Originally, the comic was a single-panel gag cartoon, similar to Gary Larson's The Far Side. It grew more political in tone during the 1990s. The comic has become more traditional, with a multi-panel format and recurring characters.
Although many of the strips are stand alone, there are several ongoing plots in multiple universes that appear on an irregular basis. The largest one centers on the Pyle family that includes the Wise Beyond Their Years Danae and her sister Kate and their father.
It's also notably published both as a strip (wide format, like most comic strips) and as a panel (nearly square like The Far Side) Monday through Saturday, so a newspaper could buy it for either slot. This requires a single-panel installment to be carefully drawn so it could be cropped either way (often with the speech balloon reoriented), and multi-panel installments to be laid out so they can be broken up into two rows. Similarly, Sunday strips are laid out both for traditional layouts and with the panels stacked vertically, which also are manually reoriented by the artist.
This work contains the following tropes.
- Aquatic Sauropods: In an Ordinary Basil storyline, immediately after escaping a hungry T. rex by swimming to the center of a nearby river to take advantage of the beast's inability to swim, Basil and Louise find themselves quite surprised when the "rock" they're standing on rises out of the water and reveals itself to be the top of a creature's head. The sauropod, just as startled by them as they are of it, ends up unwittingly helping them reach the entrance to an adjacent upper cavern by throwing them in that direction with a swing of its neck.
- Baby New Year: Several weeks after New Year's Day, Baby New Year (complete with top hat and sash) is in a bar, drinking a martini:Bartender: "I'm not one to buy into omens, but I usually don't see him here so soon after Congress has reconvened."
- Bears Are Bad News: There's a running gag of bears luring people into assorted traps, with the implication being that the bears are man-eaters.
- Beat Panel: In almost every four-panel strip, the third panel is a beat panel.
- Canon Welding: Four recurring elements: Snarky little girl Danae, the observing everyguy, the Leisure Suit Larry-ish lawyer and Offshore Flo's Diner were merged into one story with Joe (the everyguy) at the center: Danae and her sister are his daughters, Bob (the lawyer) is his brother/drinking buddy, and Flo is his mother.
- Captain Obvious: The in-universe very appropriately named Obvious Man. Though in a subversion, he points out things that should be obvious, but that people are too dumb to realize.
- Cast Herd: Most of the recurring characters are organized into groups by their geographical or temporal location, with occasional crossovers such as a Halloween arc where Danae meets the Gravesytes, or even mergers like when Offshore Flo turned out to be Joe's mother and he moved his family back to Maine.
- Conspiracy Theorist: Joe's brother clearly fits. In fact, he's an exaggeration of the concept, not even trusting Google.
- The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much: When the court jester commits suicide, a member of the court asks how that could be, since everyone loves him for his biting wit. Then they walk into the throne room, where the jester is on the ground with a large mallet on his back. His entire back.
- Crass Canuck: Pierre of the North, the perpetually grouchy French-Canadian who lives in the Yukon territory despite hating the cold (and the bears).
- Expy:
- Some readers complained that Lucy the horse was an expy of Hobbes, albeit indirectly ("I liked it better when it was with a tiger"). Lucy agreed.
- The Graevsytes, a family of monsters often featured in the strip around Halloween, are obviously patterned after The Addams Family and/or The Munsters.
- A 1998 story featured Joe interviewing "Red Tall", a caricature of cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall.
- Evil Lawyer Joke: In one arc, Danae sues the state for allowing her teacher to flunk her. The judge dismisses the case, calling it the second stupidest thing he'd ever heard.Dad: Okay, I'll bite. What was the stupidest?
Danae: That there's no shortage of lawyers willing to take the case. - Funny Terrain Cross Section: In the March 05, 2022 strip, Danae and Lucy are attempting to dispose of a large number of notes from Danae's teacher by digging a deep hole in the woods. The cross section shows that all around the hole (including just beyond where they stop digging) are a couple of treasure chests, a dinosaur skull, and possibly the Holy Grail.Lucy: Deep enough
Danae: Yeah - Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: One strip
has Danae floating in midair, with her clarifying it's because she's abiding by her own religion, which only acknowledges some sciences, with gravity not being one of them. After Kate explains that the laws of physics aren't a matter of faith, Danae falls down. - Genre Shift: The comic used to consist entirely of a guy looking at odd situations, but eventually focused more on his family, especially his daughter Danae.
- Grammar Nazi: The 6 October 2011 Non Sequitur features a nonsensical version of this trope in ancient Egypt, where a man corrects another man carving hieroglphics that you never end a sentence with a bird symbol.
- Horsing Around: Lucy the pony is unusual in that as a talking horse she'll actually explain why she's acting spooky or headstrong.
- Humans Are the Real Monsters: Lars, an alien, reveals that all human technologies were gifts from his people. Unfortunately...Lars: The only thing you talking monkeys have done on your own is turn all our benign knowledge into weapons!
(Beat)
Danae: Doesn't that make you guys the slow learners?
