Toonman Bars Toontopia - Shipping Wars (Patreon)

It's been a real long while since I did a Toonman bartending comic touching on the ! And this next comic strip has been a long time coming. Today's Toontopia guest stars are the cast of Total Drama and Invincible Fight Girl, focusing on the concept of "shipping wars" within cartoon series.

We're all familiar with shipping- a fandom concept created in the 90s with Daria where fans will obsess and pair up their favorite characters from their movies or series in romantic and often times sexual relationships. In modern times it has become a huge and popular topic amongst fans with series like Avatar: The Last Airbender and even book series like Harry Potter. And let's face it- it can get ugly really quick. The Internet is full of fandom wars and heated chatrooms discussing what is perfect or what is wrong with a particular fandom pairing for whatever reasons. For humans, it's mostly a fun part of their fandom that we usually get carried away with. But for the actual cartoon characters, I've always felt they would be someone bothered by it for multiple reasons. I mean, if you were a cartoon would you appreciate a fan obsessing over pairing you with someone who was your enemy, or not even from your franchise? Or worse, not your age or related to you? Relationships in Toontopia are pretty much set in stone the minute we write the stories for the characters, akin to arranged marriages. And as you've seen with Aesop Animation characters already, it almost never works out, sometimes in the worse way.

And then of course, there are cartoon series and movies whose entire premise partial comes down to the relationships of characters as part of their premise. I think the biggest example of Teletoon's Total Drama where relationships are introduced, built up, torn apart and rebuilt with every season and the fans go nuts over it. With this in mind and how big shipping is a part of pop culture, I like to think there are some more - lets call them dishonorable cartoons - who decided to take advantage of this aesthetic of a series and create a betting pool in which cartoons can gamble on when and with which characters will end up getting together by way of their series creators. Of course, Chris McClain, being the devil host that he is, would probably find a way to rig it so he comes out on top as he always does, much to the annoyance of his contestant co-stars. And unfortunately for new comer cartoons like Andy from Invincible Fight Girl, it serves as an unsettling preview of what life as a cartoon character may be like. And for someone like Toonman, who's never had the go through this but has bared witness to it a lot? All he can do is comfort Andy, make her a protein smoothie, and remind her that things could be a lot worse.

So, this is the next Toonman bonus comic. Honestly, with how big the concept of shipping is within fandom there was a million different ways I could have gone about it besides this one. Mostly likely I will be doing sequels focusing on Shipping in different ways. But for now, let us know what you think with a comment below!

Toonman: The Animated Ace © NRG Comics

Total Drama © Teletoon

Invincible Fight Girl © Cartoon Network Studios.

Comic Drawn by David Velasquez