Alec McCain

From Candypedia
Alec McCain
GenderMale
Age18
Birthday1991
GradeSenior as of Table for One
SpeciesDog
BreedWest Highland White Terrier
DebutFollow Me, page 1
March 22, 2010 (2010-03-22)

Alec McCain is a small dog in a very long coat. He attends Roseville High School, apparently one grade above Sue and her friends.[1][2] He will also tell you the statistical odds against your relationship, whether or not you asked.[3] It rarely goes down well, and everyone from Mike to Paulo has told him to shut it. Sue comes closest to being the exception: she calls him Alec, and he keeps turning up for her clubs, campaigns and trips. He was invented by a fan, adopted into the comic, and eventually written back out for being a little too popular.[3][4]

Personality

McCain cannot let a dubious argument pass unchallenged in Invitation.

McCain talks like a textbook that has wandered into a cafeteria. The words are long, the odds are precise, and there is no volume control on the tact. He drifts up to the edge of other people’s conversations to correct them, gets shouted down almost every time, and looks a bit wounded about it. He can look equally unimpressed by club meetings, roller coasters and cliff edges, and yet Sue keeps dragging him into her projects and he keeps coming.

Mike gets the first taste of it in McCain’s debut. When he insists he’d take his long-distance girlfriend to prom, McCain appears with a finger raised to explain why teenage relationships rarely survive junior year, let alone at a distance.[3] In gym class he helpfully informs Paulo that Jay considers Tess a “mendacious harlot”, which Paulo already knew. Paulo objects more to McCain calling her his girlfriend.[5] When Sue tells him to relax because he’ll live longer, he corrects her on the correlation between life expectancy and singing.[6] The bluntness gets darker on the Silvershore Islands. With Mike and Lucy dangling off a cliff, he starts tapping his chin and assessing whether the water or the fall is the likelier problem,[7] and it is McCain who later breaks the news to Lucy in two words: “He fell.”[8] Back at the airport he greets Abbey and Daisy’s new romance with “I give it six months.”[9]

Under all that deadpan is somebody who would rather like to be listened to. Asked at the Neglected Club whether he ever wants to be heard, he goes quiet and admits that, well, yes, he does, and when the room jeers him a moment later he falls silent, head in hand.[10] Sue puts him in the spotlight, complete with confetti, and he blushes at how strange it feels, then asks if he can keep calling the club stupid.[10] The frustrating part, for him, is that he does sometimes have a point. He suggests the club simply try asking the popular kids, and that is exactly what ends up working for Sue.[10][11] During Sue’s campaign he explains that a president can propose changes but still has to work within the school board’s rules.[12]

McCain offers comfort with a hand on the shoulder and a reminder Sue could do without.

Nothing much rattles him, at least not on the surface. He frowns through a roller coaster,[13] strolls along a narrow ledge in a full-length coat,[14] and when he falls off a cliff himself he simply drops and lands with a thud.[15][16] The cracks show after he lands, when he starts trembling.[16] Truth or Dare leaves him blushing and glowering behind Sue.[17] He is also, on paper, a reluctant participant. He protests that he hasn’t packed for the trip,[18] sulks through the flight,[19] and trails the campaign wishing he could just have lunch.[1]

Appearance

McCain is a dog, as he has to remind people,[10] and a very small one. Katie even calls him a bear,[10] Sue can scoop him up and run with him when a wild animal gives chase,[20] and she comforts him by resting a hand on top of his head.[16] He often has to look up at whoever he is correcting.[21]

The rest of him is a full-length trench coat and a pair of dark glasses, worn everywhere from the lunchroom to a tropical hike.[10][14] When he lands after his cliff fall, the coat covers his face entirely,[16] and when Sue wants to shake him she grabs him by its collar.[22] Sue sums the wardrobe up while hauling him onto a plane with no luggage: “You always wear the same thing anyway!”[18]

Significant events

Bonding finds McCain translating an insult and earning immediate notoriety.

