Webcomic / Ozy and Millie

Ozy and Millie is a webcomic by Dana Simpson (then known as D.C. Simpson) which ran from 1998 to 2008. It follows the daily lives of its two titular characters, who are children in an anthropomorphised-animal version of the Northwestern United States.

It was written in the style of a Newspaper Comic, with a four-panel format, writing reminiscent of Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes, and an ensemble cast that seems inspired by Pogo. The story arcs meander through political commentary and philosophy while simultaneously dealing with the children's own problems such as fitting in at school.

Main Characters:

• Ozymandias ("Ozy") Justin Llewellyn, a young Arctic fox. Tends towards excessive zen stoicism and Deadpan Snarker-dom.
• Millicent ("Millie") Mehitabel Mudd, a red fox. Excitable and rebellious, prone to random acts of destruction, but has a good heart.
• Llewellyn, a dragon and Ozy's adoptive father. He appears to be slightly over a century old and is prone to Historical In Jokes, especially ones related to obscure presidents (e.g., he claims to be responsible for William Howard Taft getting stuck in the White House bathtub), as well as bad Zen jokes. He runs for president every four years, despite having seceded from the United States to form the nation of Greater Llewellynlland.
• Ms. Mudd, Millie's mother. A lawyer and single mother. Although the most normal of the main four characters, she is implied to have been similar to Millie at her age. Also, her "hair" is blue for some reason. In October 2008, near the end of the strip's run, her full name was finally revealed as Mililani Minerva Mudd.
• Avery, a raccoon child prone to mindless following of pop-cultural trends.
• Timulty, Avery's younger brother, who radiates Incorruptible Pure Pureness (it helps that he's four years old).
• The dread pirate Locke, a fox who lives in a magical land inside Llewellyn's couch, is subject to Merlin Sickness, and is Millie's father.
• Felicia, a sheep and the Alpha Bitch (who later started moving in the Defrosting Ice Queen direction).
• Jeremy, a Jerk Jock rabbit who seems to live to stuff Ozy into trash cans. He's also attacked Millie a time or two.
• Stephan, a truly epic geek. Also an aardvark.
• Isolde, Llewellyn's niece, Ozy's cousin, and an aspiring reporter. Often helps Llewellyn with his plans and babysits Ozy and Millie.

Now has a character sheet. Sporadically being rerun on GoComics.

---

Tropes:

• Adults Are Useless: Mrs. Sorkowitz and Principal Beau Vine. They often don't do anything about reports of bullying no matter how many complaints are given against a student (most notably Jeremy) simply because they didn't see the alleged offense themselves or because they think it's the victim's fault for not conforming to the status quo.
  • Subverted with the school psychiatrist Dr. Wahnsinnig, who is actually aware of the bullying problems and occasionally calls out Principal Vine on how he handles it in his school.
• All Animals Are Dogs: Millie wags her tail when happy. Just like real life foxes.
• All Girls Like Ponies: Millie joins Locke's rebellion against Llewellyn when she finds out it's because Llewellyn wouldn't give him a pony. Word of God wonders just what exactly Millie would do with a pony. "Make it do her homework?"
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Stephan's love interest rejects him in favor of Jeremy.
• All Just a Dream: Both leads get one. Ozy dreams of growing dragon wings and Mille dreams her homework comes to life and starts a revolution.
• Alliterative Name: Millie's full name is Millicent Mehitabel Mudd, and her mother's is Mililani Minerva Mudd.
• Alternate Universe: The world under Llewellyn's couch cushions.
• Alpha Bitch: Felicia Laine fits most of the characteristics of an Alpha Bitch, despite being in elementary school. In subversion of the trope, however, she's not stupid (as much as she acts the part), nor does she have any attraction to the strip's Jerk Jock Jeremy (indeed, they've never even met). Her infatuations are mostly directed at the members of boy band du jour.
• Already the Case: When Llewellyn's family was inflicted with a Hereditary Curse to lose all their hair once a year, they shrugged it off, seeing as they're dragons and didn't have hair in the first place. Then Llewellyn adopted a fox...
• Anachronism Stew: Llewellyn's stories tend to include anachronisms like a caveman wearing sunglasses or a wild west sheriff using a paper coffee cup and comparing a DMV administrator's aim to an imperial stormtrooper.
• Ancient Conspiracy: Plenty of these pop up, most of them organized, perpetrated, and extended by dragons for their amusement and Played for Laughs.
• Animals Lack Attributes: Ozy doesn't wear pants and apparently has nothing, except when the annual Running Gag of him losing all his fur happens, in which case he gets covered up in various ways.
  Millie: You can tell his religion by looking at him.
  Isolde: Um...
  Millie: You know, 'cause he has no hair, like a Buddha statue. Why, what did you think I meant?
• Anti-School Uniforms Plot: In one arc, the school instates uniforms to try and enforce conformity on the distinctly non-conforming main characters. This leads to antics like Ozy and Millie swapping uniforms because Ozy isn't used to wearing pants.
