Minor Threats is a comic book miniseries by Patton Oswalt, Jordan Blum, and Scott Hepburn. It is published by Dark Horse Comics.
Recently paroled from prison, former supervillain Frankie Follis, AKA Playtime, just wants to keep her head down, hold down her menial job at a villain bar, and regain custody of her daughter Maggie. Unfortunately for her, the psychotic Stickman has just murdered Kid Dusk, the teenage sidekick to Twilight City's main hero Insomniac, and now Insomniac is out for blood and his peers in the Continuum are prepared to turn Twilight City into a police state in order to find the Stickman, and they don't care if any of the other villains get hurt or killed along the way. Realizing that the "good guys" are never going to leave her alone, Frankie decides to become Playtime again, and bands together with some of Twilight's other villains to track down Stickman and kill him.
Followed by:
- The Alternates: A companion series set in the same universe and taking place sometime after the events of Minor Threats, it follows the adventures of a group of dysfunctional would-be superheroes as they try to investigate the death of one of their friends.
- Minor Threats: The Fastest Way Down: A sequel series with Frankie dealing with fallout from the series.
- Barfly: A series about half-human/half-fly background character.
Minor Threats contains examples of:
- Abusive Parents: Playtime's mom was an egotistical Stage Mom who forced her into supervillainy at a young age. Brain Tease's dad was a severe alcoholic who gave him beatings for only getting third place in a contest.
- Alcoholic Parent: Brain Tease's dad was an alcoholic. When Brain Tease was twelve, he figured out that his dad had only about six years before his liver finally gave out.
- And This Is for...: In the final issue, Snake Stomper invokes the name of his dead boyfriend as he lunges at Insomniac.
- Awesomeness by Analysis: In the second issue, Brain Tease is able to figure out where to find Stickman just by studying a crude diagram of his prison cell and factoring in the fact that he has a fractured left femur.
- Bad Guy Bar: In Twilight City, the big-time supervillains hang out at the Trophy Room Club, run by an intergalactic game hunter. Lesser villains hang out at the Lower Level, a dive bar where Frankie works as a bartender.
- Bittersweet Ending: Against all odds, Frankie and her allies manage to kill both Insomniac and Stickman, and make a deal to cover up Insomniac's crimes in exchange for the Continuum leaving Redport forever and clearing Frankie's name, allowing her to reunite with her daughter. On the other hand, Snake Stomper is dead, Pigeon Pete is exiled from Redport, and Brain Teaser is made a scapegoat for the death of Insomniac, although he's actually happy with this as it gives him the cred that he's long craved. Also, Redport is now an even worse hive, ruled over by Playtime and Scalpel and it's revealed that Frankie's daughter has inherited her talents.
- Chekhov's Gun: An actual gun for once. In the first issue, Toy Queen grumbles about how the Insomniac stole her beloved boxing-glove gun years earlier and stashed it in his trophy case. In the final issue, Frankie finds the gun and uses it to blast Insomniac's head off. She then returns it to her mother.
- The Cowl: The Insomniac is the local Batman equivalent, with Kid Dusk as his Robin.
- Depraved Bisexual: As Frankie looks for housing, one prospective landlady suggests that she'd be willing to look the other way on Frankie's criminal history in exchange for Frankie having a threesome with her and her boyfriend.
- The Dreaded: Stickman is so terrifying to the older supervillains that Toy Queen nearly retired after one meeting with him.
- Eldritch Abomination: According to one map shown in the series, Redport's MacDouglas Station is infested by a hibernating elder god.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Most of the older supervillains, like Toy Queen and Pigeon Pete, had a moral code against killing or maiming people, preferring to stick to relatively harmless crimes like robbery, but the Stickman and his peers have no such qualms.
- Expy: This series has several:
- Facial Horror: Stickman had all of the flesh removed from his head and neck, turning his face into a sort of horrible flesh mask.
- Freudian Excuse:
- The various prison shrinks Frankie saw have all theorized that the reason all her gadgets look like toys is because she's trying to make up for the childhood she lost out on when her mother forced her to become her sidekick.
- Scalpel's obsession with wealth and opulence stems from growing up with a poor single father who was constantly broke, despite being a doctor, because he let his patients pay him on a barter system. Her willingness to work with almost anybody stems from watching her dad get killed after he refused to let a low-grade villain use his clinic as a front for drugs, even when the villain agreed to pay him well for it.
