Webcomic / Adult Children

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Adult Children is a webcomic created by Stephen Beals, which first debuted in April 2014. Originally a slice-of-life comic (though with moments of surrealism, such as conversations between talking coffee mugs, or the odd vampire encounter), it centered on five characters: a young couple, graphic designer Harvey and big-box store cashier Penny, her layabout brother Berle, their dog Claremont and (occasionally) their Cloudcuckoolander friend Todd. Starting from around December 2020, however, it began to shift into more of a Work Com, with the main focus being on Penny and Berle (and their quirky coworkers) as they navigate the not-so-wonderful world of retail.

The GoComics page is here. Unfortunately with the switch to subscription-only in April 2025, only strips less than a fortnight old can be viewed without an account, though most of them can be found on the Facebook page. The creator's own site is here, where he discusses the themes of the strip and the stories behind the creation of some of the characters.

Adult Children provides examples of the following tropes:

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The store's self-checkout machines appear to have attained sentience. Sometimes they plot to take over. Sometimes they just have existential angst. One was seen threatening an annoying customer who was throwing tomatoes at it — only to realize that, as it couldn't physically move, there wasn't a great deal it could actually do to him.
• Animate Inanimate Object:
  • Seen occasionally, especially with the coffee mugs (with other containers sometimes involved, such as teacups and bottles of hand sanitizer). Often they remind characters (usually Harvey) about the motivation they provide. When Harvey claims "it's the coffee talking", he means it. They don't talk so much nowadays, but can often be seen visually reacting to a scene.
  • Signs also appear to be alive in this universe (see under Funny Background Event).
• Benevolent Boss:
  • While he's mostly portrayed as a Pointy-Haired Boss, the Manager (later District Manager) has occasional moments of this. Such as when an irate customer was yelling at Tabby, and he took her into the back "for a talk" — but then told her, "Okay, we'll stay here until the crazy lady leaves." During his brief stint as interim CEO, he has to inform Penny, the new manager, that the company is scrapping overtime, which many of the staff depend on to make ends meet — but once his meeting is over and the board leaves, he tells her exactly how to get around this.
  • Penny, once she becomes manager, is willing to go to bat for her staff, especially against Alice.
• Best Friend: Tabby seems to be Penny's. While Penny has a good rapport with all the other employees, she interacts with Tabby the most out of all of them and they pretty much always have pleasant chats together. She continues to eat lunch with Tabby in the employee break room even after becoming the manager, and the two share a hug when Tabby comes to smuggle Penny out of Store 122, clearly having missed each other.
• Breakout Character: Tabby. Her debut more or less cemented the strip's Genre Shift and she quickly became one of it's most popular and recurring characters.
• Broken Bird: Vickie. Flashbacks show that, when she first started for what was meant to be a summer job as a fresh-faced 14-year-old, she was bright and optimistic and actually liked the job. 20 years of dealing with the public's stupidity have turned her into the harsh, bitter misanthrope she has become.
• The Bus Came Back: K intially quit her retail job and left the store, only to return later on working for a different department. She eventually got fed up with that department and rejoined the main cast in retail.
• Company Credit Card Abuse: On one occasion, Penny has to send Tabby and K to Store 122, and the only person she can find to drive them is Berle. She provides a corporate credit card to cover gas expenses, but knowing her brother as she does, she insists that Tabby be the one to hold it to prevent this from happening. However, Berle still manages to sneak a huge pile of snacks onto the transaction.
• Cool Old Guy: Rusty, a one-time employee of the store (from when he was a teenager) turned software engineer, who decided to come out of retirement and return to work there because he was bored. He quickly shows himself to have a laid-back yet caring attitude, giving a customer who was having a rough day a cool drink for free (and when the District Manager objects to this, he points out that the company's founder would do the same thing, and spoke of it in his autobiography). Also, he and his brother drive snowmobiles, which they give his coworkers lifts home on. The customers all seem to like him, which is rare, while the staff are somewhat in awe of him (asking him to share more of the "wisdom of the ancient ways".
  Shelby: I guess you're off to do grown up, responsible things that I haven't figured out!
  Rusty: I'm going to drink a beer and watch cartoons. You have to grow older, not up!