• Arranged Marriage: While attending a family reunion, Ozy discovers that he and his fourth cousin Isolde are engaged, courtesy of his great Aunt Tulip. Ozy 'talks' his way out of it: after an exceptional performance at a family sporting event, he breathes fire on the betrothal papers. His father objects to the idea; it's described by a matriarch-like figure that it'd be the best way for Ozy to really do good for his family, given the species gap.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Many jokes throughout the series.
• Art Evolution: Lampshaded here with an Art Shift.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The fate of Ozy's biological mother. She invented the perfect flavor of ice cream, you see...
• "Ass" in Ambassador: One of these visits Greater Llewellynland. He refused to believe in dragons, so he refused to speak to Llewellyn at all until Millie annoyed him into it.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Millie Mudd here. There are many more examples, one practically by name here.
• Author Appeal: A look at some of the author's other art reveals that she has, of all things, a shaving fetish. This was worked into the comic as a Running Gag.
• Author Filibuster: Simpson was known to work her liberal views into some of the strips. She created another comic, I Drew This, specifically so she'd have another outlet for political statements, which mostly worked.
• Author Vocabulary Calendar: Millie seems to have one in-universe ("Isn't it just a lugubrious day out?"), although it apparently doesn't provide definitions.
• Barefoot Cartoon Animal: Most of the cast, with the exceptions noted below in Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal and The One Who Wears Shoes.
• Beach Episode: Happens in one arc.
• Beat Panel: Usually after Llewellyn or Millie says something off-the-wall. Often followed by a Flat "What".
• Been There, Shaped History: Llewellyn is implied to be nearly 200 years old — he frequently makes claims about being present at historical events such as getting Taft stuck in the bathtub.
• Big, Stupid Doodoo-Head: Millie's preferred type of insult.
• Bilingual Bonus: Dr. Wahnsinnig, the school psychiatrist. Her name means "insane" in German. Which is ironic, considering she's something of an Only Sane Lemur compared to the rest of the staff.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Not really an alien so much as a mythical creature, but Isolde claims that she conducts photosynthesis.
• Bland-Name Product: Names like Gathering: The Obsession pop up all the time unless Avery is involved.
• Brand X: The most popular and most heavily advertised beverage is Kablammo Soda. Also seen on occasion are Frooty-Os.
• Bullying a Dragon: Jeremy's rich father literally tries to do this when he challenges Llewellyn, a fire-breathing dragon almost twice his size, to go outside for a fight. This ends up with his Porsche ablaze. Llewellyn claims he had to sneeze due to the cloud of cologne that surrounded Jeremy's dad.
• Calvinball: Ozy and Millie occasionally partake in House Rules Parcheesi. We never see much of the game itself, but we do see its aftermath: the room tends to look like a tornado hit it. Shout-Out and Suspiciously Specific Denial here.
• Cannot Talk to Women: Stephan shows this whenever he tries to talk to a girl he likes. It's most evident when he tries to ask Stephanie out. On his first attempt, he forgets to use vowels, his second:
  Stephan: Will I go out with me?
• Cassandra Truth:
  • Millie attempts to invoke it on herself here by means of doing various overly silly things.
  • In another incedent also involving "What I did for summer vacation" Ozy gets sent to the psychiatrist, only this time it wasn't his plan.
• Contemplate Our Navels: Fairly often, and lampshaded here.
• Cool Shades: Invoked in this strip.
  • Avery has some pretty awesome ones here.
  • Timulty puts them on to make his lemonade stand cooler.
  • Jeremy's father wears them even indoors.
• Crashing Dreams: In the countdown of Millie's top five dreams, this trope is number 2. Naturally, this means we don't get to see number 1... until a week later.
• Crawl: In the series about Isolde becoming a reporter, the news story she's covering features in its crawl "A public service announcement followed me home the other day" (a reference to R.E.M.'s song "Bad Day" and possibly the music video for the same; see above) and "Help me I'm shrinking."
• Crime of Self-Defense: Jeremy keeps pushing Millie into a pool of mud, knocking her over every time she tries to get up. Finally, she snaps and socks him in the face... at which point a teacher immediately spots her, and hauls her into the principal's office for starting a fight. (The injustice inherent in the school system is a frequently visited theme.) What makes this even worse, the same teacher, upon being questioned by Millie's mom, pretty much admitted she saw the whole thing and only punished Millie because it was easier than dealing with the REAL bully. Quoth Millie's mom: "Did it hurt having your soul extracted?"
• Cue the Flying Pigs: Millie draws designs for a pig catapult in an attempt to reverse-invoke this. She also acquires a ten-foot pole for her mom to touch a silly lawsuit with.
• Cute Little Fangs: Cute little vulpine fangs. Despite the cast being comprised of several carnivorous animals (some of which are mythological) most often their teeth are downplayed. The art usually only highlights Millie's fangs, whenever she's saying something particularly crazy — Ozy's are only obvious when he's talking. Somewhat lampshaded here.
