A handful of small panels proves to be plenty of room to get the facts twisted.
- Parodied in the comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug, in which a news anchor says, "And now that we have reported this story, we plan to research it as thoroughly as possible."
- Various examples involving Peanuts:
- One of the reasons Charles Schulz hated the "Peanuts" name (which was forced on him by the syndicate) was that a lot of people thought it was the name of the main character, which is why the subtitle "Featuring Good Ol' Charlie Brown" was included in the Sunday strips for several years.
- More than once, a writer will comment on Lucy or Peppermint Patty as though they are Charlie Brown's love interests, or even in competition for his affections. Probably the kindest emotion Lucy has ever had toward Charlie Brown is pity. As for Peppermint Patty, for a while she believed that she and "Chuck" were an item, but then, she also believed Snoopy was a "funny looking kid with a big nose" and that his doghouse was "Chuck's guest cottage."
- When game shows and radio contests ask for the name of Charlie Brown's teacher, the "correct" answer is Miss Othmar, who is actually better known for being Linus' teacher. While a few strips have Charlie Brown show up in Linus' class, others have him in a separate class with a different teacher named Mrs. Donovan. The fact that Miss Othmar was referred to by name way more often than Mrs. Donovan (who was named exactly once in the mid-1960s) probably contributed to the assumption the former was Charlie Brown's teacher.
- A lot of Sally Brown's school reports are in-universe cases of this. Just
a few examples. - Some online listings for the Titan Comics reissue of the strip collection Here's to You, Charlie Brown claims that it included strips that were previously published in "Ha Ha, Herman," Charlie Brown. It actually includes strips from You Can't Win, Charlie Brown, the confusion likely stemming from the similarly-titled You Can't Win Them All, Charlie Brown (one of two "abridged" versions of "Ha Ha, Herman").
- Zits did a week of strips parodying Love Is... titled "Love Isn't", starring Jeremy and Sara as everyone's favorite married naked 8-year-olds. At least one newspaper editor not only completely missed the parody aspect but ID'ed the naked couple as Jeremy's parents.
- In an early Dilbert strip, Dilbert accidentally employed the "Vulcan death grip" on a co-worker. Many readers wrote in to explain that "There is no such thing as a Vulcan death grip" (a direct quote from the relevant episode, "The Enterprise Incident"), though there is a "Vulcan nerve pinch" that only causes unconsciousness. Scott Adams says that's when he really understood who his audience was.
- Bill Rechin, the cartoonist behind Crock, made a number of these kinds of gaffes in his later years. One particularly painful strip involved an oddly-dressed black character asking people if they ever "did the hip-hop."
- One part of this review of the Pokémon: The Series comic chastises the cartoonist for drawing Starmie shooting water from its jewel. However, the reviewer himself makes an error: he mistakes Staryu (who, to his credit, can't shoot water from its jewel either) for Starmie.
- An in-universe example in Calvin and Hobbes: When the title characters are being chased by an evil snowman Calvin brought to life, Hobbes wonders, "Now, how did they finally kill Frosty?" Anyone who has watched that Rankin/Bass special knows that the main characters were trying to save Frosty, and while the villain character did appear to have succeeded in killing him, he came back to life.
- Calvin's bat/bug report is this trope lampshaded, turned inside out, and buried.
- And in the 10th Anniversary Collection, Watterson noted that he found out more about bats from fan-letters than he'd ever cared to know.
- Calvin's bat/bug report is this trope lampshaded, turned inside out, and buried.
- FoxTrot: During a short storyline where Paige dreamed that she was in the land of Christmas Specials, Hermie was indicated as HerBie.
- Bill Amend pointed this out in the The Best Of Foxtrot commentary, and tried to justify it by saying "Paige doesn't proofread her dreams."
- Amend also makes the classic "Nintendo-makes-Pokémon" mistake in this comic featuring a Pokémon GO related gag. (When that game in particular was created by Niantic with minimal input from Nintendo.) Amend being One of Us, however, it may have been made by mistake.
- Pluggers asserted that one is a plugger if they don't recognize the names of talk show guests, depicted through a panel in which a character reacts in confusion to the TV announcing that Jay Leno's guests for the evening would be, among others, Michael Cera, which was misspelled CerRa, and Little Britain, which is the name of a TV show and not a person or a band as cartoonist Gary Brookins apparently thought, inadvertently demonstrating his own cluelessness.
- Many Scottish newspapers and magazines will tell you that The Broons and Oor Wullie live in Dundee. In actual fact, they live in a fictional town which has been variously named Auchenshoogle, Auchentogle or Drumtogle over the years. The location of which changes depending on the story or the writer. The earliest strips explicitly name Glasgow as the hometown, but this was soon dropped.
- In the documentary Happy Birthday Broons, the then-writer Tom Morton suggested that the hometown is most likely near or possibly even a district of Glasgow, but the Broons themselves could be an East-Coast family living there.
- Many articles and blurbs about Phoebe and Her Unicorn say that Marigold is Phoebe's imaginary unicorn friend (akin to Calvin and Hobbes). In-Universe, however, Marigold and other unicorns are very much real, and she even interacts with other humans.
- In Stone Soup the characters watch Dumbo and the film is mentioned among Disney movies where "they always off the mom." Actually, Dumbo's mother is alive and well throughout the whole movie.
