Webcomic / The Whiteboard

The Whiteboard is an unusual paintball-themed Furry Webcomic about an Alaskan airsmith polar bear named Doc and his animal friends (all of them Funny Animals) as they play paintball, deal with ornery customers of Doc's shop, and cause crazy stuff to happen by building machines way more powerful than is necessary. Read it here.

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The Whiteboard provides examples of:

Tropes: A to C

• Abhorrent Admirer: It's not completely clear, but it's hinted that Doc may be one of these to Pirta. And Kasi is definitely this to Jinx. For now.
• Abusive Parents: Pirta worries Jinx's parents are this as he's always hanging around the store. However, it turns out that he hangs out there a lot because he has eight sisters. Pirta is satisfied with that response.
• Acquainted with Emergency Services: Doc has the emergency services, National Guard, and window replacement guys on speed dial. Another comic showed that the fire department has a switchboard indicating what emergency he needs them for now (many of them explosions of some sort).
  • Anthony, a construction and repair contractor, decided to stop by Doc's shop and check if there was work to be done because he hadn't heard from him lately.
• Alcohol Hic:
  • Jinx, in this New Years Eve strip has his speech interrupted with hics after one drink (being only ten or so years old).
  • In this strip, a no-neck who's had a few too many has his comment peppered with hics.
• All Just a Dream: Jinx's and Kasi's Forced Transformation battle, from #3416 to #3435, is a result of Howie's Acid Reflux Nightmare.
• All Men Are Perverts: To varying degrees, pretty much all of the males in the comic have made sexually charged comments about female characters, or in the extreme cases attempted to sneak peeks of the women in varying states of undress.
• All of Them: Swampy is phoning a window repair company after yet another bout of explosive hilarity:
  Swampy: Hey, Rog, they want to know how many windows got damaged this time.
  Roger: Um...
  Swampy (to the receiver): I don't even know why I asked. He's just gonna say "all of 'em".
  Roger: No, I think the one in the bathroom hasn't broken...
• Amusing Injuries: They are usually inflicted upon one or another of the resident Butt Monkies. Swampy more often than not.
• And I Must Scream: As usual, Played for Laughs. Here Doc and Roger have burnt to ashes, and are waiting for Unexplained Recovery to kick in (Swampy went looking for the key tool — a dust pan). One pile of ashes complains about itching nose.
• Animal Stereotypes: Most of the non-human characters display some obvious stereotypical behavior from time to time, like dalmatians manning the emergency response center, waiting for a fire or other emergency have a task common to their species.
• Animated Actors: This strip and several of the following strips show the crew at Doc's Machine shop getting back into action after the artist / author took a short break.
• Annoying Arrows: Doc treats tranquilizer darts much the same way. (Being a large polar bear running on adrenaline and caffeine helps.) Ditto a chemically enhanced arctic fox. Then, there was some offscreen event involving Roger, grenade launcher, riot armor and arrows.
• April Fools' Day: Many April Firsts since the beginning have had a special strip, on the general theme of Fanservice. In 2009, the author changed the front page to look like a directory listing, including folders for "alternate storylines", a "passwords" text document, and a well-executed Rickroll. Readers actually called the site's host to warn them of the security hole.
  • In the 2018, the shower gag (see below) was pulled on Tawny◊. She outright DISSES the guys unseen for it!
  Tawny (sarcastically): The shower gag again? Nice try, guys, but April First was yesterday.

