Casey and Andy
is a completed webcomic by Andy Weir, about a pair of Mad Scientists and their wacky hijinx as they deal with their girlfriends, try to Take Over the World, kill each other (repeatedly), play RPGs, annoy next door neighbour Jenn, test-drive their inventions and do battle with Andy's nemesis, Grover Cleveland. Bob was there, too.
The characters of Casey and Andy are based on Weir and his best friend Casey. The other characters are named after Andy Weir's friends, including his cat, Cujo.
The comic was on Series Hiatus for 19 months between comics 644 and 645, before Andy finally went back to conclude the final story arc and the strip.
See also Cheshire Crossing, an uncompleted second webcomic by Weir, and The Martian, his debut novel, published to great success in 2014.
Includes examples of:
- The Ace: Quantum Cop, who starts out knowing everything except bovine dentistry. A strangely high number of his solutions to quantum mechanics problems involve hitting people with sticks.
- Advertised Extra: Grover Cleveland is touted as Andy's nemesis, but only shows up for a few arcs and one-off gags.
- Affably Evil: When you look a little closer at them, most of the major characters in the comic (apart from Quantum Cop) are pretty horrendous people who will lie, cheat, steal, commit murder and try to take over the world without any qualms — but they're also genuinely likeable, amiable, and usually easy to get along with. A special mention must go to Satan; sure, she's the literal Devil and she's an unashamed Card-Carrying Villain, but she's very sweet, polite and friendly.
- All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles: Comes up in a guest strip when someone leaves the "Porn-O-Mat" in "Japan mode."
- All There in the Manual: Jenn's occupation was "international jewel thief", first revealed if you bought David Morgan-Mar's C&A GURPS module.
- Another Story for Another Time: Andy's "Exploding Hamster" era mentioned in the epilogue.
- Art Evolution: No huge shifts, more the difference between two close tones of grey: First strip, next-to-last strip.
- Ascended Demon: Satan briefly returns to her status as an archangel during Azriel's attempted takeover of Hell (which serves as an example of Shown Their Work — according to Christian theology, Lucifer was an archangel before being cast out of Heaven).
- Ascended Extra: Jenn was introduced as a throwaway character, but — likely owning to the fact that she was a (relatively) normal person among weirdoes — she quickly gained prominence and ended up as one of the comic's main characters, with most of the storylines either revolving around or heavily involving her. Andy weir even claims that he came to view her as the comic's main protagonist over time.
- All Men Are Perverts: Yep. But as is frequently shown, All Women Are Lustful as well.
- Artistic License – Religion: Satan is portrayed as the ruler of Hell, and also as being God's daughter.
- Backstory Invader: The guest strips by Rob Petrone (starting here) feature Rob insidiously inserting himself into the title characters' lives (and the title). It doesn't end well for him.
- Belief Makes You Stupid: The author admits to having certain...opinions about organized religion that show up in the comic.
- Born in the Wrong Century: The Religious Zealot is left in 1886 where people share the same fervor and beliefs as him. He's pretty happy about it.
- …But He Sounds Handsome: "I do not know this brilliant and handsome Lord Milligan you speak of. I am Lord 'Smith.'"
- Butt-Monkey: The clearest example is Jenn. Both Casey and Andy have their moments of this too, Andy especially.
- Can Not Tell A Lie: Quantum Cop can't lie. He eventually gains the ability in the final arc as Character Development.
- Card-Carrying Villain: Lord Milligan. He goes out of his way to make sure that most, if not all, of the tropes of classic villainy occur come hell or high water. The reason he does this is that it also enforces the other rules of being a villain. Like being able to disable a Action Girl by using the Standard Female Grab Area.
- Cats Are Mean: And Cujo is a bastard even by cat standards.
- Cerebus Retcon: Conspicuously averted; the creator is very insistent on not giving an explanation for how the titular characters keep on dying and coming back to life.
- Cheated Angle: One strip mentions that the cartoonist had to move the cat around slightly between frames because otherwise it wouldn't be visible from certain angles.
- Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys: This strip embraces the trope.
- Chekhov's Gun: The Casey vaporiso-annihilatomat reappears after 168 strips, and the nineteenth century white house teleport-o-mat reappeared more than 350 strips after it was first shown!
- Cloudcuckoolander: Andy. Casey, by contrast, is more of a Wonka.
- Confusing Multiple Negatives: Casey tries to get the King of Sweden to leave his couch this way. It doesn't work.
- Contractual Genre Blindness: Lord Milligan is an Evil Overlord, with many expected tropes taken to extreme.
