Mugging the Monster/Comic Books

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Mugging the Monster in Comic Books include:

  • The Marvel Comics version of Godzilla had this happen when the big G was temporarily shrunk by Hank Pym's Applied Phlebotinum. The Tagalong Kid had "disguised" the lizard in trenchcoat and hat, then lost Godzilla in New York City. Godzilla wanders down the wrong back alley, and Hilarity Ensues.
  • In Ultimate Marvel, a bunch of thugs tried to mug Captain America and the Wasp (not in costume, of course) on their way back from a date. The next panel simply panned up and showed a scream.
  • In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, a couple of unfortunate criminals try to mug the Corinthian. Oh shit. Whoops. It would be a great establishing scene for what his character is like, if his very first scene had not been so... memorable. (It helps that they mistook his sexual interest in young men as a good reason to target him, when it's really a very good reason to avoid him.)
  • In Watchmen, while Dr. Manhattan is giving the interview, Laurie and Daniel fight off a group of muggers. Not a word of dialogue is written for this event, and instead it is overlaid with the aforementioned interview. It's a subtle bit of foreshadowing and character development, that illustrates what makes Watchmen great.
  • It happened to Superman... he'd gone into a dark alley and a guy jumped on him ("Hmmph! What are you, a bodybuilder or something?"). Guy gets thrown into the sacks of garbage, tries shooting at the shadowy figure, and then nearly pees his pants when the bullets bounce off the big red "S" and a big Kryptonian fist starts hurtling towards his face. Fortunately for him the fist was catching a ricochet.
  • In an early issue of Hellblazer, a bunch of punks racist skinheads get ready to beat up a hunched over bald guy in a trenchcoat, thinking he was a homosexual. He turned out to be the demon Nergal, the first real Big Bad of the series. It didn't end well for them.
  • In a similar vein, one issue of Ghost Rider features a bunch of bikers harassing a piggish-looking good ol' boy while he is cruising down the open road. Said good ol' boy is a demonic bounty hunter from Hell named Hoss. He promptly lights the bikers' heads on fire and forces their leader to crash and break his neck. When the leader agrees to serve Hoss in exchange for his life, Hoss takes the liberty of "altering" his body to suit his new position in life.

Hoss: Oh, and by the by, your new name's Butt-view.

    • Similarly, when local police put the Scarecrow and Madcap in the drunk tank with a bunch of rowdy relatives in town for a wedding with the intention of scaring them straight... there were no survivors.
  • In Marvel's Avengers, two thugs once tried to mug someone walking in Central Park (I think it was)[please verify] at night. Said "someone", wearing a trenchcoat and hat, was the Vision.
  • Incredible Hulk: Naturally, this has happened to Bruce Banner a few times. In one instance the Grey Hulk was nearly mugged, which is odd considering he's taller than most people and almost as wide.
    • The moment where Bruce Banner is nearly raped by two men in the shower of the YMCA takes the cake. It's an aversion, though, as when Banner threatens to turn into the Hulk, they doubt him but decide not to risk it.
    • She-Hulk had a similar experience, although it was an unruly protester rather than a mugger. After the Stamford disaster an angry mob of anti-superhero agitators had formed outside of the courthouse where Jennifer Walters was defending two surviving members of the New Warriors in court. One guy recognized Jennifer and grabbed her, shouting "I've got She-Hulk!" Cue Jennifer turning green and growing eight feet tall. "Okay, you've got She-Hulk. Now what?"
  • In Secret Six, Deadshot and Catman are discussing the potential Heel Face Turn that Catman underwent in Africa when they enter a convenience store that is in the process of being robbed. They completely ignore the brandished weapons and pick up some cigarettes and ice-cream and even go to pay for their items, all the while being screamed at by the skinheads who are doing the robbing. After a little while, Deadshot takes a break from the conversation to easily disarm the skinhead behind him and then berates him for his amateurishness. As he explains, it is fine if the skinhead does not respect him, but he will damn well respect the gun. Deadshot gives the thug a few pointers (start the robbery by placing the gun against the victims head in order to give him a primal fear reaction, but then speak slowly and calmly in order to keep anybody from panicking and reacting, etc.) and then shoves his head through a glass case, taking out one of his eyes, as punishment. Of course, Deadshot then finishes the robbery, taking the cash from the register, to punish the store for "lax security precautions." After Catman and Deadshot leave they resume their previous conversation, but Deadshot immediately points out that Catman, despite what he may think, has not become a good guy. When Catman asks why, Deadshot points out that he just left several defenseless witnesses in the same room as a group of bloody and angry thugs who will be looking for vengeance and to cover their tracks after their humiliating fiasco of a robbery. Catman pauses for a moment, sighs, and walks back into the store.