McCain first appears in Follow Me, interrupting Mike’s prom talk with a lecture on long-distance relationships and getting the first of many orders to shut it.[3] He spends the rest of that school year doing much the same thing to Paulo, translating insults in Bonding and A Different Side.[23][5] In Out of the Frame he joins Sue’s short-lived Neglected Club, tells her the whole idea is pointless, and gets jeered by Stacy and Katie for it.[10] Once the mob clears out he finds himself alone with Sue, and the two of them have a moment neither is quite ready for.[24]

Sue needs an even number for the trip to the Silvershore Islands in Invitation, so she baits him into an argument and drags him up the plane stairs.[18] He rooms with David in Arrival, which goes badly for him.[25] In Search and Rescue he hikes beside Sue and watches Mike fall after saving Lucy.[14][26] It falls to him to tell Lucy what happened to Mike.[8] Later he ends up going over a cliff himself while fleeing the beast.[15] Back home in Return he gives Abbey and Daisy’s relationship half a year.[9]

He walks into school alongside Sue on the first day of the next school year in A Distance Apart.[27] In Feline Filibuster he is on her campaign staff, reading her policies aloud with visible doubt and challenging Jasmine on whether hers is a serious campaign,[28] while Sue pencils him in as the vice president of her planned puppet council.[2] She loses in a landslide, and his attempt at consolation does not go down well.[29] He is backstage at her play in Curtain Call long enough to observe that the narrator is stuttering,[30] and Sue shakes him until he froths.[22]

His last main-comic appearance is in Guest of Honor, seated at the table for Sue’s convention panel when she arrives late.[31] After that Veronica pulled him from the comic on purpose, and in January 2026 she described him as still at school and acing his classes, imagining him fretting about university applications.[4][32]

Major relationships

Sue

Sue calls him “Alec” and the sparkles give him a headache in Out of the Frame.

Sue keeps roping McCain into schemes he has already told her are pointless. He calls her Neglected Club a waste of time to her face, then stays behind when everyone else storms out.[10][24] Alone with her, he attempts comfort in his own key: “What did you really expect? This whole school is filled with idiots.”[24] Sue, rather than snapping at him, agrees, admits she often feels like the only sensible person in the room, and calls him Alec. He is startled to be called by his first name at all. Both of them go red, sparkles fill the panel, and he waves them off as a headache while Sue makes a hasty exit.[24] Veronica’s commentary calls it very romantic, like one of her Japanese animes.[24]

With Sue, even “shut it” can come with affection. Veronica notes that she is the one who uses his first name,[24] whether cheerfully (“Relax, Alec! You’ll live longer!”) or as a warning when he starts calculating Mike and Lucy’s odds of surviving the fall.[6][7] She carries him bodily away from the beast and rests a hand on his head when he is shaking after his own fall. He looks relieved when she finds Mike safe.[20][16][33] She smiles at his scowling in the airport,[34] and his photo hangs on her bedroom wall as she works on her play.[35] After her election loss he comes over to her, puts a hand on her shoulder, and says, “Cheer up. It’s not like you’d have had the power to change anything anyway.” Her answer is a stammered “Sh.. Shut it, McCain.”[29]

Veronica planned to reveal at junior prom that McCain and Sue had been quietly dating for two years. That secret was the reason she kept him around as long as she did.[4][36] She dropped the reveal once demands for his return got loud enough to be a nuisance. She also gave the relationship an ending: in her July 2016 response she declared Sue single, saying she and McCain had broken up so amicably that Sue hadn’t bothered to tell anyone.[4] The members-only comic Everyday Life later has Sue mention that she broke up with her boyfriend over the summer, quite amicably, and that nobody really noticed.[37] The boyfriend is never named there; Veronica had already described Sue and McCain’s breakup in much the same terms.[4]

Minor relationships

Paulo

McCain helpfully translates Jay’s opinion of Tess in A Different Side.

Paulo is the loudest and most frequent shouter of “shut it,” and McCain gives him plenty of reasons. He wanders past an argument to tell Paulo that Abbey is calling him a “hormonal imbecile”,[23] and in gym class he translates Jay’s insult into formal English before pointing out that Paulo kept asking what he’d said.[5] During Sue’s campaign Paulo swells to twice his size at McCain’s lecture on the limits of student government, and later flips him off while holding a poster.[12][28]

David

McCain’s eight hours begin badly, with David listening to the room next door.

