Adults Are Useless / Comic Books

• The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius tends to fall into this pattern. When adults aren't outright antagonists, they're either clueless or helpless. Justified in that since Barry is a "boy genius," he's naturally the smartest person in the room all the time.
• In The Beano the adults and teachers never seem to be able to prevent their kids from misbehaving. In older strips they would whack their kids with slippers or a cane but now it seems the kids never seem to get much in the way of a punishment apart from making their parents really angry.
• Berrybrook Middle School: Averted by most of the teachers, with two exceptions. One is Mr. Ramirez, who's first instinct during a crisis is to go get Ms. Tobins to fix it instead. The other is Mrs. Crabbler, who's so old she's only ever seen sleeping in her appearances.
• This trope is typically averted in Calvin and Hobbes, (Calvin just believes they all are) but exception has to be made for the coach of the school baseball team Calvin briefly joined in one arc. Calvin accidentally stays out in the field when the teams switch sides and catches a ball hit by one of his own teammates. The coach calls Calvin a "quitter" when Calvin asks to leave after the other players read him the riot act, despite what had just happened.
• Champions: In Champions (2016), this is the main drive of the comic - tired of the Let's You and Him Fight-driven attitude of the adults thanks to Civil War II, former All-New, All-Different Avengers members Spider-Man, Nova, and Ms. Marvel form a team with other teens in order to show that heroes are better than just slugging each other, destroying things and leaving things alone as they disappear.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: Huey, Dewey and Louie are often shown to be far more competent and smart than their Uncle Donald and to a lesser degree their Uncle Scrooge. The trope is especially in play in stories focusing on the Junior Woodchucks, an international group of hyper-competent junior scouts which Huey, Dewey and Louie are part of.
• Aversion: The adults in Gladstone's School for World Conquerors are typically famous super villains and are quite important to the plot.
• Averted but slightly invoked in I Kill Giants. Barbara sees them and everyone else as stupid and useless, but they're all trying to be as useful as they possibly can. Mrs. Molle actively tries to reach out to Barbara and the teachers address student misbehavior accordingly. Perhaps the only useless thing they've done is somehow not intervening in Taylor's bullying for this long, considering they're intervening with Barbara (though, to their credit, one scene implies that they haven't been told about it, nor have they seen Taylor in the act).
• Justified in Locke & Key - similar to Peter Pan, children are the only ones who can believe in magic. Adults might see it, but they wouldn't quite process it as being abnormal. If fact, once the children hit 18, they forget everything to do with magic, meaning the Locke siblings are more or less on their own when all hell quite literally breaks loose. This is averted in more mundane situations, where adults are shown to be anything but useless. Like in issue 1, when Nina kills a psycho with a hatchet for threatening her son.
• "Monica's Gang": Monica and Jimmy Five are constantly fighting and antagonising one another, and their families are rarely willing to make them stop doing so. It doesn't help that the comics heavily rely in inconsistency due to having multiple people on the writing department.
• My Friend Dahmer presents a tragic Real Life example. No adult during Jeffrey Dahmer's formative years noticed his mounting psychological problems. His parents are too consumed with their marital strife and both eventually abandon him. His teachers are either clueless or indifferent to his binge drinking at school. His classmate-turned-biographer, Derf Backderf, links the lack of attention from adults to Dahmer's obsessive drive to find the perfect victim who would never leave him, resulting in his grisly killing spree.
• This is the overarching theme of New X-Men during its second half. Following M-Day, most of the world's mutants are depowered, and the rest are being hunted and killed. The X-Men are often unable to deal with the problems the kids face, thus leaving them to fend for themselves. This ends up making most of the kids distrust and look down on the X-Men, who have been ineffectual in protecting their charges.
• Nuts: A recurring theme of the comic is that adult rules and motivations are completely incomprehensible to kids, making this more like Adults Are Cthulhu.
