If you take a commuting square of maps and use homotopy cofibers to extend outward to a big grid, you eventually run into some anticommuting squares, which are really supercommuting squares. I think this answers your last question in the affirmative. Whether this answers your other questions really depends on your standards, I suppose. The anticommuting square is mentioned in <i>Faisceaux Pervers</i> and possibly also the triangulated category chapter in Weibel's <i>Homological Algebra</i>. <b>Edit:</b> I think there is a way to write a Mayer-Vietoris sequence as chains on the totalization of a big grid like this. Then you need the signs to make it work. Here is an attempt at a diagram: $$\require{AMScd}\begin{CD} A @>>> B @>>> B/A @>>> \Sigma A \\ @VVV @VVV @VVV @VVV \\ C @>>> D @>>> D/C @>>> \Sigma C \\ @VVV @VVV @VVV @VVV \\ C/A @>>> D/B @>>> X @>>> \Sigma(C/A) \\ @VVV @VVV @VVV @VVV \\ \Sigma A @>>> \Sigma B @>>> \Sigma(B/A) @>>> \Sigma^2 A \\ \end{CD}$$ The bottom right square anticommutes, but the rest commute. The maps on the bottom and right edges have minus signs.