    • See also Too Dumb to Live: The thugs (The Zyklon-B Boys) deliberately attack Deadshot a few weeks later when one of them sees him walking into a restaurant. He follows Deadshot, looking for revenge, and is viciously beaten again, only surviving because Deadshot had made a promise not to kill anybody that night (he was on a date). Instead of taking the hint, he waits for the rest of the gang to gather and attacks one more time; this time he and the other skinheads are not so lucky, and Deadshot's date kills them all, explaining that she did not make any promises that night.
  • In Garth Ennis's Welcome Back Frank, the world's unluckiest thug tries to mug The Punisher. Frank kills him.
  • In a recent issue of Detective Comics focusing on the origins of Kate Kane, the Post-Crisis Batwoman, Kate is on the phone to her girlfriend outside a bar when a thug with a pipe tries to take her for an easy mark. Unfortunately for the thug, he does not know that Kate was recently a student at West Point, where she was first in her class, and that she is in an extremely foul mood. Kate promptly beats the crap out of him, pointing out that he thought she was just a victim, but that she is a soldier. She is only prevented from really messing the guy up by the timely intervention of Batman, who had presumably intended to sweep in to save the socialite from the thug, only to find himself doing the opposite instead. With the fight essentially over, all that Batman can do is extend his hand to Kate before leaving to answer the Bat Signal.
  • Early in the "Grasscutter" story arc of Usagi Yojimbo, Gen finds the remains of a bandit gang who apparently tried to rob Jei. Thank goodness for Bloodless Carnage...
    • It is highly arguable that Bloodless Carnage made the scene any less horrific. What Gen finds are a multitude of corpses strewn like so many broken dolls, their faces frozen in abject terror, their eyes wide and staring out into nothing in horror that is plain and striking even (especially) with Stan Sakai's deceptively simplistic art style. Adding blood to the scene would have arguably detracted from it by, ironically, making it far more cartoonish.
  • A Running Gag in Asterix, with the poor pirates who always end up attacking the ship the Gauls are on.
    • Before the pirates even made an appearance, in Asterix and the Golden Sickle, Asterix and Obelix are traveling toward Lutetia and are attacked a few times by brigands or barbarians. The two Gauls don't even deign making a pause in their conversation and keep walking while they casually slap around the first group of muggers.
  • In one of the Street Fighter comics by UDON, this happens to some thugs and Chun Li.
  • A pervert mistook Supergirl for a prostitute (to be fair, she was completely naked) only to have his hand crushed and be slammed through a wall.
    • A guy groped Mary Marvel, and it took Supergirl to stop her from tearing him limb from limb.
  • Early in the year long Batman No Mans Land storyline, there were a series of interludes starring a character called "The Punk". His M.O. was trying to steal supplies by threatening people with an empty gun. The twist was that all his intended victims knew that no one had any supplies, including bullets. The last of the stories was titled "The Punk and The Stranger;" it features the title idiot attempting to rob a strange, pale man in a purple raincoat who seemed inordinately happy with everything. I think you can guess why this is the last "Punk" story.
    • Immediately after the Gotham earthquake that ultimately precipitated the "No Man's Land" arc, a gang of burglars decided that a citywide power outage that had every cop in the Gotham greater metropolitan area so busy responding to the natural disaster they had no time to do anything else would be the perfect time to break into rich peoples' houses that they'd normally have to avoid because of sophisticated security systems and heightened police response. Which would normally have been an example of good planning, except for the fact that the first house on their list was Wayne Manor. (Amusingly, it wasn't even Batman that cleaned their clocks, but Alfred.)
  • A Wolverine solo adventure had a variation of this. A young woman was on a subway train with no one else around besides a sleeping homeless man with a newspaper over his face. Two muggers approach her and attempt a routine mugging, then the homeless man woke up, and you'll never guess who he turned out to be!
  • Career Killers: Many are the unfortunate (now dead) bikers who thought Lady Shiva would be an easy target.
