Webcomic / Pet Foolery

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Pet Foolery is Ben Hed's amusing (and sometimes philosophical) take on animals, people, popular culture, and the world at large. The now-famous Pixie and Brutus comics actually began as a comic from the series, and, while some other "mini-series" have emerged, most of the strips are joke-a-day one-shots that bounce back and forth between reality, fantasy, horror, and science fiction, usually with a healthy dose of comedy.

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This webcomic includes examples of the following tropes:

• Adaptational Badass: The cast of Dora the Explorer and Go, Diego, Go! get aged up and played more seriously. Dora is still an explorer; Diego becomes a wildlife trafficker after being scarred in some offscreen incident; Swiper is a bounty hunter, and Boots is a muscle-bound Killer Gorilla.
• Agony of the Feet: An agent being tortured taunts his captors with their inability to make him talk...and then they bring in a LEGO and force his foot down onto it. When he realizes what's happening, he panics and says he'll tell them what they want, but they force him to go through the experience anyway.
• Aliens Steal Cattle: In one strip, a crew of aliens on a UFO tractor beam a cow up to their ship...only to find that their ship's miniscule size (matching their heights) makes it impossible to bring it inside. The next time, they successfully abduct a cat...and quickly regret it when the cat starts hunting them.
• Analogy Backfire: In "Negativity", a depressed guy is given the advice that "negativity is like a monster, and the more you feed it, the more it grows." The guy starts imagining a shadowy monster growing out of him, slurping up his speech balloons and growing bigger whenever he says something negative, and immediately cheers up at the prospect of having a giant pet monster. The lady who gave him the advice yells at him for ruining the analogy, but he's too busy saying negative things and praising the monster with Baby Talk as it happily munches them up.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: In "Weak", when two dromaeosaurs are scoping out some potential prey:
  Brad: But this time let's make sure we pick a weak target. You remember what happened last time, right?
  Brad's partner: (turns to face Brad, revealing the very fresh scar over where her right eye used to be) You mean two days ago when that huge iguanodon gouged my eye out? Yeah, Brad, I remember.
  Brad: (wincing) Sorry.
  Brad's partner: Why would you even ask me that?
• Be Careful What You Wish For: One strip has a dog treeing a cat and then being unable to get at it. When his Fairy Dogmother appears, he wishes he could climb trees. She turns him into a squirrel. Now he can climb trees, but the cat is no longer afraid of him, and he's the one who has to run for his life.
• Bottom of the Barrel Joke: One strip has a man showing his new car to a friend, only for the friend to open the wrong thing, letting out all the "horsepower" (literal horses) in the tank. The characters note how bad a joke this is.
• Bruiser with a Soft Center: One strip shows an intimidating-looking muscular guy taking a pet carrier home from the pound...and a tiny kitten scampers out of it to play with the toy he got it. The comic ends with the kitten happily snoozing on its smiling owner's lap.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: In "Sinuses", a knight comes to slay a dragon for having burned down his village when he was a boy. The dragon tells the knight that he burns a lot of villages and it wasn't personal (but still apologizes for it).
• Canon Character All Along: The strip about Monsters, Inc. 1 features a group of armed soldiers invading the monster world led by a female scientist named Doctor Gibbs, who intends to capture monsters and bring them to Earth to prove her theory on parallel dimensions. But when she sees Sully, she calls him "Kitty", revealing she's actually an adult Boo.
• Cat Up a Tree: One strip starts with a boy walking up to Emma as she stands beneath a tree and asking what's wrong. She says Mr. Noodle won't come down. He offers to retrieve him and climbs the tree, calling, "Here, kitty kitty!" until he comes face-to-face with the snake and falls.
• The Chain of Harm: One strip starts with an anthropomorphic tiger picking on an anthropomorphic owl for her large eyes. The owl then makes fun of a crocodile wearing braces, who then insults a pig over his snout, who then belittles a penguin shooting hoops for his lack of height. The penguin then breaks the chain by inviting the pig to join him, and the strip ends with them bonding while ribbing each other in a more good-natured way.
