Mugging The Monster / Webcomics

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• Alien Loves Predator: In a guest strip, a mugger pulls a gun on Abe and Preston while they are talking about crime in New York. The mugger quickly asks if the gun is theirs, while Preston's Plasmacaster accidentally targets his head.
• Anthesteria by A-gnosis: An ancient ghost tries to lay a curse on Hades, not recognizing him as the God of the Dead. Being an unusually level-headed deity, he just Dope Slaps her with her own ghostly miasma, then tries to talk some sense into her.
• Another Gaming Comic: Mocked. Within the tabletop game the characters play, poorly-equipped bandits attack a group of "flying, flaming weaponmasters" — a standard D&D party. "They're bandits, not brain surgeons."
• At Arm's Length: During one story, a troupe of conquistador-like alien bugs choose Reece's house as the starting point of their invasion of Earth. They quickly regret this.
• Blue Yonder: This is broadly implied to be part of the Back Story of Claremont Apartments and why such a wretched neighbor is so safe.
• Cthulhu Slippers: It's more a case of don't bother Hastur until he's had coffee.
• Chopping Block: A mugger once told Butch to empty his pockets. He tried, but he ran out of body parts to stab the mugger in before he ran out of blades to stab him with.
• Crimson Flag: In the early strips, a couple of thugs tried to mug Lucian, a Level Three fire mage (which incidentally means the guards wouldn't bother him).
• Dead Winter: This is Monday's Establishing Character Moment. A squad of incompetent thugs, sent to assassinate him but clearly not expecting much resistance, receives a condescending verbal beatdown followed by an extremely quick Guns Akimbo genocide.
  Leader: D... don't you has a message... for a survivor to send... to our boss?
  Monday: ...What survivor? [pak]
• Drowtales: A mugger decides to go after Ariel and Faen and lead them into an alley when they ask him for directions. While he is right that they're two young Val girls with relatively little in the way of street smarts, what he didn't know was the fact that Faen's mother, Ash'waren, is the most powerful empath in Chel, and Faen is powerful enough and has so little control over her abilities that she sics a wolf on the mugger without meaning to before he can react.
• El Goonish Shive: While Grace and Sarah are walking through an alley, they're jumped by a knife-wielding mugger. Little does the mugger know that Grace is a shapeshifter with an exceptionally powerful alternate form. And in case it's not enough, telekinesis.
  Mugger: AAAAAAAA!!! Demon Girl!!! Repent!!! Repent I Say!!! AAAAAAA!!!
• Endstone: Aiming your Witch Hunt at Kyri and her daughter may not be wise, even with Torches and Pitchforks.
• Errant Story: The Veracian guards are looking for Jon over a matter of a recent assassination. He's having trouble shaking the pursuit, so he decides to take a young girl (Meji) hostage and offer to trade her safety for his escape. When the guards decide to Shoot the Hostage, Meji zaps them with a lightning spell, then enquires of Jon if there's a price on his head, and if so, does she need to bring all of him in, or just the head?
• Freefall: Sam admits to being surprised to have to rescue the guard from Florence and not vice versa.
• Girl Genius:
  • Oublenmach tries to break into what turned out to be a Jägermonster bar, brandish his weapon and threaten the staff into giving him what they consider a sacred relic. The next time we see him, he's subjected to a Neck Lift. (Though they end up giving him the relic, because he intends to take... drag... it back to its usual home to be used for its assigned purpose.)
  • The last surviving hostile Spark in Mechanisburg found himself "a charming pair of innocent hostages": Zeetha, daughter of Chump and Axel Higgs. Next time we see him, he's wearing his BFG as a scarf.
• Godslave: When "Suit Guy" Blacksmith decides to go after Edith, both his colleague and the readers are convinced she'll mop the floor with him.
• Grrl Power:
  • A background check reveals that Sydney was once arrested for assault. Maxima does not find that surprising. What surprises everyone in the board room is that she was found not-guilty due to acting in self-defense because somebody actually tried to mug her. The only description in the official police report is "Oh, the humanity!".
