An Arm And A Leg / Comic Books

Amputations in Comic Books.

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• All Fall Down: the speedster, Pronto, loses both legs in the first chapter.
• Aquaman: In Aquaman (1994), Aquaman loses his right hand when Charybdis commands a school of piranha to strip it to the bone.
• Art Ops: Reginald has his harm torn off by some wall graffiti in an alley. He gets it replaced with an arm made of living paint, but now he has to regularly spray himself to keep the paint from taking him over.
• Black Moon Chronicles: During the final battle with Haazheel Thorn, he rips off Hellaynnea's arms when she tries to stop him from killing Wismerhill.
• Calico (2020): During his Cold-Blooded Torture of a family who hunted and killed a lioness, Calico chops the father's arms off.
• Captain America: John Walker, a former US Agent, loses an arm and a leg to Nuke and his energy axe. Although he knows Tony Stark and could easily get a replacement, he refuses on the grounds that he doesn't want to become like the cyborg who did this to him. Mind you, it's shown that he can kick more than enough ass on his own. He later gets new biologically-created limbs to replace the ones he lost.
• The Crow: Eric slices off both of a mobster's legs, leaving him to die from blood loss.
• Deep Gravity: Warner, a shuttle pilot, is attacked by a venomous native lifeform on Poseidon's surface, and the doctors have to amputate his legs. (It's not a case of Amputation Stops Spread, though — they stop the spread by other means, the toxin having already done its damage.) However, Warner points out that he doesn't need legs to fly his shuttle, and ends up rescuing the rest of the surviving cast that way.
• Dolltopia: Soccer Scotty loses an arm and gets half his face damaged in an attack soon after leaving his life like Kitty did. When he gets to Dolltopia, the doctor is quick to fix him.
• ElfQuest: The warrior troll king Guttlekraw likes to punish disobedient elf slaves "one finger, then one limb at a time". Case in point: Ekuar, who lost half a leg, one arm, and one finger of the remaining hand that way. He was the luckiest.
• G.I. Zombie: In his debut issue alone, Jared Kabe gets his hand cut off by his partner to convince the Western Terrorist group they're investigating to let he in. Thanks to his Healing Factor, he's able to reattach it later on.
  • Jared later rips the arm off a guy who was getting ready to beat his wife.
• Green Lantern:
  • During the Sinestro Corps War, Risk attempts to take revenge against (then-renamed) Superman-Prime for having done this to him earlier (see below), only to have his left arm ripped off as well.
  • Green Lantern Sath Varn loses both of his legs during the Blackest Night, but his sector partner Isamot Kol has his own legs amputated to donate them to Varn, as Kol's own physiology lets him regrow the limbs in question.
  • Ganthet's tenure as self-appointed Green Lantern of Sector 0 ended when his ring-bearing hand was destroyed during the War of the Green Lanterns arc, though he later has it restored when Saint Walker heals him using the blue light of hope.
• Hitman (1993): Hacken has his compatriots cut off his hand after he's bitten by a zombie penguin. They later revealed that he was never in danger.
• Infinite Crisis: Risk of the Teen Titans has his right arm ripped off by Superboy-Prime.
• JSA Classified: Delores Winter's meta-human organ theft group cut off Grogamesh's arms. Later, Delores loses one of her own arms when she tries to use the power she's stolen from Icemaiden to attack Mid-Nite and freezes her own limb off.
• Judge Dredd: Judge Logan has the misfortune of repeatedly losing limbs. After being wounded during the Fargo rescue, he gets an Artificial Limb in place of his left arm before switching it for a specially regrown one. Then he loses that one to Mortis's rotting touch.
• Justice League of America:
  • In the "Age of Obsidian" arc from JLA (1997), The Flash has both his legs torn off by Tezumak. His legs are later restored by magic.
  • In Justice League: Cry for Justice, Roy Harper gets his arm chopped off by Prometheus. This, combined with his daughter's death, drives him over the Despair Event Horizon and he becomes a more brutal Anti-Hero.
• Legends: The villain Sunspot uses his power blast to get out of the ankle cuff that Guy Gardner holds him upside-down by, but in the process, he accidentally blasts off his right foot. Guy tends to Sunspot's injury, but threatens to cut off the villain's left hand if he uses his power blast again.
• Legion of Super-Heroes: The actual superpower of gag character Arm-Fall-Off Boy is to remove his arm from his body. Needless to say, his Legion application was not accepted.
