Le Avventure del Grande Darth Vader



"Better than Penny Arcade! Better than Dank And Scud! Better than Dragonball F! Better than Niklas And Friends! The only, inimitable, Adventures of the great Darth Vader!"

Le avventure del grande Darth Vader (in English: The adventures of the great Darth Vader) is an Italian webcomic about a dyslexic hacker and emulation geek who goes by the nickname DARTH VADER (all capitals), always wears a Darth Vader costume, owns a real lightsaber and interacts with other emulation geeks (typically based on actual people who post in the newsgroup it.comp.software.emulatori) by means of jokes about emulation and retrogaming, slapstick and scatological humor. Usually, it has no continuity (to the point that people who die in an episode return in the next as if nothing happened), but sometimes events that occurred in previous episodes are mentioned.

Tropes:

 * Big Ball of Violence: happens in the following episodes:
 * 9 - against an idiot who tries to pass as an alleged celebrity (actually a spammer) and is pummeled for it, then he reveals who he actually is and is pummeled a second time
 * 10 - the spammer mentioned in the previous episode shows up for real and is appropriately dealt with
 * 20 - the author of an emulator with poor performance tries to pass as a bride at a wedding but is discovered and punished by disgruntled fans
 * 21 - not against a character but against a toy stand where the main character's name is misspelled
 * 28 - the above-mentioned spammer shows up at a retrocomputing exhibition and is promptly jumped, then an idiot journalist justifies him and receives the same treatment
 * Binocular Shot: Averted in episode 26, where the main character looks through binoculars, and what he sees is shown inside a single circle. There's even a "note for lamers" which explains that the cartoon represents what can be actually seen when looking through binoculars, as opposed to the two overlapping circles shown by "moviemaking faggots".
 * Crossover: in episodes 7, 10 and 15, DARTH VADER meets Gabe and Tycho from Penny Arcade. In episode 23 he meets James Rolfe, while in episodes 26, 27 and 28 he meets a character from Bova Byte, a monthly Italian comic strip published in the PC gaming magazine The Games Machine.
 * Cut and Paste Comic: every time a character is shown, he is almost always in the same pose because it's never a new drawing, it's always a drawing that was already made that was copied and pasted. Eventual (rare) instances of a character changing pose are obtained by copying a part of an existing drawing and rotating it accordingly.
 * Death Is Cheap: several times, the main character kills other characters (typically by decapitating them with his lightsaber), only for them to return in another episode when the story requires them again. This is lampshaded in episode 24, where Jedi Springar (see No Celebrities Were Harmed entry below) shows up again after he was killed in episode 6. A character asks him: "Weren't you dead?" and he replies: "Yeah, I remember I was dead too, but our audience won't care about this."
 * Expy: everything about the main character (except the name and what he wears) is based on the character JeffK created by Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka. The kayfabe relationship between the main character and the author is also the same as the relationship between JeffK and Lowtax. However, while Lowtax stopped producing JeffK-related content years ago, the creator of this comic still supports the character.
 * Face Fault: happens in episodes 10 and 27. In the latter case, the statement that triggers the face fault is so asinine that a sheep face faults too.
 * Gag Penis: happens in episode 13 (a parody Linux advertisement where Linux is shown to be able to recreate melted computers and enlarge the penis of its users) and in episode 27 (where a character gets an impossibly big erection in his pants after being tricked into eating a Viagra-laced steak)
 * Hollywood Hacking: although hacking has never been explicitly shown in the comic, the results of it are. They imply that hacking is so easy for the main character that he can write an emulator in few hours, break into the PC of a movie director and download the full DivX copy of an unreleased movie, successfully pass as other people while still wearing his Darth Vader costume and so on.
 * In Name Only: Well, assuming the titular character actually is supposed to be Darth Vader.
 * Kayfabe: the comic is allegedly drawn by the main character himself. The actual author appears in it as a completely separated character, who has nothing to do with the creation of the comic. Also, the real author posts in it.comp.software.emulatori as both himself (he then acts like a real person) and the main character of the comic (he then acts exactly like you see in the comic). Sometimes, the two personas argue with each other.
