Paper-Thin Disguise/Web Comics
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(Antimony approaches door, wearing a headband with attached antennae.) |
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Examples of Paper-Thin Disguise in Web Comics include:
- Mocked in Cinema Bums in this comic related to Robert Downey Jr.'s many disguises in Sherlock Holmes.
- Parodied in El Goonish Shive, in which several aliens and magical beings successfully disguise themselves with shirts and hats reading things such as "Homo Sapiens" or "Ordinary Student". This filler comic serves as an example.
- George the Dragon is infamous for using and abusing this particular trope, usually to the disgrace of any human beings present.
- This is an example where the dragon 'sneaks' into a top secret meeting of the Dragon Hunters Anonymous.
- Also parodied in Eight Bit Theater where the bad guys sneak into a castle by hiding behind a banner with "Doin' fine" on it.
- And at another point, they trick the Light Warriors by donning pirate hats. Which fools even the Magnificent Bastard Thief. Black Mage is the only one who isn't fooled, and nearly has an aneurysm trying to get his teammates to see the trap right in front of their faces. The worst part? One of the Dark Warriors, Bikke, is a pirate TO BEGIN WITH, and doesn't look different AT ALL. AND EVERYONE IS STILL FOOLED.
- Subverted at yet another point, where Black Mage kills an evil cultist and slices off his face to use as a mask. Upon greeting the other cultists they immediately realize that he killed their friend and is using his face as a mask, and lecture him on what a poor disguise it is.
- Parodied in The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, where the doctor tries to achieve this using only a name tag. No one's fooled—the mask, you know—but they play along. In fact, every single time he tries to disguise himself, he leaves his mask on. Apparently Contractual Genre Blindness is not just for villains these days.
- Gordito also attempts this in the Sky Pirates chapter, with some success.
- Parodied yet again in I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space where the paper-thin disguise is a pair of glasses.
- Brawl in the Family subverts this.
- Subverted in Narbonic, where a group of intelligent hamsters operate a fake body with a paper plate with a face drawn on—poorly—for their disguise. They can't even get their pronouns right. Nobody is fooled, but tend to take in stride the fact that they're talking to a bunch of hamsters.
- Another subversion in The Law of Purple: the human characters disguise themselves with facepaint to pass as Caligulians, but not only is this not convincing, none of the natives seem to care whether the humans are disguised or not. They ditch the facepaint relatively quickly.
- This Freefall strip has literally a paper disguise. Granted, earlier havoc started by Sam had everyone's attention focused elsewhere. May be a Shout-Out to Okami, since Amaterasu and Florence are both wolves. See the Video Games section, above.
- Qwerty and Dvorak should have worn dark glasses.
- With their robots even this would be too sneaky. This one believed when robots that disassembled him, basically, told him they're handless models. It gets better when Edge turns off his transponder, other robots don't even recognize him as a robot. Conversely, recognize as a robot anything with a proper transponder.
- Robots are programmed to identify each other by transponder signal—which makes sense as they can move their "brains" around. It also makes a perfect disguise, to the point that they can have a masquerade this way. And see "ghosts". They are not stupid or gullible, they just don't have the necessary shape recognition algorithms.
- "There's an SD-40-2 locomotive engine sleeping in my cubicle".
- In Gunnerkrigg Court, Antimony dons a pair of plastic antennae and declares herself a robot, repeatedly. Doorbot falls for it; all the other robots simply assume she's a robot because she got past Doorbot.
- There is also some Lampshade Hanging on that page when another character (and Trickster at that) comments, "Your powers of deception and trickery are bewildering, child." And this comment is footnoted with "I don't think he's being sarcastic."
- Demonstrated in the Three Panel Soul strip "On Subterfuge."
- In the storyline where Roomies! started getting really strange, a group of aliens escape the notice of the general populace by putting funny shapes on their heads and claiming to be The Teletubbies.