  • When Sydney's co-worker/business partner hears about the bank robbery, he's concerned about the fate of the bank robbers.
  • Cora and Sydney get accosted by some alien muggers on a space station. Cora is an experienced adventurer and starship captain, while Sydney has some of the most powerful technology in the universe literally within arm's reach. They both burst out laughing.
• Gunnerkrigg Court: Some senior schoolkids mocked Annie and Kat. And the "teddy", which was a doll possessed by the spirit bored out of his mind for years and now also annoyed.
  Big Bully: I absolutely did not expect thiiiiis!
  The Rant: I bet that guy wasn't expecting that.
• Heartcore: A couple of thugs attempt to do horrible things to a helpless woman. Oh wait, that's no helpless woman; that's Amethyst Lashiec, former princess of Asgard and a powerful succubus, incognito.
• Homestuck: Tavros really shouldn't have tried to troll Dave.
• I'm the Grim Reaper: Jordan a serial killer, unknowingly, when he chose Scarlet as his next victim. It goes as well as expected, as in, she kills him easily.
• Impure Blood: Some men decide to stalk Caspian as a freak lover.
• Johnny Wander: In "Barbarous" Hale breaks in to steal Cecilia's lens, and while he knows who Percy was he thinks Leeds is just a person wearing a glamor and definitely does not know that Cee is Death's immortal girlfriend with the ability to kill with a touch.
• In Jupiter-Men, Rick picks a fight with Arrio when Arrio refuses to help Rick flirt with Jackie. This fight ends with Rick nursing a black eye from getting three punches to the face while Arrio is completely unscathed. Rick only learns that Arrio is an ex-gang member after the fact. Arrio replies that Rick is lucky he only gave him a black eye.
• Kevin & Kell:
  • Because eating others is perfectly legal in the Crapsaccharine World of the comic, this is a fairly common event, making one wonder why anyone in general would be a crook, since it's perfectly legal for the police or your victims to eat you if they can. Two notable events we see are one of the earliest comics, where Kell deliberately leaves her home unlocked to lure in stupid thieves to sate her pregnancy cravings, and one after Danielle joins the cast, where a puma that tries to eat her ends up being made into mincemeat and eaten by her instead.
  • Predators attack Kevin, expecting an easy meal, only to discover that he prefers fighting to running away, and as a former WWF wrestler he has more than enough skill. One storyline involves a would-be predator actually suing Kevin for using methods unnatural for a rabbit.
• Magick Chicks: Chapter 4 has this happen mutually. Faith sees an opportunity to seduce a random girl she met on the street — and do Melissa a favor, as she imagines it. She is rather surprised to be bitten in the neck after two aiming kisses. Layla sees an opportunity to drink a little blood — and as far as we know, when she's promising to be "very nice", she really means it. She is rather surprised when her "snack" panicks and has her telekinetically Punched Across the Room. And then Faith decides she's cool and can fight a vampire for fun, so things get somewhat messier from this point.
• MegaTokyo: It is not a good idea to try groping Erika.
• The Monster Under the Bed: A bully named Craig thinks it'll be fun to tease Timothy and his 'little girlfriend'. Too bad for him that said girlfriend turns out to be a monster from another dimension.
• Niels: Happens to Agent 250 in this strip. The mugger soon finds out why you shouldn't pick fights with government/former military agents.
• Newheimburg: Jack Delitt manages to improvise a defense against a would-be mugger, getting stabbed in the process.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • Parodied in "The Economics of Banditry", where Haley points out that mugging is just too dangerous in a D&D-based world, and ultimately not worth it.
  • Directly referenced at the end of that arc:
    Durkon: One a' these days, yer just gonna end up trying ta rob like a level 16 fighter by accident and get massacred.
  • Played straight after the end of the bandit arc in "Tied Up Nicely", where the former leaders of the bandits get killed picking on a much higher-level character.