• Deadpan Snarker: Ozy, being The Stoic, manages to be so deadpan that his targets often don't even realize that he's being snarky. A prominent case of this came when Avery declared himself to be a "bad boy".
• Delightful Dragon: The strip treats dragons in general as harmless and lovably eccentric. This is especially evident with Llewellyn, who is a loving adoptive father to Ozy and a Cool Old Guy.
• Demoted to Extra: Stephan used to be a much bigger part of the comic. The cartoonist explains that he was created to represent the overly confident geeks of the dotcom era; when the dotcom bubble burst, there simply wasn't as much of a place for Stephan.
• Dinner Order Flub: Llewellyn goes to a Chinese restaurant and tries to place his order in Chinese. The waiter brings him a shoe and a bowling ball.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Llewellyn (who has declared his property to be a sovereign country) decides to legalize cutting tags off mattresses. The U.S. is not happy with this, and ends up deploying border patrols to prevent people from smuggling mattresses between the two countries. In case you're confused, this arc was written around the time Canada was considering legalizing marijuana. (It failed, but still.)
• Don't Do Anything I Wouldn't Do: Backfires when Pirate Captain Locke pretends to be Millie at school:
  Ozy: Just don't do anything Millie wouldn't do.
  Locke: Okay, that should be easy enough. Listen up, everybody! We're going to consolidate our pirate booty, and then pillage the principal's office!
  Ozy: [Facepalm] Shoot... I forgot he's met her.
• Draconic Humanoid: Llewellyn, Isolde and most of the other dragons in the strip.
• Dragged into Drag/Wholesome Crossdresser: It is speculated that Ozy has worn dresses/skirts as much as he has pants. He once admitted that he prefers them.
  • Dress/Skirt: here, here, here, here (seven strip arc).
  • Pants: here (continues in next strip), here, here, here, here.
  • It's also noteworthy that Dana did not initially "adult Ozy" wearing pants, but she has drawn him wearing a kilt. The pants would finally arrive in early 2024.
• Dreadful Musician: Millie's attempts at songwriting range from completely unstructured, to trying to exhaust every possible rhyme for a word (and inventing new ones).
• Early-Installment Weirdness: An early strip had Millie attempting to petition her parents. Later it was established that her father left before she was born.
  • Also, Millie once asked Ozy to holler if anyone came to the girls' restroom while she was doffing her overalls (to dry them with the hand dryer). For most of the comic's run thereafter — perhaps due to her Flanderization into more of a Cloud Cuckoolander — she didn't need much of a reason to get naked in public.
• Extreme Omnivore: Llewellyn, being a dragon, has been known to drink gasoline, lighter fluid and rocket fuel, and once claimed to have eaten Joseph McCarthy's car. The buffet at the Llewellyn family reunion implies that motor vehicles are common draconic cuisine, as his Aunt Tulip ate a bus.
• Fake Band: Mostly boy groups.
  • Backstreet Spice Boys.
  • N The Sink
• First Kiss: Millie's kiss to Ozy, delivered to convince Felicia she ''didn't'' like him.
  • Ozy's first, Millie's second. Her first was improvised by her school play co-star Avery. Millie was irate; her replies involved a wedgie and a punch in the face, at minimum. As Avery wasn't wearing pants at the time, that's quite a feat.
• Flat-Earth Atheist: The walrus ambassador to Greater Llewellynlland doesn't believe in dragons. When he meets Llewellyn, his reaction is to dismiss his words as the sound of the wind.
• Flanderization: In-universe example, where Llewellyn's horns exaggerate character traits when worn. Ozy becomes so passive he goes a whole day without moving, Millie becomes so mischievous she tries to cut off Ozy's tail, and Avery does nothing but gush about how awesome he is after putting them on.
• A Fool and His New Money Are Soon Parted: Timulty is given a lot of money just for mentioning that he knows something about the internet (the comic was parodying the dot com bubble before it burst). He immediately blows all of it on candy.
• Foreigner for a Day: Greater Llewellynlland (notable in that it never had the snapback).
• Fully-Dressed Cartoon Animal: Isolde and Captain Locke, as well as Ms. Mudd before she was redesigned as a Barefoot Cartoon Animal.
• Fun with Homophones: Invoked poorly by Millie who spends quite a few strips trying to set up a situation where she asks Ozy "Do you want your palm read?", he says yes, and she gets to paint his palm with the bucket of red paint she's been carrying around. It never quite works out; Ozy figures out what's going on almost immediately but is perfectly willing to watch her continue to try.
• Furry Confusion: A seagull of similar size to Mrs. Mudd was seen in a classy restaurant, but in the Beach Episode Millie has a conversation with a realistically sized seagull who is apparently wild.
