< Breaking the Fourth Wall

Breaking the Fourth Wall/Web Comics

  • Megatokyo - - A seriously frightening example (in retrospect) where the character is reflecting the symptoms of her real-life namesake's autoimmune disorder which later turned into cancer. Note the knee brace on Seraphim then read Rant 1042 for details.
  • In the sprite comic Bob and George, the 4th wall never existed, and it was a constant running gag. All the characters knew that they were in a comic, and the author of the comic often made appearances. Once he even came out to fight another author that entered his comic's universe. One of the characters even read ahead to know what was going to happen next. Of course this wasn't exactly a bad thing, as it made the comic what it was.
  • Xawu, in most (if not all) the comics that have Hori in them.
  • The fourth wall is given a loving fracture every now and then in A Moment of Peace. At one point, it's opened up so that stars can pour through.
  • In Horndog, the fourth wall breaks Bob's nose.
  • In PvP, now and then, the characters break the fourth wall, usually for some movie impersonation. Nearly every time, someone dies horribly, but as it's fourth wall breaking, it gives an excuse for a Snap Back.
  • Ctrl+Alt+Del broke the fourth wall quite literally in this strip: One-Thousand.
  • Scandinavia and the World occasionally breaks this, but without referencing it. Whenever the Netherlands and Denmark, (and sometimes Germany) surprise Japan by making out, they call it Yaoi, with is never real people; meaning that they, even if it wasn't intentional, know that they know that they are drawn.
  • In Acorn Grove, after a long break, the creators of the strip write themselves in to apologize for the last strip being there for so long. [dead link] . In another strip the resident redshirt get killed when he notices the fourth wall [dead link] .
  • "Dr. McNinja's Final Thoughts" breaks the fourth wall at the end of each chapter in The Adventures of Dr. McNinja (usually used to deliver a humorous 'lesson' from the story or a moral of questionable veracity)
  • The Insecticomics wavers between breaking the fourth wall and not having one altogether. The Insecticons themselves don't really seem to bother with it.
  • Done (incredibly skillfully) every now and then in Dragon Tails.

Corlis: That's it, I'm finding a new comic, this one's stupid!

