Webcomic / Weapon Brown

Weapon Brown versus Alley Oop

"I've got a lot of names, depending on who you ask. I'll let you call me Chuck. I kill for a living. There's a lot of guys in my line of work, and they're all cheaper than me. If all you want is to put a hole in somebody, you hire one of them. But if you want to take out a tank crew of battle-hardened scum and fall asleep knowing they died screaming — You call good ol' Weapon Brown."

— Chuck "Weapon" Brown

It is years after the last war, and the world has ended.

The fighting, though, that still continues.

Surviving — no, thriving — in this world is "Weapon" Brown, a cybernetic mercenary with absolutely no pity and balls that could crack diamonds. Together with his man-eating dog Snoop, they eke out a living as a pair of mercenaries. If you want something done to someone, don't need any questions answered, and absolutely need to make sure the poor bastards suffer, you call Weapon Brown.

In other words, Weapon Brown is Peanuts, only set After the End and Grim Darker than Warhammer 40,000. Filled with great art and Shout Outs to just about every syndicated comic out there.

The comic started out as a side project to cartoonist, Jason Yungbluth's, comic, Deep Fried. The first Weapon Brown story was called A Peanut Scorned, and was originally included as a bonus in the printed versions of issues 1-4 of Deep Fried. It starts off by telling the origin story of Charles "Weapon" Brown, and sequences into his quest to save his red-haired girlfriend from his insane former friend, Linus van Pelt, who plans to use her in his attempt to finally summon The Great Pumpkin, all while he runs into other characters from the Peanuts universe.

Yungbluth would eventually shift gears, and made Weapon Brown his main focus. Having already used the characters from Peanuts, he decided to widen the scope, and include elements and characters from just about every newspaper strip out there, in order to make the bigger and more epic follow-up, Blockhead's War, which ran for five issues until 2013.

Yungbluth later released an omnibus, containing all the Weapon Brown comics stories, loads of extra material as well as a new story about the eternally grim hero.

In 2018, Yungbluth announced that he was in the process of developing a sequel, called Weapon Brown: Aftershock. The comic is to work as an epilogue of sorts to Blockhead's War, and will be structured as an anthology, with the Framing Device being a mysterious wasteland prophet telling three different tales about Weapon Brown around a campfire to an audience of townsfolk. Yungbluth himself will handle the frame story, while the three stories will be handled by three different artists. Yungbluth successfully funded the project through Kickstarter.

"Blockhead's War" can be read at http://www.whatisdeepfried.com/, starting Here. It is most certainly Not Safe for Work, with nudity, sex, and Gorn.

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Weapon Brown contains examples of:

• '90s Anti-Hero: Brown draws quite heavily from this archetype, ticking off the grizzled design, gruff and antisocial personality, propensity for handling his problems with intense violence, fondness for excessive firepower, and grim and amoral haunts.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: Zig-zagged. On the one hand, you turn Charlie Brown into a muscle-bound, lantern-jawed Perma-Stubble Frazetta Man badass, Riley and Huey Freeman into cool Scary Black Man soldiers and characters like Little Orphan Annie and the Red-Haired Girl into pouty sexpots. On the other hand, you have otherwise friendly or at least cartoonish characters like Popeye, Hildy, and Beetle Bailey turned into grotesquely deformed mutants, and Blondie is now rather severely overweight.
• Adaptational Badass: Absolutely everyone, as a consequence of the Genre Shift from all-ages funny pages comic to hardcore balls-to-the-wall post-apocalyptic action. Except for Popeye, of course, who was always a badass.
• Affectionate Parody: Judging from the sheer amount of Mythology Gags and visual references, both to Peanuts and numerous other newspaper comics, a lot of love and attention to detail has clearly been put into the comic.
• And This Is for...: As Chuck prepares to finish off CAL, he dedicates each of his two blows to Gramps and Hughie.
• Anyone Can Die: And they do, in droves. Scores of recognizable comic book characters are killed off in droves, many of whom only show up for a panel or two before immediately dying. By the end of the story, the only major combatants left alive are Chuck, Annie, Snoop, Riley, and Pops.
• After the End: The comic is set after "the Last War", which more or less ended human civilization and left the world a field of ruins and rubble home to mutated survivors and ferocious monsters.
• Animesque: Considering Huey and Riley Freeman already had Animesque designs this comic embraces it wholeheartedly.
• April Fools' Day: In one strip, Chuck and Crokk gets in an argument over the script and unmask themselves to reveal that they are Beepo and Roadkill, the main characters from Deep Fried, in rubber suits.
• The Apunkalypse: The comic wholeheartedly embraces the aesthetic of the genre, and almost all characters dress in outfits heavy on spikes, leather and metal and light on the actual skin coverage. The only real exception from this is the economically advantaged forces of the Syndicate, who tend to dress in fine suits and robes.
• Ass Shove: After Chuck finally gets the upper hand against Crokk when he reattaches his metal arm. He beats him within the inch of his life and by the time he's done, Crokk has a flamethrower barrel shoved up his asshole, he finally delivers the coup after making him admit that he's a blockhead.
• Artificial Limbs: When Chuck was being made into a Super-Soldier Hollywood Cyborg by the Syndicate, they cut off his right arm and replaced it with an extremely powerful (and remotely controllable by Chuck) prosthesis with its own nuclear reactor.
• Badass Boast:
  • Chuck gives us a good one: I'm a hearse. I deliver dead bodies.
  • When "Pops" as he beats the unconscious Chuck, he's warned that they still need to interrogate him and he can't give answers with a broken jaw. He replies that he can write them down.
• Bald Head of Toughness: Weapon Brown has one strand of hair on his head, drawn in the same fashion as the original Charlie Brown's stylized hair, as a reference to the fact that some readers thought Charlie Brown was bald instead of just having (according to Charles Schultz) very close-cropped light-colored hair. In Chuck's case, his baldness fits his career path as an assassin and rugged survivalist pretty well.
• Berserk Button:
  • Don't hurt Snoop. Weapon will not be pleased.
  • Annie knows one of Brown's actual buttons (an invitation to play football) from the first story — she uses it to make him have rough sex with her. As in he's got his gun to her head rough.
• Bittersweet Ending: Snoop stays with Annie; Jeffy joins Chuck to destroy The Syndicate and avenge his family; Chuck notes that since the world has a second chance, there'll be things worth fighting for again. The "strange shadow" Chuck sees spreading out over Bone City is the schmoo from the exploded Garf, which is turning into vegetation, bringing life back to the wasteland.
• Black Comedy: A lot of the comic's humor comes from the hopeless condition of the world, the terrible things that people have to do for survive, and people dying in graphic manners.
• Black Dude Dies First: Inverted. Hughie Freeman is the last heroic character to die.
• Blind Weaponmaster: Annie is completely blind, but is a very competent fighter who uses her hearing to make up for her lack of sight.
• Body Horror: The mutations from radioactive fallout and the strain of wasteland life has left many recognizable characters not looking too hot, especially Beetle Bailey.
• Bond One-Liner: Chuck has a lot of them to serve up.
• Brown Note: Lucy Van Pelt's conditioning of CALv1n included such hard-grained gynophobia that the very word "girls" gives him a crippling mental breakdown. When Weapon Brown figures out and invokes the key word, CAL's vivid imagination turns the surrounding Schmoo into the object of his terror.
• Call-Forward: Reading Blockhead's War, you probably didn't question why Crokk is wearing a neck brace. One of the stories of Aftershock shows why he got it. Turns out Chuck nearly broke Crokk's neck during his "resignation".
