Jack is a furry webcomic by David Hopkins. The main character, Jack, is a rabbit who is also The Grim Reaper. Most of the stories take place in the afterlife or involve death in some form.Oh, and fair warning, this comic can get veryNSFW at times.Also has awiki.
Anything That Moves: Drip, if it doesn't move fast enough when it sees him coming.
Arch-Enemy: Among the villains that Jack faces, Drip and Dr. Kane stand out.
Art Major Biology: In-universe. Aurthor doesn't really know that much about cancer himself (however he does know that cancer is a group of diseases), but his speech to the press essentially tells them cancer is caused by evil monsters.
Ascended Extra: Within the series' universe. When humanity died in the Human-Furry War and furrykind failed to learn from man's mistakes, God ensured that the ensuing history would follow that which came before (sans biological-warfare-apocalypse) as closely as possible. However, certain furry works of fiction, such as Extinctioners and The Funday Pawpet Show, are now mainstream works.
The Atoner: Too many to count. Jack seems to be the most prominent one, though.
Bloody Bowels of Hell: One punishment for those who are guilty of the sin of Lust is being fused into a huge, writhing gob of meat, similar in form to a Gibbering Mouther from Dungeons & Dragons.
Break the Cutie: This webcomic exemplifies more than any other work of fiction. Good, decent, cute people get REALLY broken and abused, sometimes just for being good, decent and cute.
It's no better exemplified than with Fnar, the Innocent in Hell. An unborn baby who died with his mother, Fnar was given the form of a small child and told that he's to stay in Hell for the time being but that Hell will not affect him since he did not do anything to be damned personally. His role in the comic is to wander through people's personal tortures not quite grasping what's going on, and acting as Jack's Morality Pet. Fnar even manages to acquire a girlfriend (a deformed demoness introduced in a previous arc as the aborted child of that arc's protagonist) and a pet (A Rework, which is a 28DaysLater style feral zombie)(Fnar fails to notice anything off about either and they both become very much fond of him in turn). Everyone likes Fnar and wants to be nice to him (And those that don't stay uninvolved in his dealings) until Fnar is told he is finally going to leave Hell. This event is treated with a lot of build up and celebration, until Fnar's father Drip, serial rapist in life and the Sin of Lust personified in death figures out his connection to Fnar and molests him right before he was to leave, spoiling his innocence at the last minute. This causes Jack to have a Heroic BSOD where he lashes out at an angel who had been one of Jacks few true friends, spoiling their friendship.
Due to the above lashing-out, Farrago herself gets broken, enough so that she asks for Laser-Guided Amnesia (from God, no less) so that she could re-meet Jack, ignorant of his past evils.
Broad Strokes: The Canon is confusing, as time does not exist in Hell, so the plot wanders across earth's timeline. Plus, the "history repeats stuff" makes the timeline confusing and possibly broken. Canon gets really confusing when characters from Rework The Dead start appearing in Jack. Drip is the main problem. Are both Drips the same person? If so, Lita grew up during the events of Rework, but as we see her death and see her alive in the background of Two For You both of which are noticeably rework-free, so either the ability to recover from a Zombie Apocalypse ridiculously quickly is one of the lesser known furry attributes, or Drip died multiple times in the same universe, once killed by a rework that looks exactly like his hell-form, which given the Reincarnation and escaping from hell bits may be possible, or it's paralleled but related Universes, or the damage to the time line is worse that it original seems. The two works seem to fit together, don't think to hard about how.
Bug War: Arc XXIII Debts, which takes place in the future of the furry earth.
Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Darkly subverted. Doctor Thalmus thinks that developing a cure for cancer entitles him to molest children, even going so far as to hold the cure hostage when Aurthor finds out. No one else seems to agree with his viewpoint.
Came Back Wrong: See the entry for Necromantic below, where a Type 2 of sorts occurs: turns out people have difficulty adjusting to being resurrected.
Worryingly, temporarily getting out of hell without being reconciled with your sins is possible. More optimistically, getting and staying out if you reconcile them is possible and permitted.
Cheerful Child: Fnar, though the mere fact that he is one despite the context he's in also pushes him into Creepy Child territory. His reincarnation, Randy, is a clearer example.
