Spoorflix (in spacesuit), Minionbot, Sid, and Vexxarr in their native habitat: Assigning blame for failures.
"Your logic is your weakness..."
Vexxarr is a comedy Sci-Fi webcomic by Hunter Cressall. The initial setup sounds similar to Invader Zim: An alien Evil Overlord sends his flunky to conquer earth, mostly to get him out of the way. However, it plays out quite differently. For starters, the flunky Vexxarr is quite well aware that he is incompetent, or in his own words: "Let's say I know a thing or two about being volunteered for one-way missions." Secondly, Vexxarr tries an open invasion, with War of the Worlds-esque walkers. It fails miserably, and Vexxarr is captured. Initially, the comic showed Vexxarr living on earth. After a while though, Vexxarr was allowed to leave, and since then the comic has centered on Vexxarr's journey through the galaxy, and trying to find a place that isn't inhabited by something that wants him dead.Or worse.During his travels, he has picked up several new passengers, as much as Vexxarr would wish otherwise. Currently, Vexxarr's crew includes his robotic lackey Minionbot, his ship AI Carl, a legion of repair drones, Sploorfix and Sid. To give an idea of Vexxarr's typical day: The first three either diss him, play pranks on him, or try to kill him, Sploorfix shifts between Emo-mode and Wide-Eyed Idealist-mode, and Sid is a member of a prey species that is terminally afraid, despite being virtually indestructible. In short, if at any time Vexxarr's incompetence is insufficient to ruin his day, one of his "friends" will do it for him.
This webcomic provides examples of:
A God Am I: Minionbot reprograms the repair drones to recognise Vexxarr as their deity. It goes about as well as you would imagine.
Drone (producing a software patch): {int Add(the green lout had it coming); };
Schlumpoid Queen: I would like to ask you something, and I want a straight answer. Tell me the unvarnished truth,no matter how much it may hurt. [snip] Is our civilization also in decline?
Schlumpool: No, but only because it is so pathetic it has nowhere to decline from.
Schlumpoid Queen: Ok... I'm going to ask again and I want a direct lie. Pile one on so high I can't see daylight over its height.
But for Me, It Was Tuesday: A variation - it's not that they intend for anyone to get hurt, but because of Vexxarr's Cosmic Plaything status, there tends to be...er... some karmic overflow...
Minionbot: Have we yet again condemned an otherwise innocent species to brutal and premature extinction?
Vexxarr: What makes you say that?
Minionbot: Is it a Thursday?
(And yes, they have).
Again when Vexxarr feels there's still something missing from the news that the ship is without power and at the mercy of a malevolent species.
Carl: Structural failure?
Vexxarr: Nope.
Carl: Reactor breach?
Vexxarr: Be dissapointed if it hadn't
Carl: Bleeding atmosphere into space...
Vexxarr: It's a Thursday.
Card-Carrying Villain: The plant AI's, from their first conversation, are quite clear about their plans with Vexxarr. It doesn't get better either.
AI: Now, let's discuss your feelings. Start with pain.
Vexxarr: Just determine the most hazardous place (the warp sabot) could have gone and start our search there...
Carl: I hate to say it but he has a certain practical logic...
Minionbot: I concur... past experience supports this.
Vexxarr: Whoa whoa whoa... stop right there! What have I told you both? We do not...ever...goad the universe!
Cowardly Lion: Sid, like all rock-crabs, is afraid of almost everything, despite the fact that very little can hurt him.
To make it even weirder he feeds on radiation, like that produced by Bleen weapons and antimatter explosions. So he loves the things that most sane beings would fear the most.
Dangerously Genre Savvy: Vexxarr's usual high level of Genre Savviness can sky-rocket into this occasionally. Usually this is directly proportional to how insane a bad situation has become.*
Considering that every situation is almost always bad...
Deadpan Snarker: Vexxarr, Minionbot and Carl. Vexxarr and Carl have ribbing matches that go on for panels.
Delicious Distraction: Used deliberatly by Vexxarr whenever a stressful situation arises. And they arise often...to the point Sploorfix has picked up the habit.
Vexxarr: First of all their planet was in the way and second it's triple layer carrot cake. See? There are raisins...
The Drag Along: Vexxarr hates it when things get interesting.
Vexxarr: All I want is a safe place where I can enjoy a little cake and Xbox and instead I find bizarre civilisations in danger of unintended self-extermination. And then they want help. From me.