• Characters Dropping Like Flies: Does a named, recognizable comic book character exist? There is at least a 70% chance they will appear in Weapon Brown and die, most likely in gruesome fashion.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Snoop being able to drive a car in the original story is just a fun gag, but it ends up being how he defeats HOBS.
  • The flesh-eating kudzu is what finally destroys Bone City and the invading army.
• Chest Burster: CAL kills the Garf by bursting out of its gullet.
• Christmas Special: Just like most of it's comic strip source materials, it can't resist the temptation of celebrating the holidays. Merry Christmas, Blockheads.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: The shmoo seems to work this way. Once Weapon Brown finds out its actual origin (that it's the GARF's excrement), he can't get past the idea that he's essentially eating giant bug shit, so it tastes terrible to him. Others in the know, Anne for example, don't have a problem believing the shmoo will taste like whatever they want it to.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Brown does not outright kill the people that have REALLY gotten themselves on his bad side. He wants to hear them beg continuously for it first. Just take a look at what happened to poor Crokk.
• Crapsack World: Life After the End is brutal: bloodthirsty trogs and horrific monsters are everywhere, it's practically impossible to grow food so everyone has to survive off scavenged rations, many people have to deal with Body Horror-level mutations, and the Syndicate seeks to control the wastes with an iron fist. Anne however is at least trying to make the world less crapsacky.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Almost every single battle against CAL ends with the other party beaten, humiliated and often dead.
• Dagwood Sandwich: The man himself makes some Here and here.
• Darker and Edgier: Well As many syndicated comic strips as possible, although it started with just "Peanuts".
• Death by Cameo: Many recognizable, syndicated comic strip characters show up for a panel or two and are then immediately killed off — if not dying in the very first panel they appear. Perhaps the most notable of these is Olive Oyl.
• Death by Irony: Cal fears and hates women thanks to Van Pelt's "conditioning". When he gains control of the schmoo, it turns against him when it takes the form of Slimy girlS that he can't Get Rid Of.
• Determinator: Chuck, no matter what happens and despite how much his body wants to give out. He keeps on trucking just to survive.
• Deus Angst Machina: The ending of "A Peanut Scorned". Linus' summoning of the Great Pumpkin fails, and as it collapses he, Sally and the red-haired girl are crushed beneath it before Weapon Brown can do anything.
• Died Standing Up: Walker, the expy of The Phantom, gets his head blown clean off. Not only does he die standing, he becomes the corpse that walks!
• Dirty Old Man: Colonel Halftraque, who takes the original Colonel Halftrack's tendency to hit on younger women and dials them up to eleven for a mixture of comedy and Fan Disservice.
• Enfant Terrible: CALv1n slaughtered every other survivor of his Super-Soldier-building program when he was six years old.
• Evil Counterpart: CALv1n and HOBS are sort of this for Chuck and Snoop. Of course, Chuck isn't exactly good...
• Facial Horror: We finally get a look at The Pilgrim's face at the end of Aftershock. The tumors on Pops' face have overtaken his whole face, to the point he had to have a hole cut in his cheek to breathe and eat.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: Almost too many to count, but the most notable ones are probably Crokk getting dismembered, brutally tortured and finally having a flamethrower shoved up his ass and fired, and CAL-v.1N getting fed the Schmoo until he explodes.
• Fan Disservice: Chuck battles the Neanderthal savage Alley Oop. You know, that big hairy patch over Alley Oop's crotch? It's not a loincloth. Prepare the Brain Bleach. Honourable mentions also go to Mary Worth in a rubber catsuit, and an overweight Blondie as dom to a Mad Max leather-clad Dagwood's sub.
• Fanservice: Miss Bucksley, Honey Huan and Anne, all of whom parade around the wasteland in various flavors of Ms. Fanservice.
• Faux Affably Evil: CALv1n is charming, humorous and very personable, while also being an unhinged sociopath who starts murdering people whenever he gets bored.
• Foreshadowing: Pops's howl of despair over losing Olive Oyl briefly upsets CAL. Pops's accent is too strong to actually invoke the word itself, but CAL knows what it's supposed to be, if only on an instinctual level...
• Funetik Aksent: Displayed by a fair number of characters, but taken to extremes with Hilda. "Dalab! Brakka glazz! Brakit ffurritseez ennamore!" The lab! Break the glass! Break it before it sees any more!
• Fun with Acronyms: Cyber Augmented Legionnaire -- version 1 N and his Heuristically Optimized Bonding Surrogate; U.S. Agro-Commerce Research & Engineering Station.
• Future Badass: Just about every character who was a child in their own comic has grown up into a post-apocalyptic ass-kicker — except for those becoming monsters.
• Future Food Is Artificial: Schmoo, a self-replicating miracle food created from the digestive processes of a genetically engineered worm monster.
