Webcomic / Buttersafe

Buttersafe is a gag-a-day webcomic by Ray Castro and Alex Culang. It can be found here.

Recurring Characters:

• Saddest Turtle and his friend Jolly Octopus. The Saddest Turtle is a rather naive creature who likes playing the guitar.
• Punch Monster, a purple monster with one massive arm who punches people.
• Skeleton Harvester, a giant monster who harvests people's skeletons. Appears infrequently, but his first appearance was iconic enough that he is one of Buttersafe's most famous characters.
• Veiny Dog, a dog with very prominent veins.

There is also a Twitter feed, which they use to announce updates/discuss what they've been eating (usually in the same tweet).

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Buttersafe provides examples of:

• 419 Scam: "Email Scam" features an actual prince trying to transfer money in an identical setup. The recipient, Saddest Turtle, is a little too eager, and creeps out the sender.
• Anti-Humor: In "A Guy Walks Into A Bar".
  • Anti-Humor is fairly common in the dry world of Buttersafe. For example, "Fishing". The joke is that from the text in the first panel you expect some sort of hilarious shenanigans to go down. You expect these shenanigans (of the hilarious variety) to go down right after the guy says he's got one - say, he has difficulty reeling it in, the boat capsizes, whatever - so when it cuts right to the elephant being sanguinely in the boat with no problems experienced at all (nor indeed any indication that this is at all outside the norm) this goes against your expectations, and thus humour is born.
• Artistic License – Physics: Extensively lampshaded in "Great Neighbors" when a "7,000 m.p.h. wind" frees the protagonist's car from the glue it's stuck in, and provides it with enough momentum to match a working engine.
• Blessed with Suck: A man's having his wife be the most beautiful woman in the world turns out to be this in "Arbitrary Potato and the Most Beautiful Woman in the World", because Arbitrary Potato is a capricious and arbitrary potato.
• Body Horror: "Clear Skin". Clear skin is not necessarily a good thing. When a woman tries the lotion for clear skin, the lotion makes her muscles visible through her skin.
• Call-Back: In "The Space Dog", as the dog travels through space, a spaceman traveling with a pig, Saddest Turtle and Jolly Octopus on the moon, and a guy next to a eucalyptus tree, also on the moon, appear in the background.
• Cat Up a Tree: One of the many tragic events in the tragic life of Annabelle.
• Chest Burster: As part of an Alien homage in "APPLE".

