Characters who are treated poorly by the majority in Comic Books.
- The Batman villain Oswald Cobblepot (a.k.a. "the Penguin") was born into a wealthy family. However, he was also short, fat, and had a beak-like nose, which made him a prime target for the fellow society types of Gotham and his own family besides his mother. After putting up with years of constant abuse and scorn, he decided to get his revenge by turning his mind to crime. His status as this is even referenced by the man himself in his Start of Darkness miniseries, Pain and Prejudice.
- Berrybrook Middle School: Jaime is a somewhat introverted nerd who doesn't have a whole lot of friends. Unlike most examples, a lot of the kids see him as a good person nonetheless, especially after he and Peppi become friends. On the other hand, Jensen is this trope in full, being treated like an outcast and a nuisance most of the time, though it primarily stems from his own social anxiety. Thankfully both Jaime and Jensen overcame their states as outcasts by the end of their stories.
- In The Courageous Princess, when Mabelrose attends her first ball, the other princesses are uniformly nasty and insulting towards her, making fun of her less flashy clothing, smaller fairy-tale kingdom, and supposed lack of refinement.
- Deliberately invoked by Darkseid during Legends as his evil plan. He sends several of his minions down to Earth to create anti-superhero sentiment in the hopes that the public will start to hate and turn on the heroes and thus take care of the heroes for him. This is very effective until one of the minions slaps a kid, snapping everybody out of it.
- Empowered has to deal with this from the Super Homies, but most of them are like that anyways. Fortunately, there seems to be a slow shift in this from some of the nicer ones.
- Evil Ernie (super-powered menace, published by Chaos! Comics and Devil's Due Publishing) started as an abused child who developed telepathic powers and discovered that everyone on his street knew his parents were abusing him but did nothing. So he snapped and murdered the entire street. In the asylum, he saw the hypocrisy and deceitful natures of the people who wanted to "help" him, and when their experiments gave him evil powers, he decided to kill as much of the human race as he could.
- This is part of the origin of the supervillain Mole Man from Fantastic Four, He became bitter because people used to tease him about his ugly appearance. So bitter, in fact, that he left civilization itself to get away from the taunting.
- Horndog: Not any of the characters in the book, but the comic itself, which is called "the most hated comic on the planet"... by its publisher, no less (and its creator, too).
- This trope hits The Incredible Hulk pretty frequently. Even if he saves entire cities, people will still hate and fear him, which pisses the Hulk off, which makes him go on a rampage, which makes people hate him even more, and then he'll perform another act of heroics, repeat ad infinitium. Even his fellow supers in The Avengers were uneasy about him, causing Hulk to quit in the second issue and become an enemy for a while after that.
- Mark Waid's comic Irredeemable explores this. Superman Substitute the Plutonian goes from being the world's greatest hero to being its most dangerous villain because during the ten minutes he spent up in space where he couldn't hear everyone begging for help and complaining about him behind his back a horrible disaster occurred because he entrusted a scientist with a piece of alien technology. Part of it is just that he snapped because he couldn't handle the failure, but part of it is that people were constantly ragging on him.
- It is, however, played with regarding exactly how much people ragged on him; he was still considered the world's most beloved hero, and although this incident certainly dented people's regard for him, it's implied that one of the reasons he snapped was because he was consumed by a desire to have everyone love him and couldn't tolerate any criticism whatsoever.
- Supreme Power features a Superman Substitute named Hyperion, who has never had any friends and whose school life was extremely lonely due mainly to never having a normal or healthy family environment.
- Watson in Kid Sherlock faces isolation and bullying from the other kids at Baker Elementary because he's a dog. The only exception is Sherlock Holmes.
- Marvels played with this — the comics tell the history of the Marvel Universe, from the first appearance of the Golden Age Human Torch up to the death of Gwen Stacy — from the perspective of an average man, photographer Phil Sheldon. First, we see him and the rest of the public fearing and hating superhumans like Namor or the Human Torch, and we saw how their attitudes change with appearance of Captain America. By the Silver Age, Sheldon admires superheroes, but like everybody else, he hates mutants until he realizes they are the same. Later, he's disgusted when the general public starts to constantly bash superheroes for everything.
- Misfit City: The main characters are not well liked by their peers.
- Averted in The Secret Service, the other student seems to like Gary well enough but are worried he's not good enough to become an agent. It is however, implied that the students we see are the nice ones so this may be happening to some degree.
- Sleepwalker put an interesting twist on this when the eponymous hero is often attacked by the very people he just helped because of his bizarre appearance. Sleepwalker got so fed up with their harassment that at one point he admitted he'd have stopped altogether, except that a few humans actually showed some appreciation. Even that didn't stop him from eventually becoming addicted to a special form of artificial light that essentially turned him into the alien equivalent of an alcoholic or a junkie.
- Spider-Man: Peter Parker in all of his incarnations.