• Gone Horribly Right: CAL-v1.N was meant to be a powerful, dangerous and unstoppable killing machine. He was all of those things in abundance, and this makes him impossible for anyone to control.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: Pops arms are enormous, and can dish a lot of damage. With guns like these, who needs firearms?
• Gorn: All the violence is gleefully bloody and over-the-top.
• Gratuitous French: General Crokk has the habit of calling Weapon Brown Arme Brun, a literal translation of "Weapon Brown" in French.
• Guile Hero: Miss Bucksley hides her schmoo ration in Weapon Brown's canteen without his knowledge (she was somehow carrying it in her breasts; Weapon Brown mistook it for breast milk when Miss Bucksley offers him some Rescue Sex, and she didn't correct him), keeping it from falling into the Syndicate's hands.
• Halloween Episode: Linus (and about a hundred other guys) uses Sally's body to summon the Great Pumpkin but only succeeds in getting "The Cold Ones" (three spirits based on the non-/mutant Bedsheet Ghost costumes in the original Great Pumpkin), who reveal that Sally was too in love with Linus during the "ceremony" and the Great Pumpkin requires fear.
• Heartbroken Badass: Weapon Brown will probably never get over losing the red-haired girl. Pops is also devastated when Olive Oyl is killed during the evacuation of U.S.A.C.R.E.S. They commiserate briefly after the battle.
• The Heavy: While The Syndicate is behind it all, CAL is their main enforcer who does all the dirty work for them and with whom the audience has a greater emotional involvement in seeing defeated.
• He-Man Woman Hater: Cal does not like women. If you were "conditioned" by Van Pelt you'd probably develop a phobia too.
• The Hedonist: Duke. He does not seem to care about the fact that he is having sex and taking drugs during the business meetings with the other members of the Syndicate. Then again, neither do they.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Miss Bucksley, offscreen. She kills herself to avoid being tortured and possibly giving up the location of U.S.A.C.R.E.S.
• Hero Killer: CAL. In a single engagement, he and HOBS slaughter Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon, Prince Valiant, Steve Canyon, Gil Thorp, and the Phantom. Among others.
• Hollywood Cyborg: Chuck, a cybernetic Super-Soldier with a giant robot arm packed with weaponry.
• Homage:
  • Most obviously to American Newspaper Comics, but in addition, the art, plot, and general style take major cues from 2000 AD.
  • In the notes to the print edition the author notes that some pages are influenced by Mike Mignola's style, especially Hellboy.
• Hotter and Sexier: Amongst other things, "Mint" Patty and Marcy are bisexuals in a BDSM relationship. Surprisingly, given what happened to her boyfriend, post-apocalyptic Olive Oyle looks pretty good (and surprisingly curvy).
• Humanoid Abomination: Beetle Bailey, a hideous fusion of human and arthropod. Chuck mentions that these have become common since the Last War, thanks to the radiation and chemical weapons that have mutated much of humanity.
• Humans Are White: The comic invokes and frequently lampshades this in a satirical jab at how newspaper comics in general seems to lean towards Monochrome Casting, with only the occasional Token Minority appearing every once in a blue moon. In "A Peanut Scorned", Chuck expresses puzzlement upon encountering Patty's bodyguard, Franklin, asking if his darker skin is some strange kind of mutation. In "Blockhead's War", Chuck remarks to Hughie X, after meeting his family, how weird it is to see more than one black person at the time, comparing seeing three of them together to encountering a convention. It then also becomes a justified trope when Hughie reveals that during the war, a Synthetic Plague meant to either kill every person of African descent, or turn their skin white, was released unto the world, and it for the most part was successful.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: HOBS dies by being impaled on a souped-up Zamboni.
• Klingon Promotion: Horns (aka the Pointy Haired Boss) becomes chairman of the Syndicate this way by defenestrating Mr. Dithers.
• Lantern Jaw of Justice: Most of the males in Weapon Brown have prominent chins but the eponymous cyborg has a particularly epic jawline.
• La Résistance: Anne and her crew, who fight secretly to end the Syndicate's power over the surviving humanity.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: Loads of em, with many of our beloved comic strip characters either being unnamed or even when they are named, are named in away that just manage to stop the lawyers from going after the comic.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The witch Hilda knows that Snoop can understand her. Why? Because she can see his thought bubbles, which even the readers can't see.
• Loud of War: Loud music was used to torture Chuck Brown. Even better, it's by Deathtöngue.
• MacGuffin: Miss Bucksley's genetically enhanced breast milk. Oh, if only that's what it was. It's not. It's the Garf's excrement.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Beetle Bailey is a disgusting bug-human hybrid.
  • Rex Morgan, M.D. appears, turned into a half-dinosaur person. Can you say T. rex Morgan?
  • The Dagwood expy, all clad in bondage gear, is called "Dogwood", and it's heavily implied that he loves dogs in that way.
