Cruel Mercy / Comic Books

Moments of Cruel Mercy in Comic Books.

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• In American Vampire, infamous outlaw-turned-vampire Skinner Sweet attends the book signing of a writer who was there back when Sweet was turned and has since made a fortune from his one novel, a fictionalized account of the outlaw's story. Sweet exits the event, leaving behind a note saying "You are old and I am young for eternity. So I let you live to suffer and die. Why not? What better revenge is there than that?"
• Atar Gull is the son of an African chieftain who is Made a Slave in Jamaica. He begins working his way up the ladder, gaining the trust of his masters, the Wil family (who are considered among the kindest on the island, even by the escaped slaves, for such humane treatments as only applying half the beatings prescribed by the law), and using it to slowly ruin them, poisoning their cattle and slaves (including his own son) and murdering their daughter by putting a snake in her bed. When Wil is completely broken (his wife having committed suicide), Atar refuses his freedom, claiming that he'll stay with the master in France and take care of him, earning nothing but praise and admiration from the locals for his devotion. Once Wil suffers a stroke that leaves him unable to move or talk, Atar drops the mask and gloatingly confesses everything, including his intention to keep Wil alive as long as possible, as revenge for his treatment and Wil having hanged Atar's father. When Wil dies, Atar breaks down entirely.
• Atomic Robo: When Robo confronts Otto Skorzeny long after the war, Skorzeny - who's dying of cancer - tries to bait Robo into killing him. Robo declines.
  Robo: You don't get to die like a soldier. You get to die alone, in a strange bed, in agony.
• Batman:
  • The Caped Crusader has done this a few times, as his no-killing policy can make it a necessity; in one instance, a man inadvertently killed a mutual friend as part of a revenge spree, but destroyed the evidence. Batman forced the killer to stay in the same small town, referring to it as the killer's "prison," and returned once a year to make the guy sit at the gravesite of the friend he rued killing.
  • Similarly, in Kingdom Come, the evil members of the Mankind Liberation Front are ultimately forced into helping care for the survivors of an attack they helped launch; Lex Luthor is especially galled at having to empty bedpans.
  • Bruce Wayne once he tracked down a black ops agent who helped frame him for murder. The man couldn't be tried since there was no evidence he even existed, so Batman put him in Arkham. The spy tells the doctors that he's not crazy; he's a secret agent who framed Bruce Wayne for murder and there's no record of the mission because he was tasked directly to the president. None of the doctors believe him.
  • Bane pulls this on Batman in Knightfall for why he breaks the hero's back rather than killing him after he defeats a worn-out Batman in combat.
    Bane: Death would only end your agony... and silence your shame.
  • Batman also managed to pull this off on The Joker once in "The Devil's Advocate", when the Clown Prince was on Death Row for a crime that he, surprisingly, didn't commit. Batman's investigation found the real culprit, so Joker was spared. But Bats gets one last dig at The Joker.
    Batman: You came close, Joker. Just minutes from death.
    Joker: But I'm still HERE bay-bay!
    Batman: That's right. And when you're sitting here alone... in the middle of the night... unsleeping in the dark. Remember... every breath you take you owe to me. What's the matter? Don't you have any jokes for me?
• In Batman: Damned, Etrigan saves Batman, but tells Constantine that he only did so in order for Batman to experience more suffering.
• Captain America does this inadvertently sometimes. His enemy Flag-Smasher once went into a lengthy Motive Rant about how he couldn't stand knowing Cap was simply a better person.
• The Twilight King in Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things. Though enraged when a mortal murders one of his daughters, rather than take revenge directly, he curses the mortal to fall in true love with the dead girl so that he will mourn her loss as keenly as her family does. Forever.
• Daredevil:
  • In the comics, Bullseye's hatred of Daredevil was actually exacerbated after the hero saved him from an oncoming subway train, which Bullseye considered a humiliation. He gets a nice little speech about it in the issue where he breaks out of jail and kills Elektra.
  • The first arc in Volume 2, "Guardian Devil", focuses on a dying Mysterio wanting to go out on one last swan song, and unsure if Spider-Man is the real deal due to the events of The Clone Saga focuses on Matt instead, trying to drive Matt into a rage so he'll be forced to take his life. Daredevil refuses to give in and instead gives him a brutal "The Reason You Suck" Speech, breaking Mysterio and driving him to shoot himself.
• Subverted in Dark Times. Jennir spares the life of the Fallen Hero Demanna, and the latter presumes it’s this trope; robbing him of his honor and cutting off his hand, but leaving him alive to suffer. A disgusted Jennir says that, no, he really is showing Demanna mercy and giving him a chance to regain his honor. Demanna just can’t understand that because of the same arrogance that led to his defeat in the first place.
• Diabolik usually murders those who have earned his wrath, but sometimes his revenge consists of him making them know he could kill them anytime and leaving after telling them that one day, when he'll be bored enough, he'll come back to kill them, making them live in terror as they wait for him to come back and destroy themselves in the process. Apparently, he never comes back.
  • Done more horrifically to Elisabeth Gay, that he drove to insanity because he knew she considered it a Fate Worse than Death. When she recovered and tried to take her own revenge for that and choosing Eva over her, he let her leave not because of this but he had realized he had gone overboard and couldn't bring himself to hunt her down.
