YMMV / Jack (David Hopkins)

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • God - almighty force of goodness that takes the form of a sheep, neglectful all-mother who built a half-assed universe, or an emotional abuser who circumvents all criticism of her behavior by making all her victims' suffering about herself?
  • Considering how few people besides Bob interact with her directly, it's easy to read Lisa as being entirely an imaginary personification of Bob's cannibalism and lust. This especially becomes apparent, as in their first chronological meeting, Lisa seems to appear out of nowhere as as a sexy Gender Flipped version of Bob when he's longing for someone to understand him and then mysteriously vanishes when he tries to have her interact with anyone else.
  • Lisa and Bob in general, partially due to Bob being an Unreliable Narrator: is Bob just a Dogged Nice Guy suffering in silence while being neglected by a cheating bitch because he's holding out hope that she'll come around, or is Lisa refusing to be tied down to a sanctimonious, moping jerk who silently resents her for not being faithful to a man who shows her no affection at all?
  • Given some character show up very infrequently or only for a single arc and are given little characterization, it's easy for the fandom to start interpreting their actions differently.
    • Rachel, a character in Heaven who claims she's the girlfriend of what's implied to either be Drip or one of his two apprentices that we know about that were interested in women. (The third Fangs was gay, had castrated himself, and preferred psychologically torturing women to raping them.) Is she really the girlfriend of a character who is an evil, murdering, raping psychopath or is she just deluding herself, stuck in a battered woman or Stockholm Syndrome cycle?
    • The characters in the short Deeper and Worse are shown to be trapped underground, bound to the walls and unable to leave unless one of them shoots the other, a fate that judging by their wounds may be them reenacting their last moments in life. They refuse to do so, instead passing the time by doing a what-if game of which two characters paired against each other would do it first. Fans are torn between seeing them as already being on the first steps of redemption given their hesitance to kill each other despite the fact it might save them more torment, genre-savvy characters who realize Hell will likely just heap more torment on them given its perchance for lying about how to get out of current suffering, or two people who are too cowardly to make a decision or take responsibility for their actions and therefore damning themselves. It's never shown what happens to them and they're only referenced in a Brick Joke in a later arc shows they are STILL trapped in the hole and playing the game.
    • Was Lucifer being sincere when he told Jack that Dalton would take his place as the Reaper if he ever got redeemed? On the one hand, with time being so wonky in Hell, it's possible he told Jack this because it already happened. On the other, he's a consummate liar, psychopath, and Manipulative Bastard, so it wouldn't be beyond him to tell Jack something like that just to scare him badly and prevent him from seeking redemption even if it wasn't true.
    • Is this demon really all that he seems? Up to this point in the comic, demons are shown as just being Hell's tool when it comes to punishing damned souls, and most of them are just cruel and sadistic. This one goes out of his way to help Megan despite all his grumbling, suggesting that he might too be a damned soul that has merely been forced into the shape of a demon.
• Anvilicious:
  • Hopkins lampshades his own "preachy" nature in "Suffer".
  • Don't you dare think about abortion! Not even if you were raped!
• Arc Fatigue: "Megan's Run." Part II alone is Hopkins' longest arc to date, but both parts total to a whopping 257 pages. With some Schedule Slip added to that, some fans felt like the arc would've went on forever.
• Archive Panic: 1,927 full pages.^note As of October 1, 2014, which is a hiatus point. And many of these arcs can be difficult to get through quickly, given the nature of the comic. If you're just starting out, have fun, and be careful what you wished for.
• Broken Aesop: Hoo boy. Jack manages to contradict it’s central Aesop so many times that it veers right into Poe's Law, becoming a Deconstructive Parody about how The Bible preaches about your own choices deciding your fate while supernatural forces manipulate said choices and fate with impunity.
  • Hell Is That Noise is the story of Todd, a soldier who obeys an order to kill children, commits suicide, and ends up in Hell. He argues that he had no choice and Fate had already decided what would happen in his life. The story and everyone in it judges Todd for refusing to take responsibility for his actions, but that order came from Satan disguised as a general, meaning that Todd was a Cosmic Plaything after all.