• Contractual Genre Blindness: One strip (about a Jurassic Park expy) has one dinosaur coaching another how to act when one is around the hero of the story, such as going for the Jump Scare rather than the killing move and tripping over every obstacle in the way rather than running him down.
• Cover Innocent Eyes and Ears: One comic has a tigress scoffing at a white tiger cub's attempt to pounce on his mother. The white tigress covers her son's ears so he won't hear her bad-mouthing the tigress's own son.
  White tigress: At least my kid is an actual tiger.
  Dog: Mother, is she talking about me?
  Tigress: Don't listen to her, Steven.
• Deadly Prank: The comic "Reward" shows a queen with a very puckish sense of humor constantly pulling pranks on the people who come to claim a reward for getting rid of various monsters. Her bodyguard, Sir Tom, points out the obvious problem with teasing people strong enough to kill a monster, which she dismisses as him having no sense of humor. The episode ends with her pulling another prank on a man called Daemaztoth Face-Ripper.
• Deconstructive Parody:
  • The Lion King isn't going to end with the lions switching diet to bugs and the prey animals living in peace, because the Circle of Life is real.
  • Capturing a wild Pokémon, especially one that won't follow your command might get messy. Especially when it's a real-life wild animal.
  • Moonlight is actually reflected sunlight, so werewolves can totally transform in daylight, they've just been lying about it. Similarly, it also means moonlight can harm vampires just like sunlight.
  • "Fight" starts as a sequence of martial arts anime tropes — a wiry kid walks into a boxing gym to challenge the coach, tanks his first punch to his face, offers him three free hits as a boast, and then tanks each of the coach's specific called moves, after which the coach and students, awed by his power, beg him to teach them. It then cuts back to reality, showing that the first punch actually knocked the challenger into a stupor and he's been hallucinating the entire thing.
• Dogs Are Dumb: One early strip shows a trio of dogs yelling "Car!", exasperating the cat who lives in the same house, who says that they don't need to do this when cars come by so often. Then the dogs get distracted by one of the neighbors and start yelling his name instead, much to the cat's chagrin.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: In one strip, a ghost snickers to itself as it prepares to scare a guy relaxing in his easy chair, only to be intercepted by his faithful dog, who barks it away. The guy doesn't see the ghost and scolds the dog for the disruption, causing the dog to ask where his "thank-you" is.
• Formally Named Pet: One mini-series shows a young girl, Emma, adopting a snake when her parents take her to buy a pet for her birthday. She calls the snake Mr. Noodle.
• Fridge Logic: In-Universe; one strip shows a vampire and a werewolf meeting on a beach during a sunny day. (The vampire is wearing sunscreen.) When the vampire questions how the werewolf is in his wolf form during the day, he chuckles and points out that moonlight is just reflected sunlight. Later, at night, the vampire contemplates the meaning for her own vulnerability to sun... and promptly bursts into flame.
• Goofy Feathered Dinosaur: The recurring Velociraptor character Twig is a very heavily feathered dinosaur who is also an opportunistic loser prone to other predators taking advantage of him or putting the kibosh on his dishonest schemes. In particular, "Intimidation" calls particular attention to his plumage when he tries to scare off a hungry Carnotaurus with a feather-poofing "intimidation display" that looks anything but intimidating. We also see some lightly-feathered T. rex characters occasionally, but they're not depicted as nearly as goofy as Twig.
• Green Is Gross: One strip is "written" by a cat pretending to be a human and consists of reasons cats are superior to dogs. One of these is that dogs don't bathe themselves as cats do and are "stinky gross." The odor is represented by green wiggly lines around the drawing of the dog.
• Grimmification: One strip reimagines Goldilocks and the Three Bears as a horror film. The comic starts with the Bayer family (a group of anthropomorphic bears) summoning the police to deal with a "flat-faced goblin" that has invaded their home. The cops slowly become spooked as they see evidence of the creature's presence, and, when they find Goldilocks, she looks like a zombie with Glowing Eyes of Doom.
• Guile Hero: One strip shows a young woman encountering a werewolf that has been preying on the herds. She keeps it talking by pretending to mistake it for a furry until she can load her gun.