  • Played straight (albeit more mildly) in "Too Slow"; Pickpocketing the Rogue if you will.
  • When Tsukiko discovers that Redcloak has been lying to Xykon about the ritual to control the Snarl, she confronts him, confident that he's too spineless to stop her from exposing his deception. Redcloak reveals that he has taken control of her wight minions, and has them seize her and remove the ring protecting her from their energy drain. He then proceeds to fill her in on his plans, including the fact that his apparent subservience is an act to help him manipulate Xykon, while her own wights drain her to death.
    Redcloak: If I tolerated your humiliating attempts to undercut my authority before, it was only because killing you would've upset the delicate puppet strings upon which "Lord Xykon" unknowingly dances. But if you're going to stand here and tell me that you're going to expose one of those strings to him? If you're going to be THAT stupid? There can only be one rational response to that.
  • Xykon once tried to steal a cool crown from a librarian.
    Xykon: ...and it turned out oops! He was also an archmage! Needless to say, hilarity ensued.
• Project Future: The side story Red Valentine has three people mugging two monsters. Afterwards they mop up the blood while discussing what do with the surviving mugger.
• RH Junior comics:
  • Tales of the Questor: A group of angry townspeople catch Quentyn trying to flee with their prisoner. Quentyn warns them off with his elfshot pistol. The lead roughneck laughs in his face — only to be pincushioned a moment later.
  • Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger: Apparently this is the inevitable fate of space pirates.
• Schlock Mercenary: This happens a lot, seeing as how the protagonists are heavily armed mercenaries.
  • Such a happenstance incidentally turns something the mercs are not good at (a formal dinner) into something that they are very, very good at. Note this continues to happen occasionally, only these days the mercs tend to be wearing power armor (it looks just like the uniforms they wore before that weren't armor... so it stays this trope).
  • When the "union" workers at Czorny-Luna Shipyard tried to shake down the Toughs, Sergeant Schlock burned the first two thugs to ash with his plasma cannon, then ate the ashes (for which he was mildly reprimanded.) When the union boss came by the next day to check on them, he noted that he commanded a small army of men who used their muscles for a living, to which Breya replied that, as a mercenary admiral, she also commanded a small army of "testosterone factories", and her boys had military-grade weaponry.
  • While acquiring Schlock some new eyes (after his were gouged out in a particularly brutal fight), the Toughs are continually faced with a more numerous but far less able enemy. This culminates in the enemy fleet attacking Petey in the mistaken belief that any ex-Tausennigan warship can't possibly have a working AI. A visual metaphor is provided.
  • Other groups don't pose quite such a threat.
  • Some alien frat boys decide to go looking for a fight. This is a bad move. Then the cops show up and decide that they'll engage in a bit of police brutality. This is also a bad move.
    Nick: Are you pickin' a fight wit' me?
    Narration: Anyone with half a brain would know that this question, asked in this tone of voice, by a man of this size, has exactly one correct answer.
    Frat boy: Yes I am. What are you going to do about it?
    Narration: That was not it.
  • Reality TV show Glamour Assault, which runs around mocking what people are wearing, tries their schtick on Action Girl Elf and her hair-trigger temper, then refers to the doc as her "friend the streetwalker." Elf ends up putting the "assault" put back into "Glamour Assault". Literally.
  • Elf is good at these sorts of things.
  • The Uuplechan Patriot Armada, a nationalist militia group, attacks the Toughs' squadron when they come to offer disaster relief. They think the Tough's three ships are an escort cruiser, a repair ship, and a freighter. In fact they are a heavily up-gunned cruiser as powerful as the UPA's entire squadron, an armed repair ship designed by a Mad Scientist, and a battleship, and their crews included multiple One-Man Armies capable of capturing small pirate ships single-handed.
• Sequential Art had the Think Tank pulling this in the Alien Invasion arc, when one of the squirrel girls notices Martian Trash Cans hunting for Art —
  Violet: [panically] A bad, floaty, shooty, tinny thing is being bad upstairs!