  • The non-linear nature of time in Hell tends to screw around wildly with the concept of free will and personal choice; the Devil often resorts to directly manipulating the circumstances of the past and future to compel his victims to act, and then blame them for it all. This is most notable with Drip: It's his own fault that his parents are dead because the Devil has him in a Stable Time Loop: he's sent to live with his grandmother after his parents die, his grandmother abuses him until he becomes a violent rapist, and when he dies, the Devil trades him a memento of his dead mother for a favor: the murder of his own parents.
  • This has the added bonus of making the angels complicit in almost everything Drip does, since they only refrain from saving any of his victims because "it has to be his choice". Central is later shown to have murdered Bob and Lisa specifically to prevent them from turning away from their life of sin, meaning that actually, choice doesn't matter at all. The correct course of action is the one that generates the most rape scenes.
  • And then there's the part where furries have replaced humanity, but for some reason, are repeating human history exactly, so we still have events like the Vietnam War re-enacted by furries. This means that we still get furry Charles Manson and furry Jeffrey Dahmer, too. And that would be fine, except that God is deliberately enforcing the re-enactment and is sending billions of furries to Hell for their part in it. This means that God not only deprived every living furry of free will, she also had full and absolute knowledge of what she was forcing them into doing to themselves and each other and what Satan would do in response, but did absolutely nothing to stop it. In other words, she condemned countless innocent people to eternal suffering to punish them for something she forced them to do. The entire comic is about choice and personal responsibility, but the only character who has unquestionable free will is God herself, and there are no consequences for anything she does, ever, because she's in charge of the entire universe while everyone else can just go to Hell.
  • The general lesson being taught to all those sent to Hell is to realize their own sin and allow them to atone for it, and that Hell exists to force them to confront their misdeeds in life, but they're too busy being tortured to contemplate the philosophical implications of the torture itself. Even the ones who do realize their sin and repent never make it out of Hell, and it's impossible for them to successfully do that unless agents of Heaven intercede on their behalf and the agents of Hell don't prevent it.
  • One of the afterlife's options is Purgatory, an idealized Earth that lacks the oneness with the divine that Heaven boasts, and also doesn't house the kind of sanctimonious goody-two-shoes types that go to Heaven or the assholes that go to Hell. People who go there are offered a chance at reincarnation, a chance to "try again" at life in the hopes that they'll earn entry into Heaven next time. Like all things in Heaven and Hell, it has to be a matter of personal choice to be meaningful, and so to give the choice meaning, returning to Earth after Purgatory means God will intentionally force a second life to be harder than the first and ban all further entry into Purgatory. This all but guarantees that a reincarnated soul who's been to Purgatory is going to Hell, but the choice is there. And then that moral gets shattered into pieces because God is happy to send angels to Purgatory on a mission to "remind" them what kind of awesome sex they're missing out on, by offering sex and not taking no for an answer. The comic loves to remind the reader of how important personal choice is, but only if the personal choice is the correct one.
• Broken Base: Fans were completely divided over who was wrong when Fnar was raped by Drip, causing Jack to try to strangle Farrago to death. On the one hand, Farrago was right to refuse to let a man who tried to murder her apologize for his actions, as nothing he could ever do would remove that trauma. She'd put his needs ahead of her own long enough and needed to stay away from his toxic influence. On the other, she absolutely REFUSED to take responsibility for her part in causing the situation in the first place by letting Fnar stay in Hell so long and many readers agreed they would have reacted the exact same way as Jack did when someone he considered to be a son was hurt so badly. Farrago allowing her memories to be erased so she could get to know Jack again without her trauma was seen as her taking the easy way out instead of owning up to her own faults and allowing a mutual apology to occur between the two of them.