• COVID-19 Pandemic: Naturally featured heavily from 2020-1, which included the first year or so of retail-themed strips. The staff were generally shown wearing masks (and often having to deal with customers who refused to do so, or at least refused to wear them properly).
• Crazy Cat Lady: Downplayed with Tabby, who is noted to own many cats and is (for the most part) sane — at least, insofar as that word can be applied to anyone at the store — but is shown early on to have picked up a few behavioral quirks from them, such as a tendency to scratch and hiss at people she doesn't like, and to crouch on high places and watch. (She even reportedly caught a mouse on one occasion!) For the most part, these traits seem to have disappeared, but she is often shown to have a an oddly-adept sense of smell...
• Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: After a chaotic two weeks at Store 122, Penny is so overwhelmed at all the insanity around her that she resorts to hiding in the janitor's closet, staying there until a strip where a voice from the other side of the door tells her a friend has arrived to get her out of the store. The door opens to reveal a smiling Tabby. Penny then smiles as well and the two share a hug.
• Deadpan Snarker: Most of the cast, actually (even Todd has his moments), but Tabby in particular stands out.
• Declining Promotion: Tabby, being both the store's smartest employee and the best at handling difficult customers, has been repeatedly offered management positions. However, she's very adamant that retail is just what she's doing now to earn money, not what she intends to build a career on, and tends to respond to these offers by silently staring at the other person until they give up and leave.
• Demoted to Extra: Harvey and Claremont, due to the Genre Shift. Formerly main viewpoint characters, their importance in the strip has severely diminished, though they're both still very much part of Penny's life and make sporadic appearances.
• Funny Background Event: The signs, which are apparently aware of what goes on around them and change their text from one panel to the next, generally making snarky observations about their role. Word of God says that this is an intentional dig at the tendency of a lot of store customers to ignore signs. One particularly noteworthy example can be found here, which features not one but two sign gags — a wall sign cheerfully explaining that their produce is cheap because they don't bother with quality, and the sign on the stockroom door, which facetiously claims to hide an interdimensional portal and that only "citizens of the Gorg Empire" are allowed in. In this one, a breakroom sign gets sick of telling everyone to clean up after themselves and quits. The office coffee mugs have faces and often react to what's going on with the human characters. The main mug is named 'Charlie.'
• Genki Girl: April Bloom, who greets everyone with a resounding "HIIIII!" and is consistently friendly and cheerful — even when she briefly mentions that ex-boyfriend she'd like to strangle.
• Harmless Freezing: Berle has been frozen solid not once, but twice (once when the entire meat department quit, leaving him to stock the walk-in freezer on his own, and once when he was sent outside to collect carts in below-freezing temperatures). Both times he made a full recovery (admittedly the first one landed him in hospital, but to be fair, in reality it would have been the morgue).
• Hollywood Atheist: Discussed in one early strip, wherein Berle opines that atheists always feel the need to constantly tell everyone that they're atheists. Harvey, annoyed, replies that he's an atheist — a fact Berle wasn't aware of, because Harvey never felt the need to tell him. (Not that Berle is religious himself — he admits in the same strip that he's not actually sure what he believes, and plans on making up his mind on his deathbed.)
• Hopeless Suitor: Todd has a massive crush on April Bloom, who only has eyes for her boyfriend Winter Sun. Becomes particularly awkward when she invites him on a date, to his excitement... only to learn that she wants him along as a chaperone for the two of them, at Winter Sun's parents' insistence. He seems to have gotten over it now, though — the fact that said date ended with him in hospital probably helped — and has since started dating Shelby.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Berle (a fairly big guy) and Tabby (at least a head shorter than the other characters) were briefly involved early on, though she ultimately rejected him on the grounds that they were just from two different... sides of the store. Plus, he smells like dog.
• Iconic Sequel Character: Most of the retail workers, including many of the strip's best-known characters — Tabby, April Bloom, Vickie, K — didn't debut until at least seven years into the strip's run.
• Incompetence, Inc.: How the company is depicted. A textbook example is when they send Penny — a deputy manager who got the job because she was the least unqualified person available, and at this point has no training or experience in actually being in charge — to act as interim manager of Store 122, leaving her completely in over her head... and then hire a guy who also has no management training or experience to take over the role, and expect her to train him. Tabby ends up having to smuggle her out of the store.
