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Characters / Narbonic

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Characters of Narbonic.

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Personnel of Narbonic Labs

    Artie 

RT-5478, alias Artie Meriono, A. Murida, Arthur Narbon

A test gerbil given partially human DNA and superhuman intelligence by Helen Narbon. While originally a mere experiment, Helen grew very fond of him and he proved to be a very competent individual, leading to a de facto, and later official, place on the Narbonic Labs staff. He is artistic but also a competent scientist and leader. Being the only morally upstanding member of the staff, he's prone to being various characters' conscience. Later he gains the ability to toggle back and forth between human and gerbil form whenever he hiccups.

  • Catch a Falling Star: He's the catcher in the finale for Helen. Who may have created him specifically for this, he speculates.
  • Even the Guys Want Him: On Skin Horse, Tip goes from identifying as entirely heterosexual to openly bisexual due to Artie's attractiveness and sexual "mojo," which overpowers his own mojo.
  • Granola Girl: He's an activist in causes ranging from progressive (rights for genetically-modified organisms) to environmentalist, is vegetarian and would like to be vegan, smokes marijuana, and is implied to be a socialist, as he funnels money to socialist revolutionary groups in the Middle East.
  • Humanity Ensues: It takes him some time and Wangst to cope with it.
  • Improbably High I.Q.: 250, or "1.57 Stephen Hawkings".
  • Innocent Fanservice Girl: Or boy. Artie's human form is hot, and, as a gerbil, he's unused to having to worry whether he has any clothes on. Also, in his case Shapeshifting Excludes Clothing. Hence incidents of running around starkers.
  • Intellectual Animal: Perhaps best showcased when he's packing his things:
    Artie: My novel in progress... my gnawing block... my Goethe... Helen, have you seen my little sleeping pillow?
  • Insufferable Genius: Not so much in Narbonic, but grows into this in Skin Horse.
  • Involuntary Shapeshifting: For a while, he transforms whenever he hiccups. After mastering the reflex, he still changes involuntarily in his sleep, several times during a night.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
    • Near the end of the comic, Helen rather viciously points out that everything that's gone wrong and everything that's currently threatening the world is his fault. Specifically, he made Dana super-intelligent (and insane), and she went on to create the intelligent hamsters who are trying to wipe out humanity. He went on to sponsor the hamsters' "non-partisan think-tank", giving them the funds to set up said humanity-wiping plan. Then he forced Helen to make Dave leave, thus allowing his mad genius to awaken without a controlling influence and nothing to keep him from deciding to take over the world.
    • Whether Helen meant for him to do those things, or even created him for that purpose, is a difficult question, however, and certainly complicates matters.
  • Like You Were Dying: When he's approaching his fourth birthday, Artie assumes he has a normal gerbil lifespan, so he decides to see the central issue of the story resolved before he dies, which is part of why he pushes Helen. But, since he's been sort of humanified, he's not really dying, turns out.
  • Morality Chain: For Mell. In the Bad Future, where he's dead, Mell casually destroys the world that she's previously taken over a good part of.
  • Only Sane Man: Despite his destructive naivete. Helen is literally mad, Mell is obsessed with weaponry and destruction, and Dave often goes along with Helen's insane plans due to their sheer coolness, so Artie's often the sole voice of reason. Later, he becomes literally the only sane member of the staff. Still, he gets outvoted or ignored a lot, and has his own share of bad ideas.
  • Parental Sexuality Squick: Artie may not call her this, but he puts Helen in "mom" box, which is why, according to Word of God, he's squicked by her having a sex life. This gives him a motive to sabotage it. Yes, a jealous gerbil is behind the crisis. It's that sort of a story.
  • Parrot Pet Position: In his gerbil form, he often rides on people's shoulders (usually, Helen's). Sometimes, he's a Head Pet.
  • Raised in a Lab: He was created as an experiment, natch. He stayed in the lab until the age of roughly three (he was born fully developed mentally, mind), and after leaving had some problems understanding things like money, which is how his grant ends up with the hamsters.
  • Resourceful Rodent: Pretty smart for a gerbil, although naive and given more to soft science and art.
  • Snarky Non Human Side Kick: At the beginning, although, as he develops, the snark loses its meanness and becomes more of a coping mechanism.
  • Soapbox Sadie: He's an activist in causes ranging from progressive (rights for genetically-modified organisms) to environmentalist, is vegetarian and would like to be vegan, smokes marijuana, and is implied to be a socialist, as he funnels money to socialist revolutionary groups in the Middle East. Eventually he ends up working at an inner-city school to help disadvantaged youths. While he's occasionally used to make fun of factionalism, he's always portrayed as very noble for his activities in these causes.
  • Species Surname: He changes surnames several times, the first one being "Nick Cricetida", from Cricetidae - the taxonomical family that gerbils belong to.
  • Straight Gay: As far as one can tell from a comic, he seems to lack camp mannerisms, while it becomes very clear that he's gay after he adjusts to his human form. Before, his sexuality was more difficult to determine because female gerbils' hormones affected him involuntarily, a source of Squick for him as he ends up being the only intelligent gerbil in a lab full of non-intelligent ones.
  • Uplifted Animal: By definition, yes, but he takes offense to the term, saying that it promotes the idea that evolution is a one-way street with human-level intelligence as its goal, as well as a hierarchical view of humans and animals.
  • Voluntary Shapeshifter: After mastering the reflex with Zazen meditation, he permanently gains the ability to transmogrify between human and gerbil at will.

