While the strip began as a gag-a-day-based series in which the three main protagonists (Torg, Riff and Zoë) would stumble from one brief, bizarre, parody-centric adventure to the next, the characters and plotlines gradually became more complex and serious.

[1] According to a 2014 article in CBR, the "Mokhadun" storyline provided an in-canon explanation for the title, "which has been a source of consternation for webcomic pundits for nearly two decades".

Early characters also include their neighbor Zoë, the strip’s straight woman, and Dr. Lorna, a parody of talk show psychologist Dr.

[5] A 2002 review described the comic as "telling a complex ongoing story in a punchline-a-day style... His characters, a pack of cheerfully put-upon twentysomethings... frequently fight killer robots and drop into alternate dimensions as Abrams parodies popular film, television, and video games.

"[6] Writing for CBR, Larry Cruz said in 2014 that the characters "form a sort of Scooby team that encounters ghosts, mad scientists, aliens and holiday mascots on the reg.

In every New Year's Eve storyline, Bun-bun gets drunk on 151 Rum, which results in his being uncharacteristically kind and courteous (such as apologizing to Torg or praising the main cast).

A frequent result is a parody of the strip itself, other webcomics, other creative works and/or artists, including Scooby-Doo and Ayn Rand.

[20] There are several implicit cross-overs with R. K. Milholland's Something Positive, such as a comic where Aubrey was forced to sell her bunny, an aggressive Mini Lop with a love of sharp things, to "Kiki's Petstore".

Shortly after the birth of Leah Nicole Abrams in the middle of "The Love Potion" storyline, Sluggy Freelance entered a three-week-long side story.

Also, the first two novels of Ringo's distant-future Council Wars series have appearances by an irascible, treacherous, switchblade-toting, telemarketer-hating AI in a rabbit-shaped body, created by a long-dead fan of an unnamed 20th-century webcomic.

[29] Early reviews noted that being published on the internet allowed Sluggy Freelance to use subject matter not allowed or not typical for newspaper comics, including geeky subjects such as Star Trek, The X-Files, Aliens, The Matrix, slasher films and Microsoft, as well as references to alcohol and sex.

Club of the fifth book in 2002 by Tasha Robinson called Sluggy Freelance "one of the oldest and best of the ongoing Internet comic strips", and described plots in which the characters are attacked by Satan-spawned kittens and a nanotech-based Y2K bug.

Robinson said that Sluggy Freelance had "irrepressible silliness", describing his humor as "absurdist", "geeky", and "left-field", but that the book did have a serious side, building on a previous plot threads and story developments, and said that Sluggy Freelance and other webcomics "collectively offer hope for the future of the comic-strip medium.

"[6] The Sunday Times described Sluggy Freelance in a 2006 article as "TV buff heaven ... think The Office-style sardonic observations about everyday life set in Buffyverse's universe, with Battlestar Galactica thrown in ... very funny indeed.

"[31] Writing for AppScout in 2007, writer Whitney Reynolds said that "Sluggy Freelance was better in the 90's, when you didn't have to slog through ten years of continuity and alternate universe and rabbits to figure out what the heck is going on.

"[32] A reviewer for Sequential Tart in 2008 said, "Sluggy Freelance has such a convoluted interconnected plot line... by God, if I've mastered this universe, I'm in it for the long haul...

"[33] In a 2014 article for Comic Book Resources, reviewer Larry Cruz felt that the mythos of the strip was impossible for a reader to retain, and said, "Marathoning Sluggy Freelance can often feel like a chore, and I admit that I tapped out during the second "Oceans Unmoving" storyline (concluding in 2006), which I understand was the breaking point for many longtime readers."

Cruz noted that "Abrams himself is aware of the impenetrable nature of his webcomic" and had been including footnotes with most pages, hyperlinking to previous strips to provide context for recurring characters, locations and storylines.

[4] Cruz also felt that "revisiting Sluggy Freelance [in 2014] is like stepping into a time warp", not just because the site "still looks like it was developed on Geocities and optimized for 14.4k dialup modems", but because one of the first scenes in the contemporary story "was a big-eyed female who resembles an anime girl with her clothes falling off," concluding their review by saying: "Things may change, but Sluggy never changes.

He did not believe the attention span on the Internet was long enough for the kind of elaborate graphic novels he was used to drawing, so instead he went for a daily, quickly drawn strip.