• Furry Reminder: Occasionally. Both Ozy and Millie have been seen to sit down on their haunches like normal foxes, are inconvenienced by their lack of sweat glands, and scratch itches with their feet.
• Genki Girl: The hyperactive, lovably eccentric Millie Mudd is a Genki Girl-in-training.
• Genius Book Club: In the April Fools' Day gag panel, all of the characters are acting wildly out of character; Felicia is holding and enthusiastically praising a book by Proust.
• Girl Posse: Felicia Laine, with her unnamed cat and squirrel. However, after Felicia decided to become a goth, this caused the other two members in her group to basically disown her, being turned off by her weirdness.
• Girls Have Cooties: The "cool people" sometimes think so. Felicia's response to Millie touching her after being 'infested' by boy germs from Ozy? Runs away screaming for various cleaners, culminating with 'Heck, set me on fire!'
  • So does Locke in this strip.
• A Good Name for a Rock Band: Flying Couch.
  • Don't forget Pinkness Poisoning.
• Goth: Lampshaded: Felicia has times when she'll break out the goth makeup in what everyone except the extremely gullible in the strip consider to be a very fake goth style.
• Groin Attack: Discussed between Ozy and Millie here. Ozy decides to keep his distance, to which Millie rolls her eyes and says she was "just being colorful".
• Guest Strip: The first one was drawn by no-one less than Bill Holbrook of Kevin & Kell.
• Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal: Ozy generally wears a vest and a top hat, but no pants, which is lampshaded at least once. (Speculation runs he's worn dresses more often than pants.) Ms. Sokowitz and Avery and eventually Llewellyn have outfits that lack pants as well. Millie and Felicia do not wear shirts, and Millie has plenty of scenes entirely unclothed. Timulty tends to be nude save for his fur. Note that whenever Ozy ends up bald, he does have to cover up; once this is done with pants, but usually he manages with either a long shirt or awkward camera angles.
  • Some fans have noted that Ozy generally seems to have a "two articles of clothing" rule, especially since some newer images of his older self show him wearing just a beret and scarf instead of his usual hat and vest.
  • This is something of an odd example — it regularly draws comment, suggesting that Ozy and Avery are expected to wear pants, yet nobody ever treats it as if their exceptional nudity is a problem. Other characters the same age also go around without a full complement of clothing with no comment. As is usually the case with this trope, calling attention to the fact is mostly based on the Rule of Funny.
• Hand-or-Object Underwear: Ozy resorts to this whenever the Llewellyn hair curse hits him (i.e. here), at least until he finds some pants.
• Hand Puppet: Millie's "Mister W" sock puppet^note Slightly odd considering she's a Barefoot Cartoon Animal, that she frequently used to mock George W. Bush.
• Happily Adopted: Ozy is a fox raised by a dragon. He's quite happy with his dad, even if he is a bit... odd. And, at the very end of the strip, his dad and Millie's mom get married, giving him an adoptive-but-loving mother as well. He's been told of his biological parents, but as he reminded Millie once, he knows who his real father is. Even if he occasionally sits on him, or sets him on fire, or makes him scrub the moat as a chore.
• Happy Dance: Llewellyn and Ozy do one to celebrate the impending failure of Llewellyn's Presidential campaign.
• Hereditary Curse: Llewellyn and his family are cursed to lose their hair every year. Since they're dragons, this didn't come up much until he adopted Ozy.
• Historical In-Joke: Llewellyn loves these. So much.
• House Rules: House Rules Parcheesi, which is most definetely nothing like Calvinball. We never hear anything about the rules or gameplay, seeing only snapshots and aftermath.
• Hurricane of Excuses: Millie gets one of these in this strip, when she decides to practice running for president. She ends with "I had to wash my Styrofoam!"
• Hurt Foot Hop: Millie steps on a bee and does the hop with an accompanying "YEEOWCH!!!"
• Hypocritical Humor: The news report on Millie and Isolde's thermometer theft shifts between describing Greater Llewellynlland as hostile and peaceful within the same sentence.
• I Need to Go Iron My Dog: In "Dealing With the Press", Ozy springs a practice question on Millie about taking cookies from her mother's cookie jar, filling the role of a reporter on her presidential run. At first, Millie's excuses are reasonable enough, but it ends with "I had to wash my Styrofoam!"
• Ice-Cream Koan: The strip occasionally makes Zen jokes using Ice Cream Koans, like showing a Zen map ("Go one place and not another") or a Zen board game ("It's your turn to move by not moving").
  • X-ing by not X-ing is a Running Gag in the comic. It's taken to even higher levels of absurdity when Llewellyn runs for president on the Zen Party ticket, and declares that he's running by not running. Ozy asks him why he's running, and he says he's running because he's not not running, and thus that he's not not running by not not not running.
  • This strip shows Ozy using an Ice Cream Koan to win a game. Maybe.