    Dave Davenport 

Dave Prescott Davenport

Geeky everyman, or is he? Dave Davenport is the viewpoint character for much of Narbonic's run. He's an intelligent but dorky computer scientist with a love for all things geeky, from Star Trek: Voyager to Dungeons And Dragons. When he accepts a job offer from Narbonic Labs (apparently because Helen agreed to his terms of "casual dress code, smoking allowed), he finds himself drawn into the insane world of Helen Narbon, eventually finding himself a willing and enthusiastic part of the mad scientific community. Which is appropriate enough, given that he's a latent mad scientist.

  • Achievements in Ignorance: Helen tricks him into doing this on a regular basis. She tells him that a rusty mail-sorter is a broken weather-controlling doomsday device, and he makes it work as such. She later tricks him into rebuilding a non-functional death ray console into a functioning one that can control existing Kill Sats. As he's actually a latent mad genius in deep denial, almost all of his technical feats count as this trope.
  • Always Someone Better: He's a bit surprised to learn he's this to Madblood. Even before Dave breaks through and becomes a far stronger mad scientist, Professor Lupin Madblood envies a mere henchman, because, let's face it, Dave is a very lucky man. He has experiences that no one in their right mind could ever dream of having, gets the girl and manages to have a kind of geeky coolness that Lupin can't manage. But learning not to compare himself unfavourably to Madblood and Bill is an important part of his Character Development.
  • Androids Are People, Too: Machines love Dave, true, but he treats them with nothing but friendliness (except maybe when a Logic Bomb is absolutely necessary).
  • Bat Deduction: After going mad he begins to make intuitive leaps that baffle everyone, but make perfect sense when you actually have all the dots he connected, as if Dave's thinking an order of magnitude faster than normal people.
  • Blind Without 'Em: After his first ressurrection, he's worried that he can't see properly. Then Mell hands him his glasses.
  • Brain Uploading: While going mad, he deletes Lovelace and uploads himself into her hardware.
  • Crazy Sane: Dave seems a lot more introspective, less angsty and generally stabler after the shoe drops and he's settled into his new identity.
  • Can't Act Perverted Toward a Love Interest: Enjoying Mell's teeny-tiny skirts? OK. Possibly taking advantage of maybe-demonically-altered mental state of Helen? Absolutely not. As the Word of God states:
    "Dave seems to have strong morals only when his crush on Helen is involved."
  • Deadpan Snarker: He starts out quite cynical, but grows out of it.
  • Digitized Hacker: Why he performs the Brain Uploading. At least, part of why.
  • Dreaming of Things to Come: Dave in Slumberland strips foreshadow the next year of the story.
  • Drunk on Milk: Dave can get stone drunk on half a glass of Vanilla Coke. (And pathos.)
  • Earn Your Happy Ending: Zig-Zagged. Yes, he goes through hell literally and figuratively and never regains his sanity, and it is very satisfying when he gets his happy ending, but considering some of the things he does just before the end after he goes mad, it also counts as a Karma Houdini in a way. Much of the conflict of the last chapter is whether Helen can accept him back, but it seems so easy once she makes up her mind to that it comes off as a Karma Houdini anyways.
  • Freak Out: His eventual breakdown begins as babbling and tinkering, then turns into Tranquil Fury, but still destructive, including trying to kill Helen and go on to nuke the world into desolation as a living computer virus. Afterwards, he wakes noticeably calmer and more self-assured than before, and not particularly evil. He apologises to Lovelace, something Madblood would have never done, for instance.
  • Gadgeteer Genius: He can apparently tinker anything technological into anything else, no need for real tools. Perhaps the most extreme example is a paper-thin PDA capable of using any surface it's placed on as a quantum CPU. Dave builds it while half-listening to a mad-scientific conference lecture, and quite possibly with a paper-clip. This PDA clues Titus that he's a mad genius, and in turn, clues us.
    • He also apparently turned the lab's coffee maker into some kind of rocket-propelled space probe capable of transmitting data back from the outer Solar System. This is after he gave it and lots of other appliances in the lab Artificial Intelligence, by the way.
    • And Madblood's coffee maker now runs on heat from a quantum singularity, thanks to Dave. It still makes mediocre coffee, however.
