Generally people expect comic strips to make sense. You open up the Sunday news, you look at the funny pages, and you know exactly what to expect. Pop Team Epic by Bkub Okawa, sometimes shortened to Poptepic, spits on your familiarity. It spits on it and then flips it off and then rockets off to the moon on a robot unicorn.

So what is Pop Team Epic? Well, it started off as a webcomic with heavy surrealist leanings and a deformed manga art style, then went on to become an anime series. The animated episodes are bizarre as well, but for the purposes of this article I'll be focusing on the Internet comics.

Having established that:

Poptepic is a webcomic series featuring the disjointed, insane hijinks of the short orange-haired spitfire Popuko and the relatively calm blue-haired Pipimi. Those two constantly-smiling girls are just about the only recurring characters in the series, which has absolutely no continuity whatsoever. Instead it favors dada-esque randomness and a surprising amount of vulgarity for how cute it usually looks.

One particularly distinct element of the series is how it plays around with and ultimately subverts short comic conventions. Instead of clear punchlines the strips often avoid any kind of closure by having the girls perform some non sequitur action with little to no connection to what came prior. Their reactions to other characters are frequently irrational and expectations of progression are anticlimactically crushed by repetition and abrupt stoppages. Characters come and go just as soon as they've arrived. Antihumor is a favorite tool of the comic and it employs it well. Other times, the comic will completely follow conventional short narrative rules, but this happens so rarely that it comes off as surprising even when the strip does exactly what is expected of it. This works because it trains readers to expect the unexpected.

The series has become popular for its nonsensical shattering of any attempts at comprehension as well as its disdain for its own subculture. It is basically a fountain of memes at this point, too. If you're looking for something strange and different and you want to laugh, it's a pretty safe bet. Just be ready to go to some really, really weird places.