Breaking The Fourth Wall / Webcomics

^{He's trying to save you from this, by the way.} 

• In Acorn Grove, after a long break, the creators of the strip write themselves in to apologize for the last strip being there for so long. In another strip the resident redshirt get killed when he notices the fourth wall.
• "Dr. McNinja's Final Thoughts" breaks the fourth wall at the end of each chapter in The Adventures of Dr. McNinja (usually used to deliver a humorous 'lesson' from the story or a moral of questionable veracity). In one of these comics, he points out that during the "Final Thoughts" he knows things he doesn't otherwise (presumably including that there's an audience, but also in-universe facts). In another one, someone who's been spying on his office says he's observed he comes in and talks to the wall occasionally; the Alt Text goes "Which wall? The first wall? The second wall? The third wall? Which wall?"
• In Adventurers!, Final Boss Khrima uses an attack spell with an animation so over-the-top, it doesn't just include an Earth-Shattering Kaboom, it actually cracks the Adventurers game disc, requiring Karn to tell the "player" how to replace the disc with a backup copy.
• APT Comic has some characters that can see through the fourth wall, and some that have no idea what they're talking about.
• Rarely done in Arthur, King of Time and Space ... at least within the panels (there are frequent No Fourth Wall strips with the characters against the plain background of the website, meant to be "backstage"). However, the court of Carbonek starts doing it during the "Lancelot is found by King Pelles's men and recovers from his wild man phase" storyline. Lancelot eventually calls them on it.
• Beyond the End: Characters frequently break the fourth wall to make silly comments, particularly in regards to the writing of the story itself. Such as End commenting on the 2 years it took to publish the Deadwoods arc and Death telling Hal that this story isn't about him and his backstory, so there's no point dwelling on it.

• Most obviously in Bittersweet Candy Bowl during the chapter Out Of The Frame, when all of the minor and background characters form a "Neglected Club" to campaign for more screentime.

• Bob and George: The fourth wall never existed, and it was a constant running gag. All the characters knew that they were in a comic, and the author of the comic often made appearances. Once he even came out to fight another author that entered his comic's universe. One of the characters even read ahead to know what was going to happen next. Of course this wasn't exactly a bad thing, as it made the comic what it was. Megaman, for instance pulled Screw This, I'm Outta Here on the comic within the first month.
• Bruno the Bandit did it in these early strips.

• Carry On: Lieutenant Krueger has been known to bribe Kathy Garrison-Kellogg so a rope bridge won't break. Both he and Kathy Grrsn have also been kicked through the fourth wall, and he and Sandy have both opened doors to comment about the plot to the aforementioned cartoonist.
• The Cartoon Chronicles Of Conroy Cat even lampshaded it here
• In Clarissa the titular protagonist does a story arc where she addresses the audience directly on the subject of how kids like her can avoid being molested by their sexually abusive fathers during bathtime. Subverted at the end, as we see Clarissa has been talking to herself in the mirror.

Clarissa, glaring at herself: We all know whose fault this is ...

• Close to Your Heart:
  • Blixer acknowledges that keeping the artifact away from Cube even after he learns it's her Soul Jar is a jerk move, and looks at the camera while remarking that he can hear the audience angrily commenting away.
    Blixer: Yeah I hear you guys typing in the comment section about me being rude to the guardian, but just shut up OK?
  • The mini-comic "Blixer's Intervention" features the debut of Rave, Cuda's younger brother. Blixer points out that this is his first appearance in a mini-comic.
• Commander Kitty is usually good about keeping its Fourth Wall intact, but that didn't stop Zenith from complaining about not getting her own button when Nin Wah got to have one (early in the comic's lifespan, you could purchase buttons with the main characters' faces on them).
• Ctrl+Alt+Del:
  • The series initially had No Fourth Wall at first, but then abandoned that and switched to only occasionally Breaking the Fourth Wall.
  • In the strip One-Thousand, the fourth wall is broken literally after the characters comment on the concept of the comic they're in. They panic upon realizing that the fourth wall is broken and the readers can see them now, with Lucas stating that they better get the wall fixed.
• The Cyantian Chronicles:
  • Mostly averted in the canon comics. Only NOT averted when "We Have a Shivae-13 Rating To Maintain", which only happened once so far.
  • Played for laughs in a fan scripted bonus comic contained in the print version of Akaelae 5.
• Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures uses it to have a go at the readers.
• The Daily Derp: Hello DerpyHoovesNews people!
• Darths & Droids' 468th strip says "Puny Comic-Reading Humans, Bow Before My Magnificence!".
• Demonseed Redux: In a bonus page, Dee congratulates Chico for having a 100th. He panics if it's about babies and she says it's the 100th comic.
• Dragon Ball Multiverse: Chapter 42's name and cover both point towards featuring Piccolo Daimao as its main character, yet he doesn't appear until the eleventh page. Once he appears, he's quick to point it out:
  "It's about damn time. It was supposed to be my chapter after all!"
• Dragon City's fourth wall is usually only broken by Erin and she often gets in trouble with her mom for it. Most of her other family members try to avoid it.
• In Dragon Mango, two characters manage to get through a maze since it's been a month since they entered it. The one trying to keep them out curses the erratic update schedule.