  • Gender Bender: He's the first test subject for Helen's experimental gender-swap pill/serum. Contrary to the First Law of Gender Bending, it's temporary, although he goes back sporadically when he and Helen have kinky mad-science sex all over the lab and later in order to bear their child.
  • Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: Until he changes the timeline so that he never took up smoking, Dave's a rare good or at least chaotic neutral chainsmoker.
  • I Hate Past Me: Says so when encountering Dave prime. Whom he then casually electrocutes. During the Mental Time Travel trip, he's not too happy to be his past selves, but mostly because childhood and teenagehood weren't fun. Bad Future Dave views his young, not-disillusioned self with disdain, too.
  • Loser Archetype: What he thinks he is, for a good chunk of the plot. Dave describes himself as "depressingly average", makes disparaging, Deadpan Snarker comments about himself, honestly believes he's got no future and is pretty much resigned to being evil (he had a job interview in Microsoft, for crying out loud!). That's why he's Oblivious to Love for a while, since how Helen could fall for such a loser?
  • Loss of Identity: Much of what happens to him in the first arcs - death and zombiefication, having his brain put in a robot as the CPU, the Gender Bender - is stated in the Director's Cut to be exploration of the essence of Dave and how much can he change while still being himself. Only when this is done, Character Development can start. And, of course, in the end he loses the "sane Dave" identity in favour of his Mad Scientist self.
  • The Madness Place: Slides into it during his breakdown, speaking more and more incoherently and paying increasingly little attention to what he can't use.
  • Morality Chain: Acts as this for Helen, and vice versa, whether either of them is willing to admit it or not. Just look what happens when he's temporarily out of the picture.
  • Mister Seahorse: It's strongly implied that he's the one that will eventually give birth to his and Helen's daughter, enough so that it shows up in officially commissioned fan art used as part of the grand finale.
  • Nerd Glasses: Big round ones. They're Opaque Nerd Glasses (not terribly Scary Shiny Glasses though) for most of the comic's run. This serves as a visual shorthand for Dave's blindness to his true nature as a potential mad scientist. When he realizes this, they're drawn clear, and when he goes mad, one of the lenses cracks.
  • Projected Man: After Brain Uploading, he uses Lovelace's hologram. Still set to Jennifer Connelly. He resets it to his own form. Bad Future Dave might be still using the same holographic projector.
    Dave: That look like me? Good.
  • Significant Wardrobe Shift: After he accepts his madness, Dave loses the flannel he wore for most of the story. It gets replaced by a Labcoat of Science and Medicine. He first wears it when posing as Madblood, incidentally.
  • Techno Wizard: Machines like Dave. That's it. That's his secret.
  • Walking Spoiler: He's the central character of the comic, and the big secret behind the plot is directly about him.
  • Walking Techfix: Seriously.
  • Weirdness Censor: Most people have this about mad science and the general weirdness of the world around them, but Dave has it for the fact that he's a mad scientist. Solely this fact. He has no problems dealing with the weird otherwise.
  • Went Crazy When They Left: Helen dumping him is not, surprisingly, the last straw. But Dave breaks down properly after understanding what she meant by her parting words "You don't want to go among mad people."
  • Wetware CPU: In "Professor Madblood and the Wetware Interface'' Madblood gets his hands on Dave's brain and puts it in a robot.
  • Wrong Genre Savvy: Early in the run of Narbonic, he tries to act like the Only Sane Man, but finds himself ill-suited for the role.
  • Unfazed Everyman: After he gets used to the daily life in a mad-scientist's lab, handling weird abominations, logic-bombing unruly computers and being experimented upon, he comes across as one of these guys.
  • Younger Than He Looks: In Bad Future, Future!Dave is stated to be fourty six, but looks a lot older. Possibly because a) this version of him smokes (smoking ages people prematurely), and b) it's a clone body made by Helen, who might have given him shorter telomeres and weaker hair out of spite.
  • Visual Development: Shifts in Dave's personality are marked with subtle changes of his appearance. Most notably, during the adventures the group has on the island he grows more confident, and his hair grows longer - he never cuts it short again. See also Significant Wardrobe Shift.
  • When She Smiles: Helen finds him really cute.
    Artie: You like his smile?
    Helen: It's rare, but when it's genuine, it simply lights up the room.
    Artie: Then why do you do such terrible things to him?
    Helen: Well, his scream is pretty cute too.