  • It Makes Sense in Context because April 1st, 2018 DID fall on a Sunday.
• Arbitrarily Large Bank Account: When asked how exactly Doc pays for the frequent shop rebuildings and massive amounts of damage done by his projects, the only answer he's ever given is "DARPA". Later he's shown to have several roomfuls of money. However, if this non-canon filler◊ is to be believed, those are 1-dollar bills.
• Arbitrary Weapon Range: The comic has a strip during the first zombie apocalypse arc where Doc is reminded how this applies to grenade launchers.
  Roger: "You just wasted one guy with a three hundred dollar bullet!'
• Are We Getting This?: Daryl managed to take down Doc using one of Doc's special paint grenades. Red asks if anybody got it on video. Bandit had 2 GoPros and an iPhone.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • While Doc and Roger are working on a gun with a fusion reactor that can shoot paintballs through time, it's speculated that the following would happen after a core failure: "There would be a massive influx of gamma rays, the core would overheat, fuse, possibly go critical, and detonate. In fact, if the Transwarp barrel were operating, the explosion could collapse the Morris-Thorne wormhole, rupturing the fabric of space/time and destroying the universe." And "the DVD player would probably stop working too."
  • Inverted by Doc after Roger tells him that he (Roger) and the others were being sneaky about planning a Christmas party because they weren't sure Doc wanted to have another party so soon:
    Doc: So you're saying you thought I wouldn't like the chance to quaff Dew, eat chips, meet girls, and maybe staple Swampy to the ceiling again?
• Art Evolution:
  • It's a bit hard to tell, but Doc's appearance, along with the other regulars, has been refined since the beginning strips.
  • A much more significant one happened the final time Roger pushed the Schmuck Bait button; the comic was entirely black-and-white up to that point.
• Artifact Title: The first five strips were doodled on a whiteboard at the author's workplace, before being photographed for online publication. He changed to using a computer to create the comic after that. There was a sixth one on the whiteboard in honour of the Fourth of July, but after that, the titular medium was not used until five strips (June 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23, 2017) that commemorated the comic's 15th anniversary. Then Doc went back to doing the strips normally.
• Attack Pattern Alpha: Combined this with Noodle Implements here, when discussing strategy on an "outlaw" ^note little to no rules paintball field.
• Author Avatar: Doc is more or less the author as a polar bear.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • There's a recurring joke about newbies trying to use paint grenades, which fit neatly into this trope due to the rarity with which they actually work.^note And most paintball enthusiasts would debate the "awesome" part of the trope.
  • Subverted when Doc goes on a caffeine-deprived rampage with a paint minigun and an invisibility cloak. He's eventually taken out by a paint grenade when 100+ players with high-tech markers couldn't hit him.
  • The new prototype marker Robin won is so impractical that it requires a computer that nobody except overclockers would currently have: a Windows PC (with a 5 GHz processor and 32 GB of RAM), a USB 4 cable, fingerprint analyzer, neural port interface, retinal scanner, an Occulus Rift, and a note from your mother. The owner's manual is as thick as a telephone directory. It also requires knowledge in SQL (the database is needed for the Bernoulli Inducer Control maps), containment fields (for injecting tritium) and the use of a Cray supercomputer (which Roger happens to keep a spare in his truck for)! Just the list of the features it has make no sense: 5G capable, firing from the cloud, web-enabled fire modes and its own Facebook page!
• Awesome Personnel Carrier:
  • The 2010 Zombie Apocalypse story arc featured an apparently up-armed version of the APC from Aliens, its firepower consisting in part of an ungodly amount of guided missiles as well as several machine gun turrets.
  • Before that, Doc fitted a regular M2A3 Bradley IFV with a hot tub, complete with girls and probably an entertainment system, as a gift for the Army after the Real Life capture of Saddam Hussein, in 2003.
  • Sandy's simple 4 door car was very nearly turned into one of these, when she asked Doc to find out why the Check Engine light was on. She regretted it immediately, but by the next panel, Doc and Roger already had it mounted (upside down) on a lift and a set of missiles and a larger engine with a supercharger installed.
• Awkward Father-Son Bonding Activity: Played with by Jinx who has convinced his dad to buy him a chain saw. As well as doing... other things.
• Barefoot Cartoon Animal: Lampshaded:
  Swamp Fox: ". . . why do I even own socks?"
• Beary Funny: Subverted in one Christmas eve strip. Nobody expects a mauling, when Doc wears Santa's hat, but he's perfectly capable of it.
• Bears Are Bad News: The comic has 4 bears, three of whom are bad news to anyone that happens to annoy them:
  • The protagonist, Big Eater Gadgeteer Genius grumpy airsmith polar bear Doc.
  • His friend and a regular client brown bear Bruno. Sometimes described as "old, fat and slow", but more of a Cool Old Guy.
  • Another friend of Doc, bad-tempered scary-looking obnoxious panda Gino. Usually appears when situation already went out of control and escalates it or takes the story in entirely new direction. Like a skunk spray in the aftermath of zombie invasion.
  • Averted so far with Cara, another polar bear and Doc's apparent love interest. She is surprisingly even-tempered. But she is still a polar bear.^note Inspired by a documentary about mating polar bears.
• Behind a Stick: In this strip, during a paintball match Bandit peeks out from behind a tree that is in no way thick enough to actually hide him, even with his normal slenderness. His peeking out almost makes it look like his head and neck are sprouting from the tree like a branch.
  • Taken to extremes (or taken to something) when Bandit manages to hide behind HIMSELF.
• BFG: Entusiasically indulged in.
  • Paintball guns! Most would be illegal in the sport, especially the railgun and rocket-launcher.
  • And then there's this◊ beauty, from the real 2005 April Fools' Day strip. ^note Which one is the "beauty" is left as an exercise for the audience.
  • And one of the latest ones was found in this strip by a little girl in the back of Roger's truck. After she asked permission to use it (Roger was manning a drone with VR gear at the time), she went to the chronographer stand and fired it. If Roger's calculations are right, the stand is now someTIME around last week on Tuesday.
• Big Ball of Violence: With claws and fangs bared, Doc gets into a fight with another shopper over the last of an item on sale. Nobody outshops Doc on Black Friday.
• Big Damn Kiss: Doc gets one in 2017 with newcomer Cara, which is spicy enough to cause flames to shoot out of her ears - though that might just be the hotwings he'd eaten beforehand.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: To celebrate the 1500th strip, a big can-can line appears out of nowhere on Red's paintball field with most of the main cast, leaving behind some debris in the last panel along with a very confused Pirta. invoked
  • The other bar patrons witnessing the Big Damn Kiss between Doc and Cara. A real jaw-dropper for those who thought Doc would strike out.
• Big "NO!"/Big "YES!": The players are all trying to get Doc (who is on an unconscious sugar jag), and two people have a perfect shot at Doc: The "NO!" comes from Robin (who had a perfect shot on him), and the "YES!" comes from Darryl, who got Doc with a paint grenade.
• Big Red Button: Roger stumbles across one of these in Doc's shop. Hilarity Ensues when he can't stop pressing it, with various responses suggested by TWB fans.
• Bigger Is Better in Bed: Both genders get a light dose of this with the "miracle coffee" - only works on women, though.
• Bigger on the Inside: Doc's pickup truck, which has a big-screen TV and myriad other amenities. They even installed a doorbell!
• Bland-Name Product: If you look closely at the background, you can see Doc carrying a Khil chainsaw, while more recently Jinx can be seen with his brand new Khil Jr. chainsaw. Clearly a pastiche of Stihl and Skill power tools.
• Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: Howie's sells hot wings in several heat levels Hot, Extra Hot, Screaming Insanity and Death by Nuclear Inferno. The Nuclear Inferno wings are a bit too much for most mere mortals. Doc still finds them "A bit on the bland side" despite flames and smoke coming from his ears.
