"The morality of my activities escapes me."
— Doctor Manhattan, Watchmen
Blue-and-Orange Morality in Comic Books.
- Anarky: The titular character meets Darkseid, DC's resident God of Evil, and questions him to try to understand evil. He comes to the conclusion that Darkseid is fundamentally incapable of doing good, and is therefore not technically evil because evil requires making a choice which Darkseid literally can't.
- Batman:
- While The Joker prides himself on being a
Chaotic Evil Card-Carrying Villain, he does have a loose moral code entirely based around whether he thinks something is funny or not as the entire reason for him being evil is that he thinks mankind as a whole is even worse than he is. Mass murder? A good punchline to a twisted joke. Mass infanticide? A bit overkill. Pranking Commissioner Gordon by making it seem like he raped his daughter after crippling her? Hilarious. Actually raping Batgirl? Out of the question. In a crossover with The Mask, Joker puts on the titular mask and becomes much more destructive due to Loss of Inhibitions, but Batman manages to stop him by simply pointing out that his crimes weren't what he considers "funny". - Poison Ivy apparently considers killing plants to be just as bad as murder but thinks actually murdering humans is okay. Good luck figuring that one out.
- While The Joker prides himself on being a
- Deadpool: Most of the time, Deadpool wants to do the right thing... the problem is, he's nuts. He doesn't always have the best judgment on what's right and wrong.
- Doctor Strange: One early appearance of Doctor Strange's extradimensional enemy Dormammu portrayed him this way, with Doc realizing Dormammu did have a bizarre and alien sense of honor which Doc could use to his advantage once he understood it.
- Enigma: The titular entity plainly doesn't understand why certain things are arbitrarily "right" or "wrong".
- The Eternals: Eternals (2006) invokes this. It is set after the Super Registration Act is passed, and Iron Man is trying to get the Eternals to register, eventually saying that "you must choose a side." Zuras replies "Imagine that you find two kids fighting over who gets a plastic ball. Would you choose a side?"
- Fantastic Four: Galactus was originally intended to be one of these. More recent interpretations have put him more into Above Good and Evil territory, with varying reasons for his planet devouring ways.
- Frank: The eponymous Frank from Jim Woodring's comics, and pretty much all the characters in the Unifactor. Their morality ranges from simple selfishness to extreme sadism, but without any reference to whether it's good or bad. There is some internal consistency for each character's morality, but not between the characters. The lack of words adds to their separation from moral norms.
- Green Lantern:
- Atrocitus' moral code is very simple — killing and destroying whoever or whatever has made you mad. In Red Daughter of Krypton, Sheko reads his mind and notes that he's a monster by her people's standards, but he's utterly convinced that his actions are righteous and necessary.
- Nekron from Blackest Night was intended to have this according to Geoff Johns, simply doing what he was created to do, which was bringing death to the universe and raising the undead and being beyond understanding. However, his actions during the event such as controlling heroes' bodies as Black Lanterns with their consciousnesses being unable to do anything about it suggests otherwise.
- Harley Quinn: In Harley Quinn (New 52), Harley is a downplayed example. While most of the things she considers immoral aren't that weird, her reactions are often so violent and over the top that it's hard not to find them a bit disturbing. Case in point: in the first issue, she sees a guy neglecting his puppy and gets upset enough to take the puppy under her wing and drag the guy behind her motorcycle until she eventually crashes (due to the cops chasing her) and he dies.
- Miracleman: The Alan Moore rendition of the character counts as more Above Good and Evil. The Neil Gaiman version of the character, in the first Gaiman story, lives this trope.
- The Sandman (1989):
- The Endless show this at times, and at others are utterly human. Plus, each character's personality lends them different ways of dealing with the world. Dream shows this multiple times, such as not punishing a creature which dominates others' dreams to create a 'nest' because it is simply acting in its own nature. Death never (well, almost never) interferes with the natural demises of anything, no matter how much she likes the individual and Destiny knows when catastrophic events will occur, and will only summon the others for a meeting about said catastrophes if his book says he does.
- In general one of the themes of the book is that one is ultimately a slave to their own nature. The Cuckoo who creates a nest and is harming others is not evil, that is how her species lives. Cain actually loves his brother Abel deep down, but cannot simply stop killing him because if he did not kill his brother he would not be Cain. Morpheus creates and employs nightmares, which by definition are dreams that frighten people, and rewards them for doing so (when one nightmare walks out on his job to become a serial killer, Dream is more annoyed he abandoned his post than anything else). Beings of all kinds can change and grow, but in the end you can only change so much before you become an entirely different person.
- Superboy: In Superboy (New 52), Superboy sometimes has trouble understanding moral issues, as he hasn't really had much time to learn about it. He honestly doesn't understand why robbing a bank gets him complaints.
- Supergirl: In Bizarrogirl, the titular Bizarrogirl is not evil. She is... backwards. She rampages through a city and kidnaps a bunch of people because she looks to throw a party, and she shuts her "guests" up when they try to talk. As she fights alongside Supergirl, she learns human morality and the difference between killing and saving people, remembers she killed a man because he was too loud and has a breakdown.
- Supergod: The comic imagines a world where super powered beings essentially live by this trope, because they're so far removed from human values and experience that their resulting morality simply cannot be expressed in human terms. This ends about as well as you'd expect.
- Thirsty Mermaids: The Aunties cause a sudden tsunami that would have destroyed the human town in order to bring back Eez, seeing the rest of her pod (and the rest of the collateral damage) as inconsequential. Though it's implied that they knew it would all work out in the end.
- Usagi Yojimbo: Jei is a self-described "servant of the Gods" who considers it his task to cleanse the world of "evil". However, how he determines who is "evil" or "innocent" seems completely arbitrary to anyone with anything resembling conventional morality.
- Later in the series, it seems that Jei considers anyone who knows what "evil" is to be evil, meaning that the only ones who are safe are either childlike innocents or complete psychopaths.
- Watchmen: Doctor Manhattan is above it all. When Ozymandias is asked about Dr Manhattan's political allegiances, he replies, "Which do you prefer, red ants or black ants?" When the reporter admits he has no preference on such a trivial matter, Ozymandias says that Jon has the same opinion about the factions of the Cold War.
- X-Men: Cyttorak, another extradimensional magical god, empowers both the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak, one of Strange's Signature Moves, and the Juggernaut, one of the X-Men's most powerful enemies. Therefore, he provides power to one of the greatest forces for good, and one of the greatest forces for evil, on Earth. Why? Why not?