Children Are Innocent: Fnar deconstructs this trope, by showing that a cute, genuinely innocent and pure kid who doesn't quite understand the horrors of Hell can be as scary as said horrors.
Chekhov's Gunman: All the souls Jack has collected end up coming back several arcs later.
Cosmic Plaything: Hopkins makes this one dance a jig when it comes to Todd: He believes himself this, so he becomes this, with the Devil controlling his life. Then he realizes the Devil told him about the Seventh Wall, which means he can invert it and make the cosmos (or at least the comic strip) his plaything, right? Wrong.
Crapsack World: Hard to place as since the comic is largely set in hell our viewpoint of events is skewed, and there are some very optimistic bits, however the facts are humanity has been wiped out, humanity's successors are doomed to make the exact same mistakes as humanity in the same order, and worse, hell may as well have a revolving door as far as some of its worse repeat offenders are concerned, there's a Zombie Apocalypse and a war with aliens waiting in the immediate future, and both god and the devil seem to have taken a "hands off" approach to things, leaving the fate of the world to mortals, angels and sins, of which only the worst of the sins seems to have a clear plan.
Cursed with Awesome: Most of the characters who are punished with being anthropomorphic personifications of the seven deadly sins are given far greater powers than a normal denizen of hell. However, they're unable to actually enjoy the activities that embody their lust. The angel Central told Jack that one of the reasons the Sins were given power was so that they would not seek out redemption, continuing their punishment in Hell.
Days of Future Past: Apparently, when furrykind annihilated the human race (their creators), they ended up being knocked back into at least medieval society, working their way back up to what we would call the present day and beyond. An obvious piece of evidence for this is the first official playing card deck, which shows that when Farrago was alive, she was a medieval-style knight or warrior.
Dead to Begin With: Most of the recurring characters are dead, or have been dead at some point.
Disproportionate Retribution: In the "What's Pissing off Dalton" story arc, Dalton kills a man because of his speech impediment that causes him to draw out his "s" sounds, which annoys Dalton due to his headaches.
Jack is not a completely straight example ( see the YMMV page), but he still genuinely cares for the good souls it is his job to take. Unless they are clearly evil — he IS the sin of Wrath, after all.
One arc has Satan pointing out that Jack's ongoing efforts to escape Hell mean that someone else will have to take his place if he succeeds, which will be guaranteed to lead to an all-out aversion.
Driven to Suicide/Suicide Is Painless: A lot of the recurring non-angelic cast took their own lives out of either desperation or a desire for control. No less than three recurring characters were driven to suicide by Drip.
Both played straight and subverted regarding the denizens of Hell. Any one of them (up to and including Satan himself) is perfectly capable of ending their time in Hell at any time by recognizing their sins, repenting for them, and asking for forgiveness. Seems easy, but the subversion comes in the fact that the people who end up in Hell tend to, by their very natures, resist doing this, as pointed out elsewhere on this page.
Inverted in "Hell Is That Noise", when the mother character recognizes her sins, repents for them, and asks forgiveness of the children she killed... and is torn apart by them.
Even Evil Has Standards: Even DRIP of all people can feel bad about what is happening to others, and when two characters are captured by Kane, Drip gives one a Mercy Kill and offers to do the same to another. He later goes on to being regular Drip, but look at his eyes in panel 4 here. Look there and tell me he doesn't at least have a sliver of a heart.
Every Episode Ending: At the end of every main story arc: "TTFN" (Ta-Ta For Now). Lampshaded in the story arc Twist, Twist, Twist.
Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Even if they do have good in them, it's clear why the damned are damned: they shift blame around and say it's all the fault of a higher power they got condemned to hell. Some of them (like Lita) get disproportionately incensed at angels whenever they see them.
Explicit Content: Although there is the occasional display of nudity throughout the strip, "The Games We Play in Hell" has more than a bit of explicit sex, particularly of the nonconsensual variety.
Famous, Famous, Fictional: "... before uzis, RPGs, jets, bars, saws, lazers, power armor and pathmakers"
Fate Worse Than Death: These are often used as punishments for sins and for the damned in hell, who due to their ability to regenerate get to relive the punishments again and again.
Furry Confusion: Furries are genetically engineered, apparently, so there's nothing weird in a family of crow-men farmers being pestered by crows. There is confusion about how the furry offsring looks like: a cat-girl's elementary school-old kitten looked like a real life kitten, but Littlest Cancer Patients looked like furry kids.