• A Bloody Mess: In one strip, after a flood of replicated beer "threw everyone out of Howie's bar", Sandy momentarily freaks out at the sight of Jinx covered in red stains. In the next strip, he's perfectly fine, and Howie identifies the stains as his hot-wing sauce, though it does burn a bit.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall - Leaving the frame, here.
  • A combination of this, Aside Glance, and Tempting Fate in this strip.
• Breast Expansion: A pot of Klatchian Coffee grants the women who drink it a temporary increase of their bust size.
• Brick Joke:
  • A long time coming. Early on in the comic, Doc makes a comment about how he keeps a bone around for anti-cheating and safety lectures, so people take his threats of eating them seriously. Cut to a few years later, when Bandit recalls his first experience with paintball...
  • Doc's Special Grenades. First used in a game of Everyone vs. Larry And Daryl (where Daryl tossed it says it's "The best 40 bucks he ever spent". More than 6 years later, it's STILL the best 40 bucks he ever spent!
  • If this counts, it's one over 15 YEARS in the making!
    • The week of June 19-23, 2017 was done in the same marker-on-whiteboard technique as the first 5 "strips".
    • Behold the third strip, published June 20, 2002, which has Doc asking if he should burn the shop down, delete the website, shave his head and move to Tibet. Fifteen years (and two days) later: he's living in the mountains, wearing a monk's robe and has shaved his head.
    • The very first strip also got a follow-up about Doc's tardiness.
• Bring My Brown Pants: The Fire Dept. captain mentions a need to change his pants after running into Jinx while he was Hulked up by a batch of Doc's weapons-grade Mountain Dew, which turned him from a three foot tall arctic fox kit to a feral-looking giant that's taller than even Doc, and has a rather unhappy expression to boot.
• Buffet Buffoonery: It's stated that the Chinese restaurant where Pirta used to work had to discontinue its buffet due to Doc eating a whole Tibetan yak's worth every time he went.
• Butt-Monkey: Usually Swampy, but occasionally happens to Roger. Even Doc gets a little of this from time to time.
• Callback: This strip gives a nod back to Sandy's first game, where Rainman suggests reading a pamphlet titled "Coping with loss" after she asks what to do taken out of the match by a hit, with Bandit offering one such pamphlet to a generic player he managed to sneak up on to tag out.
• The Cameo:
  • Nearly every Halloween, other comic characters show up for Doc's party, sometimes costumed as still others. The list is extensive.
  • Later crowd scenes, like this one are sometimes populated with cameos as well.
• Carnivore Confusion: Averted. Rainman wanted lettuce on his half of the pizza. Swampy wanted fieldmouse and ground squirrel while Jinx wanted lemmings. The authour keeps track, which species appeared as characters and which as food. It doesn't apply to cameos, though.
• Cast of Snowflakes: The furry cast is, for the most part, easily identifiable. The humans... not so much.
• Casual Kink: A downplayed example here, with Pirta comparing her boyfriend Jake to General Patton, saying she needed to get Jake an outfit to match the general's iconic uniform, but doesn't mention a riding crop. Sandy asks about it, and Pirta responds that they already have one.
  • When Doc is helping them move, Sandra rushes Doc out of Swampy's bedroom so she can deal with the "t- old family photos" under the bed. They're actually a box of her Thin Mints.
• Censor Steam: The steam from a scalding-hot cup of coffee serves to conceal a nude Pirta's nipples from the viewer during a Dream Sequence Doc is having after being knocked unconscious.
• Chainsaw Good: Jinx getting his dad to buy him a chainsaw for a Halloween costume, of Ash from Army of Darkness.
• Cheek Copy: Swamp Fox made one, as a Valentine to Sandy.
• Cheshire Cat Grin: Bandit gets one of these when Doc upgrades Bandit's firepower in one game.
• Chivalrous Pervert: The main male (adult) characters are, well, guys, but they do have standards. Best shown during Pirta's first paintball game when some guy in a ghillie suit snapped a picture of her with his phone while she was in a state of undress^note she was stripping off some layers to better cope with the heat. Snow Leopards, heavy clothes, and Mr. Sun do not work well together. When the crew found out, Roger jammed the phone to keep it from getting onto the Web while Doc tracked the guy down and "persuaded" him and his friend to delete it.
• Clown Car: Red asks Doc if his truck was bought from a circus clown after seeing a bunch of players and gear being unloaded. Doc says no, but notes that it uses the same technology. Among the things located in the truck are a basement with a couch and big-screen TV, Barcaloungers with seatbelts, a desk, a tea cart, and a piano.
• Cobweb Jungle: When Pirta and Sandy get back to the store after a day at the paintball field, the store has become this as a joke on just how long it took to chronicle the events of that day: two and a half years! ^Dates (April 28, 2014 to October 28, 2016) The length of that story arc was, of course, lampshaded at the end.
• Comfort Food: For Kasi, it's cocoa with little marshmallows.
• Comically Missing the Point: When Sandy is railing against "upgrades" done to her car by Doc (which include offensive weaponry) in this strip, he insists on pointing out the difference between rockets and missiles (unguided versus guided), a launcher for the latter mounted on her car. All Sandy wanted was a MINOR tune-up to bring her car's performance back up to factory spec.
• Compensating for Something: Done subtly in this strip. During a zombie apocalypse, one fireman asks another why the latter's gun is bigger than his. The second fireman's reply? "Genetics."
• Cone of Shame: Miki is seen wearing an Elizabethan Collar after a date with a firedog, apparently it went really well.
• Conjoined Eyes: The "generic" anthro furries that have more or less replaced the featureless "bubblehead" no-neck humans all tend to have conjoined eyes, although much of the older, more regular cast have eyes that are separate from one another.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: Bandit is forced, via being duct taped to a couch, to watch a Martha Stewart show marathon after pulling a prank on Doc and Roger.
• Cool Car:
  • Doc and Roger attempt to upgrade Sandy's car to this level, starting with this strip. See Comically Missing the Point, below.
  • The local emergency response center has one with tires larger than most passenger cars.
• Cool Garage: The first one was Doc's shop, but now the Emergency Response Center has one of their own, mostly to house their giant fire truck.
• Covered in Gunge: Most paint grenades don't work very well. Doc's Special Grenades, on the other hand, work very well indeed.
• Comic-Book Time: combined with Leaning on the Fourth Wall in a series of meta-jokes about how an arc about the events of one long day at the paintball field, and subsequent events, spanned two-and-a-half years....
• Crazy-Prepared:
  • Doc has a flamethrower stashed away in case of zombies, aliens, rampaging ninjas, or uncleaned refrigerator.
  • Sandy's surprised that the shop has an alarm for an indoor snowball fight.
  • One storeroom is equipped with 2 metric tons of Alka-Seltzer.
    Roger: "You've seen Doc eat, right?"
• Crossover:
  • TWB and PVP had a crossover for a Paintball Episode, but it was cut off before the planned story finished.
  • A brief subtle cross over, a quantum coffee maker dinosaur from Questionable Content pays a visit to Doc's shop, here.
• Curse Cut Short: While it's clearly said in full, the word itself is cut short by the panel in strip #1875.
  • Expletive also hidden by a speech bubble when Sandy is surprised by New Year's Day decorations suddenly appearing.
• Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon:
  • Sandy threatens Doc that she will cut off his ears with piano wire and staple them to his knees.
  • After a long session of planning strategy, Pirta points out to Jake that if he tries to get her up before 10 am, she'll staple his tail to the headboard of their bed.
  • In one strip, Doc threatens Roger with removing Roger's tail (details left unsaid, but in context probably not gently) and sticking it in his ear.
  • Don't call Tawny "Thunderbuns", or you'll end up sleeping on a couch, in a dumpster, whilst probably on fire.