• Happily Adopted: One strip retells the story of The Ugly Duckling as it would have been if the cygnet had ended up in a crocodile nest rather than a duck nest. She still feels awful, this time because she can't hunt like her adoptive family, but she's very happy with them other than that. One of her brothers reassures her after a failed attempt to drown a wildebeest and brings her some meat from their most recent catch.
• How Do I Shot Web?: In one strip, an experienced vampire is teaching a newbie things about using vampiric powers. While he's teaching flying, the newbie asks excitedly if it's true that vampires can turn into bats. The older one says it's true that they can turn into multiple types of animals, including bats. However, it takes some practice to get the right one. At this point, the new vampire, who's been experimenting, turns into a wolf. He ends up severely injured because he doesn't know how to change back yet.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: In one strip, a warrior enters the cave where a dragon resides with the intent to kill him. The dragon then lists the various titles that were given to him over the years after countless other warriors tried and failed to kill him. The dragon then breaks down in tears and asks why people want to kill him, he minds his own business and never bothers anyone, yet he has been targeted because of what he is, and then he's the one called a monster when he defends himself from an unprovoked attack. The warrior just scratches his head and lets out an embarrassed "oh, wow..."
• Interspecies Adoption:
  • The Ugly Duckling strip still has the cygnet being adopted by another animal family...a Nile crocodile family.
  • One strip has a dog being adopted by a tiger. When the tigress insults the efforts of a white tiger cub pouncing on his mother, the mother white tigress remarks that at least her kid was an actual tiger.
• Interspecies Romance: Recurring Velociraptor character Twig is in love with a T. rex named Roxy. It seems to be one-sided on his part (Roxy berates him for considering her his girlfriend), but she does rescue him from a Carnotaurus that was about to eat him.
• Ironic Echo: In one strip, a Chihuahua gets a shot at the vet's office, snarling threats all the way. The vet laughs, calls him "tough guy" and tells him it won't hurt at all. Later at night, the Chihuahua tracks down the vet with a syringe in his mouth and mockingly repeats the statement.
• I Warned You: In one comic, a lioness named Carol tries to skip out on hunting by having a baboon wrap itself around her head and pretending to be a lion named Kevin. The lions immediately penetrate the disguise and Carol's headgear reminds her that he said it was doomed to failure.
• Killer Rabbit: One strip (which has since been redrawn) shows a pair of T-Rexes walking and talking when one of them freezes. Seeing the lawn flamingo, both of them try to back up slowly. Unfortunately, the male steps on a twig, bringing the flock after them. He gets mobbed and killed by the flamingos. The last panel shows a bunch of lawn flamingos on an assembled T. rex skeleton, explaining where the artist got the idea.
• Know When to Fold Them: In "Sinuses", a knight faces down a dragon, declaring that he will take its gold and slay it as revenge for burning down his village as a boy... but the dragon just gives him some sacks of gold (as it has plenty and won't miss it), isn't in the mood to fight due to its sinuses acting up, and apologizes for the village-burning. The knight refuses to back down... until the dragon melts his sword with one blast of fiery breath, upon which he takes the gold and heads on out with a "get well soon!"
• Lightning Bruiser: In "Hornet", a nimble fencer faces off against a giant ogre, with an initial exchange of taunts about the value of raw strength versus speed and agility. Trouble is, the giant ogre is fast and precise in addition to being huge and strong, allowing him to easily overmatch his smaller foe.
  "Tell me, how can the little hornet win, if the bull can match its speed?"
• Mermaid in a Wheelchair: A normal-looking young woman approaches a werewolf who's holding a Monsters Anonymous meeting. She claims that she's the daughter of a mermaid/minotaur romance who got the human half of both. After the werewolf chews her out for mocking their problems, she tells him she's just here to drop off her brother. Cut to a bull-man with a fish tail, sitting in a wheelchair-like contraption and looking unhappy at the werewolf bothering his sister.
• Monster Brother, Cutie Sister: A normal-looking young woman approaching a Monsters Anonymous-type group, claiming to be a Non-Human Humanoid Hybrid of a minotaur and a mermaid. The werewolf in charge of the support group thinks she's mocking him and chews her out until she explains that she's just here to drop off her brother, a muscular mermaid-tailed bull man in a wheelchair. As she walks away, you can see she has a tail.
