The Anime Club

A web comic that was, originally, just a recurring cast in KC Green's Gunshow. It stars the four members of a high school Anime Club: Mort, Mark, Dave, and the newest member, Clyde.

One day, Mort brings pornography...err, hentai to the library for them to watch. Unfortunately, the disc gives Dave's computer a virus, and this sparks a fight between the incensed Mark and the always-furious Mort.

To make matters worse, The Anime Club is booted from the public library for the fight (and for watching hentai,) leading them to search for a new location to conduct their club, as well as a refund for the corrupted data.

A five part web-comic (not including the original strips, a very short Part 2.5, and a non canon Part Six,) it's a short but highly recommended read. It can be found here. A Fan Vid series has started by the people who did the Hiimdaisy Persona4 fandub, and is probably even more hilarious.

Tropes used in The Anime Club include:

• Batman Gambit: Dave's revenge on Tony turns out to be one of these.
• Beware the Quiet Ones: Dave is a sulky force to be reckoned with.
• Black and Gray Morality: Done with three forces at hand here:
  • The title Anime Club's only greater sins are that Mort is ill tempered and has a short fuse, which can potentially lead into fights with Mark. Topping all of this, Mort is the leader, and tends to impose his repertoire of anime onto the group. On the other hand, the club is generally the most sane portrayed group of the rest, are shown to be sympathetic and redeemable, and even Mort cares for the group, going as far as apologizing to his enemies to help salvage the club at its worst time. His fuming passionate anger, though on the surface imposing and scary, turns into genuine love, implying he only wishes to share the magic of the moment he has felt out of the shows he has seen with his friends. Even if the anime they watch is sometimes highly questionable and at times is hentai, they are at least going the far distance of knowing the full spectrum of what anime is about.
  • The Japanese Animation Club, lead by Amy, tend to get along well and do not stir up much of a fuss, allowing them to hold the school as a stable meeting ground. However, the group is a strictly-managed echo chamber where open discourse is discouraged, and is outright cringe-worthy if their disposition is to betray evidence to the latter. Members are encouraged to insert obnoxious weeaboo mannerisms and terminology into casual conversation (something that even Mort and co., and especially Clyde, find excruciating for how forced and awkward it is), ignore dissenting opinions to uphold their "happy" atmosphere, are implied to follow trends to a fault, and they've been shown to keep around people worse than Mort in terms of personality and social integrity as long as they don't challenge Amy's authority. They're also capable of being just as horrible as Mort is, as shown when they demand that he degrade himself at the film screening, further pushing the fact they're possibly worse than Mort, as for all his rude behavior, he never went out of his way to humiliate somebody out of spite.
  • Tony's group isn't shown much on screen, but much can be inferred with his overall appearance and impressions. Running the local comic book shop, he is the oldest anime fan on the strip, and knows much. On the other hand, Tony is shown to be a surly, arrogant elitist who looks down on anyone who doesn't have tastes like him, uses his store to shortchange customers with bootlegs, merchandise, and other schemes like movie events simply for a quick buck, and anyone he doesn't find meshing with him gets him to act like a cruel dick, either to their face or behind their backs like a sneaky greasy two faced backstabber that he evidently is.
• Black Comedy: Played with together in Refuge in Audacity. The negative archetypes for (western or American) anime fans and showcasing the undignified truth that is weeabooism are utilized so brilliantly on the nose and in your face that while the cast are played to be near caricatures, its character direction has merit in being outright true in many circumstances, and that even goes for the protagonist Anime Club. What diverts The Anime Club from being pure full slung insult jest against western anime fandom with the broad brush is that everyone is given a bit of pathos for why they do what they do, and that helps to explain not only their faults but their motivations. It likely also helps that K.C. is also a casual curious anime fan, that his work not only reflects that he knows what he's talking about, but shows that he has been there in the 2000s decade western anime fandom, and that helps to bring out that this is as much of mild social commentary, accurate parody, and moderately intensely tasteful farce to the treasured ups, and downs of self image that the western anime fandom had come to bring upon itself after the late 1990s. Played totally straight however with the April Fools' non canon Part 6 Suicide episode where the Anime Club decides to asphyxiate themselves with automotive carbon monoxide poisoning.
• Breakout Character: The Anime Club started as a one-off joke and grew into a rather large story.
• Comically Missing the Point: Clyde's reaction to what was presented to him.
• Could Have Avoided This Plot: At the end of it all at Whyme R. Reiner's, Clyde suggests they could host meetings at his parent's house basement, which is big enough and private enough to accommodate them all.