- Deadpan Snarker: Most of the characters have traces of this, but the clearest and most consistent examples are Casey and Jenn.
- Death Is Cheap: Casey and Andy die in strip #1. And then repeatedly afterwards.
- Deus Exit Machina: Weir had to write Satan out of some of the arcs or somehow occupy her so that she didn't use her demonic powers to bail Casey and Andy out when they got in a jam.
- Distaff Counterpart: Andy in every alternate universe.
- Divine–Infernal Family: Satan (who is portrayed as an attractive young woman, and is also Andy's girlfriend) is shown talking to God, Whom she refers to as "Daddy" (and Who at least sometimes refers to Satan as "my little girl").
- Early-Installment Weirdness: This rejection letter from God to Satan does not really work with their "loving father/daughter" relationship as presented later in the strip.
- Enemy Mime: The Mime Assassin is a walking trope.
- Evil Chancellor: Evil Grand Vizier Milligawain, from the Mountain of Mages arc. Except he's really not bad; Court Wizard Kasor is the real villain.
- Evil Feels Good: One of the perks with dating Satan
- Evil Is Cool: Referenced in-universe by (who else?!) Satan here.
- Evil Twin: Quantum Cop and Quantum Crook.
- Extreme Omnivore: The Planet Devourer.
- Fanservice: Once in a while Weir would take a break from the regular comic to make sexy, somewhat more realistic "cheesecake" pictures of Satan or Mary.
- Fetish: It's more or less stated during the final arc that Quantum Cop's turned on by Jen's thieving. Kinda puts his job in a new perspective, doesn't it?
- For Inconvenience, Press "1": This strip.
- Friendly Enemy: Sure, Lord Milligan wants to kill Casey and Andy, but that doesn't mean he won't play the occasional game of Dungeons & Dragons with them.
- Frame Break: Here!.
- Geeky Turn-On
- Genius Ditz: "Brains that run so fast they short-circuit themselves" is a pretty apt description of the titular characters.
- Girl Scouts Are Evil: Don't ever mess with Don Cindy.
- Good Angel, Bad Angel: Somewhat of a drawback with dating Satan
- Grover Cleveland: Andy's arch-nemesis.
- Hell of a Heaven: As his girlfriend is Satan, Andy is sent to heaven as eternal punishment.
- Holy Water: One storyline sees Satan square off against another demon... and he's packing a squirt-gun. As it turns out, it's filled with holy water blessed by a dying pope on Easter Sunday directly over the holy sarcophagus of St. Peter.
- Hot as Hell: Played straight with the uber-sexy Satan, who loves Andy, but still subjects him to the tortures of the damned sometimes.
- I Have Boobs, You Must Obey!: Jenn is the Trope Namer.
- It Runs on Nonsensoleum: many of their random inventions, in varying degrees work on nonsense physics or just because.
- Kid from the Future: J. J., Jenn's daughter (who is born in the last strip, but comes back from the future on a couple of occasions to Set Right What Once Went Wrong).
- Leaving You to Find Myself: Casey has Andy move out in the final strip as part of preparing to marry Mary.
- Manchild: Andy is the endearing kind; he never loses his childlike enthusiasm and wonder. Casey as well, due to sharing Andy's love of nerdy discussions. Part of the reason he has Andy move out is feeling the need to grow beyond this.
- Medium Awareness: the comic panel borders are the edges of the space-time continuum in this strip.
- Mirror Universe: Accessed by accident, and the origin of the Quantum Crook.
- Ms. Fanservice: Satan
- Mundane Wish: In one strip,a genie offers Andy the choice between eternal world peace, end to world hunger, or a pastrami sandwich. Andy chooses the sandwich.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: "No! Wait! My inventions must not be used for peace!"
- Not a Morning Person: In one strip, Satan is literally a monster until she gets her cup of coffee.
- Not So Above It All: Jenn, though the Only Sane Woman of the strip, discovers to her frustration that she can't relate to actual normal people because her life is too weird, and that the boys have really been rubbing off on her.
- Number of the Beast: The comic ended with strip number 666.
- Oh, Crap!: Satan's #2, Azrael, tries to supplant her by absorbing all her evil, thinking it will make her disappear. Instead, he turns her into the Archangel Lucifer, who proceeds to kick his ass.
- Opposites Attract: During a time travel storyline in which Jen accidentally change the past so she hooked up with Andy, it turns out Satan hooked up with the Religious Zealot.