• Inexplicably Awesome: The dragons are a mild case. Oddly enough, they're not magical beings as such, but they do seem to be involved in the surreal from time to time. Ozy put it best: "They like to attempt the impossible on a regular basis. Sometimes, to their surprise, it actually works." This may account for why there's a portal to another dimension in Llewellyn's couch.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: Subverted when an arc centering on Jerk Jock Jeremy's ceaseless bullying of Ozzy, brings up the "bullies are really just insecure and have low self-esteem" stereotype. The arc closes with a look into Jeremy's head, where we see that he's actually an egomaniac with a vastly inflated sense of self-worth.
• Innocent Innuendo: Ozy, who doesn't wear pants, has lost all his fur, and Millie notes "You can tell his religion just by looking at him." She was actually referring to the fact that his lack of hair makes him look like a Buddha statue.
  Millie: What did you think I meant?
• Irony: Avery tried so hard to be cool, when in fact he was cool all along if he just stopped trying to be cool. Because all that forced effort was actually doing the opposite.
• Interspecies Adoption: Ozy (a fox) is the adopted son of Llewellyn (a dragon).
• Innocent Prodigy: Nearly all the youngsters at some point.
• Jerk Jock: Jeremy. Much like in Calvin and Hobbes, the titular characters never actually get back at him, and rarely manage to avoid him. Millie could initially avoid his more physical attention since he Wouldn't Hit a Girl, but when she demanded equal treatment, he complied. However, while the kids couldn't do much against him, the fact that Ozy's family consists entirely of dragons has occasionally brought some truly satisfying results.
• Karma Houdini: Jeremy is almost never punished for his bullying. This could also apply to Felicia, though to a lesser extent.
  • May be a case of sorta subjective Truth in Television. To a kid who gets routinely bullied, it seems that the bully never truly gets what he deserves for it or they would have stopped a long time ago. There is an entire story arc about how Millie gets punished for hitting Jeremy back after he hit her, simply because the teacher didn't see the first offense. Many a bullied kid can tell you similar stories.
    • Though many cases in real life, bullies at some point wake up and realize what a monster they had been, though at that point the kids they tormented were long in the past and since moved away to who knows where? (So it seems like a Karma Houdini to the victims) while the bullies have to live with the torment of guilt for what they did for the rest of their lives. (Then of course there are those who will always be psychopaths/assholes forever) But knowing they'll never be able to apologize, nor get that forgiveness is the worst feeling in the world, and in many opinions rightfully deserved.
• Lame Pun Reaction: When Millie wonders why it's called "impeachment", Ozy's punny reply makes her want to pour orange juice over him.
• Laugh Track: If anyone would invoke this trope in a medium that doesn't even have any audio, it's Millie, with a boombox that has a laugh track on it.
• Least Rhymable Word: Llewellyn invents the "authentic Llewellyn-brand borange" just so that orange will have a rhyme. He's a bit unclear about what exactly it does.
  • Not to mention that the very first strip has Ozymandias relieved that the kids at school can't make childish bullying rhymes about him because nothing rhymes with his name.
• Like Brother and Sister: Ozy and Millie have this so much that in the final arc their parents get married.
• Lions and Tigers and Humans... Oh, My!: Possible but never confirmed, as real-life celebrities like George Bush and John Lennon are mentioned, but it is never stated if they are their human selves or furry alternates. When asked about this Dana admitted she never even considered that. Although we once saw a painting of Albert Einstein as a human.
• Lite Crème: Discussed in one strip while Ms. Mudd and Llewellyn are shopping for cereal and spot things like Froot-O's and Sinn-a-munn Crispies.
  Llewellyn: I had no idea there were so many synonyms for sugar.
• Mama Bear: Mrs. Mudd. When her daughter has truly been wronged, she will do something about it, even when it's an uphill battle.
• Master of Delusion: Millie here.
• Mattress-Tag Gag: Turned into a Gulliver's Travels-esque satire: Llewellyn legalizes this act in his tiny country. The U.S. takes serious offense at this.
  • Even earlier, Ozy implies that cutting tags off mattresses is a worse crime than music piracy.
• Meaningful Name: Dr. Wahnsinnig, the school psychiatrist. Her name means "insane" in German.
  • Mildly ironic because she's the Only Sane Man of the school faculty.
• Merlin Sickness: The dread pirate Locke. He has a normal memory. At the time of the comics, he's a child. He's also Millie's father, and remembers doing some "really icky things" about ten years ago. Interestingly, the subject of what happens when he reaches the youngest possible point is touched upon- it turns out that, rather than "turning into a zygote, then disappearing", he swings around and ages the other way. It was never clarified in-comic, but Word of God states that when he starts aging forward and becomes too old to live, he'll start aging backwards again, in an infinite loop, though the writer never stated he is actually immortal.
• Must Have Caffeine: An early strip, from when the writer admits she was going for the newspaper comic audience.
  Millie: I don't care if it does stunt my growth. I. Need. COFFEE.
  • Subverted once she actually gets hold of some.
