bad Guys Win: Super Dan, not being able to stand fact that he killed 20 millions of people, leaves Earth and tries to find SuperpowerGirl's dimension leaving her in his place. Lemniscate Society successfully kills most of heroes and only few remain to continue their resistance. Oh, and Evan graduates from Bad Guy High and finally can become true villain and join Lemniscate Society. Like in first strip, narration ends saying that all hope is lost.
What did you expect from a comic called “Bad Guy High”? - Badass Normal: Super Dan's brother Captain Perfect. Also the Captain DC in the future, after he loses his superpowers.
- Black Dude Dies First: Happened on this strip
- Book Ends: Clearly, all hope is lost.
- Bottomless Magazines - In one arc, Gen shoots 11 clownonite bullets at Superdan even though the clip shown in an earlier strip looks like it should only hold about 8, and definitely no more than 10.
- Brainwashed: Several villains use brainwashing to further their nefarious plans.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Not a comedic staple of the comic, but it is used from time to time.
- By the Power of Grayskull!: Parodied with Captain DC.
- Captain Ersatz: Pretty much every character to some extent.
- Card-Carrying Villain: Just about all the students and faculty at the eponymous Bad Guy High.
- Cerebus Retcon: That awesome holographic mother Evan created? Replacement for the one his dad killed in front of Evan for trying to defend herself from one of his nightly wife beatings.
- Cerebus Syndrome: The comic starts out with a dolphin powered doomsday device, and ends up with the protagonist needing to use said doomsday device against his best friend, who took over the world, killed most of his other friends, and enslaved his girlfriend. Pretty much everything funny or cool introduced in the first half of the comic turns into a drama filled Chekhov's Gun at some point in the second half.
- Charles Atlas Superpower: Captain Perfect. Also the Captain DC in the future, after he loses his superpowers.
- Chess with Death: Dan tells Evan he escaped Hell by challenging Death (who's apparently a very attractive Goth girl) to a game of Twister. He's lying.
- Clark Kenting: Super Dan's first costume was adding a cape to what ever he was wearing.
- Clothing Damage
- Covert Group: The world is secretly ruled by a group of supervillains calling themselves Lemniscate Society.
- Crapsack World: Super Dan's evil future self puts it best. Their world is rotten to the core. So much so, that they actually tolerate schools for supervillains.
- Deal with the Devil: The driving force behind all resurrections in the comic. Yes, even Superdan's.
- Death Is Cheap: Spoofed to Hell and back. Dan lampshades it, asking Peter why he isn't dead anymore, with Peter responding that it's because no one ever stays dead in a comic book. In actuality, death generally isn't cheap in this story, with Peter only coming back due to a Deal with the Devil.
- Demonic Possession: In order to come Back from the Dead, Super Dan had to make a deal with a demoness. She resides within his body, and should he ever allow himself to love someone or have sex, she will be released. When Super Dan also gets possessed by Rhet Khan, both of them work together to take control of Super Dan's body to create an Omnicidal Maniac villain that is only defeated by an Intrinsic Vow Dan made to Gen.
- Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: In earlier strips, Cthulhu was the lunch lady at Bad Guy High.
- Distaff Counterpart: Super Power Girl to Super Dan.
- Dragged Off to Hell: When Death Master, a lich, uses up too much magic and loses the Calamity Stone he was using to augment himself, a rift opens up and a bunch of demons take him away, saying that he has abused the powers of darkness for the last time.
- Easy Amnesia: In one arc, Evan gets hit on the head with a bit of rubble and loses all memory of who he is. Hilarity Ensues.
- Easy Road to Hell: After a life of heroism and helping others, Dan goes to Hell... for premarital sex.
- Enemy Without: Peter during his trial to become Captain DC.
- Even Evil Has Standards
- Everybody Knew Already: Everyone but Evan knew Dan was Super Dan.
- Eviler than Thou
- Evil Knockoff: Bizarro Dan and Cyborg Super Dan.
- Evil Overlord: Super Dan's future self.
- Evil Plan: Its a school for villains, of course there's going to be one of these.
