Boxer Hockey is a webcomic created by Tyson Hesse, starting in 2006. It updates Biweekly on Wednesdays and Sundays, and follows a team for a fictitious sport called Boxer Hockey. The comic mostly focuses on the team's lives outside the games, but also has the games in separate arcs.
Alliterative Name: Two of the all-girl Georgia Peaches: Crystal Kaning and Ryan Richards.
"That's a boy's name."
Animal Athlete Loophole: Averted. Tyson goes out of his way to explain that everyone can play Boxer Hockey. "Even good 'ole Fido". That being said the Sydney Screamers' goalie is a kangaroo.
Berserk Button: When Daisuke stepped on Skip's Cool Shades. They were one of the first gifts Rittz ever gave him, and this pissed him off so much that he ignored that he was paid by him to throw the game to pay him back for it.
Calvinball: Boxer hockey has rules, but they're so simple and vague it falls into this category.
The Complainer Is Always Wrong: The coach's approach to everything. Tragically, since Billy has tried to warn him twice that Skip is selling out the games, and he won't listen.
Fanservice: As a rule, competitors in the game are required to play in their underwear, regardless of gender. Some women opt to wear an apron over them, but modesty has no place on the field.
Fatal Flaw: Skip's is Greed. He's Only in It for the Money and has lost the sense of fun in playing the game. What humanizes him most is that he's entirely aware of it and fighting with regret about it.
Filler Strips: He tends to do a lot of non-story comics. He also gained much attention by making a guest strip for PvP.
Freudian Excuse: All over the place in Rittz & Skip's backstory. Rittz was the fat kid growing up and Skip was the troubled, "criminal in waiting" kid who bonded because they had no other friends. Things like why Skip doesn't smoke or why breaking his glasses was a Berserk Button all tie back into their backstory.
The Friend Nobody Likes: Poor Chuck. Possibly because he's a replacement player for Ace, who was the coach's nephew and the childhood friend of Rittz & Skip.
Ho Yay: Though most of the gay jokes are directed at Chuck, it's Rittz and Skip◊ with the most subtext.
Rittz blurts out that at one point he work up with Ace kissing him on the mouth, to everyone else's surprise. Rittz is too innocent to understand what he just said.
Rittz and Skip are more an example of Bromance than Ho Yay thanks to Rittz being an innocent.
Improbable Weapon User: A player's "stick" can be any kind of blunt object. Cue players using boards, boxing gloves, rainsticks, wooden swords, and paddles.
Innocently Insensitive: Rittz, following along with the gay jokes about Chuck. He apparently thought they were making fun of him for having red hair the whole time.
In some ways, that's also evident of Skip being a Jerkass Woobie.
The coach qualifies. He punches a stewardess in the face for telling him not to light up on the plane and brushes it off when everyone thinks he got one of his players killed doing it. However, he does care for (the rest of) his team and sees (most of) them as a surrogate family.
Man Child: Rittz, an adult Mouthy Kid, and given the unrestrained violence of the sport he regularly engages in, he qualifies for Psychopathic Manchild as well.
Mistaken for Gay: Chuck, fullstop. Even by people he doesn't know.
Mood Whiplash: The most recent pages have taken a dramatic (literally) shift away from the typical humor of the comic.
The game of boxer hockey uses frogs as the ball. Granted, they are somehow genetically altered to be more rubbery and resistant to harm, but they do get beaten up pretty badly, and one of the very few rules of the game is that you get a 5 point penalty for killing one, meaning that this happens often enough to need a rule.
The team's pet cat and hamsters also don't fare well. The former nearly starves to death, and all of them end up suffocated to death by the team's ditz.
Posthumous Character: We haven't been told what happened to Ace and whether he's alive or not, but he fulfills the same role in the story and is only shown through flashbacks.
Read The Fine Print: Not used storyline wise, but rather as a joke for people who are able to read the tiny text. Here.
First section reads "This is all just a bunch of placeholder text, none of this matters, and you won't be able to read any of it."
The section 'Proud of Their Boy' reads "I'm only making all this up because I know there's SOMEONE who's going to go looking for something to read here. Well, are you happy? Did you get what you want? I HOPE YOU DIE!"
Last section reads "And that's when I knew I had to kill her. True, she did nothing wrong, but the VOICES. THE VOICES TOLD ME TO. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES BILLY A DULL BOY."
Rule of Symbolism: Daisuke cuts couch in half. Skip and Rittz sit on opposite sides of the couch. Their relationship starts to falter after the night Daisuke cuts the couch in half. Symbolic?
Schedule Slip: Formerly due to college, and a few trips between America and Japan. Now due to freelance work, selling, shipping, and sketching in huge orders of books by himself. He often makes Filler Strips when he does not have the time for story ones. Lampshadedhere◊.
Too Dumb to Live: Rittz. He's barely functional, really. He falls for tricks that only sometimes work on dogs.
The coach manages to destroy a plane and a life-raft both in the same day through smoking despite Skip telling him to knock it off.
Toxic Friend Influence: Skip, when he and Rittz were a child, until Rittz made him promise to be good if they were going to be friends. He stops dragging Rittz into things but doesn't really reform, setting up the conflict within the team when Billy finds out.
Un-Cancelled: For a while the creator was contemplating ending the official storyline comic after the Australia story arc wrapped up, but after a short hiatus came back to continue the story.
Webcomic Time: Lampshaded in strip #97: "Did anyone else feel like this week lasted like ... three years?"
What You Are in the Dark: Skip is forced to face this in a dream. Billy is intent on making him face it in real life to destroy him for what he's done to the team.
Write What You Know: The first story arc has Team MekPen visit Japan. Author Tyson Heese has lived in Japan before and is fluent in Japanese.