• Name and Name
• No Intelligent Life Here: Parodied, as Millie pretends to be a space explorer on a search for unintelligent life, which turns out to be extremely easy.
• No Name Given: Ms. Mudd, until October 2008.
• Non-Humans Lack Attributes: Of the "fur covers everything" variant, judging by Ozy's awkward attempts to cover himself every time he's shaved.
• Non-Mammal Mammaries: subtle but visible on Millie's mother.
• Noodle Implements:
  • Often combined with Historical In Jokes by Llewellyn for such masterpieces as "...that photo of me with Mrs. Calvin Coolidge and all the whipped cream." In fact, a number of Llewellyn's Historical In Jokes seem to involve whipped cream. Though knowing him (and this comic) there's no guarantee that he meant you probably thought he meant.
  • Three words: House Rules Parcheezi.
  • Also on Take your Daughter to Work day, that conversation Ozy had with Llewellyn that got censored. No shortage of implements here.
• Noodle Incident: Isolde accidentally sneeze-fried Ozy three times.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Millie does this with Felicia, of all people. Millie herself admits that, aside from the surface personality, both she and Felicia are smart (though it's more of a book-smart sort of intelligence in Felicia's case), competitive, a bit short-tempered, and prone to taking a black-and-white view of the world.
• Not So Stoic: Ozy looked like he was gonna cry after hearing about his birth mother.
• Once a Season: There is a story arc that occurs once a year in which Ozy somehow loses all his fur. This is explained to be because of a family curse that only affects Ozy because he's the only member in the family to actually have fur. It is later explained that the whole curse story was a lie told to him by his father.
• The One Who Wears Shoes: Isolde and Locke. Also, Ms. Mudd, in the early comics, though they were phased out with the comic's Art Evolution.
• Only One Name: Llewellyn, apparently — The evidence is this wedding invitation. His son Ozy inherits the name as a family name. Millie's mother has always been referred to as simply "Ms. Mudd", and her first name was never revealed to the readers until this strip came out.
  • Avery's last name is never revealed, but this doesn't seem to occur to most readers.
• Orphaned Series: A followup series showing Ozy and Millie's later life was planned but never written, probably due to Simpson's later strip Phoebe and Her Unicorn becoming popular enough to take up most of her time.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Llewellyn is essentially a lovably eccentric Englishman — and a wise, kind-hearted adoptive father — in dragon form. Oh, and he's also Really 700 Years Old. "Lovably eccentric" is the dragons' hat — during a family reunion, Ozy won a game by being suitably Zen in his justification for not participating to begin with.
• Our Slogan Is Terrible: The local grocery store Pay 'n Pay, "Where freshness is a possibility."
• Overly Prepared Gag: When Millie has "serious beef with the leaf grief belief thief." Ozy calls her on it.
• Painting the Medium:
  • Llewellyn's font (and those of the other dragons, with the exception of the teenage Isolde). According to Word of God, the weird font represents the dragon accent, and Isolde lacks the accent because she has grown up in the US. Lampshaded here when a character says to Llewellyn "You also speak in a non-regulation font."
  • In addition, Jeremy, the dull-witted bully, speaks in all lowercase, in a cruder handwriting style.
  • Dana continues the "speaking in fonts" gag in Phoebe and Her Unicorn.
• Parody Retcon: In-universe, Millie attempts this for a poorly-written essay here.
• Perky Goth: Happens to Felicia near the end, as she becomes Goth, but the circle of Goths she tries to hang out with snubs her because she's "too happy" so she quickly abandons that.
• Phrase Catcher: Anybody talking to Llewellyn for long will end up going "Wait. What?"
• Piano Drop: In the strip aptly titled "The Friend Zone," Stephan is smushed by a piano bearing the words, "I just want to be friends." (In older versions of the website, the strip was instead titled, "The appropriate metaphor.")
• Pint-Sized Kid: All underage characters except for maybe Jeremy and the other bullies. Lampshaded several times:
  • When Ozy and Millie try to use the drive-thru at a fast-food restaurant because Millie can't look over the counter.
  • Or when Millie tries to play an electric guitar that's longer than herself, and she cannot even reach the strings with her right hand.
  • Or when Timulty needs a ladder to get onto a bike, and even then he can reach neither the handlebar nor the pedals.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Captain Locke zigzags this. In his first appearance, he sails to a convenience store to buy gum. The next time he's seen, he does a Prince and Pauper switch with Millie and tries to raid the principal's office. Later he mentions having battled a giant squid and attempts to overthrow the government of Greater Llewellynlland.
• Playful Cat Smile: Millie has a bit of one when she finally manages to annoy the ambassador from the U.S.
• Playing Doctor: Subverted, as it's used to parody health insurance ('Thanks for sitting here by yourself for an hour. Here's a referral.'). They wonder why they're so concerned about playing doctor and conclude it's out of worry it'd make them cynical. Keep in mind that Ozy is normally a Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal anyhow.