Everything Trying to Kill You: And everyone. By the time Vexxarr has gotten through facilitating an all-out war between the Bleen and the Lattrox, the only people's hit list he isn't on is the humans and their allies. And that's a pretty damn tiny percentage of the space-faring races, considering that it amounts to about... 3.
Genre Savvy: Vexxarr has become increasingly savvy about his attempts to find safety, to the point of having a betting pool on how long after encountering anything they would be attacked or ordered to surrender.
Vexxarr: ...alright, fifty-seven seconds. Who had fifty-seven seconds?
Minionbot: I had five dollars on fifty-seven but it was under 'Prepare to be assimilated...'
Good Is Not Nice: Vexxarr is a borderline type IV Anti-Hero who can be quite vindictive when he wants to be. But he still has a conscience - albeit one he has tried to literally bash out of his own head - and he will - in the end - do the right thing.*
Eventually.
He is not going to be nice about it though. Ever. And depriving him of cake is probably going to send him off the deep end.*
The aesop of this story is to always supply your Anti-Hero with chocolate gateau whenever they have to make an important moral decision.
Gravity Sucks: Averted hard; at one point Vexxarr actually tries to hide in a black hole's accretion disk, relying on his invincible hull to protect him against the radiation. It almost worked, too.
Gun Porn: In the early, black and white days of the comic, the art of earth's millitary equipment looked significantly more detailed than the characters.
...unless, of course, it would be unimaginably fun...
Hammer Space: Vexxarr can conjure a paper list of research projects performed by Bleen AI seemingly out of thin air. The explanation: It's just that important to remember how any research project headed by an AI has Gone Horribly Wrong and ended with the creation of a tiny sun. (Except the one that ended with a super massive black hole.)
Aid: You have my sword. *beat* Ok. That was disturbing beyond words.
The Heart: Sploorflix keeps trying to get everyone to work together, help all the creatures they come across, and wants everyone to live in love and peace. Unfortunately, for him, he's in the wrong universe and within a lightyear vicinity of Vexxarr and Carl, where his extreme idealism does not hold up well in the face of Vexxarr's wormhole of cynicism. However, he does still manage to drag Vexxarr's conscience out into the open more than once, though, pulling their somewhat dysfunctional crew into doing the right thing. ...Eventually.
Vexxarr: So this is what it has come to... my dignity... had I any left... would get a devastating blow from this.
Insult Backfire: An interesting example. Anytime Vexxarr claims that all machine life is murderous and always planning the destruction of organic life, his two robot crew will happily admit that he is correct.
Vexxarr: Not until that... that machine admits that it is a calculating, survival obsessed, self-centered, tyrant wannabee with a pathological hatred of anything organic!
Carl: Yep. That's me to a tee. Shall we continue to the Lattrox DMZ?
Iron Buttmonkey: The crew are regularly hurled across the cabin by uncompensated acceleration, decompressed, crushed, beaten up, chewed on by monsters, or scorched by energy entities, and yet never take permanent harm. Also, the ship remains unaffected by frequent collisions with asteroids, space debris and other ships.
Minionbot: ...before you begin this line of inquiry, do I have sufficent time to tunnel to an adjacent universe?
Like You Would Really Do It: But the author did his best to make us think Vexxarr got killed off, including changing the 'Vexxarr' titlecard on top of the page to 'Spoorflix'
Manipulative Bastard: Vexxarr is slowly and steadily becoming a candidate for Magnificent Bastard, if not for the war he started between the two most aggressive races in the galaxy in order to get them to wipe each other out, then Forthisrighthere.
Medical Horror: The Lattrox use the same word for 'hospital' and 'food factory'.
Multiple Reference Pun: present in the titles often. References include Ghost in the Shell, Do androids dream of Electric sheep?, Isaac Asimov, Pink Floyd, South Park, Watchmen, Doctor Who, Sam Pekinpah, Ockham's Razor, Rage Against the machine... the full list is really long.
Noodle Incident: When Carl and Minionbot are reviewing the results of simulated drone operations, we don't get to see what they're looking at, but we do hear the names Carl gave the various simulations, such as Ode to places a cutting torch should never go, Three drones, one airlock and no sense, and the cautionary tale about plasma torches, hypergolic fuel and explosive decompression called Don't.
Ship Commander: Helmsman, put me on shipwide. I want to address the entire crew.
Helmsman: We're both right here, sir.
Oh Crap: Vexxarr's 'face' is very well suited for the appropriate expression. And of course, his status as Cosmic Plaything gives him plenty of opportunity to use it, like here.
Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Bleen never had religion, thanks to their race memory. Also, while on earth, he gets a visit from an annoying evangelist.
Evangelist: You're not one of those heretics that believes we evolved from monkeys are you?
Vexxarr: Me? No. We evolved from cnidarians.
Evangelist: ... you don't actually know that!
Vexxarr: We have video.
Though Minionbot was briefly a Buddhist, and later he convinced the repair drones that Vexxarr (aka The Keeper of the Off Switch) was a god.
Minionbot: How big is the fireball, and how fast do we need to travel to outrun it?
Vexxarr: That's a tough question to answer. The fireball in question has our ship's ID and description...and it's possible we may owe it a lot of money.
Pungeon Master: Sploorfix approaches this at times, much to Vexxarr's and Carl's utter dismay and horror.
Vexxarr(strangling Sploorfix): No court in the land! Do you hear me? No court in the land!
Refusal of The Call: Vexxarr generally tries to refuse, but that never works out.
Rubber Forehead Aliens: Averted, all aliens look decidedly non-human. The only strange thing is that despite Vexxarr's single eye, his eyebrow shows the exact same position-by-emotion as two human eyebrows would. See his angry-look (his look for roughly 90% of the comic.) in the trope picture.
"The Reason You Suck" Speech: Vexxarr's own robotic allies frequently give him one. And then there's the hostile AI left by the Schlumpoid Forebearers, who gives them to any Schlumpoid in range. They actually make use of it by assigning him to teach a class called 'Stasis: The failure of Schlumpoid Culture.'
AI: Welcome class. I want to begin by saying that no matter how your grades turn out, I will be giving each of you an F.
Schlumpoid: What? What have we done to deserve that?
AI: By the end of the semester, I expect you to tell me.
Sploorfix: Just tell me what you think of when you look at him.
Vexxarr:The airlock.
Later done with consent to Minionbot to disengage the malfunctioning hyperdrive.
Minionbot: ...because saving the ship inevitably results in Sploorfix blogging about it. And I am therefore safer out here!
Translator Microbes: Justified, since Vexxarr is telepathic. However, all newly picked up crew members can not only talk to Vexxarr, but also to each other without problems (No mouths are ever seen on them either, and Sid lived in a vacuum, so perhaps they communicate telepathically too).
Sid: There was a button. Its function was unknown to me...
Recently Vexxarr himself went through this, when trying to figuer out how to disengage a planetwide cloaking system from a console that was also invisible. There were some... problems.
Who's Laughing Now?: After managing to successfully impersonate the leader of a group of vegetable-based AI that have been trying to kill him, he vents pretty much all of the frustration he's accumulated over the course of the strip through creative vengeance
Sploorfix: What are you thinking?
Minionbot: That Vexxarr has been in space entirely too long.
Bleen commander: Look, I'm going to make this easy for you. Either tell me whether or not that planet is indeed the earth or throw yourself out of the airlock. Your choice. [.....] Command makes for a lonely life. That, and flushing your bridgecrew into space.
Granted, spacing is not fatal to the Bleen, but after the number of acolytes in orbit became a navigational hazard the Emperor started vaporizing them instead.
is a comedy Sci-Fi webcomic by Hunter Cressall. The initial setup sounds similar to Invader Zim: An alien Evil Overlord sends his flunky to conquer earth, mostly to get him out of the way. However, it plays out quite differently. For starters, the flunky Vexxarr is quite well aware that he is incompetent, or in his own words: "Let's say I know a thing or two about being volunteered for one-way missions." Secondly, Vexxarr tries an open invasion, with War of the Worlds-esque walkers. It fails miserably, and Vexxarr is captured. Initially, the comic showed Vexxarr living on earth. After a while though, Vexxarr was allowed to leave, and since then the comic has centered on Vexxarr's journey through the galaxy, and trying to find a place that isn't inhabited by something that wants him dead. Or worse.During his travels, he has picked up several new passengers, as much as Vexxarr would wish otherwise. Currently, Vexxarr's crew includes his robotic lackey Minionbot, his ship AI Carl, a legion of repair drones, Sploorfix and Sid. To give an idea of Vexxarr's typical day: The first three either diss him, play pranks on him, or try to kill him, Sploorfix shifts between Emo-mode and Wide-Eyed Idealist-mode, and Sid is a member of a prey species that is terminally afraid, despite being virtually indestructible. In short, if at any time Vexxarr's incompetence is insufficient to ruin his day, one of his "friends" will do it for him.
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