Minus (Webcomic)

minus is weird like that.

A webcomic by Ryan Armand that ran for 130 episodes from February 2006 to July 2008. It is archived here, with extra strips for afterward here, and here. There is also a print version with some extra strips.

minus is an elementary school girl. She is sometimes mistaken for a boy. She has a very powerful imagination and can do anything she wants. The things she does are fickle and whimsical, as well as mischievous and vindictive. She is, after all, a child.

She has very few friends, apart from a green-haired girl, the beings that minus wills into existence, and the ghosts.

It should be noted that this webcomic is not recommended for grownups, who may find it disturbing.

Compare and contrast with "It's a Good Life".

Also, yes, both the character and the strip are spelled with a lower case "m".

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This work contains the following examples:

• Accidental Murder : by the green haired girl, of all people. And it stuck. minus does this on occasion.
• Alternate History: Even without minus around making the laws of reality her servant, there are subtle hints that her world is not the same as our own. Of course, she may well be responsible for that...
• Alternate Universe: minus has made several.
• Ambiguous Innocence
• Ancient Astronauts
• Annoying Arrows: #23. That has got to hurt...
• Apocalypse How: Quite a few, but most famously the one that actually stuck, wherein minus resurrected the entire population of Earth, past and present, human and otherwise. It was crowded, to put it mildly.
• Attention Deficit Ooh Shiny: minus tends to get easily distracted and then seems to... forget about her creations, or absent-mindedly wipes them out of existence.
• A Wizard Did It: Since minus's powers are, literally, whatever she wants, "minus did it" is a perfectly valid solution to any Fridge Logic.
• Back From the Dead: Everyone. This brings about the beginning of the end.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Rule of thumb: never ask minus anything when she's distracted, and always remember to be precise, and think of the side-effects before you do.
• Black Knight: #74

"Fool ! Do you think you can withstand the power of the Black Knight ?"

