Heist
Heist, a web comic by Brendan McGinley, is the story of the world's greatest (and thus least known) super-criminal. Geist (real name unknown) is a hedonistic yet professional Phantom Thief whose only confidant is Jin, a sapient magic ring with the power to make him a living ghost: Invisible. Intangible. Unstoppable.
And bored out of his mind.
Fortunately, he’s hired for the most challenging crime ever: to break into the Space Station headquarters of the most powerful Super Team on his earth and steal an omnipotence-granting artifact known as The Halo. Hilarity Ensues.
#1 "Homeland Insecurity" can be found in a more bandwidth-friendly format here.
Tropes used in Heist include:
- Big Brother Is Watching - Patriot and Pax Americana were about to implement this in the first three pages of #1 with a device called the Omnoculus. Geist stole it of course.
- The Cape/Captain Patriotic - Patriot looks the part ... right until he opens his mouth and reveals his true colors.
- Chekhov's Gun - the hard light technology in #1.
- Daddy's Little Villain - Badoura to Lord Hish.
- Dynamic Entry - and how!
- Evil Overlord - Lord Hish.
- Evil Sorcerer - Kahin Al’Maghrebi
- Expy - quite a few. Hish in particular seems to be a close Doctor Doom cognate.
- Hard Light
- Human Cannonball - used for a particularly sublime Dynamic Entry. A Hard Light projector in orbit around Mercury is involved.
- Intangible Man
- Invisibility
- Jerkass - most of the characters including the protagonist despite his superficial playboy charm.
- Laser Hallway - his very first appearance in costume. Subverted in that he doesn't need the usual fancy gymnastics and just waltzes through intangible, invisible and untouchable.
- Logical Weakness - his combination of intangibility and invisibility would be a Game Breaker if it weren't for the two-minute time limit ... which exists not because he's forced to recoalesce but because that's how long he has before it becomes permanent.
- Phantom Thief - Geist is so good at his job that the only people who know he exists are his previous clients.
- Ring of Power - the secret of Geist's success is a sentient magic ring that lets him go invisible and intangible.
- Smug Supers - Pax Americana are somewhere between this and Beware the Superman. While the rest of the team is closer to the former, Patriot is one bad day away from the latter.
- Space Station
- Stock Super Powers
- Super Team - Pax Americana
- Talking Weapon - Jin is not a weapon but it's the source of his powers and it talks to him.
- Villain Protagonist