Veronica describes McCain as David except opposite in personality, and the Silvershore hotel puts that to the test by rooming them together.[3][38] While David frets about what Mike and Paulo are up to next door, McCain lies in bed with a flat “I need my eight hours.”[39] He doesn’t get them. A sobbing David shoves him clean out of bed and across the room, and McCain emerges bruised and dazed as David and Paulo celebrate making up.[25][40]

Quotes

The already marginal chance of a teenage relationship outlasting junior year is made exponentially slimmer by the additional qualifier of long-distance communication. Alec McCain, making his debut with unwanted advice for Mike in Follow Me

He considers your girlfriend a mendacious harlot. Alec McCain, translating for Paulo in A Different Side

.. Why hasn’t the focus left me yet? Alec McCain, noticing he is still in the panel in Out of the Frame

Ugh, what’s with all these sparkles?! They’re giving me a headache.. Alec McCain, after Sue calls him Alec in Out of the Frame

I doubt their most pressing concern is the water hazard below. The fall is far likelier to-- Alec McCain, while Mike and Lucy dangle from a cliff in Search and Rescue

Cheer up. It’s not like you’d have had the power to change anything anyway. Alec McCain, consoling Sue after the election in Feline Filibuster

Trivia

  • McCain was created by fan T. Ashley Jenkins, who went on to make the puzzle game Petal Crash. Veronica’s commentary on his debut says she liked him too much not to use him, but warned readers not to expect him too regularly, since he is very good in small doses.[3]
  • By the end of his run, “Shut it, McCain” had been said by Mike, Paulo, Stacy and Sue.[3][23][10][29] Veronica’s entire commentary for his cliff-side risk assessment reads “SHUT / IT / MCCAIN”.[7]
  • Oliver’s commentary on the election results notes that McCain’s South Park politics were the only ones that were truly validated.[29]
  • The non-canon Disaster Dominoes, conceived as an April Fools comic,[41] ends with McCain, in a dark jacket and sunglasses, holding the principal at gunpoint and announcing that this is the last time anyone tells him to shut it.[42] Veronica thought an action-hero sketch of McCain had inspired the ending, recalling a fan’s suggestion of him taking on a zombie apocalypse.[43]
  • In the epilogue to the non-canon Another Chance, a sketch of Augustus’s old design gets the comment that he looks like McCain with a collar.[44]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Chapter 60: Feline Filibuster, page 6
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Chapter 60: Feline Filibuster, page 7
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 Chapter 32: Follow Me, page 1
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 “Ask response on why McCain isn’t coming back”. 2016-07-28.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Chapter 37: A Different Side, page 6
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Chapter 42: Arrival, page 3
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Chapter 43: Search and Rescue, page 9
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Chapter 43: Search and Rescue, page 14
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Chapter 45: Return, page 18
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 10.7 10.8 Out of the Frame, page 2
  11. ↑ Out of the Frame, page 4
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Chapter 60: Feline Filibuster, page 4
  13. ↑ Chapter 39: Love My Way, page 11
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 Chapter 43: Search and Rescue, page 3
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Chapter 43: Search and Rescue, page 18
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4 Chapter 43: Search and Rescue, page 19
  17. ↑ Chapter 44: Intervention, page 6
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 Chapter 41: Invitation, page 19
  19. ↑ Chapter 42: Arrival, page 1
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 Chapter 43: Search and Rescue, page 17
  21. ↑ Chapter 60: Feline Filibuster, page 2
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 Chapter 74: Curtain Call, page 3
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 23.2 Chapter 34: Bonding, page 1
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 24.2 24.3 24.4 24.5 Out of the Frame, page 3
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 Chapter 42: Arrival, page 15
  26. ↑ Chapter 43: Search and Rescue, page 10
  27. ↑ Chapter 50: A Distance Apart, page 4
  28. ↑ 28.0 28.1 Chapter 60: Feline Filibuster, page 5
  29. ↑ 29.0 29.1 29.2 29.3 Chapter 60: Feline Filibuster, page 15
  30. ↑ Chapter 74: Curtain Call, page 2
  31. ↑ Chapter 89: Guest of Honor, page 44
  32. ↑ “Ask response on what happened to McCain”. 2026-01-22.
  33. ↑ Chapter 43: Search and Rescue, page 22
  34. ↑ Chapter 45: Return, page 16
  35. ↑ Chapter 53: Casting Call, page 1
  36. ↑ “Ask response on McCain and Sue dating in the background”. 2016-12-02.
  37. ↑ Everyday Life, page 22 🔒 (members only)
  38. ↑ Chapter 42: Arrival, page 7
  39. ↑ Chapter 42: Arrival, page 10
  40. ↑ Chapter 42: Arrival, page 16
  41. ↑ Disaster Dominoes, page 33 🔒 (members only)
  42. ↑ Disaster Dominoes, page 32 🔒 (members only)
  43. ↑ “McCain action-hero sketch”. 2014-10-03.
  44. ↑ Another Chance, page 28 🔒 (members only)
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