    Mell Kelly 

Melody Wildflower Kelly:

Evil intern. No, literally, this is her actual job title, and she lives up to it. Mell is violent, chaotic, obsessed with heavy weaponry and thirsty for power. When armed (which is nearly always,) Mell is a teenage force of nature capable of demolishing anyone or anything. She also has a laid-back, quirky personality and a knack for manipulating people, which she later puts to good use by becoming a lawyer and a Republican politician in one timeline, eventually becoming VP and succeeding to the Presidency.

Out of universe, she's named after C'Mell from the Cordwainer Smith story The Ballad of Lost C'Mell, as she comes from an earlier, mostly-unpublished comic of Garrity's where most of the characters were named for characters from Smith's sci-fi stories.

  • Ax-Crazy: She's so violent and unpredictable that, when a plan is particularly delicate, she has to be distracted first. She's self-aware enough to acknowledge that it's a good idea, for extra crazy points.
  • Badass Normal: According to Word of God, she's not an evil genius or even a genius at all, but she's capable enough on her own to frighten hardened mad scientists, and more than one sticky situation is solved because Helen has her on staff.
    • She gets kicked out of Heaven for kicking God in the crotch and then immediately fights her way out of Hell, singlehandedly storms the Dave conspiracy's heavily guarded summer headquarters, negotiates with demons using her law degree and becomes the President of the U.S. in at least one timeline. In the same timeline she becomes the first character in Narbonic to destroy an entire universe.
    • It's heavily implied that she also has the honor of being the genetic source of Unity's brain in Skin Horse. Mell is so badass (or mindlessly destructive) that the shadow government use her (cloned) brain in a weapons project.
  • Barred from the Afterlife: Totally on purpose. See above.
  • Big Bad: It could be argued that the version of her in the bad future is the closest thing the comic has to one, given that she convinces the Daves to put a hit on Dave Davenport although she claims her motives were, for once, altruistic.
  • Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Mell in the Bad Future claims she's doing what she's doing for Artie, who was always like a brother to her. Over the course of the comic, Mell acts shocked precisely once, and that's when she thinks Artie's plummeted to his death (he hasn't).
  • Evil Overlord: In training, according to the author's commentary. She manages to make President Evil in at least some timelines.
  • Face–Heel Revolving Door: Yeah, she'll betray anyone, though she ends up usually getting her job back when she betrays Helen. She's an evil intern, after all. Betraying Helen often and unsucessfully is part of her training.
  • Girl with Psycho Weapon: Often and with gusto.
  • Hammerspace: Mell regularly pulls anti-tank weaponry or giant ray-guns out of nowhere, and at one point opens her backpack and pulls out a BFG that couldn't possibly have fit inside. At least once she literally pulls out a Hyperspace Mallet, and when asked about it, responds with the now-classic line "mallets just happen."
  • Iconic Outfit: A loose, off-shoulder top, teeny-tiny plaid skirt and leggings. Mell in her lawyer mode (also, Future Mell) wears a power suit.
  • Improbable Weapon User: Any weapon user. If it can be used to kill or maim, she'll figure it out.
  • Naked on Revival: When thrown out of Hell. Done with unusual levels of discretion, as the reader only sees her feet and ankles sticking out of a snowbank.
  • Perky Female Minion: Cheerfully violent. Definitely female. Helen's minion, at least nominally.
  • Person of Mass Destruction: More than some mad scientists, since she likes destruction for destruction's sake.
    Bad Future Mell: With the push of a button, I will destroy the universe. Yes, it's been a lifelong dream of mine.
  • Psycho for Hire: If anyone had any sort of doubt as to that, Mell runs around with guns because she likes to. Money is just a bonus.
  • Small Girl, Big Gun: Mell is tiny, possibly the smallest of the human characters, and some of her guns are huge. According to canonized fanfiction by Jeffrey Wells, she used to show up to band practice in high school carrying a bazooka.
  • Two First Names: Melody Kelly. Neither really brings to mind the Ax-Crazy, does it?

