Bland Name Product / Webcomics

• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: Dr. McNinja's first published fight is against the fast-food clown everybody is familiar with: McBonald! (It actually was Ronald McDonald when first published; Chris Hastings later touched up the original chapters, so he could continue to use the character without fear of litigation.)
• Alien Hand Syndrome:
  • Pizza Hat (Link contains bad language).
  • Erin's smartphone appears to be a Pear. You know, as opposed to...
• Apricot Cookie(s)!: Apricot buys her bread from the 11-Eleven convenience store (as opposed to 7-Eleven).
• Arthur, King of Time and Space: Arthur's webcomic gets picked up by the Today Fables webcomic collective, based on Modern Tales. In The Rant, Gadzikowski says that he also considered calling it Swellpoint.
• The Comic Adventures of Left & Right: Discussed in "Parody Brand Names", where it's mocked with the notion that companies generally wouldn't sue nobody comic artists over using their product names anyway.
• Dork Tower features this frequently, especially for RPGs and board games. Examples include Warhamster, Travailler, Dungeons & Dragoons, and Vampire: The Groveling.
• Dregs:
  • The crew's blasting agent is called "Blastol".
  • The dog food cans in the nudist's home are labeled "Doge Nosh".
  • The birdseed that Chub and Coney use is called "Birb Seed".
• El Goonish Shive featured a chase through a "Swedekea" store. "Salty Crackers Comics" counts too; there's a regional comics chain around Chicago called "Graham Crackers". There's also the American Cake movie, a reference to the movie American Pie, but with the plot of The Brady Bunch Movie.
• Everyday Heroes: Mr. Mighty once held a civilian job "hauling concrete blocks at SuperHomeCenterMart". Several strips also show "Sundo's" coffee ("sun" = "star", "dough" = "money" = "bucks").
• The Fan has brought us the electronics brand "Sunny" and the "Yeskia" mobile phones (complete with a provider called "Lemon" that even becomes plot-relevant at one point). An early episode mentions an online messenger called "Yippy Courier".
• The Fuzzy Five: In this strip, Otto is using a search engine called Searchy with a suspiciously familiar design.
• Grrl Power: Sydney is exhausted after running laps, so her training officer gives her a bottle of Power Ade "Joule Juice".
• Homestuck: One of the items hidden in chests in Karkat's section of the "[S] Past Karkat: Wake up." walkaround is a box of "Fruit Troll-Ups" (Orange Creamsicle Colonoscolypse flavor).
  Troll Crocker's vile tendrils are everywhere.
• I Love Yoo: Many. Wac Donald's, Sunbucks, and Wou Tube, just to name a few.
• Jason And The Princes Of The Universe gives us "Red Yak".
• Kevin & Kell: In this strip, peacocks at the Super Bowl use their tails to advertise "Cockatiel Cola", "Shrike"-brand shoes, "Carrot" computers (complete with the bite out of the carrot logo), the "Forage" motor company, "Ibis", "Beak Buy" and "Holiday Lair".
• Knights of Buena Vista has "Sorcery: The Rendezvous" for Magic: The Gathering.
• The Little Trashmaid: The comic is based around ocean pollution, and the effects it has on marine life. Ricky gets hit with the realisation of how big the issue is when he cuts some twine from Tidy’s wrist, only for her to promptly bring more animals for him to cut free... by the time the sun sets he hasn’t finished.
• This Master of the Obvious comic, with a young Stan Lee, has "Kentucky Fried Something" in the last panel, with the slogan "We Do Something Right".
• Lore Olympus: In Episode 45, Hades tries looking up Persephone on Fatesbook and Oracle, which are thinly-veiled references to Facebook and Google respectively. In a nod to the original Greek myth about the kidnapping of Persephone, the Apple iPhone equivalent are smartphones from a brand called "Pomegranates."
• Lovely People: The one explicitly named social media platform is name "Tooter", the public transportation company is called "Buuber" and the MegaCorp is named "Alizongle" (the name of two big companies need to be mashed up to figure that last one out).
• Megatokyo has the company names "Lockart" and "Cubesoft".
• Moon Crest 24: KB Games and Cool Topic.
• Moxs Blog: Box uses "CRADOS" instead of the real-life translation environment tool "TRADOS".
• The Optimist features Stabbucks Coffee in this strip.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • The series does this with the trademarked wizard names from Dungeons & Dragons, attributing the "Bigby's" spells to either "Bixby" or "Bugsby" instead. Likewise, Mordenkainen's Disjunction is referred as simply Disjunction. A character who was a clear copy of a D&D property (with a name of the original character's scrambled up) was dragged away by lawyers in mid-fight. He later returned under the loophole of "parody is protected speech". Similarly, some monsters' names are trademarked by WOTC, leading to everyone forgetting what Beholders are called whenever one turns up, and just calling them something like "those floating monsters with all the eye-stalks".
  • We also see a social network for clerics called Macebook.
  • Then there's SerfWay (instead of "Subway").
  • Don't forget Quest Buy.