• Deconstructed Trope: Tony helps to show how realistically more scummy and twisted extreme sardonic Know Nothing Know It All Comic Book Guy archetypes will and can use and abuse their hobby and position with big business, and are not to be taken lightly, because they will be so blinded with vanity, vindication, and self pity that they will be warped enough to pull off some outrageous shit that will go into illegal territory to feel some sense of self satisfaction and self respect, and if Tony is anything to assure, it's not just hackers and computer experts, but also people who run auxiliary (ie. non-creative and outlet based) pop culture based industries and will and try to weasel their influence for both their wealth and ego to ride on easy street off of the backs of others. Jeff Albertson may do some underhanded schemes in his home series, and may be portrayed as the clueless virgin loser who argues with children like a manchild as Matt Groening intended, but he's not as clever, maniacal, or Machiavellian as Tony in the long run.
• Didn't Think This Through: A very hard lesson that Tony learns, and along with "hindsight is 20/20" if anything the epilogue implies. Doing business by ripping off teenagers, and very passionate fans of anime at that, by selling them virus spiked DVDs just because "your tastes in anime are better" will guarantee them issuing out retribution for destroying their hardware, and especially if that teenager wasn't the one you have beef with. And if Mort's mother is anything to guarantee, an explanation to not only said teenage nemesis' mother, but his club's friend's parents, and the cops and the law if they are to be involved, for selling what is essentially black market copyright violating illegal goods at a high profitable price.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Tony dislikes the tastes of the Anime Club, especially Mort. His solution? To give Dave's computer a powerful virus.
  • Dave's revenge on Tony for this is an even better example. Not only does he pop all of Tony's tires, break his windshield, and comically dents the engine block to where all of its internals can't work to amass a nice hefty auto bill for him to deal with, he gives Tony's computer the very same virus Tony gave to his.
• Early Installment Weirdness: The initial Anime Club strips now look a bit odd. Clyde's design looked different and Mort would yell at anyone. In the later comics, Mort seems to get along fine with Dave and Clyde although he still fights constantly with Mark.
• Everyone Has Standards: Mort of all people doesn't even condone or approve of Dave's action of essentially destroying Tony's car. Not even for the blame, but for how near psychotic and insane of an unpredictable action it was.
• Fan Boy: All of the Anime Club, but Mort especially.
• Gory Discretion Shot: The hentai is mostly shown off-screen, or in the case of the fandub, depicted through silly voices and even sillier sound effects. The reason this isn't a Sexy Discretion Shot is fairly obvious.
• Grass Is Greener: For its most defining story, the heart and crux of its arc. The Anime Club gets put through its most trying time, and everyone in the club comes to realize why the club was made in the first place.
• Humiliation Conga: Mort starts on one in Anime Club part 5 before Dave intervenes.
• Hypocritical Humor: Mort chews out the Japanese Animation club for their poor taste, despite lauding a show about a Princess's weird interests.
• Identical Stranger: Mort and Porky.
• It's Not Porn, It's Art: Mort tries to defend a Hentai anime(involving bestiality, no less) with this. It doesn't work well.
• Jerkass: Mort most prominently, but Tony is not much better.
  • Hell even Mark has his moments, judging by part 4.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Despite his extreme artistic perspective on a bestiality hentai, and to his right, Mort makes it clear that a club for anime should be for anime viewing and discourse, not embarrassing its members and newcomers by making them do such things like reenact the Haruhi Suzumiya ending dance routine or weeaboo fan posturing, such as announcing a "report" on the "difference between hugs and glomps". Mort also has a point in that, while he should have thought twice, even for bootlegs, no one should be selling software and media with viruses and malicious software purposely put into it and be shortchanged and conned out of their money for it.
• Jerk Jock: A group of them at Elwood High are comedically played with to be more gentlemanly and "Ivy League Prep" material than (stereo)typical arrogant "muscleheads" in Clyde's backstory of how he joined the Anime Club, and with somewhat good, if selfish intentions, and to show how Clyde wasn't really fitting in all that well. They purposely throw a football to a new Clyde, who just moved in and got started in Elwood, hoping that he would be new football team material. They just dismiss him when he gets caught off guard and carry on with their day.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: One reoccurring theme throughout the story is the general idea every club has "the best taste in anime", and that every other group's tastes are "inferior".
  • Mort comes to bear artistic insight and meaning to a lot of the anime he watches, and this especially goes to Princess Smegma, a bestiality hentai. While innocent and with his own passion for the sequential arts, sometimes a bestiality hentai is just a bestiality hentai, but points for his more optimistic approach.
  • Daniel of the Japanese Animation Club is a constant unpleasant cynic who apparently constantly moans and begroans any series that he comes across, and keep in mind, he is the screener of the anime line up for the Japanese Animation Club.