• Cool Shades: The eponymous Burrito of "Let It Burrito" wears these. He's pretty cool.
• Cue Card Pause: Hang-gliding is GREAT! ...If you're a loser.
• Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: In "The Threat", the titular threat is "I will punch you in every genital you own. Every. Genital. You. Own."
• Depth Deception: "Depth Perception"
• Deus ex Machina: In "Great Neighbors", God stops the protagonist's runaway car. The rest of his journey is also rendered safe by a series of Contrived Coincidences.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Inverted in "House of Cards".
• Dissimile: In "Bird Stories III", it turns out making a difficult decision isn't a lot like that bird over there.
• Don't Explain the Joke: Used for depressing dystopian Anti Humour in "After the Explosion".
• Doorstop Baby: In "A Baby" the baby is forced to prove its might before it is accepted.
• Epic Fail:
  • "The Detour". There's getting lost, then there's ending up in the Twelfth Plane Of Torment while you were on your way to the kitchen.
  • In "A Simple Accident", a man practicing archery manages to shoot himself in both of his eyes.
• "Far Side" Island: The setting of "Life on the Desert Island".
• Five Stages of Grief: Applied to other things including buying a car and falling out of a tree in "The Five Stages".
• Flock of Wolves: Used twice in "Wolf in Sheep's Clothing. The first wolf goes to attack a "sheep" only to find it is another wolf. After it is quickly revealed that all the sheep are in fact wolves and the first wolf comments this does not work if they all do it. Elsewhere it is shown that all the sheep are in fact pretending to be wolves.
• Flying Car: Used in "No Parking", because it's set in The Future!
• Fun with Acronyms: "The Inventor" features the invention of Stacked Triangles Aligned In Right Angles, or stairs.
• Gamebooks: Parodied in "Choose Your Own Adventure", which appears to be one of these at first before Punch Monster intervenes.
• Imagine Spot: In "Watermelon".
• In a World…: "The Guy With The Really Wide Smile" is styled as a trailer and thus begins like this.
• It's Been Done: In "Show Me Your Moves", a guy gets mocked for 'inventing' the punch. And then the leg-punch.
  • In "The Inventor", it's stairs.
• Jerkass: Jolly Octopus, who derives personal pleasure from one-upping Saddest Turtle in every way possible, cheerily refuses to do anything whatsoever when Saddest Turtle is held for ransom, and runs a fake charity so he can spend money on a gourmet eatery, among countless other incidents.
• Kaiju: A giant T-Rex stalks the town in "The Adventures of Pie Man, Part 2: The Attack of the Terrible T-Rex" ("Ooh, he's so terrible!")
• Knights and Knaves: Parodied in "The Brothers". One always lies, one's a rabid coyote. And one's a...
• Long Runner: 2 strips a week (roughly) since 2008. Over 1500 strips total as of March 2023.
• Mayfly–December Romance: "Moon Junior".
• Metaphorgotten: The Water Cycle uses the water cycle as a metaphor for the afterlife, with two melting snowmen discussing whether they'll evaporate and eventually fall back down to Earth after they die. Anyway, they go to Hell because they killed a bunch of people.
• Monster Clown: Clowns are even scarier when they don't frown.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: In "The Tragic Life of Annabelle", a girl named Annabelle has some bad moments in her life leading up to a doctor telling her that "everyone who ever loved you just died. [Beat] Your mother will be here to pick you up shortly."
• "Not Wearing Pants" Dream: Discussed in "At School, No Clothes".
• Pokémon Speak: How the animals speak in "Voices of Nature".
• Pre Ass Kicking One Liner: In "Watermelon". "You want to know how I prefer my watermelon? Seedless." *BOOM*
• Radiation-Induced Superpowers:
  • Parodied in a Running Gag where The Rant claims that some character got his powers by being bitten by the appropriate radioactive object. In full: Pie Man's "“Pie Senses” come from being bitten by a radioactive can of syruped peaches"; The Champion of Tattoos "got his champion tattoo powers from being bitten by a radioactive tattoo needle"; Big Glasses "got his Big Glasses Powers from a radioactive one-hour glasses store"; the paramedic in "Being a Hero" "got his CPR powers from being bitten by a radioactive paramedic"; and Surfing Turtle "got his surfing & crying powers from a radioactive ocean of tears".
  • Captain Tomato, however, got his really-fast-tomato-eating powers from MIT, with a minor in Sociology.
• Ramp Jump: Subverted in "The Cliff".
• Retirony: "Gunned Down"
• Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue...: Roses are red, violets are blueniverse, I really like the centre of the universe.
• Running Gag: Whenever a character with a superpower appears in the comic, The Rant will explain that that character got their powers from being bitten by a radioactive <something related to the power>. For example:
  The God of Lightning got his lightning powers from being bitten by a radioactive lightning bolt.
  • Occasionally subverted, as in:
    He got his love of soccer from childhood.
• Screw Yourself: Applied to prokaryotic organisms in "Biology 101".
• Silly Reason for War: In "Thrift Shopping", a war breaks out between "Thissideland" and "Thatsideland" over ownership of a thrift-store bought sandwich.
• Spooky Photographs: Parodied in "Vacation Photos", where the ghost keeps showing up on their photos because it's needy.
• Summation Gathering: Parodied in "Punch Monster and the Case of the Missing Jewels".
• Take Our Word for It: Parodied in "Surprise".
• Tan Lines: The subject of "Shirt Tan".
• Tempting Fate: Subverted in "Suspense".
  • And done properly in "Head Situations".
  • And then, once more, in "The Bottomless Pit". It also serves as the page image for Tempting Fate.
• The Power of Love: Parodied in "The Power of Love".
• Third-Person Person: "The Third Person" discusses the difficulties of doing this when your friendship group averts the One-Steve Limit.
• Three Wishes: In "Wishes for a Newborn", Hopoquil (god of fertility) gives a couple three wishes for their newborn daughter.
  • And a genie grants a man three wishes in, well, "Three Wishes".
• Timmy in a Well: Subverted in "The Heroic Dog", where we learn that the dog's intentions are less than pure.
• To Be Continued... Right Now: Veiny Dog is put into prison and an inmate says he can think of a way to get him out, and the comic ends on To Be Continued... then after some empty space, it's shown that Veiny is pushed through the window bars.
• Twist Ending: "The Twist Ending" has a twist at the end.
• Underequipped Charge: "Serving the Queen" implies that bees are explicitly underequipped against attackers, where attacks are made with self-destructive weapons.
• Unusual Euphemism: "Robin Hood" imagines what it would be like if Robin Hood spent his time making up unusual insults.

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