- In some early Sluggy Freelance strips, Aylee went out in public wearing a hat and trenchcoat to disguise her alien appearance, which surprisingly worked. In her latest form, she goes through much more effort to create her disguise.
- Bun-Bun and Kiki have also operated robot versions of Torg and Riff on occasion, which people can't seem to tell apart from the real things despite their obviously blocky appearance.
- Sasha dresses up as the supervillainess Monicruel in this strip. It works perfectly because, as Crushestro put it, "Boobs and a monocle. Who else could it be?" ([1] they are unable to discern the real one while seeing them together).
- In the same story arc, Torg dresses up as a villain who everyone at the Nasty Party saw slain. The villain's power was time, so he got away with explaining that he was the same villain traveling from a different time.
- More of Torg's miniony disguises involve a logo hat and sunglasses (at night.) This doesn't keep a former interrogator from recognizing him, though.
- A sign reading "Lamp - Not Eastwood."
- Later on, they managed to fool the guards of an ice world military base by disguising themselves as pizza delivery men (only for one of them to purposefully blow their cover due to refusing to use a plan used by Scooby and Shaggy)
- Building 12: After The Reveal in the first chapter that Alex is a girl, she's generally drawn in a way that, while still fairly flat, she's not likely to be mistaken for a guy. Somehow, The Masquerade remains unbroken.
- Try to find the ninja. Last Days of Foxhound
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Grey Fox: I am thoroughly ashamed that that worked. |
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- Molly from The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob has pink fur, a large beak, and a peppermint-stripe tail ... yet she can pass in public just by wearing a suit and fake moustache.
- And in this strip, Molly exemplifies this trope!
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Tall Canadian Scientist: Pourquoi le bag, Mademoiselle? |
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- In Everyday Heroes, two aliens stranded on Earth disguise themselves ... by wearing glasses.
- Later, it's revealed that they're using an "Adams field", a Shout-Out to the Somebody Else's Problem field used in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books.
- Batman decided to crash a 'Welcome Back' party for Hal. He really didn't try hard. Batman and Sons.
- Slightly Damned pulls this off twice with Buwaro - first he wears a pimp suit which doesn't really cover his horns or fur (people seem too busy proclaiming his friends as hookers to notice), then he explicitly wears no disguise and everyone assumes it's a perfect costume of a Demon.
- Subverted in "Super Temps" as most people see right through the disguises, and just go along with it anyway because the supers themselves are loopy and rather sensitive. Bonus points for the fact that many of the supers themselves not only buy into each others' paper-thin disguises but also think that the civilian populace's paper-thin facade of being fooled is real.
- Played straight in Zorphbert and Fred, as none of the humans notice the intelligent behaviour, human mannerisms and bloody obvious antennae on the title characters, who are aliens disguised as pet dogs to study Earth.
- In Impure Blood, Dara reflects on this trope while considering making a hulking HalfHumanHybrid look inconspicuous.
- In one page of "Spiff Spoonerton and the Planet of Hot Green Women" involves Spiff and Miri infiltrating a military base. Miri wears a maid uniform and does nothing to obscure her face. Spiff wears his normal clothing with a piece of paper that reads "Also Maid". Exceptional in that Spiff is literally the only human on the entire planet and both are well known outlaws.
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Miri: I'd be more concerned about how well that went if I wasn't still hung up on why you had a maid uniform in a single-person space craft on an exploratory mission." |
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- Lampshaded in Skin Horse here.
- Dangerously Chloe has Chloe's friend Pandora who infiltrated Heaven by disguising herself as an angel. Repeatedly. Succubi are shapeshifters, so hiding her own horns, wings and tail is not a problem, but then, she got halo supported by a visible wire and acts over the top. Then again, it's entirely on their level - angels themselves tend toward over-acting, and the first we met was using a Conspicuous Trenchcoat. Pandora walks around undetected despite blatantly messing with their heads (not even to cause mayhem as such, apparently she just can't resist).