• Drowtales:
  • Kiel can tell that the readers are there and talks to them when she's bored. Others consider her weird for still having an imaginary friend. The truth is that she can hear the forum posters through nether essence. When nether essence is refined and contained, it can act as an avatar of multiple suggesters.
  • In a rare twist of breaking the fourth wall in a tragic rather than comedic manner, Kiel grows furious at the audience watching her and throws a belt at them. According to the forum fandom, it broke many screens and hit many eyes.
  Corlis: That's it, I'm finding a new comic, this one's stupid!
• Dungeons & Denizens breaks the wall from both directions. Skip back two pages and read the comments to get the whole story.
• EATATAU!!! doesn't often do this, but sometimes the Eldar just has to argue with the narrator.
• El Goonish Shive had No Fourth Wall in its introductory storyline and had a few minor characters who did it in the second arc but after that they never reappeared and (outside of implicitly non-canon Fourth-Wall Mail Slot strips and explicitly non-canon EGS:NP strips) it hasn't gone further than Leaning on the Fourth Wall since.
• End Of Infinity: The author breaks the fourth wall to tell the characters that THE POWER OF TELEGRAM COMPELS YOU. The Telegrams are direct commands from the readers to the characters.

• Erika and the Princes in Distress: When King Parfait asks Erika why she wishes to find his son, she tells him to just read the comic from the beginning again. The same gag is present in the audio adaptation, where she instead tells him to listen to the previous episodes again.
• In an early Faulty Logic page, Fox and Jalyss break through the fourth wall of the author-comments section (with a hammer) to make sure there are actually people reading their strip.
  • More recently, a spacial vortex reverses fourth-wall positions. Notably, readers can actually see the Fourth Wall in the background.
• Fathead often breaks the fourth wall when the author can't think of a worthwhile punchline...
• Flying Man and Friends does this on a regular basis, with characters addressing or reacting to readers. In this strip, there was even an actual wall underneath the comic, which was peeled away to reveal it.
• Fortuna: The concept of the fourth wall is very important for the comic and its plot, and is discussed by characters a few times. There's practically no fourth wall between the AI gods and you, as they directly converse with you from behind the screen like it's no big deal, and are fully aware that they are confined within a video game (or a webcomic pretending to be one, as Apollo v1 calls you a "reader" a few times, and Helios v1 references pages of text). Other characters, however, are unaware of the fact that they are a part of a game, and telling them that results in a quick suicide from being unable to live with this knowledge.

• The SpriteComic FRIENDS 4 EVER!!!! has engaged in breaking the fourth wall a few times.

• In The Fuzzy Five, some of the Living Toys do this occasionally.
• Early on in Game Destroyers, Spiffy breaks the fourth wall by pointing out a Plot Hole.

