Boxer Hockey

The Mekpens, from right to left: Rittz Tibbits, Skip Matthews, Charlie "Chuck" Packer, Billy "Burrito", and Coach Tim Selleck.

Boxer Hockey is a webcomic created by Tyson Hesse, starting in 2006. It updates Biweekly on Wednesdays and Sundays, and follows a team for a fictitious sport called Boxer Hockey. The comic mostly focuses on the team's lives outside the games, but also has the games in separate arcs.

Tropes used in Boxer Hockey include:

• The Ace: The appropriately named Ace is shaping up to be this, as seen here and here.
• Affectionate Parody: Of Sonic the Hedgehog, starting here.
• All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles: As seen in this page.
• All Asians Are Alike: "Rittz, you and me take the dark haired one.
• All Just a Dream: The "Chuck's baby" arc.
• Alliterative Name: Two of the all-girl Georgia Peaches: Crystal Kaning and Ryan Richards.

"That's a boy's name."

• Animal Athlete Loophole: Averted. Tyson goes out of his way to explain that everyone can play Boxer Hockey. "Even good 'ole Fido". That being said the Sydney Screamers' goalie is a kangaroo.
• Art Evolution: Compare an early strip here to a more recent strip.
• Art Shift: To Peanuts style for one strip. And in the style of Cromartie High School here.
• Bedmate Reveal: Chuck gets one of these, much to his delight.
• Berserk Button: When Daisuke stepped on Skip's Cool Shades. They were one of the first gifts Rittz ever gave him, and this pissed him off so much that he ignored that he was paid by him to throw the game to pay him back for it.
• Big Damn Heroes: Billy when he saved Rittz from being killed by a ninja.
• Big Ol' Eyebrows: Rittz.
• Book Commentary: The first printed collection has loads of notes and sketches scattered about.
• Boxing Kangaroo: The Sydney screamers' goalie is one of these.
• Brick Joke: The Bear and here
• Calvin Ball: Boxer hockey has rules, but they're so simple and vague it falls into this category.
• The Complainer Is Always Wrong: The coach's approach to everything. Tragically, since Billy has tried to warn him twice that Skip is selling out the games, and he won't listen.
• Cool Shades: Skip's original Cool Shades are crushed in the Japanese game. Rittz buys him a new pair.
  • The originals were later revealed to be a gift from Rittz. He had them for YEARS.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Rittz, apparently. At least when it's "laundry day."
  • Makes sense when you consider he's an international star of a VERY violent sport, and "laundry day" is probably a play.
• The Dandy: Chuck.
• Dark-Skinned Blond: The Richards siblings Dick and Ryan.
• Dead Baby Comedy: Quite literally.

"That is one dead baby."

• Drugs Are Bad: Eventually, we discover that Rittz's mom death was caused by smoking, which prompt Skip to refuse a cigarette.
• Duct Tape for Everything: How Skip and Rittz fix their couch after it was cut in half.
• Eyes Always Shut: Billy.
• Fan Service: As a rule, competitors in the game are required to play in their underwear, regardless of gender. Some women opt to wear an apron over them, but modesty has no place on the field.
• Fatal Flaw: Skip's is Greed. He's Only in It For the Money and has lost the sense of fun in playing the game. What humanizes him most is that he's entirely aware of it and fighting with regret about it.
• Filler Strips: He tends to do a lot of non-story comics. He also gained much attention by making a guest strip for PvP.
  • Also did one for The Abominable Charles Christopher.
• Freudian Excuse: All over the place in Rittz & Skip's backstory. Rittz was the fat kid growing up and Skip was the troubled, "criminal in waiting" kid who bonded because they had no other friends. Things like why Skip doesn't smoke or why breaking his glasses was a Berserk Button all tie back into their backstory.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Poor Chuck. Possibly because he's a replacement player for Ace, who was the coach's nephew and the childhood friend of Rittz & Skip.
• Furry Fandom: Parodied.
• Gender Blender Name: Ryan.
• Ho Yay: Though most of the gay jokes are directed at Chuck, it's Rittz and Skip with the most subtext.
  • Rittz blurts out that at one point he work up with Ace kissing him on the mouth, to everyone else's surprise. Rittz is too innocent to understand what he just said.
  • Rittz and Skip are more an example of Bromance than Ho Yay thanks to Rittz being an innocent.
• I Take Offense to That Last One:

[[http://boxerhockey.fireball20xl.com/?id=171 "This is why everyone hates you, Skip! You're a homophobic, egocentric, back-stabbing, racist asshole!"<br/> "Hey! I am not racist."]]

