Stating The Simple Solution / Webcomics

Stating the Simple Solution in Webcomics.

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• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja:
  • The comic appears to be pulling this when Frans Rayner has Mongo go to great lengths to capture Dr. McNinja alive instead of just killing him in combat. Dr. McNinja actually calls him out on this. It then justifies it when Rayner reveals that Mongo has learned the value of human life and refuses to kill, forcing Rayner to go with the capture plan instead.
  • Later, this strip pulls it when yet another Alternate Universe Chuck gets roped into becoming mayor post-attempted invasion from the Radical Lands. And then once again.
• Antihero for Hire: Both averted and lampshaded when Dr. Nefarious, embarrassed by his evil plan's failure, says he'd rather just shoot Shadehawk. Shadehawk is actually PROUD of him.
• Awkward Zombie:
  • Professor Layton refuses to do anything unless it's roundabout, elaborate, and involves as many matchsticks as possible.
  • Alan Wake find a manuscript for a book that he can't remember writing, and realizes that everything he wrote in the book comes true. So he writes a happy ending where he's safe and finds his wife. It doesn't work. (In the game itself, incidentally, Alan had a predecessor who tried the same thing. It went horribly wrong — the lack of justification for this Deus ex Machina allowed the Eldritch Abomination causing his predicament to assert itself as the justification, poking a hole in its can.)
• Bob and George: "Um, wouldn't it be easier to, say, blast me now, while I'm hanging here completely defenseless?"
• In Cucumber Quest, Cordelia asks the Nightmare Knight why he doesn't just "defeat the hero yourself? Right now?" She narrowly escapes being punished for her insubordination. The actual answer is revealed much later, along with Nightmare Knight's true motivations.
• Darths & Droids: This strip and yes, a link to this page. May the Force preserve us, we're stuck in an infinite loop!:
  Boba Fett: (to Jango) Why couldn't you just shoot him?
  Jango Fett: What sort of criminal mastermind would I be if I did that?
• Dominic Deegan:
  • One of the earliest strips had Dominic hire Stunt and Bumper to acquire a magic potion from a magic user to cure him of a curse that caused fish to fall on him when he smoked. Stunt asks why he doesn't just quit smoking. Dominic snips back by asking why the thieves keep stealing if they don't like jail time.
  • Another incident had Bumper and Stunt come across an unconscious Dominic on the street being tended to by Luna...
    Bumper: Yeah! We could come up with an ironic revenge that robs him of his dignity and pride!
    Stunt: I want to stab him in the face.
    Bumper: That should work.
• Dumbing of Age:
  • Becky goes through a series of wacky escapades to try and see Dina without her hat. When she finally admits what she's up to, Dina points out she could have just asked.
  • Lucy wants to have sex with Walky, and is just liberated enough from her conservative religious upbringing that she's willing to do so once she and Walky have had their third date. However, she's also bound and determined to turn her and Walky watching his sister Sal's roller derby with Sal's boyfriend, Danny, into a double date so it can be their third. So much so that, when Danny refuses to acknowledge the situation as a date of any kind, Lucy snaps at him over not realizing the "pretend, self-placed hoops a Christian woman will jump through to justify getting railed.". Danny replies that Lucy can just "take Walky and go eat at a friggin' IHOP. Boom, third date." After a moment's consideration, Lucy is on board with this idea so she can then make love in what she has decided is a Christ-approved way.
• El Goonish Shive: Happens twice in "So a Date At the Mall". While everyone is suggesting reasons for Andrea's erratic movements, Ashley asks if Andrea just has a bad sense of direction. Later on, Nanase is trying to contact Elliot with her fairy doll, but it hasn't been working all night. Ashley wonders if it's because Elliot isn't currently Elliot. Both of these are completely correct.
• In Girl Genius:
  • Moloch Von Zinzer is very good at this sort of thing. It tends to annoy Sparks, who don't like having their drama harshed by a Mundane Solution.
    Moloch: Why don't we just move this winch? There should be enough cable, and it looks strong enough that we could lower everybody on a platform.
    [turns around and notices he's become the subject of several disapproving glares]
    Moloch: ...and then, at the bottom, it could unfold into a ... a giant caterpillar or ... something...
    Dr. Mittelmind: No, no. You've already taken all the joy out of it.
  • The Unstoppable Airman Higgs is more used to their ways, but even he has his breaking point, as amply demonstrated here when Gil's pining over Agatha gets too overwrought.
    Higgs: So write her a letter. [...]
    Gil: I could build a machine that would project a simulacrum of myself that could explain—
    Higgs: Why I smacked you?
    Gil: Or... I could just... write...