• Madman: One of Madman's earlier adventures involves him rescuing an alien who landed among a Lamanite tribe two thousand years earlier. The Lamanites thought he communicated with the gods, and thus cut off his legs and one of his arms to prevent him from leaving.
• Magic Trixie: In the first book, Stitch's hand falls off his arm while he's waving to Trixie.
• Mega Man (Archie Comics):
  • When Shadow Man goes on the attack to prove his loyalty to Ra Moon, Crash Man loses his Crash Bomber cannons and pisses himself, in addition to screaming in pain.
    Crash Man: (screams in pain) My non-hands!
  • Magnet Man is defeated this way due to his powers disorienting his sense of direction during his fight with the Blue Bomber, who severs his right arm with a Shadow Blade.
  • Spark Man, just like Crash Man, loses his arms, which leads to his defeat.
    Spark Man: No! My arms!
• The Mice Templar: Leito has his arm chopped off by Captain Tosk. Later, Leito gets his revenge on Tosk by slicing off both of his arms.
• The Order (2007): James Wa lost both of his legs to a drunk driver, ending his baseball career. However, he went on to create a brand of high-tech prosthetic legs and made a fortune.
• The Pitiful Human Lizard: The titular Human-Lizard loses an arm in a fight against a huge monster. However, by then he's already gained his Healing Factor, so all he has to do is put the arm back where it was on his body, and let his power do the rest.
• Rebel Dead Revenge: As in real life, Stonewall Jackson's arm is amputated before he succumbs to his friendly fire wounds. This causes a major snag for Satan: the arm is missing when Stonewall's body is reanimated. If not restored, it could result in a power drain and alert the devil's enemies to his schemes.
• Red Sonja: A late arc in Gail Simone's run has Sonja destroys both her hands by charring them in a fire to prevent herself from wielding a weapon.
• Reyn: The penultimate issue has Reyn himself losing an arm while fighting Brother M'Thall. It isn't until after he loses his arm that it's revealed that Reyn is not human, since he doesn't bleed the way a normal human would.
• Robin (1993): Johnny Warlock lost his hand when Robin tossed a sealing quick-hardening gel on his gun and Johnny fired it even as he was being warned that doing so would have disastrous results for him. He later replaced it with a hook.
• Runaways: Nico Minoru lost her left arm during Avengers Arena, replacing it with the Witch Arm after her resurrection. In Runaways (Rainbow Rowell), however, her arm is back to normal, which is eventually revealed to be the work of "the One."
• Simon Dark:
  • Simon and Tom each rip an arm and hand off of Vincent, respectively. While Vincent runs off screaming, he regrows them by the next time he appears a day later.
  • When Tom was murdered his hand was cut off, and the stitching from reattaching it is the most noticeable scar left over from his revivification.
• Snowman: In the Flashback to The Snowman's backstory, we find out that in life, he got attacked by a bear. His left leg was gouged so deeply it had to be cut off at the knee. It ruined his chances at becoming a warrior for his tribe, and made hunting a lot harder. Despite that, however, he still managed to become one of his tribe's main providers.
• Spider-Man:
  • Peter's old high school rival-turned-buddy Flash Thompson lose both his legs in Iraq.
  • Peter losing a leg is the reason he retires as a superhero in the original Spider-Girl comics.
  • In the Spider-Man Beyond storyline, Morbius' entire left arm is amputated by a blast from the Beyond building's security system.
• Spotlight: Wheelie: The title character loses his arm to a Chaosterous for a time before retrieving it. Reattaching it without proper medical help proves difficult, and the arm remains functionally dead and makes transforming incredibly difficult, not least because whenever Wheelie transforms, said arm just dangles from his undercarriage.
• Star Wars: Kanan: When Grievous ambushes Depa Billaba and her padawan Caleb with a troop of droids, Depa cuts off two of his (already mechanical) arms in their duel.
• Sunny Series: Sunny's (great-)uncle Danny lost one of his arms in a farm accident when he and her Gramps were kids. Gramps uses the story of how Danny had to struggle with his life changes to help Sunny process her angst about Dale's dealing with and overcoming his substance abuse, explaining that it can take a lot of steps and some backsliding on the path.
• Superman:
  • Supporting character Professor Hamilton loses his arm during The Fall of Metropolis when he's shot by a hallucinating prostitute and his arm is too badly damaged to be saved by the time he's rescued.