• Body Horror: minus turns a balloon selling guy into a balloon himself when he yells at her for popping all his balloons. Then he pops.
• Bittersweet Ending: The entire human race is destroyed, but lives on in the after life. Also, minus and the green haired girl look distinctly melancholy in the final strip.
  • Subverted when you remember that minus still has her godly powers and, ergo, can change the world back to how it was and do anything else to no longer be sad or melancholy.
    • Hooray, the cosmos is still in the thrall of a mad, amoral god for eternity!
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: #79, where a carnival has great food, great rides, and even great food...... that you can ride!
• Bullying a Dragon / Mugging the Monster: A few kids in the early comics.
• Call Back: Sergeant Davy and his trusty steed, Prendon, are mentioned as having existed in the comic's world several strips after minus altered history to make Davy a war hero.
• Carnivore Confusion : This strip
• Characterization Marches On: Despite, as can be told by most of the rest of this page, having a reputation for being dangerous, in truth, all things considered, minus' stops doing more negative things very quickly - by halfway through the comic she's almost entirely neutral: only doing negative things out of naivete rather than intentionally doing them, and she often adds things to her some of the less positive things she caused to make them bittersweet or even good. She never stops callously making synthetic sentient beings, however.
• Cheerful Child: minus, of course.
• Children Are Innocent: Innocent, yes. She sets the bar for Ambiguous Innocence.
• Cloudcuckoolander
• Continuity Creep: Strip #50. Apparently minus's actions have consequences after all...
• Crystal Spires and Togas: The alien world.
• Deus Ex Machina: an in-universe version in minus herself, who tends to solve any problems or requests with a somewhat tangential application of her powers. Anyone who doesn't know about minus is usually some form of terrified or curious at the seemingly illogical and irrational things that occur around her (that tend to really be... well... illogical).
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: This guy. And he's a Karma Houdini who's the only one shown to do something to minus and not suffer any consequences.
  • Granted, his actions cause a chain of events which directly lead to The End of the World as We Know It, so one could say that his retribution was delayed, but there.
  • The green-haired girl also pulls this off, accidentally.
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: What adult humans who have been involved with one of minus's reality-warping events realise. For the children she plays with, it's more Pals with Jesus.
• Disproportionate Retribution
• Egomaniac Hunter: Ends up boxing the lion he shot.
• End of the World Special
  • Cosy Catastrophe
• Everything's Better with Dinosaurs: #46.
• Everything's Better with Princesses: #73
• Extraordinarily Empowered Girl
• Gainax Ending: The climax and ending do come right the hell out of nowhere.
• Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: To her credit, she isn't the originator of this.
• Great Gazoo
• Green Thumb
• God Save Us From the Queen: #73
• God Is Flawed: minus
• Hair Colors: minus' changes from strip to strip.
• Humanoid Abomination
• Idiot Hair
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Subverted in #13.
• Imaginary Friend: Only in minus' case, they really aren't that imaginary for long.
• Inexplicably Awesome: It's never explained where exactly minus' powers come from.
• Intergenerational Friendship: One of the girls in minus's class is friends with Larry, an adult man.
• Jackass Genie: The end of this strip and most of the next, although like everything else minus does it's Just for Fun.
• Jerkass: minus can be this a lot.
  • Also the red haired ghost girl. At least minus' is out of childish naivete and immaturity.
• Jerk Jock: These show up occasionally.
• Kaleidoscope Hair: minus's hair changes from strip to strip. Justified, since she is omnipotent.
• Karma Houdini: minus.
• Kids Are Cruel: minus doesn't generally doesn't recognize the consequences of their actions until they're presented to her, if they ever are at all. This leads to a lot of Disproportionate Retribution such as turning a man into a balloon and letting him pop, or moments like the creation of a miniature civilization in her tub only to destroy it when bathtime ends.
• Kraken and Leviathan: Alien invasion? Zombie apocalypse? Famine? Summon a kraken!
• Little Miss Almighty
• Living Toys: variations on a theme for minus.
• Love At First Sight: minus plays cupid in #23.
• Magic Realism: To an extent.
• Magical Camera: It captures souls.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds
• Mood Whiplash
• Morality Pet: the green-haired girl with the pigtails. Better things and happy endings happen to minus's newly-sentient lifeforms when she's around.
• No Name Given: Everyone except minus, Larry, and a couple ghost characters.
• Only Six Faces: It becomes increasingly difficult to tell Minus from characters with similar hairstyle.
• Our Ghosts Are Different
• Perfect Health: minus never gets sick unless she wills herself to.
• Perspective Magic #95. Also #14.
• Pet the Dog: minus has her moments.
• Physical God: minus doesn't just seem to be a god — she kind of seems to be the god. She runs the afterlife, at any rate.
• Pirates
• Planet Eris: Whatever minus can think up, there it appears.
• Portal Picture
• Reality Warper: minus.
• Reality Warping Is Not a Toy: Well, for minus it is.
• Recurring Character: Larry.
• Reed Richards Is Useless: #91.
• La Résistance: #75
• Retraux: minus. is deliberately drawn in the style of a turn-of-the-century newspaper comic, only without the limitations on space or color.
• Reused Character Design: Most of the unnamed characters look like the characters from another one of the artist's series, Great.
• Rewriting Reality: here and anywhere else in the comic. Continuously.
• Scenery Porn
• Seinfeld Is Unfunny: In-Universe: After the End, the ghost population finds the fact they had legs kinda funny, despite the fact most of them had legs before.
• Shout-Out: Various references to anime here. In order of lines, the immortal who wants to be human is from Soul Hunter, the second one sounds vaguely like a quote about immortality from Galaxy Express 999, the one about the witch giving up her powers is Magical DoReMi, and the quote about everything coming easy sounds similar to a lament made in Magic Users Club by Takeo's gay friend.
• The Slow Path: #25 and #26. Slight subversion as she wouldn't make it back at all; minus brings her back in her old age to say good bye.
  • The then apparently retroactively sends her sister back in time with her, so they could live life together.
• Took a Level In Badass: The ponytail girl.
• Spirit World
• Silence Is Golden: While there are a few strips that have talking in it, many strips are pantomime.
• Starfish Aliens
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Even the in-universe characters have trouble pegging minus.
• Walking the Earth: Larry. Not even The End of the World as We Know It can stop him.
• What Could Have Been: Strip #10 was the first one actually drawn, and at the time the creator had not yet decided whether minus would actually be all-powerful or just a shape-shifter. If he had chosen differently, the comic would have turned out very different.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: This strip.
  • More like making fun of True Art Is Angsty.
• With Great Power Comes Great Perks: Indeed, that's all they're used for.
• You and What Army?: This army.
• You Gotta Have Blue Hair: And Green hair, and red hair, depending on minus' mood it seems. Some of the normal characters have green or red hair regardless of minus.
• You Never Asked: Referenced here.
• Zombie Apocalypse: Here and here. It's more of a childish prank than a full-blown apocalypse, though.