• Mechanical Animals: The Syndies loose the homicidal maniac C4L-V1N and his robot tiger upon the rebels. Cal's tiger is every bit as gory and merciless as any enraged tiger, plus it's armored and Nigh-Invulnerable.
• Mutual Kill: Broom Hilda and the Wizard of Id's Astral Projection KA-ZOT each other. Hilda burns to death, but still manages to defeat the actual wizard by blowing his head up.
• Mythology Gag: Too many to list. Let's just say that Jason Youngbluth has an insane knowledge of comic strips and that practically any given panel, comic, or throwaway line of dialogue might contain an obscure reference to a comic strip you've never heard of.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Subverted. At first it seems that Chuck defeated Cal by throwing him in the Shmoo repository, making him drown. However he didn't account for the fact that the nanomachines in Cal's body interacted with the Shmoo, making him able to conjure all the horrors in his mind, such as killer snowmen and Spaceman Spiff's aliens, to kill our heroes. Then again, the Shmoo having direct access to his mind means that it also had access to his mental conditioning by Dr. Van Pelt, and so it quickly turned against Cal in the form of his worst fear: girls.
• Nightmare Face: Beetle. It's even apparent a page earlier when he puts on his Game Face.
• Noodle Incident: CAL-v.1N was transformed into a superhuman killing machine when an experiment called "Project Noodle" went awry. We're given just enough info about Project Noodle to know that he's a very unpleasant young man.
• Not Too Dead to Save the Day: Despite being decapitated, the Phantom distracts Cal at a critical moment while Brown is down and Annie defenseless.
• Off with His Head!: CAL-v.1N enjoys punching or chopping the heads off his enemies when fighting them at close range, with his bare hands.
• Older Hero vs. Younger Villain: Chuck, being the hero, and CAL, being the villain. Both of them are cybernetically enhanced Super Soldiers, but Chuck is an older model who has been living in the post-apocalyptic world for quite some time, while CAL is a newer, more advanced model who is physically younger due to having spent most of his life as a Human Popsicle. Eventually, it turns out that while some of CAL's enhancements might be superior to Chuck's (such as a better Healing Factor for instance), Chuck's experience with the post-apocalyptic world gives him quite the edge in the end.
• Pietà Plagiarism: Pop holds Olive this way after she's shot.
• Pokémon Speak: The only sound Garfield makes is a loud, bellowing "GARF".
• Pointy-Haired Boss: Though he's apparently a more effective chairman than his predecessor, Mr. Dithers. Mr. Horns does show a few tendencies of the original Pointy-Haired Boss from Dilbert, such as ignoring his scientist's (an Expy of Dilbert) well-founded concerns about releasing CAL-v.1N and HOBS, and suggesting that Mr. King add a bureaucracy to his jail in order to make it a prison for the soul as well as the body.
• "Pop!" Goes the Human: GOOEY KABLOOIE!
• Practical Currency: Rations and batteries are accepted for goods and services.
• President Evil: Daddy Warbucks, the last president the US had before the last war, basically started the war and refused to end it, even when things got so bad that it was obvious there would be no winner. At one point, he literally called Premier Ming, the leader of the opposite side, to the bargaining table for the sole purpose of spitting in his face. This was the "Man In The Fancy Hat" solely responsible for turning the world into a nuclear wasteland, and for what is likely to turn out to be the inevitable extinction of the entire human race. Chuck is sincerely happy to meet him, since if it weren't for him he probably wouldn't exist. The creepiest thing about him is that he still thinks that the war is going on, and that they still have a chance to win.
• Prophet Eyes: Anne has solid white eyes to symbolize her blindness, as a reference to how the art-style of her original comic gave everyone blank white circles for eyes.
• Psycho Psychologist: Lucy van Pelt, who was responsible for "conditioning" the Syndicate's Super Soldiers, i.e. breaking their wills to make sure they always obeyed orders. She was responsible for breaking Chuck's psyche by constantly humiliating him by forcing him to play games of "Kick the Football" (she would always take the football at the last second, of course) as well as instilling CAL-v.1N's extreme hatred and fear of women into him. She also came up with Chuck's Trigger Phrase "Blockhead", as well CAL's; "girls".
• The Reveal: To begin with, CALv1n's face is not clearly seen, as it is either kept out of frame or he is shown from behind or in shadows. His face is finally revealed as he visits the bathroom while using H.O.B.S. to slaughter an entire diner, as he listens in smug pleasure to the screams and death rattles of the unfortunate diner guests and owners while peeing, in reference to the unofficial and very infamous "Peeing Calvin decal".
• Sacrificial Lion: Val (Prince Valiant) and Gordon (Flash Gordon) are easily disposed of by CAL once he and the Legion arrive at Anne's hidden facility under Bone City.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: For the bad guys; their attack on the resistance in chiefly predicated on seizing control of the shmoo. The shmoo is only produced by the Garf, and CAL kills it before they can get to it.
