Author Tract / Webcomics

• Parodied in The Adventures of Dr. McNinja when the Alt Text claimed that:
  This whole comic has been a setup for me to push my views on you that man should not fly.
• Fans! is vehement in its defense of fanboys, portraying them as having the specific combination of strengths that makes them the only ones capable of defending Earth, and that the biggest, geekiest fanboys alive will be revered by future generations as heroes who made all of society possible.
• Shortpacked! seems to take the opposite tack in its satire and often portrays fans with complaints of any sort as self-entitled morons. Not surprisingly, what is considered unfair and what is considered perfectly okay seems to coincide with the author's tastes
  • Willis often acknowledges that obsessiveness fanishness, even his own, is Not Okay. This was parodied when he shows up at the store and gets in an armed fight with Ethan over an Edit War. The arc ends with him and his girlfriend sneaking into Ethan's apartment—Maggie in a Transformers costume—and smashing up his computer so he wouldn't be able to edit the wiki. Then there was the time he made fun of people who said that the second Transformers movie sold out because of all the marketing. In case you don't get it, Transformers is probably the most popular and transparently Merchandise-Driven franchise ever.
• Existential Comics shifted from mostly absurdly poking fun at famous philosophers' quirks to mostly proselytizing the author's anarcho-socialist beliefs after the first year or so.
• Vegan Artbook is an incredibly pure example. There's barely any story or character, just non-vegans endlessly getting smacked down by their vegan counterparts who act as mouthpieces for the creator's beliefs.
• General Protection Fault briefly delved into this in the 'Providence' arc in 2005, showing Akhilesh (a kindly doctor bordering on Ned Flanders-like religious outlook) witnessing to Trudy, with verse upon verse of scripture, accompanied by author commentary.
• Jesus and Mo is an unabashed Author Tract ridiculing religion. The comment box is headed with the note "This comments section is provided as a safe place for readers of J&M to talk, to exchange jokes and ideas, to engage in profound philosophical discussion, and to ridicule the sincerely held beliefs of millions. As such, comments of a racist, sexist or homophobic nature will not be tolerated."
• Kit N Kay Boodle is entirely a vehicle for Richard Katellis' views on free love, yiffing, and the plight of the furry community. The world outside of idyllic, nudist Yiffburg is full of monstrous dictatorships and ruthless capitalist states that criticize Yiffburg for being horny layabouts. Any character who doesn't constantly want sex with total strangers is either an evil fascist or an oppressed soul, and the answer is invariably anonymous sex, either to defeat or convert them to the yiffy way of life. It doesn't help matters that the story is occasionally interrupted by the author describing the sexual exploits he and his wife have with their parents.
• With The Last Days of FOXHOUND, this is bound to happen when a biochemistry student writes a comic about Metal Gear Solid, but it's noticeable how he still makes it funny. Mantis is the typical mouthpiece. Dr. Naomi Hunter supplements Mantis' rants with more reasonable but obviously frustrated objections.
  • Also played with when the plot stops so that Mantis can rant against banning gay marriage. The best part is that it is entirely in-character — he isn't so much arguing for gay marriage as he is saying that having sex with reproduction is just as gross as having sex without reproducing.
• MAG-ISA — this comic contains political and religious issues that reek of Jack Chick. The author is often suspected of being part of the "Christian Conservative Right Wing" but he is not if you read deeper into his work.
• The Order of the Stick unashamedly pokes fun at gamer attitudes which Rich Burlew finds obnoxious, such as players whose paladins use the letter of the rules to act like Sociopathic Heroes until their class status is endangered, then perform a token good deed to retain it.
• In Scenes from a Multiverse Internet trolls and fundamentalists end up on the receiving end of the author's pen.
• Sinfest started to drift into this territory around 2011, with Tatsuya Ishida's newly-found second-wave radical feminism quickly becoming the only point of the comic, with particular emphasis on the supposed evils of pornography and sex work. This alone led to an Audience-Alienating Era, even amongst those who generally agreed with feminist politics, but there were still occasional gag strips here and there. Around 2019, however, Ishida pivoted hard into far-right politics, overt bigotry, and conspiracy theories, dropping any non-transphobic feminist views entirely and not even bothering with jokes anymore. As of early 2024, the comic underwent yet another pivot, and now just repeats literal nazi propaganda to the few people who still bother to pay attention to it.
• In Sunstone it is common to encounter short speeches from the characters' mouths about BDSM informing the reader of such things like the importance of considering safety, the responsibility of the Dom and the importance of trust and honesty in the relationship. The reasoning given is that this comic partially exists to educate and dispel BDSM myths.
• Tiny Dick Adventures, a side webcomic by one of the creators of Looking for Group does this very often, almost too often. At first, the strip started off rather lighthearted and charming, much like the original series, but then gradually turned into a soapbox for the author's views on subjects like religion, government, presidential elections, transgenderism, homosexuality, LinkedIn, and so on.
• Earlier strips of Tales of the Questor were suffused with a certain subset of Christian theology, culminating when the author updated with rants about other belief systems. Those rants have since been moved elsewhere, but the author still provides nods towards Christianity now and again.
  
  Every other comic by the author, on the other hand, is still chock-full of pro-Christian, American (especially Southern), libertarian soapboxing and anti-pretty much everything else.
• Unicorn Jelly and Pastel Defender Heliotrope, both by Jennifer Diane Reitz, both start out as (respectively) amusing and cute fantasy and science fiction stories, but the Author's soapboxes about religion, homosexuality, and transgenderism overwhelm the plot more than once. It is revealed at the end of Pastel Defender Heliotrope that it was about anti-piracy legislation as well.
• Critics of YU+ME: dream have branded it an author tract, saying that all straight characters are portrayed as evil, especially in the first section.
• Dana Simpson tended to veer into left-wing politics in regards to her Orphaned Series Raine Dog, with soapboxing about "Blue State" Democrats and transgenderism. Previously, I Drew This! was pretty openly a political comic, but even her least political webcomic, Ozy and Millie, still had political commentary, usually with geoglobal politics boiled down to playground puppets, and famously Millie's Mr. W sockpuppet. (Phoebe and Her Unicorn, however, has averted this trope, which may explain in part why it was the first Simpson comic to win syndication.)
• Parodied in L's Empire when a character deconstructs the concept of a soul. The local Fourth-Wall Observer threatens to kill the author if he continues to inject his philosophical beliefs.
• When not simply joking about the various cultures it parodies, sometimes to the extent that it often relies on the author point-blank telling you what's so funny because chances are you otherwise wouldn't get it, Scandinavia and the World wears its left-wing views on its sleeve, and doesn't pull punches with regard to its type-2 views on Eagleland. It's not surprising that the vast majority of the registered users on the series' official website lean in the same political direction.
• Lovely People clearly opposes Christianity to a fictional politcally correct and consumerist social credit based society. In the comic itself, there is a point where the version of The Bible distributed by the MegaCorp is replaced by a more politically correct version, while the afterword criticizes the entire idea of a social credit system while talking about how finding Christianity made the author's life better.

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