TRU-Life Adventures
is a long-running webcomic set primarily at a toy store. The characters regularly deal with all the hazards that come from working retail: bad customers, worse management, an epic time-travel war that threatens to destroy reality. So yeah, things can get a little strange.
Tropes featured:
- Art Evolution
- The Atoner: Jack
- Bigger on the Inside: Toymania itself, as long as one counts the exit nook as interior space but not exterior.
- Invoked by Jack upon seeing Jenny Everywhere's home. It's not, they just crawled into a cardboard box she was using as a focus for her teleporter beam.
- Black and Nerdy: Hatch is a freelance artist with a webcomic who hosts a regular bad movie night.
- Cloud Cuckoo Lander:Jack
- Community-Threatening Construction: The lower-middle-class Abrams was slated to be redeveloped as low-income apartment complexes.
- Crossover: Two, to be precise. One with The Tao Of Geek, and another, much earlier, with A Better Life Than This
- Fictional Counterpart: Star*Squad takes the place of most Star Trek or Star Wars references.
- Ditto Hyperforce and the Super Hero universe of your choice.
- Toymania=Toys R Us.
- First Girl Wins: Averted. Darby is the third female to appear in the strip, after Stephanie and Kendall.
- Fun with Acronyms: The good guy time travelers are the Time Line Authority. The bad guy time travelers are the Chronal Hierarchy: Advanced Operations Syndicate.
- CARD unit—Controlled Applications of Reality Distortion
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Jack spends a week claiming to see the audience. He never actually looks directly as us, however.
- MacGuffin: the Bleak Diamond.
- Nice to the Waiter: Even when the waiter doesn't deserve it. Also, Darby once left a date early when the guy she was out with wasn't.
- Meta Origin: Anyone exposed to the timestream gets superpowers.
- Office Romance: Bob and Darby. Averted with Neal and Ellen, who would certainly like to were it not for their job's rather specific rules.
- Only Sane Man: Everyone gets moments like this, with Bert, Stephanie, and Kendall having the most legitimate claims.
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Schedule Slip: The cartoonist used to have trouble maintaining a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule. Then he signed on for the Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge, and hasn't missed a Monday-thru-Friday update since 2005. - Shout-Out: Several webcomic characters have popped up as customers. Others have appeared as toys.
- Soul-Sucking Retail Job: Pretty much limited to Edith, although certain other characters may have their moments.
- Take That!: Derek, the Friendly Neighborhood Vampire, doesn't think much of Twilight.
- Unsatisfiable Customer: Many of them.
- Weirdness Censor: The CARD Unit has this as one of its features.