• Mean Boss: Alice Tautgore, the company's new CEO. Established pretty early on when she gives Penny a tongue-lashing over schedules being taped to the wall instead of in acrylic holders, and when it's pointed out that this rule was never mentioned, snaps "I expect my managers to be able to manage themselves!" She then meets with the staff and acts all nice before turning to Penny and declaring that they're a bunch of useless idiots and that they need to "hire smarter".
• Mirror Universe: One arc sees Penny and Harvey get stuck in one when they get lost on a road trip, winding up in a store that looks almost exactly like Penny's, except most of the staff have diametrically-opposed personalities to the ones they know (Berle's counterpart is a hard worker and the manager), which creeps them out. Tabby's counterpart, Kitty (who works in "Humanless Resources", appears at first to be an actual Cat Girl, but it turns out it's just a costume. She also claims that Alice originally hailed from there, where she was their worst employee.
  Penny: It all makes sense...
• Nervous Wreck: Shelby, frequently. While she's a nice person in general, she is, if anything, less equipped than most of the staff to deal with idiotic customers (which is to say, most of them), and it didn't help that when she first started everyone kept comparing her to her predecessor, K. At one point she actually borrows Claremont from Penny as an emotional support animal — though he's probably more in need of emotional support than she is.
• No Sense of Direction: Ian, the former cave tour guide, who quit that job after he lost his way and impaled his arm on a stalagmite. It doesn't get any better after he starts working at the store; whenever he tries to help a customer find something they end up in the middle of nowhere, or back in the caves. Sometimes he winds up in the caves on his own with no memory of how he got there.
• The Nose Knows: Tabby, due to her catlike sense of smell. Which is how she's able to tell that Alice, the new CEO, slept with Berle, an employee. Penny is furious — not least because Berle also happens to be her brother — but she quickly takes the opportunity to use the potential HR fallout to stop Alice firing the staff.
• Pass the Popcorn: Tabby's reaction whenever any interesting drama starts playing out around her. One particularly "entertaining" week (discovering that Berle slept with Alice) sees her eat the store's entire stock.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: Being sent to the dreaded Store 122, even temporarily, is seen as this by the staff. When Penny is sent there as interim manager for two weeks "well, three at the most..." Tabby assumes she won't be coming back, and holds her a leaving party.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Vickie is easily the rudest, meanest employee, but can't be fired because she's the CEO's niece (and even after he quits, he's still a board member and major stockholder).
• So Proud of You: During a storyline where the employees were holding a training seminar for new recruits, Tabby gives the trainees a quiz on what they've learned from her. The first question she asks is how they would react if a crazy customer starts causing a scene. The three trainees all pull out tubs of popcorn. Tabby happily declares that the torch has been passed.
• Soul-Sucking Retail Job: And how! Penny and Vickie are shown to be particularly badly-affected — the first spends her nights dreaming she's back at work, while the latter has become a broken-down misanthrope. The only staff members who don't seem especially drained by their jobs are Berle (because he generally spends his "working" hours finding ways to avoid work), April Bloom (because nothing upsets her) and Tabby (because she has too much fun trolling the customers).
• Spear Counterpart: Winter Sun, the new manager of Store 122, is this to April Bloom; they share the same overtly-cheerful personality and mannerisms, a similar appearance, attend the same online church and even (initially) the same hair color. After meeting him, Penny initially guesses him to be April Bloom's brother, and is surprised when she tells her that she doesn't have one. When they actually meet, they fall instantly in love. They run into some trouble later, after learning they may be siblings after all... fortunately, it turns out not to be the case.
• Speech-Impaired Animal: Claremont can understand human speech, though he can't talk himself. Not that he's especially interested in anything they have to say that doesn't involve food or walks, mind you.
• Tempting Fate: Happens three times within the space of a few minutes. Fortunately, Tabby knows how to weaponize it.
  Tabby: I know all of the incantations.
• Time Travel: Popped up in a few of the earlier strips — there was even a fourth-dimensional mail service that allowed you to send letters to your past self, though it never actually ended up changing anything. One strip featured a wizard bringing Berle as a child to meet his adult self, before taking him back to avoid "this terrible future"... only for him to still turn out exactly the same.
• Troll: Tabby is quite the masterful one, combining her quick wit with a bit of snark and sometimes intentionally Comically Missing the Point to deter even the most difficult customers.