- The Omnipresent: Bob, who has the ability to "be there, too". Meaning that any sentence can be affixed with "Bob was there, too." In essence Bob is (or at least, can be) everywhere.
- Only Sane Woman: Mary in the earlier strips, Jenn after her introduction. Though both of them have their own quirks.
- Out of Focus: Casey and Andy in a couple of the story arcs — most notably the final one, when Jenn, J. J. and Quantum Cop are the clear protagonists and the titular characters are mainly there as comic relief.
- Parody Sue: Rob Petrone.
- Perverse Sexual Lust: Andy, towards Frances Cleveland.
- Planet Eater: Can you blame it for starting small?
- Riddle for the Ages: How do Casey and Andy keep coming back to life, yet not remember it or know why it happens?
- Rock–Paper–Scissors: Andy and Casey play to decide who cleans the reactor core, only their version involves dynamite (which beats rock), and cyber-roach (which beats dynamite).
- Running Gag
- Land Pirates coming from nowhere to steal things.
- Casey sadly sitting on the sidewalk while the house is on fire and being hosed down. In one comic, subverted when an explosive compound Casey is about to use is stolen by a land pirate; the last panel is him sadly sitting on the sidewalk while the house is perfectly fine.
- Andy's rambling trains-of-thought, which often annoy Casey.
- Any pun being responded to by the pun police.
- Quantum Cop outsmarting Casey and Andy when they try to use physics to weasel out of a traffic ticket.
- Every single alternate-universe Andy is a woman, to Andy's puzzlement.
- And of course, Casey and Andy dying as a result of their inventions.
- Satan Is Good: Or at very least, really adorable.
- Scry vs. Scry: Quantum Cop and Quantum Crook pitting their wits.
- Seven Deadly Sins: To Mary's astonishment, Casey manages to go through all seven of them in just one strip.
- She Is All Grown Up: An amusing example when Casey fails to recognize Don Cindy the evil Girl Scout.
- Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Mary to Andy. Made worse by the fact that they live in the same house.
- Skintone Sclerae: In the early strips.
- Stalker with a Crush: Jenn to Quantum Cop.
- Standard Female Grab Area: Being a traditional dark lord has its benefits
- The Stoic: Quantum Cop. Most of the time.
- Story-Breaker Power: Satan, obviously. Every ongoing story arc needed some reason she couldn't or wouldn't solve the problem with a quick handwave.
- Take That!: An advertisement for Hell includes the real-life phone number for the Republican National Committee.
- Teach Him Anger: Jen's goal with Quantum Cop is to teach him how to lie, so he can work undercover. He finally learns in the last arc.
- Theme Tune Roll Call: The C&A Cast Song, written by Andy Weir himself, and performed by the band Moosebutter.
- Thing-O-Matic - All of their inventions are named this way (with one exception). At one point, someone asks them to "build a machine to track time trails", which they say makes no sense, but then are immediately able to once she rephrases the request as "build a time-trail-track-o-mat".
- The Thing That Would Not Leave: King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. It's implied he even died there.
- This Is Gonna Suck: "This has 'bad day' written all over it."
- Too Dumb to Live
- As mentioned above, Casey and Andy manage to get themselves killed or kill each other in a lot of very creative, effective ways. A submarine that uses a chimney for air supply? Come on. The best part was the Reaper himself coming in on a little motorboat pretty much face palming that even for them it was incredibly stupid.
- Fatalball, anyone? The GURPS supplement makes a large point out of the fact that Casey and Andy hold all the records, including the one for Only People Stupid Enough To Play.
- Too Kinky to Torture: Our heroes have been tied up by the bad guy. Satan obviously could break free from her bonds and free them—but she really likes being tied up.
- Two Scenes, One Dialogue: Quantum Cop and Quantum Crook pitting their wits.
- Unexplained Recovery: Casey and Andy are "mad scientist roommates who periodically die." They always get better, sometimes immediately.
- Unsound Effect
- Weirdness Magnet: Jenn has an "abnormal probability curve".
- Wham Line:Quantum Cop: "Back in 2006, Jenn is an international jewel thief."
- "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The very last strip covers what happened to the major characters.
- Writer on Board: Some of the strips are this with the author using the characters to tell the audience of his point of view.
- The Wonka: Casey, contrasting and complementing Cloudcuckoolander Andy.
- X Days Since: X seconds since...
- "You!" Exclamation: The final story arc kicked off with one of these and a Schmakk!! to the head.
- Your Mime Makes It Real: The Mime Assassin. His first shown spree is stopped when Quantum Cop manages to ensnare him in an invisible box.
Bob was there, too.