  • To the Japanese Animation Club itself, they engage moreso in weeaboo posturing; which in real life, is code word for doing incredibly cringey and self indulgent culturally inappropriate and hegemonistic things they ignorantly think the Japanese do, while in reality, that only embarrassing weeaboos do, than watch anime for the majority of their meetings.
  • Tony is a long insufferable asshole of an anime fan whose elitist indulgence and unchallenged self righteousness has become so corruptible and abusive that he is willing to use his store to sell people virus infected bootlegs if they don't get on his good side, and makes a profit out of it as well. In addition to digging an Olympic swimming pool out of the kiddy pool shallow depth that is Tony's character, Tony reeks of entitled consumerist mindsets and those who abuse pop culture by riding on it and extorting money from media sensation just because they happen to like the series for it merely being "good" or "popular", or in layman's terms, being a hipster (ie. posturing over something old that has somehow become in vouge and using that fandom or hobby as egotistic means to throw their weight around with), which became a lot more common in the coming decade of the 2010s.
  • Importantly on the foundation they all share, all of them do not live in Japan and they don't fully understand or are in the active midst of the anime and manga industry in Japan, and for what it's worth, they're all white bread Caucasian Americans. This means that on the grounds of cultural basis and human nature, they don't really get what Japan's disposition and tastes in anime are really like in its home nation, and that to their ignorance, they are pretty much running on their own homegrown perspectives whether they like it or not. The only one who probably gets a pass is Mort, because as much as his passions might get him to see even a bestiality hentai for more than what it is, he's actually enjoying it in his own right and understanding it from another angle with artistic discourse.
• Laser-Guided Karma: While Mort may be at times ostentatious and overbearing, and is what probably invited the Anime Club's misfortune, every opposing party got what was coming to them.
  • Yeah, giving Mort that virus filled bootleg DVD of Princess Smegma was meant for Mort, but Tony's antics did not see the aftermath of his actions being much like a loose cigarette into a gas station. For all of the misery meant for Mort, Dave was the unsuspecting victim, and Dave in turn decided to ruin Tony's life. Better yet if the epilogue implies, the Anime Club has every excuse in the book to not just deny any plausibility that they had anything to do with the physical destructive vandalism of his car, but he could lose his comic book store and go to prison should they decide to turn tail to the law and tell them off that he deliberately ripped them off and sold virus infected illegal bootleg hentai DVDs under the guise of anime if he still thinks he is in the right.
  • The Japanese Animation Club gets one for being more passive aggressive, unpleasant, and imposing than Mort. A lot of what they do as club activities is why the Anime Club was started in the first place, and a lot of it was implied to have been either embarrassing, uninformative, tasteless, and trend born sensationalist overhype. Though Aimee is seemingly more receptive and welcoming, she is way more socially clueless and is implied to be more domineering than Mort, whom though is outwardly verbally explosive, at least cares for the club's members and their experiences. None of them get their money back or watch the Naruto's Law School movie due to them not taking heed to Mort's directions prior to him forming the Anime Club.
• Put on a Bus: In the paperback editions of The Anime Club, K.C. was asked by fans the question of where did resident Japanese Animation Club asshole Daniel went to, as he did not appear in the climactic second to last chapter of the miniseries. Turns out he was on the toilet "reviewing" and tossing out a $15 dollar volume one magical girl shojo manga novel in the trash while his legs fell asleep, and gotten horrified crapping himself out of the john at how his dad used an axe to bust down the locked door. After that, he fell unconscious for the rest of that night, for better or worse considering all events transpiring.
• Refuge in Audacity: This particular miniseries of K.C. Green's Gunshow is beloved by even western hemisphere anime fans for its excellent select archetypes of real life youth and teenage fandom, be it from diehard anime fans with a burning passion that runs about near purism, to showcasing the the more embarrassing and unwholesome sides of anime fans and weeaboos that try to "embrace being otaku like in Japan" or discriminate solely on "taste", for a full case comparison and near case study that shows the kind of infighting that does go on within the western fandom. This in turn works too, because of its excellent use of The Law of Conservation of Detail to focus only on the affairs of the Elwood public anime fan community and uses their relationship dynamics for all basis of plot elements to further along the story and comedy without cheap tricks and gags like irrelevant "popular kids" or bystanders tossing out irrelevant bullying insults, and gives us reason to care for the motivations and progress of the protagonist group of Morty, Mark, Dave, and Clyde of the Anime Club.
• Shout-Out: To several animes, most prominently Haruhi Suzumiya and Naruto.