Genius Loci: The anthropomorphic personification of Sloth is punished in Hell by becoming the ground.
Good Eyes, Evil Eyes: Whilst Sins, God and the Devil have pupil-less eyes all non-sins in hell are shown with pinpoint pupils until they realize their sin, at which point they are drawn with the full pupils used by Hopkins for the living and Angels. It's also shown that those who have realized their sin can go back to the ominous pinpoint pupils,if they fall in with the wrong crowd, or if they've been brutalized like Vinci in the side story "Pikri Alitheia" after trying to defend Bashful and being half-devoured by the Gorshes. Vinci's eyes, however, almost immediately returned to "open."
Good People Have Good Sex: "Well, let me put it this way. In Heaven, they make love... on Earth, they have sex... but down here in Hell, down here... they fuck."
Gorn: This is one of the bloodiest, most grisly webcomics out there, period.
Government Conspiracy: The American government knows that furrykind was created in a laboratory by humans, who used to be the only sentient species on Earth. They currently have archaeologists doing research in the ruins of that lab, which is also heavily guarded. Anyone who blabs about furrykind's secret origins would likely be secretly killed, but given the widespread panic and existential angst such blabbing would cause (i.e. "We're all descendants of lab-grown creatures, therefore WE HAVE NO SOULS!"), this is a wise policy. However, they also have possible counter-proof of this in the form of Kane's resurrection machine, unless the Government thinks that being brought back to life sent that poor woman crazy and she hallucinated the whole thing. So if they didn't believe her, they're hiding perceived disproof of the afterlife. If they did, they're hiding perceived proof of religion. One wonders which would be more dangerous.
The Gwen Stacy: Jill. Subverted because her death only made Jack sink deeper.
Swifty at the beginning of "The Superman Project".
Brisk all throughout "Megan's Run".
History Repeats: Furry civilization and its history are incredibly uncannily similar to human civilization's history, right down to TV shows and individual people like celebrities, to the point where it can't all have been the result of reincarnation of humans, if that was ever a factor in the repetition of history at all. The main source of this phenomenon was probably the lynching of Mr. Grimm, an anthropomorphic vulture who, not long after the end of humanity, attempted to write a manifesto detailing a new society based upon lessons learned from the mistakes of humanity. He was killed by those who didn't agree with his ideas, and those who fail to learn from history are doomed to... well, you know...
Ironic Hell: Some of the punishments of the damned rely on this trope.
It's All About Me: Most of the damned really can't think (or care) about more than themselves.
Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Nurse Jeremy Campbell from "It's like cancer". Arrogant and homophobic at first, but redeemed when he's touched by the tolerance of a gay patient and lets go of his hatred.
Jack's punishment is to be unable to remember his life on earth. This also counts as Disproportionate Retribution, as since Jack can't remember his misdeeds, he can't truly repent for them, so he's denied the "out" of repentance and forgiveness the other denizens of Hell have. He asked for it.
Farrago asks God for her memories of Jack, the Grim Reaper to be wiped, so she can start fresh with him.
Lita does not recognize who The Sin of Lust is upon meeting him, as his damaged hell form has little resemblance to his appearance in life Jack likewise had no clue he was created by Dr. Kane.
It is not reveled to the reader that Drip is Fnar's father right away, and Jack seems to have been keeping the information from Fnar presumably to keep him from looking for Drip (he also neglects to give Lita the exact same "your dad is Lust" info. Neither time did it help).
Mad Scientist: Kane, Nostrom, and Jack during his life.
Man Behind the Man: Dr. Kane in several story arcs, such as "Wednesday's Child" and "Sever the Hunger".
Manipulative Bastard: The Devil, who tricks Drip into never trying life again (By telling him he'll be a woman in his next life), and halts Jack's 'redemption' because if he does leave, an even worse psycho will take his place as Wrath. Plus he plays with Todd in "The Seventh Wall" and "Hell Is That Noise" (Although each one is in Hell for a reason). Drip also deserves a place here, but he does it (Mostly) For the Evulz.
In Arc XXVII, "Why Do I Deserve To Die", Jack delays sending a group of people to judgement after they are killed in a bombed restaurant, allowing them to figure out who among them set off the bomb. Called as such toward the end of the Story Arc.