Tropes: D to G

• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Pirta falls afoul of the verbal type when greeting a customer, falling back on her restaurant server greeting experience.
• Decontamination Chamber: After Gino scared Jake (the skunk), Jake had to be decontaminated. In a large laundromat. The automated defense system mistook his spray for a chemical or biological weapon.
• Destructo-Nookie:
  • Miki's firefighter date left her (happily) wearing a Cone of Shame.
  • Later, Doc and Cara break a bed. The event registers on the seismometer at the local tsunami warning center.
• Didn't Think This Through: In this strip, Sandy reveals that she is having automobile issues. Doc promptly responds. Sandy promptly facepalms and lampshades this trope.
• Did You Just Have Sex?: Most of the main cast run across this trope regarding Doc and his new Love Interest Cara. The conclusion takes a little while for Swampy.
• Distant Reaction Shot: Happens several times, being that many of the story arcs are about Stuff Blowing Up.
• Does This Make Me Look Fat?: Asked of Swampy by Sandy about paintball gear, in this strip.
  Run Swampy! It's a trap!
• Don't Ask, Just Run:
  • Doc's "oops" "tend to have a minimum safe distance".
  • Used literally by by Robin to Bandit.
• Dope Slap: Doc, delivering one to Roger.
• Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male:
  • The male characters are quite free to beat up other male character and the female characters are quite free to beat up male characters, but no males have been seen or mentioned as beating on females. This strip and the one after it shows that Pirta hit Doc hard enough for him to have another near death experience.
  • This guy had been previously injured by the same person, you'd think he'd be justified a little payback.
  • The same person punches someone out cold as a 'message' to Doc. Sensing a pattern?
  • and again...
• Drives Like Crazy: Doc tends to drive several times speed limit. On mountain roads. With little regard to warning signs and barriers. Often in heavily modded vehicles. Roger's unexpected improvements to the vehicles contribute to crashes too. The cast are OK with that, if a bit nervous, but do warn newcomers. And sometimes even they can be surprised.
  • Of all people, Cara, who used to ice race, is capable of this.
• Driving Stick: Most cars have an accelerator pedal and a brake pedal. Manual equipped ones will add a clutch pedal. A few older cars and most full-sized trucks have an additional pedal to apply the parking brake. Doc's truck has 8 pedals for some reason. And a gear shift knob that looks like it operates a transmission in a big rig.
  • Later on, Roger explains that Doc's truck ...has eighteen clutch pedals and a three dimentional shift pattern.
• Drop the Cow: The author's confessed that he makes something explode whenever he can't come with a good punchline, and has quoted Chandler's Law.
• Duct Tape for Everything:
  • Doc uses duct tape to fix anything, as well as using it to remind people not to take off their helmets during a paintball match. Usually because he can't find the stapler instead.
  • As a temporary repair to Jake's car after the driver side front door is broken off its hinge, duct tape is used to stick it back on the car.
• The Easy Way or the Hard Way: Doc makes such an "offer" to someone who took pictures of Pirta removing her top. The person who actually took the picture accepts the "easy" option. However, the one to whom the picture got sent, before Roger jammed the signal, doesn't, with painful results.
  (guy hands over phone) "You make a strong and vividly illustrated case."
  Doc: "We all have our hobbies.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: At the start of the comic, the Funny Animal main cast were treated as something unusual in a human world. The author soon dropped the "something unusual" angle as not really being where he wanted to take the webcomic, and since then has gravitated over time towards making more of the characters anthropomorphic animals, finally going all-anthro in 2012.
• Eating the Eye Candy: Sandy's reaction to seeing A.J., a buff tiger construction worker, is to drool into a dry mop.
• Episode of the Dead: There was a localized Zombie Apocalypse for the 2010 Halloween special. Which Doc and Roger took as an excuse to test their arsenals.
• Escalating War: Snowball fights. Well, that and everything else, but especially snowball fights.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: Lampshaded in this strip, with the main cast viewing a scene from a Billy and the Boingers movie with the car on the screen about to hit a cactus.
  Roger: Watch - the car will explode before it even hits the cactus.
  Doc: It's not a Bruckheimer movie, you know.
• Every Man Has His Price: A customer needing his marker fixed in a hurry bribes Doc with a case of Mountain Dew.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: In one game, whoever tags an out-of-it and well-armed Doc gets a brand-new, not-even-announced marker. Cue this trope.
• Expressive Ears: Especially applies to species with large triangular ears: foxes, lynxes, dogs, to lesser degree raccoons and housecats; lagomorphs too, but too large ears prove somewhat unwieldy. Swampy and Sandy are prime examples as foxes with most screen time.
• The Faceless: Swampy, who is almost never seen without his face obstructed by his hat or some object, and almost every human character, by virtue of having indistinct circles-for-heads.
• Failsafe Failure: Things blow up regularly in this webcomic. One of the reasons for this is that the fail-safes never work in this comic.
• Fanservice: April Fool's Day tradition! The 2014 edition brought in some cheesecake, too. The April 2, 2018 Strip parodied the shower gag, which had Tawny's shower yanked open—but Tawny was in an undershirt, brushing her teeth. (April 1 was on a Sunday that year).
• Fanservice Faux Fight: A recurring gag is promising the event (pillow fight, mud wrestling or pie fight) and not delivering. Usually as April Fools or some jubilee. Often, the girls refuse to participate, there are some technical difficulties, or it happens behind curtains. However, practice of the 3-girl paintball team and the subsequent tournament make up for it.
• Fastball Special: Doc is prone to throwing people into the air for his benefit:
  • Tossing Jinx as a scout.
  • Throwing a fellow team member with the flag to the team's station when surrounded by the opposing team.
  • At her request, he launches Kasi at Jinx.
  • Done by Tawny to Packrat when he called her "Thunderbuns".
  • Howie the bartender isn't averse to the tactic, either, launching Bandit in pursuit of a fleeing Doc during a snowball fight, in this strip.
  • Doc helps Roger's wife dive into the pool this way, followed by her husband calling out a "fastball cannonball!"
• Fire-Breathing Diner:
  • During a visit to Howie's, a new hot wing recipe made fire spurt out of Doc's ears. He thought them a bit bland.
  • The same batch of hotwings had the same effect on Doc's new Love Interest here.
• Firehouse Dalmatian: The local fire department is full of anthropomorphic Dalmatians, but is currently run by a German Shepherd and also has a cat as a member.
• For Halloween, I Am Going as Myself: In the 2003 Halloween party storyline, there's a Cameo by Kevyn Andreyasn, who's wearing his normal outfit from his "home" comic. He explains it as coming dressed as a clone of himself.
• Foreign Queasine: No, not the moose-burgers. Those are pretty tame. Try deep fried walrus. Then again, Doc IS a polar bear.
• Four-Fingered Hands: In the first few strips, Doc was depicted with 5-digit hands, but shortly after the strip's name became an Artifact Title, the character design was changed to have 4-digit hands, with a note by the author explaining the change.
  • Lampshaded, of course, when Jinx says it's like you need five-fingered hands to play Moonlight Sonata.
• Funny Animal: When the comic started, only the main cast were funny animals, while almost all of the rest of the cast were no-neck bubbleheaded humans with no distinctive facial features. The artist later experimented with more realistic humans, but then around 2012 went with the entire cast being funny animals, converting fan favorites Larry and Daryl from bubbleheads to squirrels without any commentary on the change In-Universe.
• Funny Background Event: Roger's IV drip starts as type Q-positive blood, and over the course of the next two weeks makes its way through R-positive, prune juice, and "hi-test". This may have contributed to the inevitable explosion.
• Furries Are Easier to Draw: For years humans were drawn as people with floating heads. The non-human cast is drawn somewhat better, but only somewhat. The animals mouths are seldom seen, even when they're talking. They're usually only seen if they're shouting. The technical and mechanical devices though, oh-ho, they're drawn exquisitely! According to several posts by the author on the TWB forums in August 2011, he was working on overcoming the problem with drawing humans, with more human characters being given actual details instead of undefined "floating bubbleheads", and the results were impressive. But a few months later he decided to drop humans altogether. He did use generic human faces to replaced "the no-necks" when he retroactively coloured strips for winter and spring of 2012, but after that all one-shot characters have been anthropomorphic animals. Also of note is converting Larry and Daryl — the no-necks who gained some depth over time — to squirrels.
• Furry Female Mane: Most of the female cast are given human style hair on their head, while with the exception of Jake none of the males do. When Roger was gender-bent after getting zapped due to pressing a button labeled "do not press", his female version instantly grew human style hair.
• Furry Reminder: While the funny animals in the cast for the most part act entirely human, sometimes animal behaviors can be seen.
  • Jake, a skunk, turns into a spray grenade when surprised. He's also used this as a threat at least once.
    Jake: Don't make me angry Swamps. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.^note The Incredible Hulk Shout-Out
    Swampy: Er, your safety's on, right?
  • In the Oct 5, 2012 strip canine anthros are shown hanging their heads out of the windows of a moving truck as would Real Life dogs, and get called on it by the feline driver.
  • Pirta reacting to a rat character as an ordinary cat would a mouse.
  • Doc and Pirta, being a Polar Bear and Snow Leopard respectively, don't need to wear much during the winter months. In fact, they find it quite cozy, which irks the hell out of the rest of the cast. On the flip side, Pirta has a bit of a problem with the heat during paintball matches. Doc, of course, has his own method of heat control, to the annoyance of Roger who'd like to drink the beers in the cooler instead of having them used in Doc's pants.
• Furry Webcomic: Increasingly so. Originally, the only furry character was Doc himself. Then Roger was added in Strip #12. Then Swampy (Labour Day strip just before #37), Bandit (#60), Snowshoe (#71), Red (#82), Jinx (#105), Rainman (#120), Howie (#176), Bruno (#265), Jake (#347), Tawny (#399), Sandy (#403), Pirta (#590) Gino (#900), and Kasi (#1179) (in that order). Then Larry and Darryl became squirrels in #1853, by which time humans had been dropped altogether (The last ones were seen in #1481).
• Gadgeteer Genius:
  • Both Doc and Roger are very good at what they do. When they work together, they make very dangerous machines like Powered Armor or markers that mess with the time-space continuum.
  • Jinx seems to be on the way to becoming one, after figuring out how to connect a taser to a bullwhip. His father also expressed concern over his skill with a propane torch.
• Gale-Force Sound: Doc using new speakers makes it almost impossible for a customer to enter the store, thanks to having to push against the force from said speakers.
  • In a Downplayed version, Red's screaming in Roger's face is enough to blow Roger's face fur back.
• Gangsta Style: A custom work order for a paintball marker has the ammo bin put on the side, so that when held this way it can feed the paintballs normally. Doc and Roj seem unimpressed, but hey, it's work.
• Gargle Blaster: Several cast members understand this trope.
  • Doc's custom "weapons-grade" Mountain Dew can do strange things to those who consume it and aren't Doc, including a toxic or hallucinogenic effect, with the possibility of some kind of an unpredictable mutagenic effect that can turn the one consuming it into a monster.
  • Doc asks for "a Dew and something interesting to chase it with." Howie serves up something from a glowing hot crucible here. In line with both Doc's and Howies's idea of how this trope should play out, it is spitting glowing hot embers. In keeping with the description of the original Trope Maker, it has ''interesting" results.
  • His coffee also qualifies, as the reaction can be loud enough to be heard from the next room.
• Gatling Good: Doc makes a paintball gatling gun with curved barrels that cause it to shoot in arcs, even around corners with some electronic adjustments.
• Geeky Turn-On: Of the gearhead variety, as Cora is an excellent driver with a hell of an engine in her otherwise plain-looking car, making a 20-minute commute in just five minutes. And Doc might have to go see a doctor in four hours as a result of the ride over.
• Gender Bender: After pressing a button with a Shmuck Bait warning sign, in this strip Roger is transformed into a woman.
• Genre Savvy: After meeting an attractive female polar bear and while being pestered by a drunken rabbit wanting his destroyed car replaced, Doc can clearly see the "bad episode of Three's Company" level train wreck fast approaching and slams on the brakes to head it off.
• Girls Have Cooties: When suggested that Kasi has a crush on him, Jinx replies "Ew! I'd rather kiss a chainsaw!" Of course, she's also the reason for all the band-aids he's wearing, so it's sort of an appropriate comparison.
• Girls with Moustaches: Sandy greets a customer to Doc's shop, and is told by the customer that he wants to deal with a male employee. She ducks behind the counter, and comes back up with a fake moustache on her face, asking again if she can help him.
• Global Warming:
  • This strip has Doc start to launch into a rant about GW, only to be interrupted by a mallet to the head.
  • Several weeks later Alaskan weather inspired a snow-cleaning arc:
    Swampy: (from under the snow) "Al Gore is full of @#$!"
• The Glomp: Nothing says "I love you" like playing facehugger on one's loved ones. Just ask Tawny and Robin, both of whom wrap themselves around the head of their respective targets.
• Going Commando: In the 2014 Halloween strip, Howie's girlfriend is wearing a hazmat suit as her Halloween costume, as her take on "sexy" fanservicey womens' costumes. As it's a full-body suit save for her tail (for character identification purposes, according to Doc Nickel on the forum), Howie asks her how it's sexy. Her response: "Easy... I'm not wearing anything under it."
• The Grim Reaper: The standard skeleton in a cloak showed up a couple times in one-shots to pick up a marker, while Doc came face to face with a somewhat less traditional psychopomp at the end of the "Doc ODs on caffeine arc".
• Groin Attack: Pirta and Rainy come face-to-face in a paintball match. Unfortunately for Rainy, he was standing while Pirta was crawling.
  • Rainy's shots wound up going into Victoria's Secret Compartment, sparing Pirta the female equivalent.
• Guest Strip:
  • On this page there's not only the regular strip by Doc Nickel involving a big red Schmuck Bait button, but an additional, related strip drawn by Commander Kitty writer Scotty Arsenault.
  • Kathy Garrison of Carry On contributed several strips to hold things over while Doc Nickel was having computer problems, resulting in a week of non-canon strips featuring one of her Carry On characters, who had been given a cameo in this strip. ^note The guest strips are currently unavailable on the main site, but Doc N has said that he'll put them up on the sketchbook page when he gets a chance.
• Gun Stripping: In this strip Doc manages to field strip Jinx's marker before he even finishes saying "Let's have a look" between the first two frames, leaving a bewildered Jinx wondering how Doc managed it.