• Sex Is Violence: CAL literally gets off on violence, claiming he has an orgasm every he takes a life.
• Sex Signals Death: Miss Bucksley is the first lady that Chuck beds and is also the first of the gals to die. Averted with Annie.
• Shout-Out: Oh god, hundreds. In a Shout-Out not related to the source materials, the origin of the shmoo it's the excrement of the Garf is likely a tribute to the secret behind the soft drink Slurm on Futurama.
• Slasher Smile: Many from CAL-v.1N, such as the last panel here.
• Shown Their Work: Jason Yungbluth's knowledge of newspaper comic strips borders on the encyclopedic. Expect not only to see extremely obscure comic characters from strips you've probably never heard of, but references to them buried in the background and often visible for only a panel or two.
• Spot the Thread: One of the guys sitting around the fire in the Aftershock framing story keeps scratching at something under his coat. The Pilgrim takes notice and interrogates him about it at the end. He's scratching at a growth of the carnivorous vine on his arm. It's a sign he was at Bone City. The Legion tattoo underneath it is another. It's all the clues Pops needs to deduce he was part of the attack that killed Olive Oyl..."and the little swee'pea she was carryin'..."
• Standard Post-Apocalyptic Setting: A series of devastating wars, using everything from nukes to plagues to hordes of Bioweapon Beasts, dashed civilization to tiny little pieces. The world after the end is the usual scarred landscape of brown wastes and shattered cities, mostly inhabited by vicious and mutated animals and zombie-like feral humans, while human society — such as it is — consists of disaffected survivors and quite a lot of mutants, and is firmly ruled by the Syndicate, a mix of a capitalist corporation and a medieval feudal society. The lack of plant life is a major plot point — one of the plagues killed anything with chlorophyll except for a strain of kudzu that adapted by becoming carnivorous, and the Syndicate rules in large part by controlling all the remaining pre-war ration packets. The fact that these are a finite resource is a major problem, and La Résistance plans to bring them down by keeping the last replenishable food source on the planet well out of their hands.
• Stealth Pun:
  • The monster is called the Garf. The huge boneyard it lives in is thus a Garf-field. Garf is also a cat-erpillar.
  • The Family Circus has become an entertaining performance group... a literal circus of family. CALv1n twists the pun further by making his attack on them "a circus for the whole family!"
  • Beetle Bailey's name has become literal - he's now a hideous half-man half-insect monstrosity.
  • Dagwood is a known lover of sub sandwiches, and in comparison to Blondie (a dom), he is a sub.
• Super-Soldier: Chuck himself, being one of the results of "Project Peanuts", which also gave his friend Linus his Psychic Powers and drove him insane.
• The Syndicate: The main organization of villains is actually called this, a clever pun on the fact that most newspaper comics are distributed through syndication.
• Synthetic Plague: During the war that wrecked civilization, the Elbonians somehow came up with a virus meant to either kill every person of African descent, or turn their skin white, and for the most part they succeeded. Hughie X and Reilly however avoided its affects due to having some Japanese ancestry.
• Take That!:
  • Ever notice how B.C. gradually got turned into a soapbox for its writer's religious views? Chuck certainly did.
  • Early on, Mallard Fillmore's head is on a plate, and in the annotations, Yungbluth says that he let the comic strip off easy.
• Take a Third Option: When one of Crokk's legionaries have him at gun point, Chuck tells him that the gun is just a chance he lost by not shooting him when he could, and that Chuck will give him a choice. If he tries shooting him now, Chuck will shoot him in the stomach and leave him to a slow, painful death. If he lowers it, he'll get a quick death. The legionnaire pulls his gun up to his head and blows his own brains out instead.
  Chuck: I love it when they surprise me.
• This Was His True Form: Upon death, HOBS reverts to a cuddly toy. Snoop rips his head off just to be sure.
• Unstoppable Rage: During their assault on U.S.A.C.R.E.S., the Syndicate legionaries kill Olive Oyl. Pops goes mad with rage in response, tearing through their ranks and massacring their troops.
• Unsound Effect: The sound made by an exploding, engorged CAL is, aptly, "Gooey Kablooie".
• Vagina Dentata: We get a good look at just how bad Cal's gynophobia really is.
• Viewers Are Geniuses: The more you know about comic strips, the more you'll enjoy Weapon Brown.
• The Worf Effect: This happens to Weapon Brown himself once CAL arrives. He attempts to attack CAL from behind and CAL kicks him in the face without even turning around, putting him out of commission for a while.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • The surviving subjects of the Syndicate's Super-Soldier project attacked each other, starting by ganging up on the smallest — a six-year-old boy. He slaughtered them all.
  • The adult CALv1n gleefully and graphically throws the Family Circus toddlers to HOBS.

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