Wacky College
Many webcomic artists are college students or recent graduates, so it is only natural that many webcomics are also set in colleges. However, these institutions of higher learning are of often strange places even by the standards of Planet Eris: the faculty are all Mad Scientists or Incredibly Sadistic Bastards, the buildings are often substandard, haunted and/or highly explosive, and as for the students...
Roughly the equivalent of the Elaborate University High in anime; high school settings of this sort are less common in webcomics, but not unknown, and conversely, university settings are relatively rare in anime. This may be a reflection of the different roles these institutions play in U.S. and Japanese cultures, though it may also reflect the target Demographics.
Not particularly related to Strawman U, though the name may make one think such a thing.
Comic Books
- Though it is only alluded to once, and we never hear about anything that happened there, Ramona Flowers from Scott Pilgrim attended the University of Carolina in the Sky, which must have been... interesting.
Film
- Pacific Tech from Real Genius
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Ick: Now if we can just keep it from exploding! |
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- South Harmon Insitute of Technology of Accepted. The students are the teachers, and can thus major in anything they want, including Mental Detonation.
- Huxley College from the Marx Brothers film Horse Feathers does not initially seem particularly wacky, but when Grouch Marx is the president, and he accidentally hires Chico and Harpo as ringers to play on the college football team...
- Medfield College, from the 1960s/70s Disney Films The Absent Minded Professor, Flubber, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, Now You See Him, Now You Don't, and The Strongest Man in the World.
Live Action TV
- Greendale, where everyone is accepted! And they offer an insane variety of exotic courses, hold annual paintball tournaments, and the Dean loves wearing inappropriate costumes.
Tabletop Games
- GURPS Illuminati University.
Video Games
- The Trail of Anguish offers Elkland, where the professors set paint bombs for one another.
Web Comics
- CRFH!!
- Mad About U.
- Mac Hall
- Mac Hall is notable in that it's at least semi-autobiographical (the name is short for Boyd and Mc Conville's old dormitory, MacDonald Hall), so it's entirely possible the college they went to was actually somewhat like this.
- U.C. Rats
- Roomies! at first.
- Fans
- Happy but Dead is nominally set in a college dorm, but you'd never know it
- Building 12
- The Class Menagerie
- Umlaut House had this as its original premise, but dropped away from it almost immediately.
- Candi
- Piled Higher and Deeper
- For quite possibly the most extreme example, Nowhere U has students who literally have no idea where the school is, are taught by important figures from classical literature, and tend to randomly receive mysterious powers.
- Halls, a short-lived webcomic by Craig Munro, focuses more on the main character and his roommates (all of whom are weird, but not in any particularly "wacky" way) than bizarre goings-on at the school. The only mention of a teacher is after the main character makes an inspiring speech about what he's about to learn at "Generic U". Last panel: A hand, holding a paintbrush, explaining that it is a paintbrush.
- Like Mac Hall above, probably semi-autobiographical. There comes a point in an art student's life when some of the more basic classes, like color theory, start to feel like an insult to your intelligence.
- Bardsworth.
- In a case of What Could Have Been, Bob and George was originally going to be in a setting like this, until the author realized he couldn't draw nearly well enough to make the comic, and settled into writing the Mega Man Sprite Comic that ran for seven years.
- Enjuhneer is set at one of these.
- The Succubus and Incubus Academy in Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures
Web Original
- Tales of MU
- Chatoyant College: The college is like other American colleges only that it teaches magic and not everybody there is human.