Refuge in Audacity/Comic Books

"Gamble: "You think you can steal from us and just walk away?" Joker: "Yeah.""
 * In Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8.
 * From what's been seen thus far, the twin sisters Indigo from Dreamkeepers have made an art out of this.
 * As in,
 * Saying that, Tinsel sauntering through a damaged room, full of surveyors, clad in nothing but lingerie falls safely within this Trope. Most telling is that the guards present seem used to this.
 * In the first Sam & Max comic, our heroes are spared from ritual sacrifice when the dagger-holder spontaneously combusts. Instead of lampshading the unlikeliness of such rescue and bringing plausibility crashing down, the duo comments on adjusting one's wardrobe to prepare for such occasions. Light cottons are preferred.
 * Then there's their actions in the recent games. Sure, any crime-fighting duo can take out the mafia. But saving the day by usurping the presidency, starting a civil war, and abusing "The Button" takes style.
 * Plus, they did take out the mafia-free playland and casino by pretending to be hypnotized and dead respectively.
 * The Joker. In almost every incarnation he is capable of getting away with things because no one can anticipate his actions, even Batman. In The Dark Knight he has such a conviction in himself and is so apathetic about everything that he can get away with and remain intensely frightening.

"Came the day that T.C. fucked the chicken."
 * In one of his most insane plans, Joker poisons Gotham harbor with a specialized toxin that only affects fish. Since all the fish are now smiling, he tries to copyright them and make a fortune. When a bureaucrat tells him he can't copyright a natural resource, he goes on T.V. and announces he's going to kill the guy at midnight, which he does despite police protection and Batman. . Then he just forgets about the copyright stuff and starts killing bureaucrats.
 * As a general rule, most Bat-fans would agree that if the Joker's on the screen/page and you're not laughing, something is being done horribly wrong. This applies no matter what the Joker is doing, with the sole possible exceptions of paralyzing Barbara Gordon and killing Jason Todd.
 * Spider Jerusalem lives by this. Hopped up on God-know what drugs, brutalizing anyone who stands up against him, handing out blasts of a bowel disruptor like they were candy, all in the pursuit of The Truth.
 * Notfunny Cartoons lives and breathes this one. Examples include a guy testing a plane engine whenever he can't sleep, a killer robot teacher (no, not "reprogrammed"), an Ax Crazy guy living in somebody's wall, a man losing his track of thought and accidentally puppeting and turning into a butterfly when trying to fetch cigarettes... they not only take refuge in audacity, they crank it up to incredible extremes. Oh, and naturally, nobody gives the going-ons more than a curious glance. It really has to be seen to be believed (although they're pretty slow with translating from the original German, sadly).
 * Tommy Monaghan from Hitman tells his first girl, Wendy, that he kills (bad) people for money. Wendy doesn't believe him until he shows up, shot. Ironically, his next girl doesn't believe Tommy refuses to say 'bitch' -because- he kills (bad) people.
 * Lobo is built around this trope.
 * Rose Wilson, the Ravager from Teen Titans. She's so Crazy Awesome that she can get away with leaving in the middle of a funeral reception to skinny-dip, and shoot Supergirl and Wondergirl with a rocket launcher when they're in the middle of hugging. And that's without mentioning her seemingly skin-tight chain mail armor which in Real Life would be completely impractical...
 * A Batman comic has Bruce Wayne sequestered to sit on the jury of a man he arrested as Batman trying to kidnap a baby. The prosecuting counsel asks whether there is any reason why he should not sit on this jury. Bruce calmly admits he's prejudiced in the case because he's Batman (hey, he's under oath). After everyone's stopped laughing, the judge tells him to stop screwing around and take things seriously.
 * In Kyle Baker’s You Are Here the main villain manage to serve only a year for murdering his wife due to "A good lawyer, bad evidence, worse cops and prison overpopulation" and then goes on to publish a book called "Yes I Did It and I'll Kill Again." After attending a press junket he says "I plan to kill the bastard who was screwing my wife" on air.
 * In "Axiom of Implausibility", a story from an issue of the magazine Heavy Metal, a firm is contracted to kill a witness who's holed up in the middle of suburbia. The first 3 attempts on his life fail after the hitmen, attempting to be inconspicuous and avoid witnesses, keep getting their covers blown by observant neighbors. So on the 4th try, they send in a Stripperific, Dual-Wielding, bizarre One-Liner-spouting Action Girl to kick down the front door and make a total spectacle. The hit succeeds, and the eyewitness reports are so outlandish that the cops don't believe them.
 * Most characters in Preacher (Comic Book).


 * Two words: Battle Pope
 * Calvin and Hobbes dabbled in this. One Sunday strip depicted a scene from a story Calvin had written, in which an ordinary office worker is shot and killed by rifle-toting deer.
 * Another of the Sunday strips featured aliens taking the entire water supply for no discernible reason, and telling the Earthlings "We're just doing our job". (Hobbes admits that, if anything, Calvin's story wasn't outrageous enough.)
 * And then there's this.
 * The Transformers manga series Kiss Players, in which the Autobots need to be kissed by young women to power up. If you haven't heard of it... well, let's just say it starts out sorta Ecchi and then becomes really Ecchi, with the nominally adult female characters drawn to look standard loli age if not younger. White viscous fluids and other completely unsubtle sexual imagery are thrown at the reader machine-gun style, in a way that's so over the top that it stops being Fetish Fuel. They don't make Brain Bleach strong enough to erase this. The creator has actually said that he'd wanted to make people's jaws drop. He's doing a splendid job of it so far.
 * An actual description, complete with a panel from the comic, can be found here.
 * Alexey Lipatov's comic Stalin vs. Hitler, which features Stalin and Hitler battling each other......with magic and superpowers. The fact that there's historical basis for some of the scenes and dialogue makes this even better.
 * Scud, The Disposable Assassin: Scud, a robot assassin purchased from a vending machine for 50 cents, ends up teaming up with space mafia to fight zombie dinosaurs raised by Voodoo Ben. When you get bitten by a zombie velociraptor, you  It's all explained as 'well, dinosaurs have tiny brains, so they're really hard to re-kill'. This is one of the more reasonable issues.
 * One major antagonist is a hulking monster with arms for legs (with a pair of mouths in its elbow-knees), mousetraps for hands, an electrical plug for a head, and a squid tied around its waist. Who speaks entirely in movie quotes.
 * Pick a Garth Ennis book. Any Garth Ennis book.
 * Did Mark Millar write it? If so, it has about a 90-95% chance of using this trope, and about the same percentage of those instances use this trope as the core concept. Doubly so if it gets a movie adaptation (Ya like some bending bullets? How about an 11-year superassassin?).
 * Speaking of Wanted, there is a back story in which the supposed first supervillains of the world were a bunch of completely ass-naked bank thieves who managed to get away with it for the longest time since the cops don't want to get into shoot-outs with a gang of naked men and superheroes don't want to be seen getting into a brawl with a bunch of big, burly men with their peckers hanging out in the open.
 * In Justice League International, Maxwell Lord introduces himself to the League by acting like he's already working for them, i.e. giving Dr. Light a League communicator and turning up at headquarters to introduce Booster Gold as their newest member.
 * Erik Larsen took topical Refuge in Audacity to new heights in Savage Dragon # 177, when Dragon's teenaged children fought Radioactive Giant Zombie Osama Bin Laden!! Oh, and did we mention that the radiation came from post-tsunami nuclear leaks in Japan? And that Zombie Osama was lured into his final death by a Whitney Houston song?