  • Calamities of Nature breaks the fourth wall here and here, and even discusses the fourth wall while breaking it at the same time.
  • Jason, the author of the Magic: The Gathering webcomic UG Madness, has vowed never to break the fourth wall...except when making fun of his own vow.
  • In Adventurers!, Final Boss Khrima uses an attack spell with an animation so over-the-top, it doesn't just include an Earthshattering Kaboom, it actually cracks the Adventurers game disc, requiring Karn to tell the "player" how to replace the disc with a backup copy.
  • Rich Burlew's The Order of the Stick is pretty random with the fourth wall. The worst is probably the Oracle constantly addressing the audience and referring to books or in-comic years. Also the 100th and 600th strip had lampshading referring to the anticlimax in each. And V once referred to how many strips would be necessary to get another dumb trial done. Belkar also once referred to himself as the only funny thing left in the comic strip.
    • Strip #649 memorably includes Haley stealing a diamond from the site's cast page (which is not part of the comic's continuity) in order to power a Ressurection spell. Ever since then, the actual cast page has shown Haley holding an "I owe me" note instead of the actual diamond.
  • The Cyantian Chronicles: Broken and played for laughs in the bonus comic at the back of the printed collection "Akealae 5". (Available by purchase only.)
    • Arguably, a Censor Box with "We have a Shivae 13 rating to maintain" to cover up a certain naked anthro fox's naughty bits should qualify.
  • In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob, Jean periodically scolds Bob for breaking the Fourth Wall, calling it "one of his worst habits." Although she herself indulges in it on rare occasions.
  • Casey and Andy only broke the fourth wall once, in an early strip, but did so very definitively
  • I Was Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space has been known to break the fourth wall and even had a intermission that was called The Search For The Fourth Wall.
  • In Keychain of Creation, a comic based on the Exalted tabletop RPG, the characters frequently talk as if the rules of the game were the solid rules of their reality, and they knew their own stats. However, they don't actively break the fourth wall; that's left to a band of the Fae, especially their leader, who says quite frankly that he only led his band back to fight the main characters because there'd be no story otherwise. The main characters all act like he's a jabbering mental patient when he says as much.
  • Shape Quest, an RPG video game parody comic, does this during the first strip, where Lance acknowledges that he is poorly drawn and tries to think of something clever to say so people will continue reading past the first strip.
  • The KAMics does this occasionally.
  • The Call of Whatever did it in a storyline starting here.
  • In the Freefall strip 405, the character says, "I know a day is 24 hours, but that one felt like it took a year and 37 weeks to get through" - the exact amount of time it took the author to finish and post those strips.
  • Flipside does it in the Intermission strips.
  • In Drowtales, Kiel can tell that the readers are there and talks to them when she's bored. Others consider her weird for still having an imaginary friend.
    • In a rare twist of breaking the fourth wall in a tragic rather than comedic manner, Kiel grows furious at the audience watching her and throws a belt at them. According the forum fandom, it broke many screens and hit many eyes.
  • Darths and Droids' 468th strip says "Puny Comic-Reading Humans, Bow Before My Magnificence!".
  • In an early Faulty Logic page, Fox and Jalyss break through the fourth wall of the author-comments section (with a hammer) to make sure there are actually people reading their strip.
    • More recently, a spacial vortex reverses fourth-wall positions. Notably, readers can actually see the Fourth Wall in the background.
  • The Xkcd blag features "Federal Reserve Skateboard: A Short Story," which includes the following:
    • Bernanke, trying not to slip in the patches of blood on the floor, struggled with Greenspan. The older man moved like a snake that moved like a former Fed Chairman who moved like a ninja. At last, Bernanke got a solid grip on Greenspan?s collar and hurled him through the fourth wall, knocking you to the ground.
  • Penny from Out at Home pretty much exists to break the fourth wall, to the confusion of the other characters, who don't have her Medium Awareness.
    • "Why are you talking to that wall?"
  • The Cyantian Chronicles: Mostly averted in the canon comics. Only NOT averted when "We Have a Shivae-13 Rating To Maintain", which only happened once so far.
    • Played for laughs in a fan scripted bonus comic contained in the print version of Akaelae 5.
  • In the hundredth strip of Loserz, protagonist Ben remarks: "I just got the strangest feeling, like I'm being watched. -- What's even weirder is that I'm somehow sure this has happened exactly 100 times..."
  • Girls with Slingshots doesn't usually break the Fourth Wall, but in this strip Hazel takes back a hasty comment by pulling the speech bubble back into her mouth and swallowing it.
  • Luci Phurr's Imps does it in This strip.
  • You want literal breaking the fourth wall? Check out this episode of Twisted Kaiju Theater.
  • Shape Quest does this frequently, especially at the end of the first chapter, where Lance urges the readers to continue reading.
  • Cyanide & Happiness also broke the wall several times, like this one.
  • Ozy and Millie toyed with it once. "I'm Ozymandias. You may know me from strips such as this one."
  • Sluggy Freelance breaks it occasionally, like here.
  • Too Much Information has a solid Fourth Wall, with one exception. There's an auxiliary webcomic called Maddie's Monster, in which one of the regular characters (Maddie Cartman) meets an Eldritch Abomination named G'Nar The Insignificant. G'Nar, being non-human, can see through the fourth wall, and tries to point it out. Maddie is unable to figure out what the heck he's talking about.
  • Schlock Mercenary regularly breaks the fourth wall, but it isn't often that the author breaks in through the fourth wall.
    • In many, many panels a main character uses the edge of the panel, literally, as a wall to brace themselves against.
  • Sexy Losers did this in a crossover (barely SFW) and a guest strip (NSFW) did the same joke to, er, completion.
  • Flying Man and Friends does this on a regular basis, with characters addressing or reacting to readers. In this strip, there was even an actual wall underneath the comic, which was peeled away to reveal it.
  • Nowhere University has the characters make references to plot twists & their author, then again the teachers at that school come from literary classics so...
  • In the "Little Diddle" comic Lucky Day [dead link] little diddle finds a lucky penny and lucky ducky says there is no such thing as luck. little diddle then says that they are in a comic so it does exist, then lucky says that the fourth wall just broke.
  • Done with interesting results in this Kevin and Kell Sunday strip.
  • Eyebeam features this brilliant three part comic, combining elements of the Fourth Wall and It Was All Just a Dream.
  • Untitled! had elements of this early on, with, for example, a character who was introduced as "living in the gaps between frames," complete with a character grabbing the frame and leaning her upper body out of the frame and looking into the afore-mentioned gap. What makes this case interesting is that the comic later caught a bad case of Cerebus Syndrome, and as a symptom, acquired a fourth wall. Some of the fourth-wall-breaking elements where explained away (e.g. as the actions of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens or psychic planeswalkers): I don't recall an explanation ever being provided for what was happening when the protagonist leaned her upper torso out of the frame.
  • Enjuhneer does this on occasion.
  • Hilariously toyed with in this Pungirls strip.
  • Most obviously in Bittersweet Candy Bowl during the chapter Out Of The Frame, when all of the minor and background characters form a "Neglected Club" to campaign for more screentime.
  • In this Random Chaos strip [dead link] the reader is killed. Complete with blood splattered on the "screen".
  • In Bibliography.