• Every chapter of Tales of Gnosis College ends with a "Women of Gnosis" pin-up that depicts one of the series's female characters and contains a brief caption. One of these characters — Iris Brockman — uses her caption to complain to the reader about how she got neither a name nor a dialog line in the preceding chapter.
• Grrl Power seldom does this, but the splash page for chapter 2 does it quite deliberately. Sydney sees the ARC building for the first time, and looks up at it, with the 'camera' behind her and panning upward:
  Sydney: ...I thought you said ARCswat.
  Maxima: I'll explain it on the next page.
  Sydney: ...there had better not be anyone photographing my butt.
  • Later Sydney tries to do this, but looks in the wrong direction.
• Gunnerkrigg Court also doesn't do this much, but if anyone is going to do it, Coyote will.
• Heart Core: As seen in the image above, after being a bit TOO enthusiastic about drinking BBQ Sauce, Lutz has to remind Ame that this isn't a porn comic.
• In Homestuck, there is an actual goddamn physical fourth wall. It's first used as a lame joke and then later by the author as a self-indulgent insert to the comic where he recaps the story. Then the comic introduces a fifth wall (according to Word of Hussie, it separates multiple omniscient narrators) and promptly starts breaking that, too. It's strongly implied that this will be a major plot point. On his formspring page, Andrew Hussie joked that there's also a sixth wall, and that it's what's holding back all the "shitty memes". That wall apparently broke a long time ago.
  • And in [S] Cascade, it's revealed that Jade's plan to save them all is to actually fly through the fourth wall, traveling through our universe for about three nanoseconds (from our perspective). The destination is another fourth wall leading to an Alternate Universe. The real world is apparently a Void Between the Worlds.
  • And then there's Lord English, who invokes The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You and Rage Against the Author.
• In Horndog, the fourth wall breaks Bob's nose.
• In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, Jean periodically scolds Bob for breaking the Fourth Wall, calling it "one of his worst habits." Although she herself indulges in it on rare occasions.
• The Insecticomics wavers between breaking the fourth wall and not having one altogether. The Insecticons themselves don't really seem to bother with it.
• I Was Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space!!! has been known to break the fourth wall and even had a intermission that was called The Search For The Fourth Wall.
• Jix generally tries to avoid it, but sometimes one or two of the characters slip. The first time it happened, Jix was trying to stop Lauren from doing it. It all went downhill from there.

• In Keychain of Creation, a comic based on the Exalted tabletop RPG, the characters frequently talk as if the rules of the game were the solid rules of their reality, and they knew their own stats. However, they don't actively break the fourth wall; that's left to a band of the Fae, especially their leader, who says quite frankly that he only led his band back to fight the main characters because there'd be no story otherwise. The main characters all act like he's a jabbering mental patient when he says as much.
• Looking for Group: Richard is always a bit of a Meta Guy, but outright breaks the fourth wall when, twelve years into the comic's run, a young Mental World version of him offers him information about his long-forgotten Mysterious Past:
  Young Richard: Do you want to find out who you are?
  Richard: Not really. [Points at the fourth wall] But they do.
• In the hundredth strip of Loserz, protagonist Ben remarks: "I just got the strangest feeling, like I'm being watched. — What's even weirder is that I'm somehow sure this has happened exactly 100 times..."

• Megatokyo: A seriously frightening example (in retrospect) where the character is reflecting the symptoms of her real-life namesake's autoimmune disorder which later turned into cancer. Note the knee brace on Seraphim then read Rant 1042 for details.
• The fourth wall is given a loving fracture every now and then in A Moment of Peace. At one point, it's opened up so that stars can pour through.
• Nowhere University has the characters make references to plot twists & their author, then again the teachers at that school come from literary classics so...
• Rich Burlew's The Order of the Stick is pretty random with the fourth wall, and indeed arguably has a lack of a fourth wall built into the setting itself. The worst is probably the Oracle constantly addressing the audience and referring to books or in-comic years. Also the 100th and 600th strip have lampshading referring to the anticlimax in each. V once refers to how many strips would be necessary to get another dumb trial done. Belkar also once refers to himself as the only funny thing left in the comic strip.
  • Strip #649 memorably includes Haley stealing a diamond from the site's cast page (which is not part of the comic's continuity) in order to power a Resurrection spell. Ever since then, the actual cast page has shown Haley holding an "I owe me" note instead of the actual diamond.
  • One of the prequel books shatters the fourth wall in a brilliant way.
    Elan: Good evening, innkeeper! I require a room [...]
    Innkeeper: Of course, sir. What kind of room did you have in mind?
    Elan: Well, I was thinking of something with a ceiling, a floor, and four walls.
    Innkeeper: Are you certain, sir? Because rooms without fourth walls are very popular in this comic strip.
    (Beat Panel while both smile and wink at the reader.)
  • At one point, the heroes are actually warned of an impending attack by a cutaway panel in the middle of their dialogue.
  • Tsukiko has broken the third wall, by literally blasting Haley out of the panel.
• Penny from Out at Home pretty much exists to break the fourth wall, to the confusion of the other characters, who don't have her Medium Awareness.
  "Why are you talking to that wall?"
• Ozy and Millie toyed with it once. "I'm Ozymandias. You may know me from strips such as this one.
• In one strip of Peter Parker: Foreign Exchange Student, Peter and Izuku try to strategize behind the cover of rubble, inadvertently recreating the memetic shot◊ of Miles watching a thinking Peter intently in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Tsu calls them out for "recreating memes" to their confusion.
• Sometimes, Thaddeus and Bob from The Petri Dish talk to the viewer. One case is when they discuss what happens "behind the scenes".
• In Princess Chroma, the entire cast is occasionally caught Leaning on the Fourth Wall, but Randall outright breaks it, even shoving panels aside to address the audience.