  [squirrel girls look at each other]
  All four: [gleefully] ♥ ♥ Field test! ♥ ♥
• Sire: A London street gang pull this on Susan/Anna Enfield during the second chapter. Susan rightfully boasts that she has already killed two people with her bare hands and is not afraid to make it three.
• Slightly Damned:
  • A pair of bandits tries to rob a trio of what they think is two hookers and a pimp, but it turns out one of them is an angel warrior, which are trained from a young age to kill demons and is equipped with a magic sword and a myriad of spells. They are dispatched in short order. Ironically, Buwaro, the disguised fire demon they tried to rob, was actually the most harmless of the three.
  • A while later, those same two bandits get into a confrontation with the water demon Lazuli, who is most certainly not like Buwaro. She perforates one of them with icicles and then used a giant pair of ice spikes to crush and impale the other.
  • While in St. Curtis, a khamega tries to steal Kieri's pet golden wyvern... not on her watch.
  • Also in St. Curtis, a trio of demons stick up the Sinclair family, threatening to kill them if they don't hand over the Rainbow Reverie potion set. They get more than they bargained for.
• Spacetrawler: Emily Watson's Establishing Character Moment. Two guys with knives tell her to hand over her wallet; she whips out a pair of handguns and demands her would-be muggers' wallets and car keys.
• Stalker x Stalker: Yukio and Junko are already protective and mutually possessive of one another, so threating both of them for their money is essentially suicidal.
• Step Monster: A pair of crooks try to hold up Roy's convenience store the day that Matilda gets hired there. They find out the hard way that the new employee is a bulky, 8-foot-tall monster with Scary Teeth who proceeds to eat their guns to intimidate them.
• Suicide for Hire:
  • Do not threaten to rape one of the co-founders of Suicide For Hire. He only kills people who pay him to do so, but you may want to hire him once he's done with you.
  • In an early strip, it is strongly implied that a loudmouth atheist named Thomas Wesley managed to do this to God by making a Nietzsche-like dissertation, only to wind up enduring and surviving Disaster Dominoes so improbable as to all but imply divine intervention, only dying when doves pecked his eyes out. It was all caught on film, by a camera crew coincidentally filming something else across the street. Friends, family, and classmates all laughed at the corpse.
• Super Stupor: One of the most (in)famous strips shows what happens when a Super Villain tries to stuff the wrong victim into a fridge; not only does The Maven lose a hand from his mistake, but the would-be victim proceeds to stalk him, just to drive the point home that looking for revenge would be a really bad idea.
• Times Like This: Occurs off-camera when a burglar breaks into the apartment of a master swords-woman, who is home, surrounded by some of her favourite weapons. The news reports then describe the would be robber as a one-armed bandit.
• unOrdinary: Pretty much any time someone with a level of 2.6 or lower tries to pick a fight with the school's resident cripple. A more direct example in Season 2 when two loansharks try to extort money from Adrion, and then start pushing John around when he intervenes. It quickly goes from Adrion trying to stop them to Adrion physically holding John back from continuing to beat the shit out of them.
• Various Happenings: The pair of young ladies, Edwina and Cassandra, find themselves accosted by a trio of wannabe goons in a back alley. It goes on a bit until the leader of the group accosts Edwina with a switchblade. His lackeys seem to dislike this, but Edwina voices her displeasure in a much more extreme manner...
• Wapsi Square: This happens a few times. The mugger pulls a knife. Heather pulls a gun.
• Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic:
  • A foxwoman finds a young man going to visit his grandmother. She takes human form, lures him with the promise of random sex, and then shifts into her foxwoman form, making it look she's going to eat him. Turns out the man is a shapeshifted dragon.
  • An adventuring party sneaking into Black Mountain takes a goblin female and a male Drow prisoner. The Drow is Wolf, Drow Royal Consort and the girl is Gren, girlfriend of Bob the Beholder.

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