Buttersafe

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Buttersafe is a gag-a-day Web Comic by Ray Castro and Alex Culang. It updates Tuesdays and Thursdays, and (as of August 2020) has been running since April 2007.

Recurring Characters:

• Saddest Turtle and his friend Jolly Octopus. The Saddest Turtle is a rather naive creature who likes playing the guitar.
• Punch Monster, a purple monster with one massive arm who punches people.
• Skeleton Harvester, a giant monster who harvests people's skeletons. Appears infrequently, but his first appearance was iconic enough that he is one of Buttersafe's most famous characters.
• Veiny Dog, a dog with very prominent veins.

There is also a Twitter feed, which they use to announce updates/discuss what they've been eating (usually in the same tweet).

Tropes used in Buttersafe include:

• Anti-Humor: In "A Guy Walks Into A Bar".
  • Anti-Humor is fairly common in the dry world of Buttersafe. For example, "Fishing". The joke is that from the text in the first panel you expect some sort of hilarious shenanigans to go down. You expect these shenanigans (of the hilarious variety) to go down right after the guy says he's got one - say, he has difficulty reeling it in, the boat capsizes, whatever - so when it cuts right to the elephant being sanguinely in the boat with no problems experienced at all (nor indeed any indication that this is at all outside the norm) this goes against your expectations, and thus humour is born.
• Blessed with Suck: A man's having his wife be the most beautiful woman in the world turns out to be this in "Arbitrary Potato and the Most Beautiful Woman in the World", because Arbitrary Potato is a capricious and arbitrary potato.
• Body Horror: "Clear Skin". Clear skin is not necessarily a good thing.
• Cat Up a Tree: One of the many tragic events in the tragic life of Annabelle.
• Chest Burster: As part of an Alien Homage in "APPLE".
• Choose Your Own Adventure: Parodied in "Choose Your Own Adventure"
• Completely Missing the Point: "Gold Planet".
• Cool Shades: The eponymous Burrito of "Let It Burrito" wears these. He's pretty cool.
• Cue Card Pause: Hang-gliding is GREAT! ...If you're a loser.
• Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: In "The Threat", the titular threat is "I will punch you in every genital you own. Every. Genital. You. Own."
• Depth Deception: "Depth Perception"
• Deus Ex Machina: In "Great Neighbors", God stops the protagonist's runaway car. The rest of his journey is also rendered safe by a series of Contrived Coincidences.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Inverted in "House of Cards".
• Dissimile: In "Bird Stories III", it turns out making a difficult decision isn't a lot like that bird over there.
• Don't Explain the Joke: Used for depressing dystopian Anti Humour in "After the Explosion".
• Door Step Baby: In "A Baby" the baby is forced to prove its might before it is accepted.
• Far Side Island: The setting of "Life on the Desert Island".
• Five Stages of Grief: Applied to other things including buying a car and falling out of a tree in "The Five Stages".
• Flying Car: Used in "No Parking", because it's set in The Future!
• Fun with Acronyms: "The Inventor" features the invention of Stacked Triangles Aligned In Right Angles, or stairs.
• I Love Nuclear Power: Parodied in a Running Gag where The Rant claims that some character got his powers by being bitten by the appropriate radioactive object. In full: Pie Man's "“Pie Senses” come from being bitten by a radioactive can of syruped peaches"; The Champion of Tattoos "got his champion tattoo powers from being bitten by a radioactive tattoo needle"; Big Glasses "got his Big Glasses Powers from a radioactive one-hour glasses store"; the paramedic in "Being a Hero" "got his CPR powers from being bitten by a radioactive paramedic"; and Surfing Turtle "got his surfing & crying powers from a radioactive ocean of tears".
  • Captain Tomato, however, got his really-fast-tomato-eating powers from MIT, with a minor in Sociology.
• Imagine Spot: In "Watermelon".
• In a World: "The Guy With The Really Wide Smile" is styled as a trailer and thus begins like this.
• It's Been Done: In "Show Me Your Moves", a guy gets mocked for 'inventing' the punch. And then the leg-punch.
  • In "The Inventor", it's stairs.
• Kaiju: A giant T-Rex stalks the town in "The Adventures of Pie Man, Part 2: The Attack of the Terrible T-Rex" ("Ooh, he's so terrible!")
• Knights and Knaves: Parodied in "The Brothers". One always lies, one's a rabid coyote. And one's a...
• Mayfly-December Romance: "Moon Junior".
• Monster Clown: Clowns are even scarier when they don't frown.
• My Friends and Zoidberg: In "The Tragic Life of Annabelle", "everyone who ever loved you" and "your mother".
• "Not Wearing Pants" Dream: Discussed in "At School, No Clothes".
• Pokémon-Speak: How the animals speak in "Voices of Nature".
• Pre-Ass-Kicking One-Liner: In "Watermelon". "You want to know how I prefer my watermelon? Seedless." *BOOM*
• Ramp Jump: Subverted in "The Cliff".
• Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue: Roses are red, violets are blueniverse, I really like the centre of the universe.
• Running Gag: Whenever a character with a superpower appears in the comic, The Rant will explain that that character got their powers from being bitten by a radioactive <something related to the power>. For example:

The God of Lightning got his lightning powers from being bitten by a radioactive lightning bolt.

• • Occasionally subverted, as in:

He got his love of soccer from childhood.

• Screw Yourself: Applied to prokaryotic organisms in "Biology 101".
• Silly Reason for War: In "Thrift Shopping", a war breaks out between "Thissideland" and "Thatsideland" over ownership of a thrift-store bought sandwich.
• Spooky Photographs: Parodied in "Vacation Photos", where the ghost keeps showing up on their photos because it's needy.
• Stock Shticks: Parodied in "Stand Up". Also discusses the Mattress Tag Gag.
• Summation Gathering: Parodied in "Punch Monster and the Case of the Missing Jewels".
• Take Our Word for It: Parodied in "Surprise".
• Tan Lines: The subject of "Shirt Tan".
• Tempting Fate: Subverted in "Suspense".
  • And done properly in "Head Situations".
  • And then, once more, in "The Bottomless Pit".
• The Power of Love: Parodied in "The Power of Love".
• Third Person Person: "The Third Person" discusses the difficulties of doing this when your friendship group averts the One Steve Limit.
• Three Wishes: In "Wishes for a Newborn", Hopoquil (god of fertility) gives a couple three wishes for their newborn daughter.
  • And a genie grants a man three wishes in, well, "Three Wishes".
• Timmy in a Well: Subverted in "The Heroic Dog", where we learn that the dog's intentions are less than pure.
• Twist Ending: "The Twist Ending" has a twist at the end.
• Unusual Euphemism: "Robin Hood" imagines what it would be like if Robin Hood spent his time making up unusual insults.