• In PvP, now and then, the characters break the fourth wall, usually for some movie impersonation. Nearly every time, someone dies horribly, but as it's fourth wall breaking, it gives an excuse for a Snap Back. Handily combined with You Bastard!!
• One strip of Rae the Doe has a doctor tell Rae to read a webcomic called Rae the Doe to be in better spirits.
• In this Random Chaos strip the reader is killed. Complete with blood splattered on the "screen".
• The first entry of The Rifters has Tobi addressing the reader, telling them the title of the comic they're reading.
• Several characters of Sandra and Woo have already broken the fourth wall, for example Sandra, Woo and Cloud's father David. Larisa literally breaks the fourth wall in one strip. With an axe.
• This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic has the entire human race break the fourth wall of the universe after figuring out that it is just a simulation.
• Scandinavia and the World occasionally breaks this, but without referencing it. Whenever the Netherlands and Denmark, (and sometimes Germany) surprise Japan by making out, they call it Yaoi, with is never real people; meaning that they, even if it wasn't intentional, know that they know that they are drawn.
• Schlock Mercenary:
  • Characters often grip the edge of panels, occasionally address the reader, and otherwise act on the panels or their framing.
  • One time the Toughs fired a plasma lance through the border of a frame.
  • Kevyn meeting his creator, literally, has got to take the cake..
    Kevyn: Are you killing me?
    Howard: No.
    Kevyn: Oh, goo-
    Howard: Blood loss is killing you.
  • Schlock swings a Chainsaw for an attack, and the tip shreds the comic border in the process.

• Scoob and Shag: This is an in-universe side-effect of having too much Ballyhoo energy, as characters will begin to hear the voices of those watching them — i.e., their in-universe viewers and the comic's readers alike — and reflexively addressing them.
• Sexy Losers did this in a crossover (barely SFW) and a guest strip (NSFW) did the same joke to, er, completion.
• Shameless (2012) gives us this bonus strip in which Seven directly explains to the audience why she looks different than the other Cosmos.
• Shape Quest, an RPG video game parody comic, does this during the first strip, where Lance acknowledges that he is poorly drawn and tries to think of something clever to say so people will continue reading past the first strip.
• In Sinfest, played with: Slick announces it, and has Squidly break down a wall — but since he narrates it for the audience, he really is breaking the fourth wall.
• Sluggy Freelance breaks it occasionally:
  • In this strip where after kissing someone, Riff comments on how his life was a lot simpler two strips ago.
  • When Torg is being very slow on the uptake: "He'll figure it out any moment now folks!" (Unless you count "folks" as a direct acknowledgement of the fourth wall. It seems to refer to the audience, but it's left vague.)

• In Survivor: Fan Characters, there is a character named Eli in SFC11 that constantly broke the fourth wall, because he knows how the editing tricks on Survivor worked.
• Too Much Information (2005) has a solid Fourth Wall, with one exception. There's an auxiliary webcomic called Maddie's Monster, in which one of the regular characters (Maddie Cartman) meets an Eldritch Abomination named G'Nar The Insignificant. G'Nar, being non-human, can see through the fourth wall, and tries to point it out. Maddie is unable to figure out what the heck he's talking about.

• Jason, the author of the Magic: The Gathering webcomic UG Madness, has vowed never to break the fourth wall ...except when making fun of his own vow.
• Untitled! had elements of this early on, with, for example, a character who was introduced as "living in the gaps between frames," complete with a character grabbing the frame and leaning her upper body out of the frame and looking into the afore-mentioned gap. What makes this case interesting is that the comic later caught a bad case of Cerebus Syndrome, and as a symptom, acquired a fourth wall. Some of the fourth-wall-breaking elements where explained away (e.g. as the actions of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens or psychic planeswalkers): I don't recall an explanation ever being provided for what was happening when the protagonist leaned her upper torso out of the frame.

• The xkcd blag features "Federal Reserve Skateboard: A Short Story," which includes the following:
  • Bernanke, trying not to slip in the patches of blood on the floor, struggled with Greenspan. The older man moved like a snake that moved like a former Fed Chairman who moved like a ninja. At last, Bernanke got a solid grip on Greenspan?s collar and hurled him through the fourth wall, knocking you to the ground.

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