The Lounge is a slice-of-life webcomic by artist John Joseco. The comic stars Italy Ishida, a Japanese-American young woman who takes over running the titular family business (a comic, anime, video game and coffee shop) after her father takes ill, and Max Espinosa, a teenage Filipino-American who is a close friend of Italy and the assistant manager of The Lounge.
The comic started as a gag-a-day strip, but very quickly became a story-driven slice-of-life comic. It can be found here
at Keenspot, and occasionally has NSFW updates.
This comic provides examples of:
- Animal-Eared Headband: Resident cutie-pie and cat lover Jamie occasionally wears a cat-eared one, moreso in earlier strips than later ones. Italy notes that customers spend more when she's wearing it.
- Animesque: The artist also borrows a few of the anime artistic trademarks, beyond just the general style of the characters.
- Art Evolution
- However recently it has been devolving (mostly due to the artist working on other projects) now looking worst then when it started.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Quite common in the earliest strips, though anymore, the most abuse the Fourth Wall gets is a bit of leaning on.
- Cerebus Syndrome: The inclusion of longer story arcs led to some more serious plots being incorporated, culminating in serious family conflict between Italy Ishida and her father, and the introduction of the children of her father's former business partner, hellbent on destroying the family business
- Cuteness Proximity: Jamie has it.
- Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Jamie MacKenzie, who is the quirky, irrepressibly happy foil to her coworkers Italy and Max.
- No Bisexuals: First averted, then played straight thanks to retcon, then traded out for the Depraved Bisexual trope.
- Otaku Surrogate: Italy. Not only does she like video games, comic books and anime, but she fancies women, too.
- Plot With Porn: There is a very well-written and though-out dramatic story running through this comic series, but it also has a number of scenes involving characters having sex.
- Punch-Clock Villain: Tobias again, who really couldn't care less about feud between Vilehelm and Ishida.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: The comic stays on calendar, and there are regular seasonal and holiday story arcs, particularly centered around Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. This can lead to stories getting rushed to keep up with the calendar.
