Bogleech

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"Run for your lives!"

Bogleech is a website devoted to insects, parasites, monsters, and High Octane Nightmare Fuel in general. It was started by web cartoonist and biology buff Jonathan Wojcik, also known as Scythemantis. Topics include biology, movie monsters, videogames, toys, mythology, and so on. The main site also includes webcomics and flash cartoons, as well as Mortasheen, Wojcik's own idea for a Pokemon-style videogame. Also has links to numerous Cracked.com articles written by him, usually about the less pleasant aspects of Mother Nature (e.g. parasites that cause aberrant supernumerary leg growth in frog.

Tropes used in Bogleech include:
  • Animal Crossing: "Kitties are funny. Kitties like fish. I like fish too. I like to rub them up and down my chest. Kitties are funny."
  • Anthropomorphic Objects: Or organs, in this case; two recurring characters in his comics are Brains and Guts, who are a sentient brain and stomach, respectively.
  • Crap Saccharine World: Mortasheen is something of the Bizarro version of this trope. The setting is a sprawling continent-sized toxic urban wasteland of twisted science that is home to degenerate humanoids and hundreds of species of horrific bloodthirsty monsters (many created by the residents as living tools or weapons) where life is either nasty, brutish and short or agonizingly drawn out for far too long... and yet most sentient beings who live there cheerfully take it all in stride, and behave pretty much like you'd expect if this was a standard happy-go-lucky Pokémon-like world instead of a hell-world that could otherwise give Warhammer 40,000 a run for its money.
  • Eldritch Abomination: Some of his Mortasheen menagerie are Shout Outs to H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Some are worse.
    • Sometimes appear in the comic and elsewhere on the site too.
  • Mons: Mortasheen is pretty much the darkest possible version of this idea, with several monster clowns, sentient iron maidens, an entire class consisting of various insects fused with humans and at least four different varieties of zombie fetus.
  • Monster Clown: Jonathan is quite obviously a fan; Mortasheen contains an entire monster type comprised of this trope, known as the "Joker" class, which is basically equivalent to there being a Pokemon type called "Clown". There are numerous monstrous clown merchandise items in the Halloween galleries, as well.
  • Nightmare Fetishist
  • Our Vampires Are Different: Mortasheen's Vampire-class monsters, aside from extremely freakish forms, are created by infection from an extraterrestrial (possibly extradimensional) super-parasite whose ultimate form is absurdly powerful. Fortunately, ultimate form vampires rarely live on Earth for long. Unfortunately, it's because they leave to spread vampirism to the four corners of the universe and beyond.
  • Take That: This article ends in one, after a pretty nice build-up. Most of the information about spiders and arachnophobia is presented pretty fairly, if perhaps a bit bitterly. For the sake of the sensitive, most of the photographs are of butterflies. These butterfly photos get increasingly creepier as they go (did you ever notice how ugly butterflies can be up close?), and then suddenly you get a picture of a jumping spider looking quite innocent and adorable, presumably to ease arachnophobes into the idea that spiders can be cute, too. Then the second-to-last picture pops up, followed by a photo of a spider catching and killing a butterfly. The words accompanying this picture: "Also, screw you." The overall intention is a comical one, but it can still be a little jarring.
  • What Measure Is a Non-Cute?: Averted. Jonathan and most of the forum members undoubtedly prefer parasitic flatworms that live in snail eyeballs to kittens.
    • Some of us like everything.

Specific strips from the webcomic include examples of:

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