Half sprawling fantasy adventure, half doorslamming farce, Hitmen For Destiny
is a webcomic by Øyvind Thorsby. The setting is a city in Norway in 2009. Fusk and Vorte are assassins working for a mysterious organisation called Destiny. Their job is to covertly ensure that various prophecies come true. Their current job is to protect a woman called Anette Iversland, who has stumbled upon a magical sword that gives her unnatural strength, a lust for killing, and psychic dreams showing strange and fantastical monsters that she must kill.
And so begins a series of wild adventures involving portal monsters, miniature worlds, shapeshifting, Demonic Possession, Bizarre Alien Biology, and lots and lots of Zany Schemes.
It was originally hosted on Webcomics Nation, and later on Comic Fury after the former site shut down.
Tropes:
- Anyone Can Die: Lampshaded when Maythorn shouts "YOU CANNOT DIE!" as an important character dies.
- Bait-and-Switch: In the first strip, a hideous-looking alien and a knight step out of a portal, while one of the hitmen mentions that "the monster will breathe fire on the hero, badly hurting him". Cue the KNIGHT breathing fire on the ALIEN.
- Berserk Button: Lostclock hates the belief in ghosts, and will often spend hours telling you why.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: So, so much - and almost always explained in exquisite detail by Lostclock.
- Book Ends: The first and last strips take place with two hitmen for destiny watching over an alley, both have a rift that open with a good and bad guy going through, and both have a significant prophesy trying to come true.
- Brick Joke:
- The dwarves are delusional; one believes that there are birds hiding in the ground to spy on people having sex. 150 strips later, we find out these birds were real.
- Lostclock assures Bianca that her tentacle will fall off in a week or two. They meet her after a three year time skip on her end, the tentacle having grown to monstrous proportions, and she quotes his words back at him sarcastically.
- Closet Shuffle: Jymre hides in a closet onboard the cruise ship.
- Combat Clairvoyance: The feeyoufee sees by reading the minds of others. If the targets close their eyes, the monster has trouble finding them. Self-imposed blindness worked well until the creature grabbed a gull from outside.
- Convection, Schmonvection: Jumping over lava pools, anyone?
- Demonic Possession: Dagon's "servants" can possess people for failing to perform a ritual correctly.
- "Eureka!" Moment: "Well, they didn't have any ears."
- Eye Spy: One of Vorte's powers is to send out one of his eyes to spy remotely for him.
- Fat and Skinny: Fusk (tall and skinny) and Vorte (short and stout).
- "Fawlty Towers" Plot: The comic has this in spades, mostly from Fusk, Vorte, and Jymre. There are examples where the web of lies doesn't "come crashing down" but is [awkwardly] stabilised. In particular, the end of the Passion, Lies, and Fungus arc.
- From Bad to Worse: Any given story arc is one long string of the characters trying to keep up with frantic mashing of the 'make it worse' button.
- Go for the Eye: Attempted, but punching it with a fist wasn't good enough.
- Hollywood Evolution: Averted. Thorsby really understands evolution, and the evolutionary histories of his monsters are really well thought out. But they're still hilarious.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Third Prophecy episodes are named "In which...", Fourth Prophecy episodes are named "The ____ of _____", Fifth Prophecy episodes are named "____ and ____", Sixth Prophecy episodes are named "[Adjective] [Noun]", and Seventh Prophecy episodes are just single nouns or "__ hours/minutes".
- Improbable Taxonomy Skills: Professor Lostclock is able to name and describe the evolutionary history of more or less every animal in the multiverse.
- Improvised Golems: Play-Doh and life is an experiment with the first imrpovised golem, which rips itself apart as it moves because its a weak material - plus it can't hear instructions from the creator. She later creates a fully function golem from random scrap, which wasn't durable but was at least able to repel the monster with a few swings.
- Incompatible Orientation: Jymre tries seducing Anette while shapeshifted into human men before she reveals that she's a lesbian.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: Bianca — or rather, she wants to stay normal in the face of everyone around her doing crazy prophecy stuff.
- I Know What You Fear: Subverted with Caspar Gropius - he can see peoples' worst fears and manifest them into reality, but he's extremely lazy with this power, and if the fear in question is even slightly abstract or difficult he just summons a Giant Spider instead because "everyone is scared of them".
- Invisibility: An invisibility spell whimsically backfires. Twice
- Junkie Prophet: The seventh prophecy was obtained by licking toads.
- Karma Houdini:
- Fusk and Vorte royally screw up at their jobs, then lie to their superiors and kill lots of innocent people to cover it up. In the ending, they successfully escape into another universe where they can evade the authorities.