• Monster Lord: The queen in "Reward" seems to be a goblin and/or catlike humanoid whose subjects come from various sapient monster races — we see an orc and a more freakish Monstrous Humanoid seeking an audience with her. Though her Number Two, Sir Tom, is a regular human.
• Monster Protection Racket: One strip shows a woman warning the mayor of a village that a werewolf will soon attack, and that it is probably weak to silver. This leads the villagers to throw silver objects at the werewolf that night to repel it. When the mayor expresses worry that the beast will come back, the woman says that gold will work even better, and the next day she suggests diamonds. In each of these panels, the woman is shown wearing progressively fancier clothes, as well as the silver and gold accessories thrown at the werewolf the previous night....
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: "Bite" shows a young woman meeting up with an old acquaintance, who shares that since their last meeting, he's been bitten by a vampire, a werewolf, a radioactive spider, a cobra (which killed him) and a zombie (which brought him back to un-life).
• Non-Human Humanoid Hybrid: A normal-looking young woman approaches a Monsters Anonymous group, claiming that she's half-mermaid and half-minotaur and inherited the human features of both. The werewolf in charge doesn't believe her until she explains that she's here to drop off her brother, a mermaid-tailed minotaur in a wheelchair. The very last panel shows she also inherited her father's tail.
• Our Dragons Are Different: The Western gold-hoarding sort appears as a subject of humor in several strips, such as a huge terrifying dragon wondering in tears why people keep coming to his remote cave to try to kill him, another being swindled out of house and hoard in an ill-advised riddling game with a knight, another refusing to fight a knight that came to challenge him because his sinuses are acting up, and a dragon knight rescuing a dragon princess from a tower guarded by a naked human.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: One strip shows a pair of male lions being approached by a lioness disguised as a lion. They instantly recognize her, given that this particular lioness keeps running out on hunting parties and given that she disguised herself by wrapping a baboon around her head.
• Polymorphic Plummet: Played with in one strip. A veteran vampire is teaching a newbie about his powers, such as flying, when the newbie excitedly asks if vampires can really turn into bats. The older vampire says that they can turn into bats, among other creatures, but it takes some practice to get things right. Just as he says this, the newbie turns into a wolf and immediately drops out of the sky; the older vampire yells at him to change back, but unfortunately, the newbie hasn't quite got the hang of transformation at short notice, and the strip ends with the new vampire in a hospital, covered in bandages.
• Predation Is Natural: Where comics about dark comedy and comics about genuine animal facts come together. Multiple strips feature animals predating on each other and holding conversations during it, with the predators largely unbothered and just doing what they have to. Some strips feature the predator releasing the prey (such as an owl being tricked into releasing a gerbil), some feature the eating happening offscreen (such as this one, which ends with the snake more willing to eat a mouse backtalking them), and some rare ones show the afterwards (such as a snake going very quickly from friendly towards a cockatiel to eating them).
  • Diego discusses this frankly in regards to children's shows that use Predators Are Mean, pointing out the hypocrisy in advertising yourself as a protector of animals but only saving herbivores from carnivores.
  • Big Jack the sheepdog has some moments of philosophy about the wolves that he contends with — he knows that they are distant kin and has no illusion that the only difference between him and them is that his meat is brought to him, and feels a fair amount of pity for the wild beasts that struggle to survive. Nonetheless, the wolves are still dangerous predators, and it's his duty to keep them away from his master's flock — he just rejects that there's a real moral contrast to it all.
• Refuge in Audacity: In "Ride", a mouse is grabbed by an owl and screams... in exhilaration, before thanking the confused bird for "giving them a ride" and saving them a long walk to their home. They then casually direct the owl to drop them off by the tree they live in, and the owl, still clearly thrown by the mouse's reaction, does so, whereupon the mouse jumps into the hole with a friendly "See ya!" The owl looks contentedly satisfied at having done a good deed for a Beat Panel, then...