- Imagine Spot: Frankie deals with her many frustrations by imagining herself violently killing all the people who piss her off.
- Mirroring Factions: Though he looks down on the protagonists as losers, has-beens and failures, it's heavily implied that Stickman carried out his entire plan because he was beginning to be regarded as a joke by the wider community as well.
- The Mole: Pigeon Pete ratted out his friends to Stickman because Stickman promised to help him raise his profile.
- Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Scalpel is a doctor who caters to supervillains, mobsters, and other criminals. Her services are in so much demand that she's recently opened a third clinic.
- Ms. Red Ink: Scalpel lost her license after her obsession with the finer things caused her to spend more than she made, which in turn led her to take illegal jobs.
- Never Had Toys: Frankie "Playtime" Follis grew up as the daughter and reluctant sidekick to the toy-themed supervillain named Toy Queen, but the only toys she got to play with were disguised weapons. According to her, the prison shrinks believe that the reason all her inventions look like toys is because she is subconsciously trying to make up for her lost childhood.
- Practically Joker: The Stickman is a perpetually-grinning sociopath who has just murdered the sidekick to Twilight City's main superhero.
- Psychological Projection: This turns out to be the major flaw in Brain Tease's analysis of Stickman; he assumes that Stickman's ego is as big as his, and thus he would go to the Trophy Room Nightclub to gloat about killing Kid Dusk. In reality, Stickman goes there and dumps Kid Dusk's body there before running away, leaving an entire club full of supervillains against an enraged vigilante.
- Refuge in Audacity: Scalpel started her supervillain career by stabbing another low-level villain in the carotid artery and then offering to save his life in exchange for telling all the other supervillains that she was now offering them off-book medical service for a price.
- Self-Made Orphan: In a flashback, it's implied that Brain Tease killed his abusive father.
- Sherlock Scan: This is Brain Tease's main power; by concentrating on something long enough, he can intuit nearly everything about it. In the second issue, he figures out where Stickman will strike next by putting himself in a crude replica of Stickman's prison cell in order to imagine Stickman's state of mind.
- Small Name, Big Ego: Brain Tease is convinced that he is the Insomniac's main nemesis just because he was one of the first members of his rogues gallery, even though Stickman has long since overshadowed him.
- Stage Mom: Frankie's mom was the Toy Queen, a Silver Age supervillainess who used toy-themed weaponry. When Frankie developed powers, she was forced to become Toy Queen's sidekick, Playtime.
- Straight Gay: In the first issue, the hulking Snake Stalker brings another villain to the Lower Lair, hoping that the Scalpel will save him. Issue 2 reveals that the other villain was his boyfriend.
- Thou Shalt Not Kill: Insomniac (a clear expy of Batman) has completely thrown out this rule in his grief of the murder of Kid Dusk, the Continuum in turn coming down so hard on low-level villains out of worry that Insomniac will kill one of them and destroy their heroic reputations. By the final issue Insomniac rages that Stickman's death was "stolen" from him, dismisses his killing of Snake Stalker's boyfriend and prepares to murder Playtime and the rest while ranting about his own descent from what he was, showing that his sympathetic grief has transformed into a rather psychopathic version of It's All About Me.
- Wretched Hive: Twilight's Redport district, where Frankie and her associates all live, is a miserable slum that includes an area called the Stomp, so named because it's littered with the remains of a kaiju that one of the Continuum members killed and couldn't be bothered to clean up. Most of the city's supervillains live there because it's cheap and because the Insomniac and Kid Dusk are the only superheroes who bother to patrol there.
Minor Threats: The Fastest Way Down contains examples of:
- Atop a Mountain of Corpses: On the cover
◊ of the first issue, Playtime sits on a throne on top a mountain of costumed corpses with her right hand and girlfriend Scalpel sitting besides her also on the pile. - Gang of Hats: The Holiday Squad are a team of Supervillains who dress as Holiday icons.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: The Christmas themed Supervillain St. Nick refuses to work for Playtime and Scalpel because they're "females playing dress up" and refers to Playtime as a "Femanazi".
- Twofer Token Minority: The first issue reveals that Frankie and Scalpel are in a relationship, making Frankie a queer black woman and Scalpel a queer Latina.