  • Early gags where Durkon is seen as a box of Band-Aids and Elan as a can of Diet Coke were genericized as Bandages and Diet Cola in the print version.
  • Also in the book, the narrator can't say the name of the game itself, "because we'd get sued by the trademark holder". So the comic dances around it.
    Player 1: Let's play Demons & Delves.
    Player 2: No, let's play Dwarves & Donjons.
    Player 3: I prefer Drakes & Daggers.
• Ozy and Millie: Stephan collects Gathering: The Obsession cards. The brand name says it all.
• Parasite Galaxy does this with pretty much everything: WcDonalds, Starducks, Microhard. Even the names of countries get changed.
• Please Forgive Me!!! features the "Goofle" search engine, sticks of "Pocko" snacks, and a "redthing" (or "hotbox") kiosk.
• Pops up in the background of Punch an' Pie, most memorably the shopping bags from "Warm Mention" (Hot Topic).
• In Rain, Video game systems and games tend to be lawyer-friendly versions of their real life counterparts. For instance, the "Super Nintendo" entertainment system instead becomes the "Super Funtendo" entertainment system, and the game Battletoads becomes "Fighter Frogs". And it's just as hard as ever.
• Reunion (2021): In the 14th chapter, Shiro fell asleep while watching Nightflix, not Netflix.
• In Rusty and Co., who doesn't want a can of Cloaker-Cola while listening to music on their Eye-pad and checking Feysbook using Druid?
• Scoob and Shag: Kermit's "Product Placement" Ballyhoo creates giant copies of consumer goods with names like these, such as "Bebsi"-brand vending machines and giant potato chip bags labeled "Boritos".
• Selkie has Selkie wondering whether she can watch movies on Flixnet (an obvious take on Netflix) at home.
• Sequential Art:
  • It has the MMORPG Realm of Lorcraft and 3D building game Cubeminer.
  • This comic is rife with slight respellings of product names. Pip uses an online auction site called eBuy. The phone book is called the “Hello Pages.” It happens with movies and video games, too: the Wintendo Pee (as well as the handheld Wintendo BS), its rival gamemaker Saga; Arkham Lockdown, Contemporary Warfare, All Saints Boulevard, Skyroam, the oft-mentioned Temple Raider. Films like Far Trek, Nightlight, The Metrix (and its sequels, The Metrix: Rebooted and The Metrix: Rotations).
• Sleepless Domain:
  • An interstitial page features Melty Flame and Melty Frost starring in an advertisement for Junetag Appliances, a play on the American appliance company Maytag.
  • A shelf in Tessa's room contains a bunch of merchandise for Team Alchemical, including one figure of Alchemical Aether that suspiciously resembles a Funko Pop collectable. According to the page's alt text, it's called a Punko Pop.
• Played with in this Spinnerette comic, where Katt O' Nine Tails offers Captain Alberta a box of "Timmy Ho" donuts. Turns out Tim Horton's does exist in this world: Timmy Ho is apparently a rival chain made of former Hortons franchisees who rebelled when the main chain switched from freshly made dough to frozen.
• Pretty much every product in Sluggy Freelance is one of these. The PlayStayShun 3 console, the Years of Yarncraft MMORPG, the pirate-themed coffee shop Swashbucks, the list goes on.
• These abound in Squid Row. For instance, Randie often eats Pop-N Tarts. Other brand names are respelled but still recognizable.
• Chaerin Eun, protagonist of Surviving Romance, spends most of Season 1 in an Adidds sports jacket.
• 30-Something Wolf:
  • The 31st and 33rd strips took place in a store that, among other things, sold a brand of cereal called Lucky Sharts.
  • The 34th strip had Zephyri come across an employee from "Wal-Fart".
• In Tower of God, Yu Hansung loves his instant coffee which is totally not a rip-off from Korea's most popular instant coffee brand.
• In Uprooted (2022), Brainstagram stands in for Instagram.
• User Friendly had "Snurf" guns in several early strips, as well as Bigbucks Coffee.
• Vixen: NYC: Bruce Wayne is in New York to host FNL, not SNL, in this universe.
• Walky is a big time fan of cheese Nachitos, along with the actual Taco Bell. (The Taco Bells in Dumbing of Age sell Nachito shell tacos.)
• Any references to real-life products or people in Weak Hero are obscured with a few switched-out letters. For example, Phillip Kim buying a 'Yaxaha' motorbike, or Ben referring to the famous football player 'Benaldo'.
• The Whiteboard: If you look closely at the background, you can see Doc carrying a Khil chainsaw, while more recently Jinx can be seen with his brand new Khil Jr. chainsaw. Clearly a pastiche of Stihl and Skil power tools.
• Woo Hoo shows parody / joke brands and logos every time a brand appears (like "Technical Virgin Megastore").
• Averted in Yehuda Moon & the Kickstand Cyclery. The characters have no problem mentioning real brands, and at one point a real-life item becomes a major plot point.
• YU+ME: dream has "IHOW", the "International House Of Waffles", as well as "Wahoo.com".

---