  • In The Killers of Krypton, Supergirl grabs Harry Hokum's left arm when he attempts to stab her with a knife. Right then Hokum is teleported away, but his left hand is sliced up and left behind by the teleporting portal.
• The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: Dismemberment happens all the time, though the limbs themselves can usually be replaced. The situations all have some significance: Cyclonus severing Rung's arm is Played for Laughs; Drift cutting off Pharma's hands leads to the latter's Disney Villain Death, with Ratchet later taking them up; Black Shadow rips off Hyperion's arm while simultaneously blasting away another Wrecker to show how powerful he is; and Empurata cuts of the victim's hands and head and replaces them with claws and a Cyber Cyclops head.
• The Ultimates 3 sees Valkyrie lob off Pyro's hands in retaliation for his role in his and Mastermind's Attempted Rape of her.
• Über:
  • Colossus gets both of his arms torn off by Sieglinde prior to his Cruel and Unusual Death.
  • Siegmund loses an arm after being briefly overwhelmed by 90 Soviet tankmen.
  • A particularly awful version happens to Leah during the battle of Calais. Her leg is left dangling from a few strands of tendon, and can't be properly amputated due to her Super-Toughness. It later gets restored by Maria.
  • Razor/Colossus II loses an arm saving a defecting Siegmund from a nuclear bomb.
• Violine: An early villain, Muller, falls to his apparent death in a crocodile-infested moat. After losing both arms in fighting them off, he takes a level in badass, obtains clawed arms, and becomes the series' bigger bad.
• The Walking Dead: The Governor takes Rick's arm as punishment for refusing to fight in his gladiatorial arena.
• Weapon Hex: The first time Laura fights Hellhound outside of training, it ends with Hellhound cutting off Laura's left arm, right hand, and both legs. Laura gets better.
• West Coast Avengers: This is integral to the backstory of Master Pandemonium. Originally a spoiled, rich actor named Martin Preston, a car crash one night after drinking heavily severed one of his arms. Dying and yelling for help, the demon Mephisto appeared and offered him a deal, which he accepted. Mephisto summoned four demons; one of them wrenched its own arm off and used it to replace the lost limb, whereas the other three repeated the trick with Preston's good limbs. Since then, as Master Pandemonium, the four demons are his servants while in Mephisto's employ, and he can detach any (or all) of his limbs, which causes them to turn into the demons who donated them.
• Wolverine: In issue #1 of Wolverines, Daken has one of his arms ripped off by Sinister, who takes it along with Wolverine's corpse for research purposes. Ordinarily this wouldn't be an issue for him, but in the last issue of The Logan Legacy, his Healing Factor was stripped from him by Siphon, leaving him in danger of bleeding out.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Wonder Woman (1987): During The Contest Diana meets one of the Bana, who is struggling with a rudimentary crutch and lost a leg helping defend the island while Circe had it trapped in a hellish dimension. It is used to help highlight the disparity in equality between the two tribes of Amazons even though the Bana sacrificed more in the defenses during their fight to survive.
  • Wonder Woman: Black and Gold: In "I'm Ageless", an American G.I. that Diana was conversing with ends up losing his arm in a surprise attack from a German Panzer. She ends up keeping in contact with him for the rest of his life and visiting his grave for decades long after his death.
• X-Men:
  • The backstory for Age of Apocalypse sees Wolverine's counterpart Weapon X lose his left hand in battle against that reality's Cyclops. However, he didn't lose the claws in his arm, as Cyclops later discovers to his dismay.
  • In Uncanny X-Men (2011), Emma Frost loses an arm against Mr. Sinister. Being in diamond form, she doesn't die from blood loss or anything, and she gets better.
  • In X-Men: Second Coming, multiple people end up losing limbs.
    • Archangel slices off Stryker's arm (specifically, his right arm, which he'd covered with Nimrod's), before slicing him in half.
    • Karma loses a leg to Cameron Hodge.
    • Bastion loses an arm due to Nightcrawler teleporting away with it. He soon grows a new one.
    • Hellion loses both his arms at the elbow to the Nimrods.
• X-Statix:
  • The Coach of the original team had a large left arm as part of his mutant powers. He lost it sometime after Edie Sawyer joined the team.
  • Ocean of O-Force loses both her legs to the zombies summoned by Arnie Lundbeg. After he realizes what a little shit he's been, he uses his powers to restore her legs.
  • El Guapo loses both of his legs on a mission.
• Youngblood (2017): Shaft lose an arm.

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