     Helen Narbon 

Helen Beta Narbon

Helen is a perky, cutesy mad geneticist with a gerbil fixation. While Dave is both the viewpoint character and the main protagonist, she's the title character for a reason; ninety-five percent of the individual arcs happen at her instigation.

Out of universe, she's named after Helena de Narbonne, a main character in Shakespeare's All's Well that Ends Well.

  • Beard of Evil: Whenever Helen is turned into a man, she spontanously sprouts a goatee. Apparently it materializes from sheer evil.
  • Bloodbath Villain Origin: More like tomato sauce and pesto bath anti-villain origin, but her Freak Out claimed nine casualties.
  • Brain in a Jar: In Bad Future.
  • Cannot Tell a Lie: What Dave thinks of her. What she wants him to think of her, since she can, in fact, lie very convincingly.
  • Clone Angst: Her youth in a nutshell. Being a clone has also caused her interest in the origins of mad genius - Helen wants to know if she, herself, has been doomed from the start. And yet, she's surprisingly cavalier about cloning people herself.
  • Clones Are People, Too: It might have taken buying a rifle and taking legal action against dr. Narbon to make her emancipation possible...
  • Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Being a mad scientist, her thought processes are baffling at times. At times she does things like trying to set her (flame retardant kevlar) pants on fire while giggling. She also apparently can't help herself from experimenting on Dave without his consent even when they're together.
  • The Chessmaster: Is she? Or does she just do what the voices tell her? In a mind as twisted as Helen's, there's apparently no difference between the two. She claims to have orchestrated all the major events of the comic up to a certain point as part of her intensive research on Dave, which would be a mind-boggling feat of prediction considering all the unknown variables involved. Towards the very end of the strip, Dave uses a form of mad probability (indistinguishable from Bat Deduction to the uninitiated) to predict someone's location within a large area, so superhuman powers of prediction and strategy apparently go with the territory.
  • Consistent Clothing Style: Helen's favoured style is cute (the family lawyer in her backstory is scandalised about the sheer pinkness and girly cuteness of Helen's clothes, especially in contrast with her face, which is, of course, identical with dr. Narbon's). While she's working, it's always jeans, a Fun T-Shirt and a Labcoat of Science and Medicine.
  • Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Helen never actually appears stupid (she is a mad scientist afterall) but she does almost always act as a Affably Evil Genius Ditz. This is very much an act.
  • Cute and Psycho: Her favourite color is pink. Puts heart motifs wherever she can fit them. Loves gerbils. She's also a Mad Scientist. The monstrous ur-gerbils are the least of your problems.
  • Forced Transformation: She is accidentally turned into Dave due to a teleporter accident, with plenty of homages to The Fly (1986).
  • Identical Grandson: The women of the Narbon family tend to be identical in appearance and strikingly similar in personality. This is perhaps less striking with Helen and her mother of whom she's a clone, but it's very noticeable with the Helen Narbon who was active during the Victorian. In fact, the author theorizes that they might have been cloning themselves even back then. It's less explicable in the case of Victorian Mell and Dave, however.
  • Immune to Mind Control: Might be. Caliban claims he can only adjust the temperature of her feelings for Dave, but, as it later turns out, anything Helen does is by her decision.
  • I Am Not My Father: And the more she insists, the more she looks like her mother. Then again, Helen's personality and life choices (some of them...) are quite different than dr. Narbon's.
  • Laughing Mad: In her backstory, where "everything was so funny and she had so many interesting ideas"... From a Jerkass Victim point of view it's a cute, girly, utterly deranged Dissonant Laughter.
  • Lethal Chef: An animate, monstrous pesto was her very first mad creation, alluded to in the comic and shown in a well-hidden easter egg story. Come to think of it, she's probably not much better at cooking now. Then again...
    "not thoroughly hopeless pesto alla genovese pity she hadnt had access to a proper parmagiano reggiano [the Jerkass Victim of her rampage, who is apparenty a conoisseur of Italian cooking] thought wildly"
  • Making a Spectacle of Yourself: Pink lenses in the present day. Frilly filigree frames that made her look dumber instead of smarter in the backstory.
  • Motherly Scientist: According to her backstory (the one of Helen's breakdown), all the Narbons have "this strange maternal instinct toward their creations". Helen likes to be adressed as "mom" by Artie (who never does it) and Zeta (who does). Her arguments with Artie also play out as mother-against-a-petulant-teenager thing.
  • Offstage Villainy: We see her do mad science daily. Mere irresponsibilities are common, too, but Helen doesn't do a lot of evil on page.
  • The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: When Helen hears that the Dave Conspiracy has hired Mell to kill Dr. Narbon:
    Helen: I don't care if they are a powerful top-secret conspiracy! No one takes out a hit on my mother! Her head is mine, darn it!
  • Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Normally averted, as her specialty is definitely genetics and ninety-five-percent of the science we see her doing is biochemistry or connected disciplines. That being said, she did build a device capable of sending Dave's consciousness back and forth in time, and is more tech-savvy than she lets on. She certainly doesn't need Dave as a computer tech.
  • Raised in a Lab: Having been created as part of her mother's experimentation on mad genius. Dave's surprised she's not crazier. Helen doesn't speak of this often, but that's a big part of her motivation. She also reminisces about dr. Narbon's presentation guests poking sticks into her terrarium.
  • Sore Loser: In a side arc Artie and Mell note that most of the board games in the lab are broken or missing pieces thanks to the tantrums she throws when she loses. Boggle was spared thanks to her biologist vocabulary.
  • Un Evil Laugh: She's not particularly scary, just kooky.
  • The Wonka: Small-business owner. Narbonic Labs manages to not go under for six years and counting, so she must at least be competent at it.
  • Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: Her mother's pride in her downright scares Helen.