• Plot-Relevant Age-Up: After a couple of years, Simpson aged the characters about two years, appropriately, but they then remained that age.
• Popular Is Dumb: Played with in an And I Must Scream-ish way. It's implied that Felicia actually has normal intelligence, but has to constantly play dumb because her friends would see her as a nerd if they found out she wasn't as shallow as them.
• Potty Emergency: "So I bought this stuff. The ad on TV said it's guaranteed to make me 'regular'!"
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: Played for Laughs when Llewellyn attempts to harness Millie's hyperactivity as a perpetual motion machine. Once the experiment is over, she's left sleepwalking and mumbling nonsense.
• Punny Name: Principal Beau Vine. Take a wild guess at his species.
• Recycled In Space: Calvin and Hobbes... WITH FURRIES!
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Millie is red and Ozy is blue.
• Retcon: With regards to curses.
• Revealing Cover-Up: One of Ozy's dragon relatives, Tiberius, managed to do this with the "U.F.O. cover-up conspiracy" he was in charge of. What makes this especially embarrassing is that U.F.O's genuinely don't exist in this universe.^note  At least to the dragons' knowledge.
• Rule of Funny: The character sheet on Jeremy: "He's a rabbit because that seemed funny."
• The Runaway: After he gets humiliated and brutally rejected by Felicia Stephen ends up running away from home to California. Considering that Stephen is still a child and he hadn't told anyone where he went, it was lucky that Ozy's cousin Isolde spotted him while she was in the state herself. Stephen wasn't harmed in any way apart from getting humiliated by a CEO of a company he began to work for but who knows what could have happened had Isolde not found him right away — especially since his parents didn't even notice he was gone until he returned because they were too busy watching a TV show marathon.
• Running Gag: Ozy ends up bald at least once a year.
  • One time it happens to Millie instead.
• Sarcasm-Blind: Avery
• Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl: Played With. Millie is just as smart and introspective as Ozy. She just doesn't see this as an obligation to act mature.
• Scenery Censor: Done with a lollipop here.
• Seattle: The setting for the comic...
  • Write What You Know: ...probably because D.C. Simpson lives there.
• Self-Deprecation: Dana also dabbles in songwriting, and had the lyrics to one of her songs appear in the strip. Felicia proceeds to mock the heavy use of overly emotional metaphors.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Actually a Self Fulfilling Wish.
• Seven Minute Lull: Implied in an early strip. "Implied" because it didn't visually portray the lull.
• Sgt. Pepper's Shout-Out: This◊ unused cover for a trade paperback collection.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story:
  • Most of Llewellyn's stories are this, Spoof Aesops, or both. At one point Ozy remarks, "Some kids look for Waldo. I look for Dad's point."
  • Felicia starts dyeing her wool black, which scares the school staff into prohibiting black wool. Millie, despite hating Felicia, gets indignant at this suppression of the right to freedom of expression, and covers herself with black cotton balls in protest, only to find that Felicia surrendered to the dress code without a fight and sheared herself.
• Shame If Something Happened: Done twice: once by Millie (who can't quite pull it off), once by someone from the government (who can).
• Shout-Out:
  • Along with Added Alliterative Appeal. Millie's middle name is "Mehitabel", as in archy and mehitabel by Don Marquis.
  • Also, Isolde's dragon professor is Smaug (from the animated version).
    • Ozy's great-grandfather is named Pervical Smaug Llewellyn.
  • This comic has Locke quoting the Bob Dylan/Byrds song "My Back Pages".
  • This comic has the same gag as the opening scene of the Blackadder episode "Chains".
• Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace: Captain Locke shows up at this point of the wedding. After confirming that Llewellyn loves the bride, he hits the groom in the face with a pie, starting a food fight. Of course, pie fights are a traditional part of dragon weddings, so it isn't as disruptive as you'd think.
• Spit Take: In an early (1999-ish) strip, Millie discovers that she can make her mother do a spit-take by sneaking up behind her while she's reading the paper and saying "Lewinsky." Ozy then tries this on Llewellyn; he discovers that, since Llewellyn is Really 700 Years Old, saying "Lewinsky" doesn't get a reaction but saying "Teapot Dome" does. (Being a dragon, his version involves fire breath.) A couple years later, Millie discovers that she can now achieve the same effect again, by saying "dimpled chad."
• Spoof Aesop: Several, including "Pirates are good at math."
  Millie: Why is it I only learn moral lessons with zero relevance to absolutely anything?
• Springtime for Hitler: In 2000, Llewellyn runs for president against Bush and Gore on a lark, as is clearly demonstrated by his running on the People With Nothing Better To Do ticket. He then chooses an inherently ridiculous platform to ensure that he doesn't actually get the job. Despite the fact that his running mate is a stack of pancakes and his campaign promises involve outlawing bread and selling Arizona and New Mexico to Mexico to get the money needed to buy British Columbia from Canada, he ends up inexplicably popular, and ends up neck and neck with the other two candidates thanks to some confusing ballots. He ultimately has to withdraw from the election in order to escape the risk of actually having to become president, which made him even more popular, as it proved that he was far more mature than either of the other two candidates.