- Femme Fatale: Pandora.
- Fille Fatale: Gen.
- Foreshadowing: When Paradox, Dan's evil Alternate Self, tells him just what their world is about to face, he mentions Lemniscate Society and the Miser, both becoming major antagonists to the sequel series, Generation Bad.
- Friendly Enemy: Despite each being effectively the other's archnemesis, Evan and Dan are very close friends.
- Funbag Airbag: This strip.
- Future Badass: Captain DC.
- Go-Go Enslavement: Gen's fate when Dan becomes a tyrannical dictator.
- Hot for Student: Pandora.
- Humongous Mecha: Used primarily by Doomface and Evan.
- Knight Templar: Super Dan's future self.
- Lampshade Hanging: Here is one example.
- Magic Pants
- The Mole: In the future, when Dan becomes an Evil Overlord, Superpower Girl acts as a mole for La Résistance to infiltrate his regime.
- Most Common Super Power: Both Super Power Girl and Pandora. Pretty much inevitable in a parody of superhero comics.
- Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Future Evil Overlord Dan has an army of cybernetic vampire ninjas.
- "You think that's bad? You should see his fleet of alien zombie pirates!"
- Parental Abandonment: Evan's dad is a very prominent supervillain who is disappointed in his son's lack of superpowers and spends all of his time in his asteroid lair plotting world domination. His mom is actually an AI hologram that Evan himself made. His real mother was killed by his father when he was young.
- Passing the Torch: The story gives strong hints that there is far more to the "radioactive superman" that gave Dan his powers than a one shot gag. The sequel series, Generation Bad, implies that the previous owner of Super Dan's powers was corrupted somehow and needed to pass on his powers to another.
- Radiation-Induced Superpowers: Dan gets his superpowers by being bitten by a radioactive Superman, his transformations in earlier strips are fueled by residual gamma radiation in his system, and one throwaway gag strip mentions a toxic waste-carrying truck crashing as a potential opportunity to develop superpowers.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Dan's evil potential future self raped Gen in order to exorcise a demoness that was possessing him, to ensure she could never take control of him. He states that he wasn't proud of he did, but considered it Necessarily Evil and figured Gen was a villain anyway. Word of God describes all of the horrible things he's done as being understandable, except for that.
- Replacement Goldfish: Evan's Mother.
- Reverse the Polarity: Spoofed in this strip.
- Scenery Censor: played with using speech bubbles and sound effect blurbs on a few occasions.
- Send in the Clones: Paradox's army of Superdan clones.
- Shout-Out: In addition to the ubiquitous superhero comic references, there is also the occasional shout out to an anime series or other element of pop culture.
- Single-Stroke Battle: Hilariously subverted in the duel between Superdan and Bizzaro-Dan
- Super Hero
- Super Hero School: Bad Guy High is a Supervillain School.
- Superpowered Evil Side: Peter.
- Supervillain Lair
- The Cape: Super Dan is a walking parody of this.
- The Faceless: The principal for the first 300 pages or so, anyway, before it's revealed that he's actually Doomface.
- Modesty Shorts: Superpower Girl is a Flying Brick with a short skirt, but wears shorts underneath to maintain her modesty.
- The Purge: In the ending, Lemniscate Society, the world's effective rulers, capture or wipe out most of the world's superheroes, reducing the survivors from super-powered vigilantes to resistance fighters.
- Token Minority: spoofed with "The Black Blackness", a member of the Camaraderie of Heroes.
- Two-Teacher School
- Unexplained Recovery: Both played straight and subverted on various occasions.
- Unsound Effect: Among others, " Exciting Fight Scene!"
- Utopia Justifies the Means: The motivation behind Dan's ascent (descent?) to Evil Overlord status.
- Villain Protagonist: Come on, the comic's called Bad Guy High, what'd you expect?
- Webcomic Time: Lampshaded in this strip.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Super Dan's evil future self is a murderous totalitarian dictator, but he is ultimately trying to wipe the slate in a world overwhelmed by evil.
- Who's on First?: Played with here.