  • Martellus, who doesn't typically have much going for him in the way of decency or common sense, manages to propose an obvious solution when it's clear to Gil and Tarvek that no matter what alterations Lucrezia made to their machine, they'll never be able to find them all: just rebuild it from scratch. Surprisingly, Gil and Tarvek wholly approve of the idea.
• Grrl Power: The heroes find a portal the bad guy used to escape and want to know where it leads. Obviously, they can't just go through themselves since it's probably trapped to hell and back. But the bad guy left a minion behind, so Dabbler interrogates him, plants a tracker on him, lets him escape, and starts tracking him across the city while doing high-level mathematics in her head to predict exactly where he's going so they'll have a team ready in time. Then Sydney mentions that it's too bad they couldn't have just put a tracking spell on a rock and tossed it into the portal, and Dabbler lapses into embarrassed silence.
  Sydney: You mean that would have worked?
• Discussed in the "Ask Vector Prime a Question" section of the Insecticomics site; Vector Prime, a Physical God, could have destroyed Megatron and save all of reality rather easily in Transformers: Cybertron... But he states that if he did, the villain's fangirls would kill him. Later, he claims that Executive Meddling prevented him from just saving the world in a single episode, lamenting the fact that he could have spent the rest of the series on a beach getting a foot massage from a supermodel.
• Mag Isa.
  • Demon gets Claudita temporarily paralyzed by some sort of invisible spore thingies. He insists on lecturing her about how evil their agenda is and how she's got no chance of winning or something like that.
  • Eman was shot multiple times... but Kyle didn't even think of shooting Eman in the head.
• Used in Nodwick when an evil henchman ends up asking his evil employers why they don't kill the adventurers they have so handily defeated. His only answer is to get a sword shoved in his face and a sharp admonishment that henchmen do not get to give orders.
• Oglaf: In this comic, Mistress attempts to sic a monster on two hucksters trying to sell her a "magic blanket" that turns night to day by throwing it over someone's head. The monster still has six months before it's ready to attack, and the hucksters recommend throwing the blanket over it a hundred times to make a hundred days pass. She instead tells her guard to shoot them.
• In Questionable Content, Hannelore's father sends her a strange device, but neglects to include any instructions or even a description. She spends a few strips with Marten and Claire trying to figure out what it could be, until Dora walks in and points out they could just call Hannelore's father.
  Marten: [Face Palm] I can't believe that didn't occur to any of us.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:
  • This comic hangs a lampshade. The example in question references Sleeping Beauty, which is actually an aversion — Maleficent's original intent was to have the princess prick her finger on a spindle and die on her Dangerous 16th Birthday. The Curse Escape Clause that made Happily Ever After possible was added by the youngest of the good fairies, who wasn't strong enough to negate the curse entirely but was strong enough to provide an out. Of course, none of this negates the fact that Maleficent probably could have taken out an infant if she wanted to, instead of waiting sixteen years for her revenge or whatever.
  • In the strip for 2013-05-12, Lex Luthor explains a complicated plan to use physics to make Superman explode himself. Then he proposes a physics solution for killing Batman as well: kinetic energy and a bullet.
• Defied on Sequential Art. Whenever the gang runs into a life-threatening problem, Art is usually the one to come up with the obvious solution of simply calling the police. Unfortunately, Pip or Kat usually points out that the types of situations they run into are considered prank calls by the police, so that's not actually a viable option.
• Inverted in Sluggy Freelance, in which the evil villain is talked into not just shooting the hero and instead using an overly complex and silly Death Trap as an interrogation method.
• A Shen Comix bit featured a square lamenting that he couldn't fit through the circle-shaped hole like all the other circles because he was just too different and special to fit in. Unphased, one of the circles points out he could just go through sideways, much to the square's chagrin.
  Square: You could just shut up and let me be special!
• xkcd:
  • Macgyver gets lazy. Of course, the reason Macgyver never does that in the show was that he Doesn't Like Guns and doesn't want to kill anyone.
  • An even more astute example comes when Randall Munroe is locked out of his apartment. Munroe has to hack into his roommate's Macbook downstairs and use a text-to-speech device to try and get inside. When someone else asks Munroe about the doorbell, Munroe is left in Stunned Silence, as the idea of just ringing the doorbell had apparently not occurred to him.

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