- "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility" is his mantra. For a while, it seemed like the only job available for someone with Super-Strength and degrees in physics, biology, and chemistry is to sell pictures of himself as Spider-Man to an abusive idiot. He's moved into other fields for a time — one of the most brilliant recent ideas? High school science teacher — but tends to return to status quo. In a broader sense, other superheroes in the Marvel Universe tend to experience the same kind of thing from time to time, but Spider-Man's career is practically defined by it.
- A classmate of his named Charlie Weiderman was bullied even worse. Even Peter took advantage of Charlie once to score some points with the in-crowd before guilt led him to make friends with his Charlie. Unfortunately, Charlie went too far in his attempts to "get even", pulling a knife on his tormentors once (the coach stopped him, thank goodness, and some quick thinking by Peter kept Charlie from being expelled) and later slashed the tires of the same bullies. As an adult, Charlie still sought vindication, and after an ill-conceived experiment using vibranium blew up in his face, he truly snapped, murdering two former classmates and gunning after the Parkers, burning down Aunt May's house before being stopped.
- His enemy Doctor Octopus was such a victim too; Ock may have had a much better and more illustrious career, not that different from Peter, had his parents been the kind and compassionate guardians Ben and May were. Sadly, he had an abusive father and an overprotective mother, and turned into someone even Peter can rarely sympathize with.
- J. Jonah Jameson's anti-Spider-Man behavior is given an explanation in Marvels — and other works — as being motivated out of both jealousy and a widespread inferiority complex; when you have super-powered champions of humanity running around being selfless and heroic because they both can and choose to be out a genuine sense of heroism and nobility, it makes it a lot harder for ordinary people who can't and don't to measure up.
- Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures: In "One of a Kind", it's shown that the Zeltron bounty hunter Vianna D'Pow experienced extensive and malicious discrimination in her youth due to being the only albino member of her normally vividly red-skinned species.
- Stray Bullets: The seeds of Virginia and Leon's future friendship are first planted by their mutual outcast status: Virginia is considered a freak due to her violent and antisocial behavior, while Leon is picked on for being black.
- In the Luna Brothers Ultra the main heroine Ultra after a tabloid rakes through the coals. has the public turn on her, even after saving the city from a major disaster. Later at the Super Hero Awards ceremony she is ignored and booed. Until a man steps up and calls them on it. And the crowd changes it's tune.
- Wonder Woman:
- Wonder Woman (2011): As part of their Adaptational Villainy most of the other Amazons in the New 52 thought Diana was an abomination because of her unnatural birth, and would mockingly refer to her as "Clay."
- Wonder Woman: Warbringer: While Diana isn't considered a true outcast, the nature of her birth makes a lot of the other Amazons concerned about just what she is going to cost the Amazons as a whole, since the goddesses don't give things for free. The Amazons "live" in a Warrior Heaven specifically for women who died in battle protecting others, and Diana herself feels she has not earned her right to walk among them since she was "born" of clay on the island. She gets called Phyxis as a reference to her unnatural origin.
- X-Men: Despite the purpose for their existence being to show that mutantkind is not so different, they spend far, far too much time taking it on the chin from normals (and other Marvel Universe superheroes) for their mission to ever be given a serious shot at success. The tagline for the comic used to be "Hated and Feared by a World They've Sworn to Protect!"
- Ultimate X Men is even worse. A huge crowd smashes Iceman's face with a bottle and begins attacking him the whole of three seconds after he saved their collective asses. This was toned down a bit once the book changed authors.
- Various heroes have gone through periods of public hatred — even Captain America — and on the whole, Marvel is trying to be more even-handed these days...
- Until X-Men (2019), several writers' attempts to kill or portray anti-mutant hysteria in a realistic manner were either ignored (the X-Men being lauded as heroes after their "death" in Uncanny #226) or thrown out (the gains made by X-Statix and the outed Prof. X somehow wiped out by M-Day. You'd think having 99% fewer mutants would ease the paranoia, but then, with people like Reverend Stryker saying "It's a sign from God! Now's our chance!"...).
- The best villainous example is Magneto. Though with him being Jewish and born in Germany in the 1930s, this trope was the least of his problems.
- X-Statix was an intentional inversion of this trope as it's commonly applied to mutants in Marvel Comics: The public loves X-Statix, a team made up of walking personality disorders like stuck up nerd Vivisector, the clinically confrontational and elitist Spike, and arrogant genius the Anarchist. Because, really, if you were a hot teenager with cool superpowers, people would adore you. Vivisector goes on TV to discuss the importance of fiction within fiction with Umberto Eco, Zeitgeist regularly has sex with supermodels, and U-Go Girl spun a semi-successful acting career out of her membership. The Anarchist even brings this up at one point — after starting what is essentially a traveling freakshow with himself and Dead Girl as the main attractions, he says it's different from how it looks. The people who come to see him aren't gawking at his misfortune but clamoring to catch a glimpse of his majesty.