• In Peanuts, it was just as well that adults were never fully seen, because the rare situations where the main characters had to interact with them portrayed them as incompetent. In one story arc, Charlie Brown went to talk to his pediatrician to find out why the school board (which the doctor was a member of) had banned a book called The Six Bunny-Wunnies Freak Out from the school library. The doctor fainted. The nurse later told Charlie Brown that little kids made him nervous. (Remember, this was a pediatrician.) Later, Charlie Brown told Linus that the doctor admitted that he only reads medical journals, but the pictures upset him.
  • Another story arc shows that Peppermint Patty's teacher is a Lawful Stupid type. A hole in the ceiling classroom was causing rain to fall on Patty's head. According to Marcie, the teacher couldn't move Patty to another desk, because that would disrupt the alphabetical seating arrangement.
• Relative Heroes: The teen heroes distrust of government officials and other adults who aren't Justice League members in excellent standing gets proven right time and time again. Damara's mother made a deal to force Damara into a marriage to an Olympian, Cameron's bio parents turn out to be villainous extraterrestrials, and the kids are constantly being chased by the D.E.O. which comes after them with serious firepower for being superpowered kids without a legal guardian, and being dismissed by other adults. If adults had been less useless they'd have never run away in the first place.
• Robin (1993): While it's not played straight as Alfred, Harold and Dana are usually competent and useful most adults in the series are either constantly useless or actively a problem. Tim's father has no clue how to be a parent, Ariana's uncle outright attacks Tim over a misunderstanding, Tim's teachers are combative and make no inquiries into his injuries and constant need to sleep in class, Bruce pulls heartless gambits trying to manipulate Tim, Az!Bats goes off the deep end and tries to kill Tim and after Tim's father dies Tim has to forge portions of his father's will in order to avoid becoming a ward of the state.
• In Marvel's Runaways, the teen heroes don't trust any of the adult characters, even Captain America. Civil War only cements their "Adults are tools" mentality.
  • Cloak and Dagger nearly subvert this, by finding out what's really going on in Los Angeles and telling the kids that they'll get in contact with Captain America and send him to take out the Pride. Unfortunately, they are caught and brainwashed by Molly's parents into forgetting everything.
  • Spider-Man's cameo also subverts it, to a degree.
  • Parodied when the Runaways show up at Avengers Academy. Chase goes off on a defensive tirade about how adults are always meddling in the Runaways' business... before sheepishly admitting that he actually needs the Avengers' help in retrieving Old Lace. That arc also finally put an end to the Runaways' abuse of this trope; after a pointless fight breaks out between the Runaways and the Avengers, Nico breaks it up with a spell that magically forces both sides to see each other's viewpoints, and the Runaways realize that their longstanding distrust of adults has left them with some disadvantages. They ultimately decide that adults don't suck as much as they thought.
• In Sex Criminals, middle-school girl Suzie tries to find out what happens when someone has an orgasm. She turns first to a gynecologist and than her mom. Neither are any help.
• The Simpsons: Given a thorough Lampshade Hanging in "Sideshow Blob", where Sideshow Bob turns into a blob monster and starts rampaging around the town. Lisa tells Bart they have to warn everyone, but Bart points out that no-one will believe them. Sure enough, no-one believes them (and everyone they visit gets eaten) right up until they get to Apu... who admits his lack of skepticism has something to do with the fact Bob's wrapping a tentacle around his leg at that very moment.
• Averted in Super Dinosaur where the adults perform important support roles if they aren't directly in the action. The Kingstons repair SD's armor while Dr. Dynamo creates valuable new technology.
• Justified in the second volume of Young Avengers - Mother is a trans-dimensional parasite, who feeds on kids and teenagers with reality warping superpowers and one of her abilities is to hide her existence from adults, so they won't believe their kids telling them about her and won't notice her activities, even as they're happening in front of them. Worse, if you're a parent, the first person a kid targeted by her would come to, she can turn you into her brainwashed minion. And if your parents are dead, she will bring them back as her minions through they cannot get too far away from the place of their death.