Tropes: H to L

• Halloween Episode: There's almost always has a Halloween-related story around October. Mostly it's just parties where cameos from other webcomics abound, but on occasion it's a full story arc, like with the 2010 and 2012 Zombie Apocalypse story arcs.
• Hand-or-Object Underwear: Used in this strip, when an April Fools' Day gag results in Sandy getting exposed while taking a shower.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Multiple hoisting operations have occurred here.
  • For the 2004 Halloween storyline, the theme of the party was to wear as a costume whatever was being worn when Doc called the person to extend the invitation. The tables get turned on Doc when someone calls him with the invite, catching him when he was in the shower. When Swampy points out that Doc has been hoisted, in the next strip, we find out that it's Roger getting revenge for Doc catching him at the dentist office while getting some work done.
  • A Rules Lawyer badger who was using a rules interpretation depending on a technicality about what counts as a hit to make things difficult for others playing at Red's field gets some comeuppance in this and the following few strips. When the badger seeks to complain about the Curb-Stomp Battle of everyone on the field against him, Jake points out that according to the same set of rules the badger was (mis)using, nothing says that the teams have to be the same size, complete with a Lampshade Hanging in the last panel of this strip.
  • Another time, Swampy gets to point out that Sandy managed to hoist herself.
    • The hoisting begins here, then this page, followed by this page, then Sandy discovers the crane, followed by Swampy's lampshade.
• Humongous Mecha: Apparently Doc is building one here.
• Hyperspace Mallet: Often used by Doc against customers. Sometimes appears much larger. Subverted in some instances where Doc's mallet is seen in a glass case behind his desk.
• If You Die, I Call Your Stuff: Roger detonates a Febreze bomb in Doc's office. When Doc emerges and grabs Roger to drag him off for a mauling, Roger calls for Swampy to avenge him. Swampy's response: "That depends. Can I have your PlayStation?"
• I Have a Family: In this strip, after watching an awful movie Doc threatens a janitor with violence over it. The janitor pleads for pity on account of having three mouths to feed. Two goldfish and a gerbil, which is sufficient to get the janitor off the hook.
• Imagined Innuendo:
  • "Brass nipples" are an actual component of a paintball marker, contrary to what Pirta thought when a customer at Doc's paintball shop asks for some.
  • When Packrat's porcupine friend wants the spheres that keep his spines from puncturing stuff removed, he says "Now help me loosen my balls, will ya?" His friends crack up, much to his embarrassment.
• Inconvenient Summons: Inverted, Doc goes to visit the Observers while the jackal is still bathing.
  ...you're early.
• Incredibly Lame Pun: Lampshaded in this strip, after Pirta says to a grumpy Doc, who's Not a Morning Person, that he's a real bear in the morning.
  Doc: I'd say it's too early for puns...but that presumes at some point there's a correct time for them.
• Indian Burial Ground: Tawny asks if the "outlaw" paintball field (where safety rules are ignored) is something like an old burial ground where "they only buried the really stupid ones."
• Infinite Canvas: This strip is made in a vertical alignment, and goes far beyond the three panels of a regular strip.
• In Memoriam: A strip was posted in the wake of Bob Gurnsey's passing as a way to honor and thank him for inventing paintball.
  Doc: Indirectly, I owe him for what I am today, and that's not the sort of debt that is easily repaid. Rest in Peace, Bob. And thanks.
• Innocent Inaccurate: While playing some Halo: Combat Evolved at Doc's, it's implied that Kasi's game character "teabags" Jinx's character.
  Jinx: ...why do you keep crouching over my guy?
  Kasi: Isn't that what you're supposed to do?
• I Need a Freaking Drink: In a caffiene withdrawl induced stupor, Doc blunders destructively about, tossing trees, here.
  Red: Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit drinking.
  • During a weekend where he winds up getting over a hundred players and being told that they're almost out of paint, Red requests the entire bottle of whiskey, rather than just a flask of it.
• Innocent Innuendo: In this strip Pirta beats up a customer who asked for brass nipples for his paintball gun, thinking "he was trying some perverted pick-up line!"
• Interspecies Romance: Jake (skunk) and Pirta (snow leopard), Kasi's mother (Cheetah) and Howie (wolf). Technically Snowshoe (Canadian Lynx) and Tawny (Bobcat) as well, but it's fairly hard to tell unless you check the cast page.
• It Came from the Fridge: Twice, both times it was a tentacled monstrosity.
• It Tastes Like Feet: Doc thinks that Red Bull tastes like "Rancid axle grease".
• I Take Offense to That Last One: "Oh, my mom doesn't have anything against caffeine."
• Jaw Drop: Just about EVERYONE when Doc gets a kiss from a female polar bear.
• Jumping Out of a Cake: Used for the second anniversary strip, although Doc's plan to use a cutting laser to cut the cake threatens the survival of the unseen woman inside.
• Just for Pun: "Can't you tell? I'm Harry Kotter!"
• "Kick Me" Prank: In this strip, swampy sticks such a sign to Roger's back. The text on it reads "If you can read this, run like hell", and is attached with the text facing inward, so other players can read it through the prototype invisibility cloak that Rog is wearing.
  • As well, In this strip a few days later, it's revealed the other side of the sign is a target, playing the trope straight.
• Kill Sat: Roj used one in a game once.
• Kiss of Distraction: Kasi uses a smooch of distraction to beat Jinx in a video game. His reaction wasn't quite blissful, however.
• Klatchian Coffee:
  • The crew of The Whiteboard, after (or in the middle of) a particularly interesting New Years' party (and that's saying something), manages by accident to create a coffee strong enough to cure astigmatism, boost intellect, and add a cup size to women. The effects are temporary.
  • Snowshoe tells of a day that he tried Doc's coffee, to keep him going for a Black Friday sale at the store he worked at that started at 4 AM, and finally got to sleep at 8 PM... the following Tuesday. He didn't even finish the cup.
• Lame Pun Reaction: Found here.
  Doc: What the heck is this? It looks like a furry bat!
  Roger: Obviously that's a hair club for men. (After getting hit over the head by Doc with said club) ...see how useful that was?
• Lethal Chef: Sandy describes Swampy's cooking as something like "Less Lethal". 3380 3381 3382 Clearly Swampy doen't belong in the Kitchen.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: One round of paintball shows us a "bubblehead" who at first acts like an idiot, "stayin' here to defend th' flag" in a center flag game^note meaning that his base has no flag to defend, but as the round progresses he basically winds up winning it for his team singlehandedly, and without a lot of effort.
• Limited Wardrobe: Doc's closet is shown to be filled with almost nothing but black T-shirts. In a Fourth-Wall Mail Slot comic he later explains that it's because they're cheap and hide grease stains. While Swampy's dresser is found to contain two paintball jerseys, one pair of pants, one pair of boxers, and two spare hats.
• Lions and Tigers and Humans... Oh, My!: Originally the regular cast members were funny animals in a world where many of the people were featureless "bubblehead" humans, due to furries being easier to draw, but starting in 2012 the artist started using funny animals exclusively for all characters, regulars or otherwise. Fan-favorite recurring "bubbleheads" Larry and Daryl became squirrels, from suggestions on the forum.
• List of Transgressions: A cop has a list of complaints several pages in length.
• Logic Bomb: One gets dropped on Red by a player arguing that a ball that breaks in the gun counts as tagging the player out, between "friendly fire" rules and hits on equipment counting as a hit on the player.
• Long Runner: The comic has been on the net since June 2002 and reached 3000 strips on Jan. 27, 2020.
• Loophole Abuse: Cross-country skis are perfectly acceptable on a Paintball Field.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: In a variation of the trope Jinx's friend Kasi turned out to have been Howie's stepdaughter. Both of them knew, but it was certainly unexpected for the readers.
• Luminescent Blush: Sandy shows one of these when the usual crowd is cheering Swampy's having slept with her the night before.

