Meet Paige, Stretch, Berger, and Walter, four nerdy kids who play video games and D&D. The last people you'd expect to be criminals. When a group of ex-cons enter Paige's home, they find out her dad has a criminal past, and his old pals want him to help them rob a bank. Paige decides to rob the bank before her father and his criminal friends can do it first, since she believes this will keep him from going to prison. To this end, she enlists the other three kids to help her carry out the plan.
4 Kids Walk Into a Bank is a 5-issue limited series released in 2016, written by Matthew Rosenberg and drawn by Tyler Boss. A film adaptation is in production, with Rosenberg writing the screenplay.
4 kids steal the following tropes:
- Aerosol Flamethrower: Paige uses one of these to attack Vernon after breaking into his house. She ends up setting the house on fire.
- Ambiguous Gender Identity: Walter has a boy's name and presents as a boy in public, but always plays female characters in games with the other kids, and wears a feminine fairy costume during the robbery.
- Ambiguous Time Period: The year is never stated, but the technology resembles that of the 1980s or 1990s.
- Bank Robbery: The central plot is the 4 kids robbing a bank.
- Brats with Slingshots: Berger uses a slingshot to shoot his D&D miniature into a criminal's eye.
- The Caper: The kids spend a lot of time planning, preparing, and executing the robbery, with each of them playing different roles.
- Cop/Criminal Family: Paige's dad is a former criminal, while her maternal uncle is a cop. And then she becomes a criminal too.
- Foreign Exchange Student: Gerdis, a foreigner from an unspecified country who speaks broken English, stays with Paige and her dad for most of the story, and even plays a part in the robbery, though it's unclear how much he understands what's going on.
- Last-Name Basis: Everyone, even his mother (who presumably has the same last name) calls Berger by his surname.
- "Shaggy Dog" Story: The kids manage to break into the bank and steal thousands of dollars, only to be caught by the cops after a car chase sends their getaway van into the river. And one of the cops accidentally shot Berger, which is implied to lead to his death. And then it turns out the bad guys robbed an entirely different bank, without Paige's dad. Honestly, it might as well be Shoot the Shaggy Dog, though most of the characters survive.
- The Smart Guy: Walter is a chemistry whiz and able to whip up chemicals the kids use in their plot, like truth serum.
- The Smurfette Principle: Paige is the only girl in the group.