• Straight Man: Ozy is usually this to Millie. And his dad. And Avery. Millie is sometimes this to Felicia.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: Oddly enough, Millie and Mr. Larnblatt, the music teacher. When music classes are cancelled to make way for standardized test, Mr. Larnblatt, the music teacher, starts shouting about how important music is using increasingly crazier metaphors, eventually getting to "Music is the nucleus of the cell! The avocado of death!" Later, after the music class has been restored, Millie expresses her joy to Mr. Larnblatt using the exact same phrasing. He answers "Yes, well, I did tell them that."
• Stuffed into a Trashcan: Jeremy's (most likely) daily hobby involving poor Ozy. This webcomic exemplifies and often abuses this trope.
• Supernaturally Young Parent: The Dread Pirate Locke ages in reverse, making him about the same age as his daughter Millie.
• Surrounded by Idiots: Captain Locke has a pirate crew that makes it seem more like he's running a daycare. Justified in that everyone in the alternate universe he hails from has Merlin Sickness.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: The comic strip for 2001-06-13 has an instance of this. Actually plausible...
• Symbol Swearing: Lampshaded in a 2003 strip. As it turns out, Timulty has just been memorizing characters off the keyboard.
• The Tell: The tails of the fox charcters show their emotions. This is mentioned many times, including for Ozy and Ms. Mudd
• Tied-Together-Shoelace Trip: Millie tried to do this to Ozy while he was contemplative, though he noticed before he tried to walk. It's still impressive since she had to put shoes on him first.
• Tomboy: Millie doesn't always play with dolls, but when she does it's as part of a "space commander" game, or she's making them do political protests.
  • Tomboy with a Girly Streak: She occasionally expresses a desire for ponies.
• Totem Pole Trench: Isolde and Millie try this to get Ozy pants from some lobbyist in Washington, D.C., but the lobbyist targets see through it instantly.
• Tyrannical Homeowners' Association: Subverted. The HOA frequently harasses Llewellyn over his "tacky" castle with a moat, lawn flamingos wearing Che Guevera shirts, and rocket-propelled windmills. However, he's also quick to remind them that they have no legal ability to do anything about it (presumably since he's older than the concept of HOAs).
• Unicorn: Llewellyn the dragon once had a crush on a unicorn when he was younger. She was way out of his league, though.
• Volleying Insults: Ozy and Millie had a friendly version of this in one strip, in one of their games: iambic pentameter slam.
• Vomit Discretion Shot: In the arc where Avery tries smoking, there's a strip where Millie stands outside the bathroom listening to him vomit.
• Wacky Parent, Serious Child: With Ozy being more or less the Only Sane Man, Llewellyn arguably needs his adopted son just as much as Ozy needs Llewellyn.
• Walking Spoiler: Locke, a fox kid who is the same age as Millie, was revealed to be Millie's backwards aging Dad from another dimension in one of the most compelling and dramatic arcs in the entire series. This is usually the story arc everyone mentions, though many fans respect the comic too much to spoil.
• Webcomics Long-Runners: April 1998 to December 2008.
• What Have We Ear?: Ozy does it here, to a fundamentalist homeschooled kid. She thinks it's witchcraft, leading poor Ozy to be tarred and feathered. (Don't worry, he's fine.)
• Wily Walrus: The "ambassador" that Bush sent to Greater Llewellynlland was a walrus who refused to believe in dragons (the "ruler's" species) and mostly just laid about eating all the food.
• Wingding Eyes: When the nerdy aardvark Stephan goes into über-geek mode, his glasses show things like dollar signs, clocks or whatever is appropriate in the situation.
• Would Hit a Girl: Jeremy, because Millie accused him of being sexist when he said he wouldn't.
  • Wouldn't Hit a Girl: After that, Millie decided to take advantage of the fact that Jeremy (reluctantly) can't hit girls. Not that it helped her much, since Jeremy is good at Loophole Abuse.
• Word-Salad Humor: Usually from Millie, like her attempt at creating a catchphrase for Avery, among other things. "Armadillo! Armadillo! The cheese from Zimbabwe has lugubriously flattened my popcorn!"
• World of Funny Animals: Plays with this trope. The main characters are two fox children and their single parents, one of whom is a dragon. However, figures from actual history (such as several American presidents and John Lennon) are mentioned, although they're never shown.
• You Are the New Trend: Happened to Millie once. She accidentally dyes her head black (don't ask), and for some reason that's never really explained (Millie is not remotely a trendsetter or popular), Felicia takes this as a cue that dying one's head is "the latest thing" and copies it. This eventually leads into her and her friends copying Millie's Limited Wardrobe and hanging out with her, before abandoning her again when she predictably fails to move on to the next new fad.

---