In life, Drip trained three proteges to continue his work after he died (presumably with the thought in mind that he would one day be executed), so that the people who put him away would forever be haunted by the possibility that they got the wrong guy.
The damned are all over this trope like white on rice. Truly admitting guilt and responsibility for your own actions is the first step out of hell, something most of them aren't capable of. This is one of the reasons a lot of the damned hate angels; it's easier to blame an authority figure who sent you to hell (even if they didn't) than to think you might actually deserve being where you are.
Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: The non-canon story "Frigid McThunderbones" is loaded with nonsensical stuff that seems to have been thrown in purely for Rule Of Cool reasons.
Noble Demon: Jack is a demon but is more or less on the good side.
Nonhumans Lack Attributes: Played straight for Jack and Jill, presumably as Kane was Genre Savvy enough to realize making the first batch of his experimental AIs self replicating was a bad move.Noticeably averted elsewhere.
Non Linear Character: As time doesn't exist in the afterlife, everyone's already dead technically. But Jack in particular who reaped himself.
Oh Crap: Happens a lot. It's bound to, since much of the plot revolves around people dying. The Seventh Wall has an epic one, where Todd learns how to break the seventh wall to escape Hell... except The Devil, who controls the seventh wall, has kept him firmly in Hell. Todd never stops being fun for Satan.
Only Six Faces: It's not uncommon for furry comics to have characters that are distinguished only by the features of their unique species. It's less common for them to still not be distinguishable despite being radically different species.
Our Souls Are Different: The souls of the dead appear to have some physical form in both heaven, hell AND on earth (otherwise they'd fall though the floor) this enables the dead to move objects, and kill their murderer.
Red Eyes, Take Warning/Glowing Eyes of Doom: Played with somewhat. Jack's eyes are pure glowing red most of the time. Since he's the reaper, people tend to take warning. But his actual Wrath Mode turns everything but his pupils black. ...and those go after his memories are restored. The other sins also have similar eyes. Emily has bright yellow eyes, Drip has green eyes and the others have red ones if they have them at all. God and Satan have uniquely pure black eyes until "Sever The Hunger".
Heavily inspired (but not quite like) by Catholic Christianity, down to the seven deadly sins and purgatory. However, almost nobody on Earth knows about that.
Subverted in that where you go has nothing to do with your religion. If you cannot forgive yourself for your life sins, you go to Hell. If you were enough of a Jerkass, you go to Hell. If you commit suicide for any reason, you go to Hell. If your evil was of such a prodigious magnitude that Hell does not know how to punish you, you become Sin itself. It is stated that if you don't believe in God s/he cannot accept you into heaven, though at least this version of purgatory isn't that bad, amounting to a peaceful, idealized version of Earth.
And Randy (even though that IS Fnar). Only David Hopkins could make a skunk-frog hybrid look mind-blowingly cute.
Ring Ring CRUNCH: Silverblue stabs her alarm clock. It's not known if she always did, or if she just started because she's been woken up by the exact same sound at the exact same time each morning for 125 years.
Rouge Angles of Satin: The spelling is pretty infuriating. "your", "angle" and so on and so forth.
Running Gag: The demon of loneliness protesting that his mom's not a whore... and then proven wrong, once even by said mom in "Frigid McThunderbones".
Sadistic Choice: This comic being what it is, this comes up often. In one particular example, Satan introduces Jack to the guy who will be replacing him should Jack actually manage to escape Hell. He's... lessthanpleasant.
Satan: Given the general subject matter of this strip, it's not surprising he makes occasional appearances. Satan in the Jack universe resembles the artist's furry persona, only with all-black eyes.
The afterlife is distinctively based on the Divine Comedy.
In a recent arc, a character Richek reveals that he's seen the grim reaper numerous times and considers him somewhat of a friend, but no one else has ever seen him, and he doesn't know his name. What does he call his tall, rabbitty pal? Harvey!
On one page, Hopkins got so involved in the inking process that he accidentally lettered in some notes he had written to remind him how to ink things. Upon realizing he had done this he added a new one, reading "In Hell, you can see the notes."
Done again in Mr. Smith Goes to Hell, a comic only available in print. This time, a hand drawn backwards on one of the pages is...well, handwaved in the end notes by saying that "these things happen in Hell". The publishers weren't impressed.