    Dave prime 

Dave prime

After (spoilers!) the original Dave becomes unavailable, Helen breaks a clone out of cold storage. She only has a five-years-old set of memories to give the clone, so none of the Character Development Dave went through applies. Also, he has Dave's old haircut.

Other Characters:

    Dana 

Dana

Dana is the last surviving super-intelligent gerbil from the batch created from regular gerbils by Artie. Artie was genetically engineered with human DNA to be able to cope with the intelligence serum; the other gerbils were just any test gerbils, and so they degenerated into worsening psychosis—some of them even showing competence as mad scientists along the way, as in Dana's case.
  • Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Oh, yes. This is seen with a lot of the mad scientists, Helen especially, but Dana's bouts of it take the cake, they really do. She builds a little man out of a spool of thread, shortly after building a devastating superweapon, and later commits suicide in her final fit of degenerative madness by jumping into a bathtub of whipped cream.
  • Gender-Blender Name: Gerbils don't have a lot of sexual dimorphism, and "Dana" has been both a predominantly male name and a predominantly female name in America over the past century (this is true of several of the other gerbil's names.) It was unclear even to a lot of the gerbils what the genders of some of them were. Dana ends up being female, in actual fact, but this is only mentioned once.
  • Resourceful Rodent: A Mad Scientist rodent. She designs things like floating islands, so definitely smart, and pretty resourceful, just don't expect common sense.
  • Talkative Loon: She says a lot of stuff that makes no sense whatsoever. Sometimes she says stuff that makes sense, interspersing it with ramblings.

    The Daves 

The "Dave Conspiracy"

The Daves are the body of all humans named Dave. They're an ancient and absurdly powerful conspiracy, capable of influencing the government, making business deals with Hell on even footing, imprisoning people indefinitely on a private island, and getting chain hotels to install secret dungeons for them. In fact, it might not be a stretch to say that, as of the time Narbonic is set, that they are the shadow government. (Although this may have changed by the time of Skin Horse.)