• Token Evil Teammate: For the Japanese Animation Club, Daniel, a groggy, insufferable, and disgusting looking raving cynical elitist anime fan who makes Mort seem tolerable in comparison. Sure, Mort has a case of loud mouth and crusading his tastes, but Mark notes that though Mort can turn off his unpleasantness, Daniel always has it on. It also doesn't help that he serves as the critic and screener for the Japanese Animation Club's line up, meaning he gatekeeps just as much as the leader Aimee.
• The Quiet One: Dave.
• Truth in Television:
  • People like Daniel, who whine often selfishly and in their own misery to attract others with about how anime or what not "isn't good because it doesn't appeal to me as it did before" are very real. They mainly plague the internet in forums, online journals, and even their own websites, but they also group in live pop culture and geek interest groups and meetups. Whether they last due to their integrity as people is all up to them, but they're usually doomed to self made isolation if they don't improve themselves as people.
  • As mentioned in Deconstructed Tropes, people like Tony are real too. It should be common sense, but some "geeks" and "nerds" may not be all that good of people despite portrayals of fringe and niche groups being victimized outcasts who deserve sympathy and pity, and they just might be into illegal, immoral, and skeezy things as well. They also suffer from major victimization and superiority complexes, and for every case of someone growing to overcome adversity, there's also someone who snaps into megalomaniacal sociopathy, and a personality like Tony's falls into the latter and is someone who should be stayed away from.
• Unintentional Period Piece: By the time The Anime Club miniseries was started, the miniseries all began post the 2008 Great Recession, which also severely affected the anime and manga market and anime fandom at large. As reflected at the time, series like Haruhi Suzumiya and Naruto were still in vogue, and the western (ie. "white" American) anime fandom was at a new crossroads of where to go, as the western anime market at that time was able to catch up with the mainline Japanese market, which lead fans to also get in the mainstream and latest craze than the years before, which was a huge Base Breaker, as the anime fandom was (and is still) but spectators than, well, budding creators and artists, to decide how the West's tastes were to go (many newer fans embraced the oncoming moe craze, older fans either stuck to older favorites and went elsewhere, while more vocal hobby lifestyle likes (ie "hardcore true fans") wanted anime to be what the West liked about anime when it arrived in the mainstream in the mid 1990s and morally crusaded against moe, claiming it to be pedophilia, while everyone inbetween was more or less left to their own devices.) One thing still remains strongly vocal, for better or worse, within the western anime fandom: "Only Japan can create anime". Other aspects include:
  • Bit-torenting manga and anime series and shows as the only internet based way to watch them. This was highly prevalent due to the massive upgrades to internet infrastructure and the economic slowdowns, not even to mention the still somewhat exorbitant prices for the bigger crowd of younger anime fans regarding media, paperback and video. This was all before the likes of subscription based streaming pioneered by Crunchyroll, which was, interesting note, an illegal anime streaming site before they decided to go legit and turn a new leaf.
  • Lack of smartphones and tablets. This was all before their introduction into the mainstream market by 2013.
  • The cringeworthy behavior by the Japanese Animation Club. This was much more prevalent by anime fan teens, and moreso, because the anime fan community was still admittedly a wild west of adolescence like many of the fans, and we all know how teenagers will try to stand out to want to be "cool" and "independent" as by their biology and growth in these times dictate.
  • In turn, the purist "anime only and western animation sucks" attitude shown by Mort. It's probably toned down by the oncoming decade of the 2010s, but considering the state of western animation and comics around the rise of the new millenium, (ie. in a state of decay upon the rise of the likes of anime and manga, and even Japanese video games, spreading into the United States, showcasing themes and story elements, that in the past, western animation didn't due to incessant moral guardian censorship and oppression of expression, leading to growing social stigma against animation and comics "being only for children and babies" blooming in the public eye for, well, the last several decades, and the rise of 3D CGI animation in the early 2000s out west, which was touted as "superior" to traditional western 2D animation,) it wasn't hard for many blooming tween and teenage anime fans out west to feel this way about western animation as a whole in the decade prior, and especially as something to rebel against and claim embodies everything anime and manga dared to do against a presumed embodiment of censorship and creative oppression that only did and was forced at gunpoint to do anything and everything their oppressors were forcing them to. Granted, immediately shifting all blame solely to a victimized industry and its own workers than its instigators, aggressors, and agitators, getting self depreciating your country to where you think Japan is the greatest place in the world for making anime, and touting that Japan can only make animation and be a creatively open and accepting place isn't a good mentality to hold in mind, as many did back then, but it explains a lot about the frustration and disappointment overseas anime fans had that you could literally cut with a knife at the time held against a creative industry that should have not given into a moral zealot's agenda and self destructed its own integrity with its own accumulated missteps over the years.