• Improbable Weapon User: A player's "stick" can be any kind of blunt object. Cue players using boards, boxing gloves, rainsticks, wooden swords, and paddles.
• Innocently Insensitive: Rittz, following along with the gay jokes about Chuck. He apparently thought they were making fun of him for having red hair the whole time.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Skip. He punches Rittz in the face out of habit, and most of the time acts like doesn't care about the idiot, but it turns out that Skip and Rittz have been each other's only friends for years. Plus, he bought Rittz burgers. He can't be all bad.
  • In some ways, that's also evident of Skip being a Jerkass Woobie.
  • The coach qualifies. He punches a stewardess in the face for telling him not to light up on the plane and brushes it off when everyone thinks he got one of his players killed doing it. However, he does care for (the rest of) his team and sees (most of) them as a surrogate family.
• Man Child: Rittz, an adult Mouthy Kid, and given the unrestrained violence of the sport he regularly engages in, he qualifies for Psychopathic Manchild as well.
• Mistaken for Gay: Chuck, fullstop. Even by people he doesn't know.
• Mood Whiplash: The most recent pages have taken a dramatic (literally) shift away from the typical humor of the comic.
  • None of the recent pages can compare to the last panel of this page. It's okay, you can laugh.
• Morality Pet: Rittz for Skip. Subverted in that he keeps on committing crimes anyway.
• No Animals Were Harmed: Averted hard.
  • The game of boxer hockey uses frogs as the ball. Granted, they are somehow genetically altered to be more rubbery and resistant to harm, but they do get beaten up pretty badly, and one of the very few rules of the game is that you get a 5 point penalty for killing one, meaning that this happens often enough to need a rule.
  • The team's pet cat and hamsters also don't fare well. The former nearly starves to death, and all of them end up suffocated to death by the team's ditz.
• No More for Me: Averted, hilariously, when Rittz takes a swig of cough syrup just as a NINJA decides to burst in.
• Off-Model: Played for Laughs in his Sonic parody.
• Only Sane Man: Sonic, apparently.
  • As for the Team Mecha Penguin itself, Chuck seems to come off as this.
• Oral Fixation Fixation: Skip often has a toothpick in his mouth.
• Posthumous Character: We haven't been told what happened to Ace and whether he's alive or not, but he fulfills the same role in the story and is only shown through flashbacks.
• Read the Fine Print: Not used storyline wise, but rather as a joke for people who are able to read the tiny text. Here.
  • First section reads "This is all just a bunch of placeholder text, none of this matters, and you won't be able to read any of it."
  • The section 'Proud of Their Boy' reads "I'm only making all this up because I know there's SOMEONE who's going to go looking for something to read here. Well, are you happy? Did you get what you want? I HOPE YOU DIE!"
  • Last section reads "And that's when I knew I had to kill her. True, she did nothing wrong, but the VOICES. THE VOICES TOLD ME TO. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES BILLY A DULL BOY."
• Recycled in Space: Boxer Hockey in SPACE!
• Rule of Symbolism: Daisuke cuts couch in half. Skip and Rittz sit on opposite sides of the couch. Their relationship starts to falter after the night Daisuke cuts the couch in half. Symbolic?
• Santa Claus
• Schedule Slip: Formerly due to college, and a few trips between America and Japan. Now due to freelance work, selling, shipping, and sketching in huge orders of books by himself. He often makes Filler Strips when he does not have the time for story ones. Lampshaded here.
• Scenery Porn: For a comic focused on humor, it's had some fairly spectacular backgrounds.
• Selective Obliviousness: The coach isn't willing to see that Skip is throwing games because it would break up the "family" he has with the team.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts: Chuck and Ryan, apparently.
• Spoof Aesop: The "Rittz learns a life lesson" strips.
• That Night Felt Like Months: This strip.

Rittz: "Did anyone else feel like this week lasted like... three years?"

• Throwing the Fight: Billy believes Skip threw the game against the Australians.
  • It turns out that he was probably right.
    • It's pretty much confirmed he was right
• Too Dumb to Live: Rittz. He's barely functional, really. He falls for tricks that only sometimes work on dogs.
  • The coach manages to destroy a plane and a life-raft both in the same day through smoking despite Skip telling him to knock it off.
• Toxic Friend Influence: Skip, when he and Rittz were a child, until Rittz made him promise to be good if they were going to be friends. He stops dragging Rittz into things but doesn't really reform, setting up the conflict within the team when Billy finds out.
• Trigger Phrase: Rittz reacts to play-calling like this.
• Uncancelled: For a while the creator was contemplating ending the official storyline comic after the Australia story arc wrapped up, but after a short hiatus came back to continue the story.
• Virginity Makes You Stupid: Sexual naivety is just part of Rittz's general naivety.
• Webcomic Time: Lampshaded in strip #97: "Did anyone else feel like this week lasted like ... three years?"
• What You Are in the Dark: Skip is forced to face this in a dream. Billy is intent on making him face it in real life to destroy him for what he's done to the team.
• Write What You Know: The first story arc has Team MekPen visit Japan. Author Tyson Heese has lived in Japan before and is fluent in Japanese.