Guile Hero / Webcomics

Guile Heroes in Webcomics.

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• Kendall of Agents of the Realm stands out among her fellow Agents with this quality. When others want to confront Jordan with their Magical Girl Warrior fate, hoping it would force a Heel–Face Turn, Kendall arranges a Meet Cute and pretends to know nothing, learning everything.
• Buck Godot of Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire is definitely no slouch in a stand-up fight, but his major victories throughout the comic's run were due to his ability to think on his feet and put two and two together just a little quicker than anyone else.
• Averted in Dominic Deegan: The title character likes to think of himself as one of these but his 'clever schemes' backfire on him often.
• Elator ( "Elly") of Dubious Company has managed to overthrow at least one mutiny and one riot due to his understanding of politics.. and that people like to get drunk.
• To the limited degree that Sam Starfall of Freefall can be considered a hero, he's a Guile Hero. He's not particularly smart, technologically speaking, and he's not particularly strong — at one point being beaten up when he tried to steal candy from a baby — but his ability to cause mayhem through words alone is impressive. For example, at one point he managed to prevent Florence from being cryo-frozen by dressing up as the head of cryogenics (despite only approximately appearing human), lying his tentacular butt off, and even managing to trick the Corrupt Corporate Executive into getting his tongue stuck to a freezing tube. It might be other people who come up with the ultimate plan, but if any stage of it involves manipulation, it's Sam who gets to do that part, and sometimes he'll just do it on the spur of the moment.
  Sawtooth: I don't want Sam on my side. However, I don't want Sam on the other side even more.
  • Dr. Bowman turns out to have a surprising knack for this despite being a genetically augmented chimp laden with anger issues and personal instabilities. Multiple characters describe him as The Chessmaster, but his long-term goals are invariably positive...even if he occasionally takes jaw-dropping risks in order to bring them about.
    Bowman: Take your safeguards. They're a constant neural weighting factor. As you grow and learn, you bring other factors in, making your safeguards less of an influence on your overall decision-making. There were others who wanted your safeguards to always be the overriding factor. They were quite enthusiastic about what limits your thoughts would be capable of. However, each was sure only they knew what the right thoughts were. I actively encouraged that until we ran out of time. That's how the monkey who was excluded from the process wound up making the decisions.
• Terezi of Homestuck is said to have killed or captured entire parties of FLARPers using mind games and politics. She is so good at it that she made manipulating a literal god into disfiguring and dooming Vriska look like child's play.
• Haley from The Order of the Stick is quite skilled in manipulating her enemies. A highlight involved her dealing with an intelligent, nigh-indestructible Flesh Golem with a grudge against her (due to being made from her rival Crystal). Unable to inflict appreciable damage on the construct, she managed to defeat her with words, first persuading her to turn against her master Bozzok, then distracting her with conversation until she could dump her into a lava pit.
• Petey from Schlock Mercenary isn't above manipulating others into doing work for him, although he has been willing to use direct force occasionally. The reason for this is that 99.9% of his power is occupied with the war against Andromeda, so he has to make others do the work. He also qualifies as Science Hero (being the most powerful AI in the galaxy and thus likely the smartest entity in the universe) and Action Hero (on a galactic scale).
• The Girl in Tellurion. She refuses the Robot's offer to learn how to fight, preferring instead to use her understanding of the precursors to chart the course of their Quest. Her skills are enough to instantly convince a ship captain to work for her and follow her directions.
• Khun Aguero Agnes, Twenty-Fifth Bam, and Ja Wangnan from Tower of God. While one is a Magnificent Bastard, the second is a sharp, but somewhat naive Wide-Eyed Idealist and the last is a true-to-the-blood hothead.

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