  Owl: Oh. You tricked me.
  Mouse: (from inside the hole) Honestly CANNOT believe that worked.
• Savage Wolves: Zigzagged and discussed in a few strips.
  • "Gentleness" contrasts this with tenderness in a literal Mama Wolf when an owl and squirrel looking for gentleness find it in a dire wolf — a huge, black, terrifying predator that's still gentle and loving with her pups. And that will also rip their heads off if they get close, so they've better admire this miracle of nature from the safety of the canopy.
  • "Big Jack" focuses on a standoff between a pack of wolves, seen only as glowing eyes as they hide in the shadows of the forest, and a sheepdog. The wolves are portrayed sympathetically, as they are motivated by hunger and the need to live, but they're still dangerous, desperate predators, and the confrontation is a tense standoff as wolf and dog test each other to see who can call whose bluff and who's willing to put their life on the line. A followup strip sees Big Jack and his sheep come across the corpse of a wolf dead in the snow, and, while the sheep are glad to have one less of what they see as a vicious monster, the dog's thoughts are more on the similarity between himself and the wild predator.
• Silly Reason for War: After 2000 years of war and bloodshed, the elves and the orcs are finally getting together to discuss peace. Since the war has gone on for so long, the initial reason for the conflict has been forgotten. The historians on both sides go back and forth with various acts of aggression, until finally they determine that the start of the war was triggered by an orc pranking an elf into sitting on an egg.
  Orc soldier: ...This all started because of a prank?
  Elf soldier: Two... Thousand... Years.
• Smart Animal, Inconvenient Instincts: Anubis comes to take a critically injured dog trainer to the next world, only for her to use her experience on him. She first guilts him into sitting, calling him a "bad god of death". When he does, she calls him "good boy" and throws a stick for him. The next panel shows Ra holding up a newspaper about her survival and Anubis shamefacedly saying she's very persuasive.
• Sssssnake Talk: Lampshaded in this strip, where a mouse notices that the snake slipped up its speech by not pronouncing the word "struggle" this way. The snake denies this, only to slip up some more, until it finally confesses that the speech quirk is purposely done just to look "creepy and intimidating".
• Stop Being Stereotypical: One strip has a cat invoke this on the shark trying to eat him, saying that attacking him will only play into the negative stereotypes about sharks. The shark stops to think about it.
• Swiper, No Swiping!: Carries a lot more weight, since Boots is a Killer Gorilla who's happy to crack Swiper's skull.
• Sympathy for the Devil: Big Jack the shepherd dog told off a wolf pack from harming his herd, but expresses his sympathy. When one of the wolves dies from exposure, the sheep rejoiced, but Jack told them to shut up, and wolves are not monsters for just wanting to survive, and that the only difference between him and the wolves is that he gets his food from his master. Were he to be left alone, he might go after the sheep himself.
• Tears of Remorse: Hannah, a foster kid, asks her foster brother if he was raised by wolves when he eats spaghetti without utensils...and drives her wolf foster father out of the room to recover. He laments the situation to his wife, who reminds him that they knew it wouldn't be easy and Hannah needs them. Hannah is eavesdropping from the doorway. When the wolves return, they find Hannah crying and eating her spaghetti barehanded.
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: One strip shows a wizard offering three adventurers any animal power they can name. One chooses a falcon's flight; the second chooses an elephant's strength, and the third wants a horned lizard's ability to squirt blood from its eyes. The second won't stop questioning his power, which she claims is absolutely useless, until he sprays her with blood.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Emma's parents, her mom in particular, have this reaction when she decides she wants Mr. Noodle for a pet. They eventually grows out of this.
• Would Rather Suffer: In "Rescue", an imprisoned adventurer hears a friend say she climbed up to get him out. Said friend warns him that she had to shape-shift into something he doesn't like (a spider) to reach the window. When the first giant legs come over the windowsill, he tells her to just leave him to die.
• You Didn't Ask: Emma enlists a teenage boy's help to get Mr. Noodle down from a tree. Afterwards, her mother chides her for not warning him that Mr. Noodle was a snake, not a cat, and Emma protests that he didn't ask.