The Redacverse
is the webcomic-based archive of Matt Comics's genre-busting stories. It started in 2009 as traditional pen-and-paper doodles, but remained in obscurity until 2017, when the author began to upload it online. It actually is a collection of comics, diary pages, fake newspapers and more, set on a Fictional Earth where All Myths Are True.
This project follows the adventures of Matt and loads of characters in a silly mix of Life Embellished, convoluted lore, comedy and haphazard plots.
The Redacverse provides examples of:
- Alt Text: Many pages use it as an opportunity for snarky comments or stray thoughts.
- Animate Inanimate Object: A recurring kind of character. Living toys, plushies, bubbles, balls and more all exist.
- Audience Surrogate: The retroactive introduction starts with two Readers sitting in armchairs with floating pages everywhere. They even get an explanation of the story directly from the Narrator.
- Bear Trap: The Boss's first appearance has him walking into a bear trap set by one of his employees.
- Big Ball of Violence: This is one of the standard ways to fight, featured in background and foreground fights.
- Bizarrchitecture: A house shaped like a giant toilet is introduced in Chapter 9.
- Comedic Sociopathy:
- Early on, Matt liked killing Ventoose way too much, and it was played for laughs.
- The Ball's recurring attacks against Matt and Therry are a frequent source of slapstick.
- Earthquakes Cause Fissures
- The Face of the Sun: The sun got a childish, cartoony face, and terrible manners, even burping in his first appearance. There's also a pig-faced variant picking its nose.
- Fog Feet: The Blue Ghosts are drawn with a stubby, legless lower body and float above the ground.
- Gag Nose: Both Il and the Skiski got big eggplant-shaped noses.
- Ghibli Hills: The comic's world got large areas of forest and grassy hills between relatively small towns. A lot of important characters and strange creatures can be found in the woodlands, and the initial protagonist lives in an isolated mountain house.
- Iron Butt Monkey: Therry has been stabbed many times, got hit on the head with his own guitar, and Matt even sent him to an icy exoplanet without any kind of protection. He's always back for the next page, or even the next panel. Of course, it helps that the comic doesn't take over-the-top violence too seriously.
- Life Embellished
- Living Dinosaurs: There are human-looking dinosaurs like the Matthewsaurus, still alive in the present day, and the Therrysaurus, who survived as a fossil. Several other dinosaurs also exist, including normal-looking ones, but they aren't all incredibly long-lived.
- Mile-Long Ship: The cloud-shaped Zauther ships come in varied sizes, but the Supreme Ship is by far the most enormous. According to the Zauther leader, it is 1 parsecnote long and 1 light year wide. Only its front end is seen.
- Mix-and-Match Critters:
- Arachnocurrillas are basically sasquatch-like creatures with spider legs.
- The Fly-Touch spell turns anyone into a half-fly hybrid. Of course, it gets used on an arachnocurrilla.
- Most Zauthers look like a mix of several preexisting characters.
- Mundane Fantastic: Some people develop the power to slide on their butts as they get older. Dinosaurs, talking animals and strange hybrids barely attract any attention. Soap bubbles can become deadly flying weapons. Those are only some of the many things that are considered normal in the Redacverse.
- Nonstandard Character Design:
- The simplistic art style of the early pages means that nobody had visible ears... except Grandpa, who got huge ears.
- Similarly, only a handful of characters had visible noses early on, always of the Gag Nose and Pinocchio-like variety.
- Not So Innocent Whistling:
- Matt does it after criticizing his father on the Chapter 1 cover.
- Grandpa does it after finding a way to avoid carrying heavy bags.
- One-Steve Limit: The Redacverse loves messing with this trope. Some characters can have octopus counterparts with similar names, but spelled with an "octopus accent" (for example, Matthew's counterpart is named Maffhew). Another kind of counterpart can be found on the Moon (Mattis for Matthew). And then there's a whole group of characters known as Your Father, His Father, Your Son...
- Pig Man:
- On Earth, pig folk are one of the standard humanoid races, mostly as background extras. They live more or less like humans and aren't associated with many negative pig stereorypes (aside from gluttony). They're usually bright pink (as opposed to more realistic flesh tones) and as tall as humans.
- On the Moon, there are shorter and grey-skinned pig people, most notably Terrys, the current lunar king.
- Plant Person: Matt loses a fight against two of them in the introduction. They look like human-shaped masses of plant matter.
- Running Gag: Even the tiniest earthquake will make Grandpa's seismograph go crazy.
- Slice of Life: Early pages are little more than silly records of whatever happened every Sunday.
- Stripped to the Bone: Zauther laser beams are a non-lethal variation. They instantly reduce their targets to charred, blackened skeletons, only for them to regenerate a few minutes later.
- Trivial Title: The comic was originally made by parodying, embellishing and redacting life. Other than that, the title isn't very important.
- White Mask of Doom: All Assassins wear one, with a big Slasher Smile to boot.