Lars: Oh, and rationalization. Talking monkeys have that nailed. - Hollywood New England: The strip's setting is "Watchacallit, Maine", and the characters of Flo (the owner of Flo's Offshore Diner) and Captain Eddie (the fisherman who frequents that establishment) both talk with pronounced regional accents.
- I Want Grandkids: One 2021 arc has Eddie go into a largely idyllic parallel universe where Donald Trump was arrested for tax fraud in the 20th century and his friends find his stories legitimately interesting. However, Kate and Danae don’t exist and alternate universe Flo expresses good-natured jealousy that the Flo Eddie knows has "grandbabies."
- Inventing the Wheel: In the strip from October 11, 2024 a group of stereotypical cave men have just invented the wheel (a classic big dumb stubby cylinder, apparently carved from stone, and attached to nothing). Unfortunately, these stereotypical cavemen are also stereotypical business executives, who are going to "hold off on R&D until marketing creates an ad campaign appealing to the 18-34 demographic" — explaining "why the Stone Age lasted so long".
- Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: Kate wears a pink dress and is more cheerful than Danae, a dark quasi-goth.
- Lighthouse Point: The Ordinary Basil storylines start with a lighthouse.
- Lucky Rabbit's Foot: One strip has Kate gushing about the lucky rabbit's foot keychain she just acquired. Danae points out that if she got another one, she'd be twice as lucky. And that if she got two more, she'd be... almost as lucky as the rabbit.
- Missing Mom: Danae and Kate's mother ran off with a biker while the family was on a trip to New Hampshire.
- Mouse Hole: In the October 5, 2023 strip, a woman surmises the mouse in her house is a country mouse on account of the classical arch-shaped mouse hole in the wall has a little mouse-sized outhouse next to it (complete with crescent moon cutout in the door).
- The Münchausen: Eddie often tells outlandish stories about his life at Flo's place, sometimes hoping to mooch a free lunch by telling them. The thing is a few of them are actually true, as Danae and others have found out, so it's very hard to tell which of his stories are true, which are exaggerations, and which are outright lies.
- Oh, No... Not Again!: Eddie is prone to these.
- January 28, 2013 recaps the previous week:
Joe: What's going on out there?Flo: Eddie didn't check the tide chart, so his boat got stuck in the mud flats... Again.Joe: Uh... So?Flo: So he had to walk all the way back... Again.Joe: OK... but...Flo: Well... Some tourists saw him and thought he was walkin' on watah, so he's become a cult deity... ...Again.Eddie: Hey, it could happen to anyone.Joe: Well, once, maybe...- Then on March 2, 2013:
Flo: Really? Danae wanted to be the next Pope?!Joe: Yeah... So I had to tell her the harsh reality of the selection process... that they only choose an old white male who has the most minions supporting him for the post.Eddie: Don't worry, I tahned them down again.Joe: Wait... 'Again?'- And on December 19, 2021:
Eddie: OK... Wheah did I leave off?Joe: You and Santa were in the belly of a giant fishFlo: ...Again - Paleolithic Pioneer: One strip has a cave man drawing an ungulate of some kind on the cave's wall. He's almost done, until a rock bonks him on the head. A precocious boy sitting behind him pipes up, "Now draw horsey." The caption on this comic is "The First Remote Control."
- Potty Emergency: In one arc, Danae and Kate are snowed inside the house. This then becomes an emergency when their pets Lucy and Petey have to answer the call of nature.
- Reincarnation: Homer/Honor the Reluctant Soul's whole schtick is being incarnated into various lives at different points in history, usually meeting some sticky end.
- Savage Piercings: The strip from March 25, 2026, is satirizing the American healthcare system; the patient (wearing an Embarrassing Hospital Gown) is being forced to visit the "ALT CARE" instead of the "PRIMARY CARE". The "ALT CARE" is a clearly a Witch Doctor (with a "human skulls" motif and what appears to be a Voodoo Doll) and naturally enough has a substantial bone through his nose.
- Scam Religion: Danae tries to create one in several strips that adhere to her Straw Feminist tendencies. The most vital Commandments are that girls are superior to boys, everyone is inferior to her, and you aren't allowed to question them. However, she adds a new one whenever she pleases, and at last count, had dozens. Thus far, recruitment is low.
- Silly Spook: Danae's house is haunted by her Great Uncle Reginald, a grumpy old coot who was clearly Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense during his life. Most jokes regarding him involve his dislike of technology and old-fashioned stuffiness.
- Small Name, Big Ego: Danae. She has an extreme opinion of her skills and talents and a low opinion of anyone or anything that contravenes said opinions (as the "fungable" Story Arc clearly indicated).
- Snowed-In: Danae and Kate, along with their pets, getting snowed in kicks off a particularly bizarre storyline.
- Straw Feminist: Danae takes the typical little girl's dislike of boys and magnifies it to absurd levels. In the aforementioned Scam Religion, she claims men were created when God — who she naturally perceives as female — sneezed.
- True Art Is Incomprehensible: Parodied in a one-shot. An art critic finds an empty frame hanging in a gallery and goes into a spiel to the effect of "this is brilliant!" and includes words something like "true art is dead". Then a maintenance guy comes along and hangs a sign in the frame saying "Exhibit Coming Soon".