The Fowl

The Private Files of the Fowl is a web and print comic by Dan Schkade, available online at crankyoctopus.com.

"Parris City is a collage of shadow, steel, and electric light, rumbling El tracks and steaming chimneys, humming wires and towers that glow and glint like flint in what little moonlight gets past the clouds. It is bitter cold and white hot and endlessly alive with culture and art and crime. Winding streets stacked with dive bars and dance clubs, pawnshops and fine restaurants, department stores and whorehousesâ€¦ Itâ€™s a stage, miles wide and miles deep, where its eight hundred thousand players enact a hundred million stores of sin and salvation (for you cannot have the latter without the former), or else just of blood. Saints, sinners, and simple schmoes, trying to get ahead.

Haunting this Jerusalem of vice, the Fowl! Masked, cloaked, and packing heat, this sneering mockingbird hacks away at the city's criminal elite, as well as its more literal monsters. Wanted by cops and crooks alike, he is secretly aided in his crimefighting pursuits by Det. Lt. Madeline Cross, a deductive genius and the black sheep of the PCPD, who shares his snarky humor (and his goals). Behind the kevlar and leather, the Fowl is one Stephen Demoge -- former spy, current businessman, closet schizophrenic -- a secret known only to his live-in therapist, Dr. Polly Poole, who keeps him medicated enough to keep from getting himself killed.

Though the Fowl has no problem sending his enemies down the river Styx, some of them just won't stay dead, such as the wicked voodoo priest Doctor Erasmus Fell, or the scheming ninja killer known as the Tengu."

Parris City Tropes:

 * Big Damn Heroes: The Fowl does this on several occasions.
 * Chest Insignia
 * The Commissioner Gordon: Madeline Cross -- also her partner, Hector Janston.
 * Cultured Badass: Stephen/the Fowl.
 * Deadpan Snarker: Polly.
 * Dead Person Conversation: (Sort of) Stephen hallucinates his dead jerk father.
 * Film Noir
 * Inspector Javert: Commissoner Gall.
 * Lady of War: The Mime
 * The Mafia
 * Nun-Too-Holy: Sister Mary Vendetta.
 * Secret Keeper: Polly -- and Cross to a degree.
 * Secret Identity: Slightly subverted, since several people seem to know it.
 * The Summation: Nearly every story indulges in this.
 * Utility Belt
 * Verbal Tic: Over time The Fowl has developed several of these using different ones depending on his current emotion
 * Wretched Hive: Parris City is ritzy and skuzzy in equal measure.