Tropes: M to R

• Macross Missile Massacre: Launched from their Awesome Personnel Carrier in this strip as a response to a zombie outbreak.
• Magnetic Weapons: Roger's paintball rail gun.
• Man in a Kilt: Bruno in a one-off, Red tried to convince him to wear underwear.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": Everyone was happy that Daryl finally won a match with a paint grenade. Then everyone learned that Daryl's prize was a whole case of Mark 40 paint grenades!
• Mathematician's Answer: In a Fourth-Wall Mail Slot strip, this is Jinx's response when asked what the best perk of hanging around Doc's shop is: "The toys, the danger or all the hot girls who think you're cute?"
• Matter Replicator: Doc and Roger build one for the sake of teleporting mugs of beer directly to the consumer.
• Meaningful Background Event: During Doc's date with Cara, laser beams can be seen in the distance outside her window in this strip, this one, and this one. Several strips later, we discover that Roger spent that same night fighting a bunch of robots, and the colors of the lasers involved match those seen in the above strips.
• Meat Versus Veggies: "Vegetables are what food eats." Poor Rainman, who is a rabbit in a cast full of carnivores.
  • Doc is seen on a date with a panda (which are 99% herbivore) who expresses disgust over seeing him eat meat.
• Misapplied Phlebotinum: Multiple cases. Doc uses a teleporter to get pizza delivered to his shop, and Roger once built a Tokamak fusion reactor into an Autococker.
• Moral Myopia: After Pirta uses her tail as a means of drawing fire without putting herself at risk, her opponent complains to the ref - who promptly points out that the opponent, a rabbit, had used the same tactic earlier that day with his ears.
• More Dakka: Lampshaded, averted, played straight, mocked, and wholeheartedly indulged in many times.
  • In this comic, BOTH teams ascribe to this tactic.
• Must Have Caffeine: Doc. Just like the man he's based on, Doc likes to spend long hours at the workbench and knocks back "pick-me-ups" like water. As a result he pretty much runs on the stuff, and he often resorts to brewing his own concoctions because the regular stuff "isn't strong enough". Course, in later strips it's gotten a bit exaggerated.
  • In an early "Q and A" strip, Doc states that if he could have one superpower, it'd be "never need to sleep"
  • Goes to ridiculous levels when the refrigerator full of Mountain Dew is crushed, the coffee machine wasn't fixed from its last misadventure, and Doc resorts to drinking energy drinks. By the 5-gallon bucket.
  • Improving coffee machines is high on Doc's activity list. Like when having found a BMW motorcycle engine.
• My Eyes Are Up Here: Cara to Doc due to Doc being an incurable gearhead. Doc had been inspecting the underside of Cara's car and she objected.
• My Instincts Are Showing: In this and following strip, feline Pirta pounces a rodent customer, her instincts getting the better of her.
• Mysterious Animal Senses: Occasionally, when the field is fogged over Red's solution is to have the rabbits play against bloodhounds.
• Naked Apron: Pirta sports one when greeting Jake on their first night of living together, even thinking "Better not forget the cheesecake!"
• Naked People Are Funny: Sandy and Pirta disagree, at least when the person in question is Doc. The sight of him naked sends them into catatonic shock.
• Near-Death Experience: Starting here, though a bit unusual as the manifestation is telling him he should have died. A long time ago.
  "Son, you use high explosives just to make breakfast. We're amazed you made it past puberty."
• New Year's Resolution: Many characters make those, with predictable results. One year Roger managed to break about ten out of a dozen on the very first day.
• No Mouth: Character are often drawn without mouths unless they are being particularly vocal.
• Non-Mammal Mammaries: Pretty much all of the regularly depicted female funny animals (all based on mammal species) are rather well endowed with human style breasts, which isn't treated in the comic as being unusual in any way.
• The Noseless: Just about every human drawn in the comic has a mostly featureless "bubblehead" head, save a brief period in 2011 where the artist experimented with more detailed humans, with noses being one of the details left off.
• Noodle Implements: An overcaffeinated Shoey and Tawny consider something with whipped cream and a feather duster.
• Noodle Incident:
  • How it happened isn't shown, but in the background of the last panel of this strip the golf course that Roger and Doc are playing at is shown to be a disaster-strewn wreck. Doc is talking with a police officer, who asks "... a golf club?", to which Doc replies "Well, we did modify it a little."
  • Whatever happened between Doc and Packrat has yet to be told, Red and Swampy's guesses being way off.
• Nostalgia Filter: Sent up in the paintball domain starting here and in the next strip, comparing paintballing in the past to that in the present.
• Not That Kind of Doctor: While Doc may have been working on becoming a doctor at one point, judging from the boxes in his basement, in spite of the nickname he isn't actually one, but it beats having the ER staff laugh at you again. However, Doc's medical skills were probably why the ER staff laughed at him in the first place. Later, when he introduces himself to Cara he explains away the nickname as being due to Bugs Bunny cartoons.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Sandy and Pirta find out about Doc's webcam.
  • When Roger heard his new BFG go off at the chronographer station:
    *KRAKOOM!*
    Roger: SWEET MERCIFUL CRAP!
• Oblivious Mockery: Doc's new potential girlfriend, Cara does a little of this while indicating that she had only seen one other polar bear in town. Via the evening news.
• Old Master: It isn't often that Red actually picks up a marker and plays, but when he does, watch out!
• Only Known by Their Nickname: All of the regular cast but Pirta and Sandy are referred to by their field handles, and the cast's real names are often not known, let alone regularly used.
• Only Six Faces: The humans (for the most part, with the exception of a brief period in 2011) only have one face. The furry cast is more varied. Doc Nickel isn't above a bit of a Take That Me on the subject, as seen in this April Fools' Day strip. ^note See both right-hand corners of the grid.
  • Also, in the comic detailing the different dalmations, they all look identical.
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot:
  • In this strip Pirta and Swampy get into a brief discussion of his nickname. After Swampy asks about her name in an idiot moment for him, he comments that he can skip the appetizer, as he'll just chew on his own foot.
  • In this strip, a customer that's been hassling Pirta for a date is asked if he'd be okay with the situation were their positions reversed, and she were trying to get him to cheat on his girlfriend. He accidentally lets slip that he'd be fine with cheating on his girlfriend Jenny for a date with Pirta. He winds up thrown bodily out of the store after being beat up by Pirta for his troubles.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Bandit suggests they skip a last game and go straight to eating.
• Orwellian Retcon: Roger pushed the button for the final time (according to Word of God), and most comics from the previous six months suddenly developed color. Roger is unaware that anything has changed, and by implication, the other characters are also unaware (or are they?)... and even that particular strip got retconned; it first appeared with the first two panels in black and white and the third in color.
• Overly-Long Gag: Doc's lecture to Sandy and Pirta about the specifics of a CO2 tank, thankfully made a lot more tolerable with the girls' Lampshade Hanging
• Paintball Episode: The author knows the game inside-and-out. He makes markers for the game, and at one point ran his own paintball field.
• Parking Payback: One character parked in the no-parking zone in front of the loading bay of Doc's paintball shop/underground fortress. Doc's friends proceeded to drive a heavy excavator through said bay as if the car weren't there.
• Pass the Popcorn:
  • Bandit and Roger enjoy a bowl of popcorn while listening to Doc smash the heck out of a telemarketer.
  • The "Selling Tickets" variant happens occasionally too.
  • And again during the 2013 Halloween party.
    Doc: Please tell me the cameras are recording this.
    Roger: Damn straight. This kind of thing is YouTube gold.
  • A Fanservice strip (in both the literal and figurative sense) has Roger eating some while watching Sandy.
  • When Doc and Roger are trying to get back to normal after switching species, Kasi is munching on some popcorn while Doc and Roger's attempts are going hilariously awry.
  • Something caused an emergency door to slam shut, and Shoey has found the demolition saw. Pirta and Tawny stay and watch.
• The Patient Has Left the Building: After Doc woke up from yet another concussion he just walked back to his shop. Nevermind the IV bag still connected to his arm or medics shooting tranquilizer darts.
• Percussive Maintenance: All over the place. It actually works every once in a great, long while, like in this strip.
• Pie in the Face:
  • Doc receives one in this strip, ultimately revealed to have been set up by Bandit.
  • In this strip Doc is shown to have been hit by multiple pies after Roger had pressed a button labeled "do not press".
  • Sandy gets one here thanks again to Roger and that button he shouldn't be pushing.
  • Weaponized on the paintball field, with Doc using a pie from Roger's lunch to tag out an opposing team member.
  • "Pie tag!", courtesy of Bandit.
• Powered Armor:
  • Roger once improvised one for reffing, but scrapped it after he fell over and needed a can opener to get back up. Some later strips suggest he might be trying a Mini-Mecha design.
  • Doc apparently has two suits of the stuff: the Mark III (His "Ref Armor") and the Mark V (Zombie Killer). Kasi borrows the later to stop Jinx, who'd been mutated by some of Doc's more experimental Mountain Dew.
• Press Start to Game Over: Larry doesn't have the hang of grenades yet, and one goes off just as Red yells "Go!", covering his entire team in paint.
• Primal Scene:
  • Of a sort. They're not Jinx's parents, but Sandy and Swamps are in a room having a romantic evening involving loads of salad oil. Said salad oil makes the doorknob too slippery to open. By the time they're let out of the room, Sandy desperately needs to relieve herself and practically knocks over Jinx as she runs to the nearest loo—wearing nothing more than her fur. According to Doc, Jinx spoke of the incident with "hushed, reverent tones", and he's pretty sure Jinx will be fine.
  • Another time Jinx walked in to his parents' bedroom on Valentine's Day, fortunately they still had their underwear on as they drank wine by candlelight and he had no idea what was going on.
• Produce Pelting: Cara's Coffee apparently provided tomatoes and stale pastries for Swampy's routine on Open Mic Night. The next strip shows the aftermath.
• Punny Name
  • Pirta is Inuit for "snowpack," the pun comes from the fact that she's a snow leopard, at least according to her.
  • "Kasi" is Swahili for "fast" or "speed".
• Puppy Love:
  • Kasi towards Jinx. At present the feeling is somewhat one-sided.
  • Jinx may have this to Robin.
• Pyrrhic Victory: In this strip, Roger describes the aftermath of an indoor snowball fight as being a Pyrrhic victory after the use of a snowblower results in Doc's office getting three feet of snow dumped into it.
• Quizzical Tilt: The girls do this when they discover and watch the The Star Wars Holiday Special on LaserDisc.
• Ready for Lovemaking: On their first proper date, Cara surprises Doc by wearing just three articles of clothing, with the other two getting featured later.
• Reel Torture: Doc punishes Bandit for spiking his shampoo with Nair by duct-taping him to a couch and forcing him to watch Martha Stewart.
• Rhetorical Question Blunder: Pirta walks straight into one when she challenges others to make sexually suggestive remarks to her after one customer at Howie's gets thrown across the room for doing so. There's even a list of remarks, organized in alphabetical order and by degree of suggestiveness.
• Right Out of My Clothes:
  • In an homage to Peanuts, when Doc gets hit with a giant snowball launched from a catapult, he's blown off-panel with a "POW!", and Charlie Brown's clothes (which he wasn't even wearing) sent flying into view in the last panel.
  • To clean up players that have been soaked in paint from Doc's paintball machine gun, Bruno uses a pressure washer that blasts the players' clothes off of them in the process of getting them clean.
• Ring-Ring-CRUNCH!:
  • Subverted in this strip. Alarm clock rings. Doc's paw comes out from under the covers with what looks like a Colt 1911. Clock promptly shuts up.
  • In this strip Doc applies the more common version of the trope, using a mallet to smash the alarm clock.
• Rip Van Tinkle: During an arc where Doc is unconscious for days Sandy wonders out loud why he's at the hospital when the shop has an ICU now. Swampy asks if she's willing to change his bedpan and she gets the point.
• Rules Lawyer: A badger abusing paintball rules regarding broken balls counting a person out takes his complaints to several refs at Red's field. In retaliation, the staff arranges a game with everyone else against the one badger, which in spite of said badger's complaint isn't prohibited by the rules.
• Running Gag: Sandy's desk being decorated for holidays when she is away from it.
  • Cara's coffee shop evidently serves quite good croissants, and they're freshly polished, too.
• Running on All Fours:
  • In this strip Bandit is shown running on all fours to catch up with others, even though normally when he runs it's on two feet like a human.
  • Doc can also manage a pretty good turn of speed.