Ben: Why am I so off-panel?

  • The Sprite Comic FRIENDS 4 EVER!!!! has engaged in breaking the fourth wall a few times.
  • In this Girly episode Otra comes real close to BTFW but does a nice save in the next panel.
  • Several characters of Sandra and Woo have already broken the fourth wall, for example Sandra, Woo and Cloud's father David.
  • In "The Cartoon Chronicles of Conroy Cat", where all cartoon characters are actors in Cartoon Land, the 4th Wall is revealed here to be one of the main principles of Toon Physics.
  • The narrator/author gets in trouble in Blip; K is _not_ happy.
  • Dungeons and Denizens breaks the wall from both directions. Skip back two pages and read the comments to get the whole story.
  • Often happens in Capt'n Crazy.
  • Early on in Game Destroyers, Spiffy breaks the fourth wall by pointing out a Plot Hole.
  • Dragon City's fourth wall is usually only broken by Erin and she often gets in trouble with her mom for it. Most of her other family members try to avoid it.
  • Jix generally tries to avoid it, but sometimes one or two of the characters slip. The first time it happened, Jix was trying to stop Lauren from doing it. It all went downhill from there.
  • In The Fuzzy Five some of the Living Toys do this occasionally.
  • This SMBC comic has the entire human race break the fourth wall of the universe after figuring out that it is just a simulation.
  • In Homestuck there is an actual goddamn physical fourth wall. It's first used as a lame joke and then later by the author as a self-indulgent insert to the comic where he recaps the story. Then the comic introduces a fifth wall (according to Word of Hussie, it separates multiple omniscient narrators) and promptly starts breaking that, too. It's strongly implied that this will be a major plot point. On his formspring page, Andrew Hussie joked that there's also a sixth wall, and that it's what's holding back all the "shitty memes". That wall apparently broke a long time ago.
  • Every chapter of Tales Of Gnosis College ends with a "Women of Gnosis" pin-up that depicts one of the series's female characters and contains a brief caption. One of these characters -- Iris Brockman -- uses her caption to complain to the reader about how she got neither a name nor a dialog line in the preceding chapter.
  • In Vinigortonio:

Igor: Use this convenient plot element!

    This article is issued from Allthetropes. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.