 * L Is for Dyslexia: the main character of the comic is dyslexic and knows only one insult ("culattone", the Italian word for "faggot") which he uses to mean anything from incompetent, to clumsy, to stupid, to someone who does not agree with him. Since, according to the kayfabe of the comic, the main character is also the author, all the other characters are dyslexic too, and even the signs have plenty of misspells. Ironically, the topic of dyslexia is never discussed in the comic, and the only times the real author (in his DARTH VADER persona) ever brings up dyslexia is when someone misspells a word in an actual message to it.comp.software.emulatori. The reaction is usually a reply where DARTH VADER chastizes the original poster for misspelling that word while making a lot of spelling mistakes himself, except for the word he is talking about, which is usually the only word spelled right. A variation of this is suggesting an even worse spelling as the correct one, while calling the original poster a dyslexic.
 * Literal Ass-Kicking: combined with Getting the Boot, happens in the following episodes:
 * 3 - against the author of an emulator with poor performance and an obese male fan of said emulator who entered DARTH VADER's cellar to perform a striptease
 * 9 - against a clueless noob who is trying to locate a spammer
 * 22 - against two fans (of the dumb variety) with opposing views, who are arguing about which 8-bit computer is the best
 * 24 - once more, against the above-mentioned emulator author, for creating an emulator which its own source code policy makes completely incapable of reaching the accuracy declared in its readme
 * 25 - once more, against the above-mentioned clueless noob, for suggesting that algorithms are not implemented by the programmer but automatically generated by the compiler
 * Little No: in episode 28, the answer of an emulator developer to a request of DARTH VADER to create a stereoscopic plugin for him. This causes DARTH VADER to drop a Precision F-Strike.
 * Maximum Fun Chamber: several times, the main character uses his cellar as one. So far, it has been shown to have an intentionally misspelled sign above the entry door (TEH DANGEON), and to contain: a couch, a harness to hang troublemakers by their scrotum, two pillory-targets for persimmon-throwing against the faces of troublemakers (marked as "TEH TARGHET") and an ass-kicking machine (an engine that moves two wheels with boots on their spokes, marked as "TEH ASS-KIKING MASHEEN").
 * No Celebrities Were Harmed: two episodes include a character called Jedi Springar, a cut-and-paste, lightsaber-wielding version of Jerry Springer who always gets his show hijacked by DARTH VADER.
 * New Media Are Evil: parodized in episode 11, where a Christian fundamentalist in the shape of a talking ass (the buttocks kind, not the donkey kind) publishes an article blaming video games for 9/11 because he saw DARTH VADER accidentally crashing into the Twin Towers while playing a flight simulator. That episode was released few days after 9/11 with the intent of stirring controversy.
 * Pedophile Priest: episode 20 concerns the marriage of one of the characters, who walks to the church with his to-be wife only to find the church locked. He then knocks at the priest's door, asking him what is going on, and the priest tells him to wait because he is working at the website of the church. All that is shown of it is the title ("Father Buson's pedophile website") and its four menu items: "Naked kids", "Famous (but also naked) kids", "Naked choirboys" and "African kids (poor and naked)". The church is shown to have a crucifix where the acronym INRI has been replaced with the word FAGOT. In addition, the name of the priest constitutes a Bilingual Bonus because "buson" means "faggot" in Venetan.
 * Stylistic Suck: the comic consists of pictures crudely drawn with Paint, with little to no background behind the characters (except for the objects they actually interact with in the scene, which cease to be drawn as they are no longer relevant) and almost every single word in the balloons is misspelled.
 * The Little Detecto: the main character owns a device called a "faggot detector", which resembles the PKE-meter from The Real Ghostbusters and goes off every time something happens that matches his current redefinition of the word "faggot".
 * The Un-Reveal: episode 25 is about other characters wondering about the real identity of the main character, and they ask him to remove his helmet to show his true face. The main character promptly takes his helmet off... to reveal an identical helmet underneath. This gag is inverted in the following episode, where a character knocks on DARTH VADER's door and DARTH VADER (with his helmet on) tells him to wait because he needs to put his helmet on. Then he puts on a second, identical helmet.