Tropes: S to Z

• Saint-Bernard Rescue: When Doc thinks Jinx and Kasi got buried under snow he is going to be the rescue dog:
  Sandy! I need the first-aid kit and the avalanche poles! Call for a medevac chopper! And find my collar with the little brandy cask!
• Scenery Censor: Used straight at least a few times, including for one April Fools' comic.
• Schedule Slip:
  • Not for the comic itself, but Doc's work orders in-universe. One (unfinished) order was apparently chiseled into a clay tablet when it was placed, the implication being it was sent in several millennia ago.
  • Happens to the strip, from time to time. Usually accompanied by a filler cut-and-paste strip in which characters look like flounder with both eyes on the same side of their heads. Recently the author started using regular strips (like this one) with text replaced to some out-of-canon gag. Also accompanied by an explanation for why that day's strip isn't up. The filler strips never appear in the main archive, but some of the flounder strips can be seen here.
• Secret Test of Character: After Packrat steals the Wormhole gun, which could "erase reality as we know it" as Roger put it if misused, Doc has Pirta hit him hard enough so that he can visit the Jackal and ask him to help fix the mess. The Jackal says he can, but at the price of Doc's relationship with Cara, which was a product of the gun's disruption of probabilities. Doc hesitates for one panel before consenting, then races to Cara's coffee shop to check once he wakes up. The strips that follow his arrival suggest that things have changed accordingly, but this is subverted in the strip after. Doc then gets a message (via carrier) from the Jackal that he passed and "Time is not so fragile a thing".
• Self-Deprecation: Doc Nickel takes a swing at himself in this April Fools' Day strip, on the subject of Only Six Faces.^note see the top and bottom right corners
• Serious Business: The regulars take paintball safety very seriously, where people removing their masks while still on the field will get it duct taped onto their head, with in one case the threat of staples as an escalation.
• Shmuck Bait: In this strip, Roger is presented with a button with a warning sign reading "For the love of God do not push this button!", as a filler strip. Doc Nickel invited readers to suggest the results of pressing the button, and got several hundred replies (after expecting only a dozen or so). Strips illustrating the suggestions were usually posted on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
• Shout-Out: Quite a few of them are for fairly old movies and old TV series, the list available here.
• Show Some Leg: Pirta intentionally uses her looks to boost sales, one time managing to get a customer to spend $367.84 on paintball merchandise.
  Pirta: Show a guy a little tail and you can sell 'im a box of burnt gravel.
• Shower Scene:
  • Done as part of the 2007 April Fools' Day strip, here, much to Sandy's discomfort.
  • Done again for 2012's April Fools' Day, with Pirta as the victim. The second time the end result wasn't quite so pleasant for Doc and Roger.
  • And then Doc himself fell victim to the gag via Roger's repeated mashing of the button mentioned in the Shmuck Bait entry.
• Shown Their Work: In this July Fourth strip, take a close look at Roger's shirt. "Red legs" is the nickname for US Artillery personnel, from the red stripe along the leg of their uniform pants during The American Civil War.
• Side Bet: Everyone is astounded by Doc's Big Damn Kiss in 2017, while Sandra and Swampy try to figure out who won the pool. The closest bet was "karate chop to the mouth". A later strip shows that Doc himself won it.
• Silence Is Golden: A few times
  • For a paintball game, from #793 to #801
  • For the Snowball Fight arc, from #1596 to #1605.
  • Jinx's and Kasi's Forced Transformation battle, from #3416 to #3435.
• Sideboob: As part of the 2012 April Fools' Day comic, the audience is treated to a Shower Scene with Pirta, who's turned so that only the side of a breast is showing, with fur covering other details of her nudity.
• Sleep Cute: The guys after the winter game, especially Jinx.
• Snowball Fight:
  • An indoor fight breaks out in Doc's office, in the story arc where Kasi was introduced, starting here.
  • Kasi starts another fight here, which turns into an Escalating War of Disproportionate Retribution, complete with Lampshade Hanging by Jake.
• Something Else Also Rises: In this strip from a trip into Doc's subconscious, he wishes a bunch of beautiful women into existence. He follows it up by wishing them naked, at which point the jackal with him has his sunglasses suddenly fly up off his nose with a "poing!".
• Spam Attack: Doc and Roger are worshipers in the Church of The Spam Attack, particularly the varieties involving high explosives.
• Spent Shells Shower: During a zombie outbreak, we get this shower from the dual .50 cal machine gun mount of Doc's Awesome Personnel Carrier.
• Spider-Sense: Apparently, Howie gets this. Especially when Doc is inbound with a truckload of rowdy paintballers.
• Spit Take: Doc does one of these here when he learns that his potential new girlfriend, Cara has already seen Doc being Doc on the local news.
• Spoiler Title: The one time the crew went to a movie theatre, being in the mood for some mindless violence:
  Pirta: Let me guess. We're seeing the one with all the guns, fast cars and explosions.
  Roger: Well, those three subjects are mentioned specifically in the title.
• Stable Time Loop: Starting here and confirmed here, Doc and Roger have created a time-traveling wormhole that goes back about a week.
• Stock Animal Diet: Aside from caffeine and alcohol, Doc's diet tends to be pinniped-based products, the foxes and felines eat a fair number of rodents, and Rainy favors salads.
• Streaking: In the 2016 April Fools' Day edition, Pirta ran by screaming in terror◊ because her clothes had suddenly evaporated...
  • A year later, a husky named Miki WILLINGLY took off her clothes and ran by stark naked◊ RIGHT AFTER Swampy hung a lampshade about April 1st!
    • And she did it AGAIN◊ in 2019, and YET AGAIN◊ on 2022!
• Stuff Blowing Up: Frequently. The local fire department even has a separate alarm board set aside for Doc's shop.
• Stuffed into a Trashcan: Happens numerous times with a few variations. Most instances involve a heavy object to help keep the trashed individual in place.
  • Roger, starting here.
  • A potential customer planning to misuse a marker.
  • Swampy, too.
  • Also a rat in a mailbox.
• Sudden Anatomy: Characters usually talk without their mouths visible. Occasionally they do when they're saying something with a lot of force or emotion.
• Sure, Let's Go with That: The earliest example is here.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial:
  • From one of the filler strips:
    Doc: Hey Roj? Did you take my last Dew?
    Roger: You can't prove anything! I don't even own a flamethrower.
    Doc: Oooh-kay. I was just asking because...
    Roger: It must've been Swampy! He probably took it!
    Doc: Well, Swamps doesn't usually set fire to the fridge to cover his tracks.
  • And again after Jake has a moment of mentally drifting involving imagining Pirta and Tawny getting intimate with one another, and is startled by Sandy.
    Jake: WHAT! No! I wasn't imagining anything like that! Why do you ask!
  • And this when Roger accidently let a little girl use his new BFG...
    Roger: Here you go young lady, try this one instead! I'm told it's very nice and we already chronographed it and the tank is full and I'm pretty sure the battery is charged and it's much less likely to destroy the world! You go have fun now!
    Red: "Destroy the world"?
    Roger: What? Nothing! Figure of speech! As far as you know!
• Sweet Polly Oliver: Spoofed here by Sandy, in response to a customer insisting on talking to one of the guys at Doc's paintball shop, by putting on a fake mustache and asking again what he wanted.
• Take a Third Option: The closest option in the pool was a karate chop to the mouth.
• Take That!:
  • Taking a swing at journalists who claim paintball is a war simulator.
  • The password to Doc's e-mail account is "pbnsuxxors".
• A Tankard of Moose Urine: The wine that Cara has. The very name, "Épouventable eaux d'égout" translates to "Terrible Sewage".
• The Tape Knew You Would Say That: Doc builds "Backup Airsmith Hologram" to stay in the shop while he goes to the paintball field. He and Roger agree that a set of recorded messages is enough for the kind of clients they normally get. A subversion follows immediately.
• Tastes Like Purple: A bar fight concussion results in a victim of Pirta's abuse claiming that they can taste spots.
• Taught by Television: Sandy, who had no prior experience with paintballing, is shown repairing a marker at Doc's shop after months of reading the shop's e-mail, and says she figures she could probably build a whole nuclear reactor because of that experience.
• Teleporters and Transporters:
  • Doc made a "Pizza Teleporter" so he could get food in seconds. Unfortunately it only teleports to a specific spot on his counter, trying to send it to say, the field results in the toppings and crust separating or cheese blocking up an engine.
  • At Howie's bar, Doc and Roger tried making a method to teleport beer to customers. It ate most of the bar instead.
• Tempting Fate:
  • In this strip it starts to rain, leading to Jinx commenting "at least it's not snowing." Bandit immediately replies "Shh! It might hear you!"
  • Doc asks "What could possibly go wrong?" in this strip, when using explosives to take care of some seriously expired fridge food.
  • Later, when locked in Doc's shop during the cleanup following the 2011 Zombie Apocalypse, Sandy asks what trouble the guys could get into playing a game of poker. She and Pirta realize the error of asking that question, in the second panel, and in the last panel she gets an answer, in response muttering "yeah, yeah, me and my big mouth."
  • Invoked intentionally when the people at Red's paintball field can see a huge wildfire off in the distance.
    Bruno: The fire would have to jump the river to get here, and I have taken precautions. (...) I washed my car and invited a bunch of people over for a barbeque this weekend. It's practically guaranteed to rain.
• The Bet: A pool bet involving what Doc's new Love Interest, Cara would do to him. None of them were right.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Everyone else when Daryl gets his big prize: an entire crate of Mark-40 paint grenades, which he and Larry can and have used to glorious effect—when they haven't gone hilariously amiss. Daryl, however, is overjoyed.
• This Means War!: Kasi (the young cheetah girl) says to Doc, after he dumped a bunch of snow on her, "You realize, of course... that this means War."
• This Is the Part Where...:
  • When describing to Red how her day has been so far on her first paintball game, Pirta says she's there because a refrigerator launched by an explosion, the restaurant she was working at was shut down due to contamination with some kind of toxic waste, and that she was brought out to the paintball field against her will. After a panel without a response, she comments that that's the time for him to show shock and dismay. He replies that except for the fridge part, her description of events was pretty normal for Doc's crew.
  • Doc says "This is the part where you run screaming." here to Cara after admitting that he's probably dangerous to be around. She replies that she must be using a different script.
• Through a Face Full of Fur: Sandy's blush shows very clearly, to the point of Doc saying it's nearly in the infrared.
• Time for Plan B: When surrounded by the other team at an "outlaw" paintball field, (basically no real rules) in this strip, the team goes through their options, including Attack Plans B, Delta, and Zero (the last involving two zeppelins and a smoke machine).
• Time Machine: The product of a drunken night of inventing.
• Time Stands Still: Gained in a super-speed version by Doc at one point due to too many caffeinated energy drinks. We first see the world from everyone else's perspective involving multiple things (that Doc had touched) exploding and Doc suddenly being found several buildings over with multiple broken walls between his origin and destination. Then we see Doc's side of the story. While he doesn't have to deal with light shifting and air friction isn't much of a problem, he does have to deal with lack of friction between his legs and the floor and with inertia, both that of other objects and his own.
• Time-Freeze Trolling Spree: Doc takes advantage of caffeine-induced super speed to, among other things, re-arrange some furniture and give someone an atomic wedgie. Then, reality catches up, resulting in various explosions, fires, and Doc's comatose body being found a mile away.
• Toilet Humor:
  • Poked fun at in this strip, lampshading the abruptly Aborted PVP/The Whiteboard crossover.
  • Roger attempts to set up a camera to look in the ladies' restroom. There are a few problems with his plan: 1) it wasn't the ladies room Roger was crawling over, 2) it was Taco Day at the lunch wagon, and 3) Swampy is using the restroom at that particular moment.
• Torches and Pitchforks: Bruno has this exchange with Red just after Doc had blown up his own fridge earlier.
  Bruno: Red.
  Red: Bruno? Wow, that was quick.
  Bruno: Turns out we had some... persuasion to get out of town.
  Red: Somehow, I'm not surprised. Villagers with torches and pitchforks?
  Bruno: Close. Guardsmen with APCs and fifty-cals.
  Red: You guys are moving up in the world.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Or, in this case, Mountain Dew! Which Doc has his own brewing plant for, and makes several times stronger than the commercial variety.
• Twerp Sweating: It's not Cara's father, but her friend Miki who does this to Doc. As she's seen Cara get hurt by previous boyfriends, and also knowing that Doc is indeed that nut she sees on television, she clearly has good reasons to question him.