- While Jyrme does get some punishment early on in the series, he gets off practically scot free for almost succeeding in becoming the ruler of the world, being able to return to his homeworld and make amends with his wife.
- Literal Cliffhanger: When the castle turned invisible, a character caught a ledge and couldn't pull himself up. He sees how much danger he's in when the castle re-appears.
- Lovecraftian Superpower: Vorte can release "deadly headspikes" from his head and let one of his eyes roam free on bat wings; Kubrick can suck enemies into his glowing navel, which utterly destroys them; the Servant of Dagon can sprout tentacles from the body of whoever it's currently possessing (which remain, fully controllable, after it leaves).
- Mexican Standoff: Between Fusk and Bianca. The twist is that one of the guns has blanks, but neither of them know which. What follows is a lot of Gunpoint Banter as each tries to out-game-theory the other.
- Most Definitely Not a Villain: Jymre is probably the worst shapeshifter of all time. He doesn't bother to try to act like the people he's impersonating, and when questioned, he panics severely.
- No Immortal Inertia: The magic granted to the three sisters only operate in their own house. They use magic to keep themselves alive, but as soon as the walls for last sister's house gets knocked down, her skin and tissue dissolve to leave only a skeleton.
- "Not Wearing Pants" Dream: "Dreaming of bread" has Anette fully clothed. Rather, the passport she uses to buy bread shows her naked.
- Once More, with Clarity: In "14 Minutes", we see a a montage of various scenes we'd already seen, but now with the knowledge that the Triceratops at the restaurant, Inatario's girlfriend, and Lostclock's ghost were all actually Jymre, the shapeshifter.
- Perfect Disguise, Terrible Acting: Jymre is probably the worst shapeshifter of all time. He doesn't bother to try to act like the people he's impersonating and, when questioned, he panics severely.
- Portal Cut: One invincible foe is defeated in this manner. His upper body is kept around, but doesn't decay.
- Portal Network: The living portals are creatures with portals in their bodies that connect to another creature's portal.
- Required Secondary Powers: Averted - when you're invisible, you're also blind.
- Ring of Power: Brynhild's ring of invulnerability.
- Running Gag: Caspar Gropius has the ability to make manifest anyone's worst fear once per person, but always ends up summoning a giant spider instead.
- Screw Destiny: When an evil character learns of their death through destiny, they often try to subvert it, using any trick necessary. However, the first "successful" attempt resulted in three baddies getting killed, culminating in a clear sky lightning bolt, which then caused a prophecy to become broken (and thus cascades to failures later.)
- Shout-Out: Whenever Fusk and Vorte are in the restaurant, there's usually a few characters from other comics or cartoons at the adjacent tables.
- Shapeshifter Default Form: Jymre's default form is a weird looking alien.
- Shapeshifting Seducer: Jymre attempts to seduce Anette by shapeshifting into human forms. As he figures what type she's not attracted to, he makes an excuse to leave, pretends to get killed offscreen, then shows up in a new form.
- Sliding Scale of Free Will vs. Fate: People mentioned in prophecies sometimes try and fight fate. Sometimes it works, but most of the time, it doesn't. The first successful attempt caused the bad guy to get killed by lightning when there was a clear sky, but it broke prophesy with the other person not needing to leave his home for the quest. It was later discovered that a missed prophesy will cascades into future prophetic failures. The result is Because Destiny Says So slowly shifts to Screw Destiny.
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Spiritual Successor: The Accidental Space Spy by the same author. - Taken for Granite: Trantoros, which can turn themselves into rocks for extended periods of time, but can't move during that period. A few strips later, they're used as projectiles and as a perpetual motion machine.
- Torture First, Ask Questions Later: The troll is told to torture the two prisoners until they talk. Said troll doesn't speak English.
- Wham Line:
- "Drop her."
- "The shapechanger doesn't have green blood. Inatario did."
- "Drop her.
- When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Anette solves all monster-related problems by applying copious amounts of sword.
- Year Inside, Hour Outside: The miniature worlds have controls to configure their speed. One had a time lapse of millions of years to try to exploit evolution for a Lord of the Rings world clone, and another was skipped ahead a few millenia in order to see what happens to the magic woman who declared herself a god (which broke down into a civil war that eventually constructed robots that kill humanoids outside their faction.)
- Zany Scheme: Fusk, Vorte and Jymre screw things up so often that they need to pull these once or twice a storyline. Used to triumphant effect in "Passion, lies and fungus".