     Professor Madblood 

Doctor Lupin Madblood

A high-grade mad engineer and computer scientist who has some mutual interest with Helen.
  • Always Someone Better: He feels this way about Dave, who for a good while feels this way about him.
  • Basement-Dweller: "Underground lair" doesn't preclude "mom's basement". True, he moves out twice in the run of the comic, only for his new bases to be destroyed by Dave. Both times. Afterwards he moves back and, presumably, starts saving for a new lair again.
  • Bad Boss: How does Lovelace tell Dave-transmogrified-into-Madblood from the real deal? Dave is polite to her.
  • Bloodbath Villain Origin: Played straighter than Helen's, if sneakier. The kid Helen's lawyer reminisces about going mad in her backstory? The one who turned things inside-out and collapsed at least one building? That's Madblood.
  • Butt-Monkey: Not so badly as his Victorian ancestor, but let's see: his plans for world domination are always foiled by Helen and Dave, the former of whom is a mere upstart in the mad science world, and the latter of whom is a mere henchman. He never gets the girl, repeatedly ends up moving back into his mother's basement, and his own AI falls in love with his rival - Dave. In the end, Dave's rampage upon going mad destroys his secret base yet again—in the Bad Future, Dave even claims the base for his reformed "Narbonic Labs" after the rampage. Lupin does get one shining moment when he explains madness to the newly-mad Dave in a way that makes them both oddly sympathetic.
  • Contractual Genre Blindness: Others display it, but he seems to be the most aware:
    "Common sense would be cheating."
    • He does "cheat" once by making a backup copy of Lovelace.
  • Identical Grandson: A version of Lupin Madblood lived in the Victorian, too, see the Sunday steampunk feature. He's later alluded to in Skin Horse. He created Mustachio.
  • Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: He tries. He really does. He's got the looks, the goatee, the Scary Shiny Glasses, Labcoat of Science and Medicine... He's got the panache. He's got Killer Robots. But the robots turn out to be uninterested in killing, the plans get foiled by Helen and Dave, and the Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness just makes him look pompous.
  • In the Blood: His father, Felix, had also been a mad roboticist. While Walton's disorder is hereditary, interests normally aren't.
  • Meaningful Name: He's mad, and it's hereditary.
  • Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Again, Zig-Zagged. Most mad scientists have a specific field of study, and a fairly limited range of competence outside of it. Madblood is an engineer specializing in robotics. He does, however, build spaceships, rayguns, forcefields and, probably more germane to his field, a high-powered supercomputer. And he only has one bench filled with Gratuitous Laboratory Flasks.
  • Porn Stash: Madblood has a good supply of Hustler magazines in the secret room on his base.
  • Robot Master: He's described in the backstory as a "killer robot man". On page, Madblood's prominent creations include a robot army, a Wetware CPU robot vaguely resembling a tachikoma and a Benevolent A.I..
  • Send in the Clones: His moonbase has 15 000 battle robots that look just like their creator.
  • Wrong Genre Savvy: Usually, he behaves as if this was his story, a dashing science-fictional tale of a Mad Scientist taking over the world, with the Purple Prose dialogue and grandiose schemes required. Except for this one moment of Right Genre Savvy when he's left to his own devices during the final catastrophe:
    Madblood: "And thus he falls for Villain Fallacy #2: Letting the harmless comic relief run free."

     Lovelace 

Lovelace

An Artificial Intelligence of Madblood's creation, who tries to hack Narbonic Labs LAN only to get entangled in the organic drama.

     Doctor Narbon 

Doctor Helen Narbon

Dr. Narbon is Helen's mother by way of direct cloning, and one of her archenemies. She's manipulative, callous, self-absorbed, and in league with very dark powers. For various evil-related reasons, she fakes her death often, for instance in the beginning of the the easter-egg story; this particular death (and the insensitive way the family lawyer informed her of it) was one of the stressors that drove Helen mad.
  • Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: A somewhat less cutesy version than usual, but still. She wrote a "diary" from Helen's perspective to document her development and had Helen displayed in a terrarium as a child (for a mad-scientific conference).
  • The Dreaded: Her reputation is pretty huge. Helen once said that many mad scientists cite "mom" as the reason they went mad. When Dave asks if they mean their mothers, she clarifies that they mean her mother. Generally everyone dreads dealing with Dr. Narbon. Except Mell, who has Misaimed Fandom for her.
  • Evil Laugh: A crucial point of distinction between her and her daughter. Helen's is kooky and maniacal, standard mad science fare, really, while Dr. Narbon's laugh goes "heh heh heh," and usually means that she knows something you don't. Mell tries to learn this during dr. Narbon's stay at her daughter's lab, but lacks the evil secrets to make it sound convincing.
  • Faking the Dead: If you hear news of her death, don't believe them. She's probably faked it again.
  • Joker Immunity: At least one of her faking-her-death shenanigans included being burned at stake, which got recorded live on video. And that happened about a year before she appears in the story.
    Dr. Narbon: There's always an out, Beta. Remember that.
  • Mrs. Robinson: Judging by how Nick Cricetida (a.k.a. humanified Artie) wakes up in her bed... naked...
  • Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: She sounds like a comic-book villain, oh, wait...
  • "Not So Different" Remark: Helen fears that she's not all that different from her mother in the end. Dr. Narbon certainly hopes that this is the case.
  • One-Steve Limit: With her daughter, natch. This is why she's referred to as "Dr. Narbon" so often; she finished her PhD. while Helen Beta went insane and was kicked out of Reed College shortly before completing her own.
  • Paranoia Gambit: The queen of this trope. Roughly 90% of her evil schemes consist of going "Heh heh heh" and watching the shenanigans ensue.
  • The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: She doesn't do a lot of mad science on-panel, considering that she's a well-known and feared mad scientist. The most she really seems to do is assemble some things from plans another mad scientist drew, and her reputation is apparently built on a psychological case study of her latent-genius daughter/clone, Helen Beta. Honestly, she often reads more like a hitwoman than anything.
  • Trademark Favorite Drink: Pink boxed wine. The preferrence might have been inherited by Helen.
  • Truly Single Parent: For Helen B.