• Underboobs: When Pirta reaches up to a mask on display, her shirt rises up enough to unintentionally flash a customer with the underside of her breasts. The customer is surprised by the flash, but not unappreciative, asking her to get a different mask down for him from that same display.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Jake and Rainy plot revenge on a Rules Lawyer who has been pestering Red, Bruno, and them. Image enhancement reveals the text in the speech bubble: I'd tell you what we're going to do, but I think there's a bunch of people watching us, and I wouldn't want to spoil the surprise.
• Unsound Effect: On this page, Cara's vintage Volkswagen makes a beetlebeetlebeetle noise. Given the car in question, it's not a big stretch.
• Unwanted Gift Plot: Doc gets many of such gifts returned after Christmas.
• Unwilling Suspension: In earlier strips, Swampy had a tendency to wind up duct taped or stapled to the ceiling that almost qualified for Running Gag status, until his girlfriend Sandy called Doc out on it. Roger has also been suspended from the ceiling via a staple gun a few times.
• Vanity License Plate: The Sept 12, 2012 strip shows the vanity plate of "FXYLDY" on Sandy's car.
• Viewers Are Geniuses: Some shout-outs are fairly old or obscure (or both) and there is some science which can be difficult to understand, such as Doc's explanation of teleporter physics.
• Visual Pun:
  • Like many a Time Travel story, a time travel arc in May 2011 contains a pair o' Docs.^note Play on "parodox", for those who missed the "pun" part.
  • This strip calls Roger a tool for pressing a big red button, with the X-ray view while he was being zapped showing several of his bones being replaced by hand tools.
  • Gino looks into Cara's background, complaining that the coffee menu is too blurry to read.
• Wall of Text: Jinx reels off one of these following the rogue robot arc.
• Waking Up Elsewhere: The first 2014 strip has Doc waking up on a couch stuck in the middle of a desert, after a New Year's Eve party.
  Doc Huh. That must've been some party.
• Waking Up at the Morgue: Doc wakes up in a hospital room underneath his paintball shop (courtesy of DARPA; It Makes Sense in Context) covered in a sheet and with a toe tag. Why he woke up there was never explained.
• Walking Techbane - This customer's mere touch makes markers fall apart. Ordinary hammers fare no better.
• Webcomic Time: The characters often spend most (or all) of the summer of each year playing one-days-worth of paintball. Lampshaded all over the place:
  • Comes up here first.
  • Later, it comes up again in this strip. For those at the paintball field it's been only a few minutes, but for Pirta it feels like it's been two weeks.
  • The most notorious use of this was one particularly epic day of paintball that took over 2 and a half years to tell. Red mentions not having seen his wife for that long,, while Pirta and Sandy end up hacking their way through the jungle to find the old store, which by then is covered in cobwebs. It even turns it up to eleven with a very outdated political banner.
  • The next afternoon, which itself took half a year to tell, had a running gag of Sandy finding her desk lavishly decorated based on whatever real-world holiday was happening at the time. Then she makes sure it will never happen again.
  • Since Cara's first appearance she spends the night with Doc, wakes up late, is the rest of the day at work and then meets up with Doc in her home. She then proceeds to hang a lampshade on what amounts to a day in the comic taking a year in realtime.
  • The most recent storyline started January 3, 2022 with a major snowstorm, resulting in the shop being completely snowed in, and Doc spending the day holding a beach party at an indoor swimming pool. When Mikki said the next day that it would take a few days for the snow to be cleared, Doc took them outside to show that it was now autumn—these two strips having run that September. Cara wonders if it's attributable to global warming. Mikki thinks bad writing may be the culprit instead.
• Wedgie: During one arc, Doc gives one to Swampy - it was far more effective than he'd anticipated.
  • Happens a second time here albeit with Roger giving a wedgie to Red using one of his robots.
  • Happens a third and fourth time with Doc and Roger themselves getting wedgies from one of Roger's robots gone rogue.
• Weirdness Magnet: Doc's shop, according to Jake, qualifies as one of these. (Pirta agrees.)
• Wham Episode: "The Big Kiss" story. Doc's bad luck with women had been a recurring gag for 14 years. Then Howie tells him there's another polar bear in town — just to distract him. Then she proves real, then they kiss and, most importantly, she doesn't mind being set on fire. Since then, Doc is often called "Morty" and has someone to actively try to impress.
• What Does She See In Him?: As lampshaded on the cast page, Cara dating Doc raises that question since Doc's "That nutball that keeps showing up on the evening news". Cara has an answer for that.
• What Would X Do?:
  • Daryl asks himself that about Doc when on the field, but given Daryl isn't a rather large polar bear who runs a paintball shop, the possible answers don't do him much good.
  • WWJMBD (John Moses Browning, often considered one of the gods of the firearm world.)
  • Pirta asks herself what Doc would do, in a 1 vs 1 face-off against Tawny on the field, in this strip. The exact answer is never shown, but Pirta tries to surprise the opponent, and it almost works.
  • Subverted when Tawny asks what would Doc do about hot weather. He simply puts cold beer in his pants, which irks Roger.
• What You Are in the Dark: When given the chance to wipe off a hit and not be seen, Rainman calls himself out.
  "Integrity means doing what's right, even if nobody is looking."
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The "Beer Replicator Incident" arc has one to condense their dealing with the aftermath before starting the next arc.
• Who's Watching the Store?: Early on, the issue wasn't mentioned, Doc, Roger and Swampy played together, and the store was closed. Presumably, the town is too small for any competition (besides Walmart's crappy markers). As the cast grows, it's easier to find someone to stay (often Jinx)... but usually they all leave together, anyway. Two cases stand out:
  • Doc did build a "Backup Airsmith Hologram", but it didn't work as intended.
  • After the 32-month "Longest Day" storyline a series of strips shows Sandy and Pirta cleaning up the store after the day of disuse. Which looks more like decades.
• Worth It:
  • Was getting socked for sneaking a kiss from Sandy worth it? According to Swampy, "Oh God yes."
  • For the sake of an April Fools' Day gag, apparently sneaking in a look at Pirta in the shower wasn't worth it to Roger and Doc.
• Writing Lines: In this strip, after Roger pushes a certain button that gets Doc plastered with thrown creme pies, he's forced to repeatedly write "I will not push the button again" on a blackboard.
• Wrong Turn at Albuquerque: This strip is a Shout-Out to the trope namer, when Swampy steps out onto a rather tall snowdrift, and falls through it completely.
• X Days Since: Several such signs show up occasionally, like "10 days since last mauling". In another strip Doc changes "days" to "minutes".
• X-Ray Sparks: In one of the "Don't push this button" strips, Roger gets zapped by a lightning bolt when he pushes the button in question, revealing insides that look like he's gotten some discount surgery in the past. It may be a Visual Pun on "tool".
• You Do Not Want To Know: A common reaction by the regulars when Sandy or Pirta^note moreso the latter, not having been around the gang for as long as the former asks about any particular weirdness happening.
  Jake: "If past experience is any indication, we'll be better off not knowing."
  • Miki describes one of her ex's interests this way. It's Pip from Sequential Art, by the way.
• You Monster!: Red calls Doc a bastard for awarding Daryl an entire crate of very effective paint grenades.
• Zombie Apocalypse: Starting here, one breaks out during October 2010, and again in 2012 starting here.

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