  • Many examples for Spider-Man:
    • In one issue, Spidey saw several gang-bangers with knives surrounding a short man in a trenchcoat and swung down to the rescue, his thought balloon going "I have to save that guy from being killed by those muggers!" When the man in question popped his adamantium claws, Spidey (in mid-swing) immediately shifted his internal monologue to "I have to save those muggers from being killed by Wolverine!"
    • Similarly, Wolverine and Spiderman were both in a bar, in costume, having an intense argument. Just as they were about to start trading punches instead of words, a group of thugs burst through the door with weapons drawn, noticing the angry superheroes only after they're inside. Cue the thug in the back "Next time, I choose the place we rob."
    • In another memorable issue, Spidey is in the midst of a fight with Morbius the Living Vampire, on the ESU grounds, when a gang of Friends of Humanity mistake Morbius for a mutant and attack him. The insults from them stop when they realize the blows from their bats weren't hurting him at all, and Morbius likely would have killed them if Spidey hadn't stopped him. Of course, this tends to happen to those guys a lot...
    • You'd think a well-dressed businessman with a custom-made Italian suit and a Rolex would be a complete idiot to be alone in Central Park in the middle of the night, and that's exactly what a bunch of punks thought when they saw Thomas Fireheart there in another Spider-Man story. Little did they know, Fireheart was not only the CEO of Fireheart industries, he was the Puma, the mystical protector of his tribe. Still, he didn't even need to turn into the Puma to give them a good thrashing (and he did give them a fair warning first). Even worse, the reason he was there was to meet with Spidey to discuss a crisis, who showed up two minutes after the fight started; the punks had the sense to run for it then.
    • One example that didn't actually involve Spidey: His friend (more or less) Flash Thompson was on a date with Felicia Hardy in the park in one issue when three goons accosted them. At first, Flash didn't want any trouble, and gave them Felicia's purse (leading her - who was actually the Black Cat and dating him in order to get back at Peter for marrying Mary Jane - to think he was a coward for a brief moment). Then, however, one of the thugs tried to get fresh with Felicia, and that crossed the line for Flash; being an amateur boxer at the time, he beat them within an inch of their lives.
    • One unique example was a story where The Punisher was a guest star. After he parked his Battle Van in a rather bad neighborhood, a punk (who said to himself that you'd "have to be nuts" to park a custom van there) tried to rip the wheels off. Of course, its owner and Spidey were inside it, but they didn't even notice him; the van's security system gave him the shock of his life and sent him running, convinced that the van's owner was nuts.
  • On several occasions in One Hundred Bullets, people have tried to mug Lono. He either kills them on the spot or tracks them down later for some graphic on-panel fun.
  • Lucky Luke sometimes defeats random bandits casually. In one case, he travels through a mountain pass, casually disarming indians and bandits while monologueing to his Cool Horse. When he arrives at his destination, he expresses surprise at being told there were bandits in that pass, and can't explain where the arrow in his hat came from. But then again, he is an Invincible Hero...
  • In Volume 2, Issue 1 of Witch Girls Tales, a group of gang members try to mug a group of the eponymous witch girls. Most of the girls respond by using flashy but harmless magic to scare or force them into submission, but Princess Lucinda—the team's Heroic Comedic Sociopath—responds by turning one of them into a bug and another into a frog, with the expected results; to be fair, the one that got turned into a bug was Too Dumb to Live because he actively charged Lucinda after all his other friends save one were summarily dispatched by the girls' magic and he knew just how dangerous they actually were. Then, just to seal the deal, he taunted his friend who had been turned into a frog.
  • The Dutch cartoon Humor in Beroepen: Politie ("Humor in Jobs: Police") cortains a number of "unlucky crook" tales. But the best one is about a crook whom first tries to rob an elderly lady and gets beaten into submission with an umbrella, then tries some car-jacking while the (very large) owner is standing behind him, and finally tries to rob a young lady only to be sent flying with a karate kick. In the last panel he is at the police station complaining that his neighborhood has gotten too dangerous.
  • The setup of Freak Angels is somehwere between this and Bullying a Dragon. The government obviously knows that the children are dangerous. That's why they are going after them, they're concerned they are a national security risk. But no-one, including the Freak Angels themselves, realize just how world-wreckingly dangerous they are.
  • There is a comic where a gang of thugs try to mug a blind man wearing a $300 suit. It was Daredevil.
  • A group of muggers saw a depowered Thor and Enchantress and attacked them. They quickly defeated them while talking about how helpless they are. It should be noted that although Thor technically was depowered, he still was a six-foot-six five-hundred-pound mountain of muscle who had never been sick a day in his life. And he could still use his hammer. Not the kind of guy any sane mugger should mess with in the first place.
