"Life is a rhapsody—irregular in form, and you always have to improvise. Depressing? Maybe, but anything you can jam to can't be all bad."
Rhapsodies
is a webcomic by Bill Morse dealing with the lives of neighbours, Paul Huen, Kate Jennersten and Brian Fitzpatrick and all of their friends.
Updated weekdays it also has a wiki.
Rhapsodies contains examples of:
- A-Cup Angst: Blossom tends to suffer from this whenever she runs into anyone she sees as competition to her romantic endeavors."There's lots a successful ladies out there with a nothin' but washboards for chests."
- The Alleged Car: Paul's drives a 1975 Station wagon which still keeps going much to everyone's amazement. (He doesn't know what the millage is since the odometer broke sometime after he moved to the Northwest.)
- Art Evolution: The style stays largely the same, but lines become much cleaner and more precise over time.
- Brother–Sister Team: Brian & Rowan AKA Fitzpatrick Consulting.
- Casanova Wannabe: Brian and his fruitless attempts to impress Kate, who usually responds with a sarcastic barb or a good old-fashioned punch in the face.
- Celestial Bureaucracy: While we are shown many branches of Heaven including Love, Luck, Death, Internal Dialogue , most of what we see is the Department of Minor Nuisances whose responsibilities include missing socks, Tupperware lids, loosing lottery tickets, lost keys and numerous other things.
- Chivalrous Pervert: Fedya may be an inveterate womanizer who will hit on just about anything that moves, but he will take no for an answer and is more than happy to be "just friends". Of course with his gregarious nature, and warped idea of a good time, many women find themselves missing being treated as a sex object.
- Clark Kenting: Having never gotten a pen name after the success of her first book, Kate tries to keep her "literary career" mostly a secret by wearing her hair in a bun with fashionable glasses when at public events.
- Confessional: Brian gets dragged to church by his mother and lists a series of…mishaps that have occurred since his last confession.
- Did You Just Have Sex?: After Kate hooks up with her boyfriend, Stefan, her staff at the bookstore have noticed this… Frequently. In fact Kate's disgustingly good mood is getting on their nerves.
- Ditzy Genius: Brian is a brilliant polymath, economist and accountant who can pretty much make numbers do what he wants… he also has the attention span of a gnat and is so socially clueless even people who know him think he's an idiot.
- Dresses the Same: At a fancy gala Kate nearly runs into a senator's wife she had accidentally insulted in the past. The fact they're wearing the same dress has Kate hiding from her for the rest of the night.
- Dumb and Drummer: At his best, the Circle Band's drummer, Kevin, is a drowsy Clouduckoolander oblivious to nearly everything that's going on. The rest of the time he's little more than a prop.
- Expressive Hair Paul's mullet tends to fluff up when he's mad or shocked.
- The Fair Folk: Peaseblossom, the pixie featured in many of the strip's dream sequences, is at best capricious with a very mercurial temperament. At worst some of her "bright ideas" are kind of... fatal.
- "Friends" Rent Control: Subverted, the Fitzpatricks have a huge problem renting the three apartments around Brian's, even at slum rates.
- Good with Numbers: Brian's maths skills border on superhuman to the point he thinks a calculator is a crutch for the handicapped and applies both chaos and game theory to economics just for his own amusement.
- I Need a Freaking Drink: Kate during a particularly nasty bout of writer's block. Nancy is prone to this from time to time as well.
- Local Hangout: A good number of the female cast frequent a cocktail bar called the Peach Blossom
- Must Have Nicotine: Fedya's good for about fifteen minutes between smokes before he gets… cranky.
- Neat Freak: Blossom's room mate Hilda is so fastidious she will clean other people's apartments and has been known to take a broom to the beach.
- Never Mess with Granny: Paul's grandmother manages a pro-wrestling team and used to ride with Hell's Angels.
- No Social Skills: Brian plows through life oblivious to the chaos he leaves in his wake, and how much he confuses and terrifies people, missing every clue hurled his way with great force.
- Only Known by Initials: As part of her fresh start Dielle stopped using her embarrassing first name, Daisy-Louise, and started going by her initials. (Fortunately for her "D.L" sounds French.)
- Only Sane Man: Kate lampshades herself as this during her introduction, but a few others also qualify, namely Paul and Lisa.
- Right in Front of Me: Nancy gets asked by a new coworker for advice on how to avoid getting on the bad side of the firm's notorious business manager... (first, find out what she looks like before asking this question.)
- Shout-Out: One of the protester's signs on this page says What, Me Worry?
- Sunglasses at Night: Shilo has never been seen without his Cool Shades.
- Talk Like a Pirate: Blossom sounds like this, though in her case it's talk like a Devon farm girl.
- Weirdness Censor: There appears to be quite a bit going on in the peripheral vision that most of the cast seems to be unaware of... and those who are, aren't talking.
- White-Collar Crime: Brian tends to get very…creative with his tax forms. The legality of that creativity is questionable at best."I'll have you know I have five tax loopholes named after me!"
- Whole-Plot Reference: Kevin dreams the Circle Band is the house band at Rick's Cafe of course a few times he seems to be getting Casablanca mixed up with Mos Eisley.