    Caliban 

Caliban

A Starbucks barista who used to be a demon from the depths of Hell. Where he worked as a glorified bouncer, anyway. Generally, Caliban has not as much fallen as sauntered vaguely downwards and takes getting kicked out of Hell Like a Fish Takes to Water.
  • Angelic Transformation: He becomes human, eventually, to escape some demonic loan sharks.
  • Beta Couple: With Mell.
  • Brought Down to Normal: When humanised. He soon discovers he's happier that way.
  • Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Caliban isn't as demonic as he tries to appear, but Dave pretty much befriends him long before he turns human. And later, while in his six-year old body gets quite chummy with him, including getting Caliban to do his homework while he works out time-travel mechanics.
  • Distracted by the Sexy: Caliban is quite prone to this after turning mortal.
    "I've never seen humans this way! Have you always had these breasts?"
  • Evil Brit: An honourable mention, since he's (nominally) evil and British-accented (even though not really British, since neither Heaven or Hell are in Britain).

     Zeta Vincent 

Zeta Vincent

Zeta is a gonzo journalist who writes for various zines.note  She finds herself drawn to mad science antics with extraordinary frequency. Appropriate, given that she's a early science project of Helen's, a gerbil given human form and intelligence.

  • Big Brother Instinct: She has sisterly instincts for Artie, once she realizes who he is (and regrets hitting on him earlier). She helps him up when he's cracked most of his ribs and begins to say "he ain't heavy, he's my brother" but interrupts herself.
    He's my brother, dammit!
  • Cute Monster Girl: An old picture of her as a child before having her ears and tail docked is adorable.
  • Seen It All: She doesn't have the Weirdness Censor that makes a percentage of normal people (at one point 20% of the U.S., according to Skin Horse side material) unable to see the various fantastical things that go on in Narbonic, but she's pretty jaded to the weirdness. An insane super-intelligent gerbil riding a lobotomized hippie doesn't register on a gonzo journalist's weirdness scale, apparently.
  • Sunglasses at Night: She wears her tinted glasses even indoors because she has a light sensitivity (photophobia). It goes with being a gerbil.
  • Tagalong Reporter: While far from one of the big movers of the plot, she's there for the climax of the whole strip, although by this point she's mostly given up on reporting and become an adventurer/forensic linguist.
  • Tattoo as Character Type: She's definitely a rebellious, eccentric type, with an eye tattooed on the back of her neck and an "Anarchy" mark on her arm.

     Dr. Noah Lazarow, D.D.S. 
Doctor Noah (whose last name is seen exactly once in the strip) is a dentist whose office was next door to the original Narbonics Labs. Later, he takes in the sentient hamsters, and teaches them to be objectivists; thus, while his presence in the strip is minimal, he has a certain amount of responsibility for the events of the final arc.

     MIT Student Dave Barker 
Helen's archnemesis, due to a very early Sunday mailbag strip where the characters read a letter he wrote asking about her age. He's a real friend of the author's, who was very active in the Narbonic fandom before there was a Narbonic fandom, and initially the character corresponded pretty closely to real life. Then the Dave conspiracy was introduced...

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