  • The Darkness: In an interesting variation, Jackie Estacado's Sidekick Wenders is threatened on two seperate occasions for being openly gay. Wenders himself has no powers, but he is saved each time, first by the surprising ability of Darklings to leap out of his Cell phone and devour the muggers and the second time by everyone in the diner he was in spontaneously catching on fire.
  • Averted in Iron Man Issue 173. A gang mugged Tony who didn't have his armor. If it weren't for the fact that he was drunk, he could have taken them down since he was trained by Captain America (comics).
    • Played straight in a few other instances where people have tried to beat him up, whether because he's just some rich playboy who needs a bodyguard,[1] or because he's helpless without his armor. You'd think they'd learn.
    • This is a general trope for armor-wearing superheroes. People tend to think the armor does all the work. While the current Iron Man armor is lightweight, Tony had to spend years working in heavy armor, and he still performs the equivalent of Olympic gymnastic routines every time he fights a serious villain. Which is at least once a week. A great subversion of Clothes Make the Superman.
  • In an early chapter of Bone, Phoney Bone, lost in the Valley, decides to ask directions from the Great Red Dragon, a powerful being who is also the only thing that strikes fear in the hearts of the sinister rat creatures who are after him. He proceeds to ask for information in the most condescending way possible, insulting the dragon with every syllable, as the dragon gets more and more visibly irritated, with ever greater amounts of smoke rising from his nostrils. Luckily, Ted comes along and steers Phoney away before he's burnt to a cinder.
  • Mortadelo Y Filemon's comic El Bacilón has the title character (a gigantic, anthropomorphic green monster) walk around the seedy parts of the city, and a mugger targets him, but since he is waiting behind a corner, he only hears it walking. He becomes a Running Gag along the episode and eventually turns mad due to both the monster and Mortadelo disguised as a big animal.
  • In Garth Ennis's Preacher (Comic Book), Sheriff Root and his squad of heavily armed men, backed up by a helicopter, threaten the Saint of Killers, an invincible, immortal, merciless killing machine with a pair of revolvers that never run dry, never miss, and always kill. Needless to say, it ends badly for them.
  • A more intellectual variation occurs in an issue of JLA when Lex Luthor, highly successful billionaire business tycoon, launches a plan to cripple the JLA using non-criminal techniques from the business world. Unfortunately for Lex, he's completely ignorant that one of his adversaries is really Bruce Wayne, a highly successful billionaire business tycoon in his own right (and one who does it as a sideline). The art highlights this, showing Batman sitting at the computer with his cowl down, making it quite clear which persona is fighting this battle.
  • Near the end of Alan Moore's run on Miracleman, some kids bully Jonathan Bates at an orphanage until he can't take it anymore and unleashes his murderously psychotic superpowered alter-ego Kid Miracleman.
  • In one issue of Gen 13, as Fairchild is walking along by the street, a group of guys decide to "invite her into their car", and when she turns them down they make it clear that they're not asking. Cue their shock as she drags the car behind her to the police station while they're trying to gun it in reverse.
  • Darkseid got mugged once when he visited Earth in disguise. He didn't really do anything to resist and just analyzed the whole experience, finding it rather interesting to be on the receiving end of this kind of behavior for a change.
  • Another one involving Jack Kirby's Fourth World characters: In a Mister Miracle issue, a mook tries to kidnap Big Barda in order to force Scott Free (Mr. Miracle's alter ego) to sign an insurance policy for his Mob Boss. After his Hot Amazon wife tells him what happened, Scott asks her if the mook is OK. The mook is OK, but very afraid of the possibility of seeing Barda again.
  • In the first issue of Cerebus the Aardvark, someone makes the mistake of grabbing Cerebus's tail. I am not sure it is his last mistake but he was bleeding pretty badly from the stump where Cerebus cut off his hand.
  • In one Silver Surfer story, the hero encounters Spider-Man's enemy the Rhino, who is in the process of "freeing" animals from the Central Park Zoo. He mistakes the Surfer for the typical mid-tier hero (like Spider-Man) and picks a fight, not knowing he's challenging a cosmic-powered being able to literally fly through stars. Fortunately for the Rhino, the Surfer isn't big on grudges.
  1. ↑ If his identity was a secret at the time.
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