Personal Threat: Lust. Although Drip is the one of the seven you'd least like to be forced to spend 10 minutes locked in a phone-booth with, in life he was never more than a personal threat and in death is largely too content to sit around raping and torturing to be more than an very, very effective personal threat.
Personal threat/City threat: Vanity and Gluttony. Although they either peel your Fur off and wear it or eat you alive, they constituted no more that personal threats in life, and severe personal threats if encountered in Hell, they have also, unlike Drip, set out of their own initiative large-scale activates interfering in Earth's affairs from beyond the grave, such as large-scale disasters such as plane crashes (the Gluttonies) and using an fallen Angel lover to lure several apartment-blocks of living souls into Faustian contracts (Vanity).
Country/Global Threat: Greed. A false Messiah and tyrant whose religiously-motivated armies conquered most of the known world in life, and a false Messiah whose religiously-motivated mob of followers rules the necropolis of hell in death. At least he's persistent. A greedy, unlikable, physically-replant tyrant, but actually willing to play Hide and seek with Fnar if it will get Jack of his back.
Global/Galactic/Universal threat: Envy. DrKane Human Evil genius and Mad ScientistNietzsche Wannabe in life who created the race that wiped out humanity and who eventually fight a war with an alien race, and a machine to resurrect the dead. Although in hind sight known to be part-way between Dr Herbert West, Dr Frankenstein and Dr Joseph Mengele, his one appearance as he was in life makes him come over as no-more than very arrogant and overbearing. After he dies he decides that playing Xanatos Speed Chess with Greed, helping souls escape the Reaper and building up an army of mindless spent burnt-out souls in preparation for a walls or reality destroying cosmic civil war/ prison break he may or not be planning is a constructive use of an afterlife.
Universal threat: Wrath. Jack. In his afterlife, the one nice guy out of the lot. In his life, he wiped out humanity and Broke Time!. The damage he did to the universe was so great God had to press the "Reset History" button to fix it (although the early history of furrykind erased most traces of humanity, negativing the need for a physical reset). Even in Death it's hinted his Super-Powered Evil Side could wipe the floor with the all other Sins and pose a threat to any and all nearby angels if he ever truly lost control of it.
Spikes of Doom: This is how Jack defeats Joen in Those That Run.
Stable Time Loop: Drip ends up being the Butt Monkey for one, ending with him murdering and raping his own parents in front of his infant self, making him ultimately responsible for all of the tragedies that happened in his life.
Stealth Pun: Several, but notably Edward Vade - E. Vade.
Traumatic C-Section: Kane threatens to do this to Wendy, in the arc "Wednesday's Child", if she doesn't cooperate with him.
Tsurime Eyes: How you can tell someone is a bad guy, generally.
Unfortunate Names: Possibly Drip, as a background "fanfic" written by Hopkins revealed that his grandmother named him after "the sound the blood dripping made when I killed my mother" during his birth. Definitely the detective in the B-movie parody arc Frigid McThunderbones: "Aidsyphilis Smallbush ... It's Greek."
Unreliable Narrator: The point of the short animated arc "Twist, twist, twist".
Webcomics Long Runners: This comic has been consistently running for over ten years, ladies and gentlemen.
Wham Episode: "Sever the Hunger". It reveals just what Jack did in life that made him become Wrath. Long story short, he wiped out humanity and so thoroughly wrecked the universe that he caused Generation Xerox on a cosmic scale, with furs going through the same kind of history that humans did. The kicker to this is that he himself did not know this beforehand—prior to his own demise, he asked to forget what he had done.
Jack's fur is bright green, and Jill's is pink/maroon, whereas other furries tend to have more realistic fur colours This makes some sense as adding non-natural pigmentation to transgenic creatures to identify them as such in case they escape into the wild is common real-life practice, although how someone could not notice that a bipedal talking rabbit is GM is another question. The Devil/Pepe Val Pew has got blue fur, but justified as A, he's an Author Avatar and B, The Devil!
Both Drip and Lita have bright blue fur (though it's easy to infer that Lita inherited it from Drip). Penelope in the arc "Been Reading Job" also has maroon fur.
In some of the early colored arcs such as Falling Angels, the population is positively Day-Glo.