• Complete Monster: Dr. Riger Thalmus is the doctor responsible for the cure for cancer, who in truth is also a child molester. Believing he is entitled to molest children, Thalmus molests his patients in secret, threatening to withhold the cure when his assistant catches him in the act, alongside threatening to kill his wife. Eventually murdering the child witnesses to cover himself, Thalmus makes his assistant tell his wife the truth behind the cure, and afterwards forces him to take responsibility for his crimes. Eventually getting caught and executed, but not before admitting that he regrets nothing, he's sent to Hell, where he seeks to continue his crimes.
• Cosmic Horror Story: While the comic is all about Hell (physically and metaphorically), the narrative gradually descended further into the setting's cosmic implications. The Devil often manipulates time and space to deceive people into committing acts of perdition, while dismissively condemning them for making a choice they didn't have. Souls working towards redemption, including the title character, are curtailed at every opportunity. And Heaven fares little better. God is a frequently unhelpful, hands-off authority figure who reset the destroyed timeline and forced anthros into the same good and evil roles as the previously exterminated humans, effectively damning people before they're even born. As the comic progresses, free will erodes to the point of rendering past lessons about taking responsibility a Broken Aesop when forces of the hereafter direct the living to their doom.
• Fan Nickname: God was known as "Cottonmouth" on the Jack forums. It's not because of Her white coat, either. She is also sometimes referred to as "Sheepgod."
• Genius Bonus:
  • Plato saw his master killed for his views on civilization.
  • So why the blazes is God a sheep? Well, obviously, she's the Lamb of God.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • A story arc about a plane crash finished about a month before the September 11th attacks.
  • Spirits running from Jack in one arc hide at an elementary school claiming the reaper never goes there. After the Sandy Hook shooting, alas, death did indeed make a sad visit an elementary school.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Drip, embodiment of the Sin of Lust, likely hurled himself across it at some point in the backstory, as we know he was a murderer and rapist in life. However, his first (chronologically speaking) crossing of the horizon would have to be when the Devil takes him back in time to murder his own parents. Not that he knows who they are, but given the sheer brutality in how he murders his father and handles his mother (WARNING, VERY NSFW), it almost doesn't matter. (Even he is horrified by this once he realises who they are!)
  • The Vorshes stuck a living, conscious woman in an oven, cooked her, had sex while listening to her dying screeams, and ate her the first night they met.
• Narm: The cute, cartoony art style can often undermine the impact of darker scenes.
• Squick: Too many examples to list here, but "So This Family Walks Into This Talent Agency..." summarizes how gross the strip can be, with Hopkins' take on the old The Aristocrats joke.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Central is always the first character to whip out the "Oh no, we can't help the people in Hell because of RULES" mantra, yet every single time progress has been made in helping individual souls leave Hell, it's because an angel or Jack has taken the initiative to break the rules. This makes her seem at best an Inspector Javert-type more concerned with the letter of the law than helping people and at worst someone who is remaining willfully blind on how to solve some very big problems. This was finally lampshaded in ''Megan's Run Part 2'' when Arty and Vinci call her out for being more concerned over her precious rules than helping a soul who literally went through Hell to find angels. The fact the ultimate result of this is that Megan gets to see God like she wanted to and Central would have directly prevented that from happening makes her seem more willing to break before she'll bend.
• Unnecessary Makeover: Many fans were not happy to see that when Farrago reappeared after a long hiatus, she'd grown her hair out from a ponytail into a style that made her look more like she had feelers than long bangs and ditched her usual skimpy bikini for far more modest wear like turtlenecks.
• Wangst: Most critics of the comic will consider this to be one of the main problems with it.
• The Woobie: Point at any character, there is a 70% probability that he or she is, save for the Sins. However, Drip as a child may be one, based on what his grandmother put him through. Had that not happened, Drip most likely have turned out differently. The "How to Make a Monster" arc shows us that Drip as a child was not only repeatedly molested by his grandmother, but also constantly reminded that he killed his parents as an infant. The rationale used is questionable, at the very least. And yet? She's ''right.'' Not in the way she thinks, perhaps, but her Exact Words are correct.

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