  • Subverted in "Diabolik's Treasure": it seems he's planning to do this to most members of the group that stole his favoured treasures, but in the end his revenge is limited to enjoy their fear as they escape the country as not only this was their own revenge for when Diabolik unwittingly ruined their own lives as part of his capers (and that's something he can respect) but he's actually grateful for them exposing one of his weaknesses and starting a chain of events that destroyed it.
• Thanos displays this, as usual, in Eternals (2021). He’s about to kill Thena’s lover Tolau, but then realises Tolau will soon mutate into a mindless, cannibalistic horror due to “the Change”. He decides it would hurt both Thena and Tolau more to leave him alive.
• The Flash: Rather than killing Inertia for killing Bart Allen, Wally leaves him trapped in an immobile state to stare at a statue of Bart for eternity. Wally has gone on record in support of killing villains under desperate enough circumstances; he intentionally took a much more sadistic approach in this case.
• Ghost Rider actually has this trope as one of his powers. His Penance Stare does no physical damage but forces his opponent to feel every single bit of pain or evil they've inflicted on others. Most recover, but have something to think about for the rest of their lives.
• Green Lantern: Red Lantern Bleez intended to inflict this on one of the men responsible for selling her into slavery. She wanted him to live the rest of his life in fear of her, but her leader Atrocitus killed the man on the spot, saying that her method wasn't how the Red Lanterns worked.
• In Halo: Escalation, Jul 'Mdama captures and spares Sali 'Nyon, rather than give him an honorable death in combat.
• In Kick-Ass, Vic Gigante, the big Dirty Cop of the series, is the only major villain to survive the trilogy, but not before Mindy brutally maims him with a Groin Attack which also cripples him waist-down, intending to let him live and force him to become The Stool Pigeon to his fellow Corrupt Cops. The last time Dave heard of him in the ending is that the whole experience caused him to lose quite a lot of weight when he was brought to court to testify.
• In Legion of Super-Heroes story The Great Darkness Saga, Darkseid fights and defeats the Legion in the Sorcerers' World, but he decides against killing them because he wants them to watch helplessly how he destroys the galaxy.
• Lucky Luke: "The Bounty Hunter" ends with the titular bounty hunter, having brought in a small army to capture a wanted Indian (who wasn't even guilty in the first place), be let off by Luke. Luke then claims the reward for the Indian and puts it on the bounty hunter's head instead to let him experience being hunted down.
• In My Little Pony: Fiendship Is Magic #1, Sombra ultimately chooses not to enslave or harm Radiant Hope in any way as he still had feelings for her after he embraces his inner darkness. Though this ultimately leads to his defeat, Sombra's final act of making the Crystal Empire disappear for 1,000 years is a form of suffering specifically meant for Hope as she is forced to spend the rest of her life as the sole surviving Crystal Pony and isolated from everything she had ever known.
• In New X-Men, Emma Frost, upon catching Kimura trying to assassinate X-23, proceeds to explain to the nigh-invulnerable villain exactly why she acts the way she does by pointing out that she only does what she does to X-23 because of her childhood before erasing her one and only happy memory and then sending her off with the psychically implanted suggestion of hunting down her employers.
• Towards the end of Nikolai Dante, Arkady/Dmitri has both Jena and Nikolai kidnapped and says he'll stop torturing Nikolai to death if Jena marries him.
• In Avengers of the Wastelands set in the world of Old Man Logan, Dr. Doom is dying of cancer and so he sets out to fight the Avengers one last time, hoping they'd kill him quickly (he also framed them for his own atrocities, so he'd make it look like he's a hero fighting a villain team). After the Avengers beat him, Antman gives a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown and is about to kill him, when Dani convinces him to stop. Part of it is to show that the Avengers are better than Doom and the rest is that sparing Doom means that in less than 6 months, he'll die in agony shitting his pants.
• In a flashback in Planetary #7, Jack Carter happens to run into an Invisible man, who explains that he's "this year's Herod", a Punch-Clock Villain sent by the government to kill a pregnant local prostitute just in case she's carrying the second coming. Disgusted, Carter does a seemingly ineffectual spell, remarks "And be thankful that's all I do to you", and walks away. When the Herod goes to continue his mission, he finds he's been trapped on that street corner in an invisible forcefield only a few feet in diameter. For the rest of his life. We're shown his skeleton in the present day, still invisible.
• In the Punisher Franken-Castle arc, Frank spares the life of overzealous monster hunter Robert Hellsgaard. Hellsgaard thanks him for his mercy, which prompts Frank to smirk, "Yeah, right. Mercy," as he leaves him behind, alive but forever trapped in the burning demonplanes of limbo.
• Purgatori: After Lucifer takes away her powers and sends her to Earth to suffer never-ending hunger, Purgatori repays him by leaving Lucifer to fend for himself in the pit of hell after he just lost most of his own power due to Cremator's demon-destroying blade.
• During the events of "Dead End Kids", the Runaways become stuck in New York City in 1907, where they encounter past versions of Gertrude Yorke's parents. When the Yorkes discover that their daughter is dead, they launch a plan to nuke the city to kill the Runaways. It fails, and the Runaways' leader, Nico Minoru, decides to punish them by casting a spell that forces them to go back and live out the rest of their lives knowing that they and Gertrude will all die, and they can't do or say anything to stop it.
  Nico: They'll go back where they came from. And they'll know. What happens to Gert, what happens to them, they'll know every second it's coming. They won't be able to change anything they do. Or say anything. Not even to each other. For all the world, their short, useless lives will play out exactly as they did before. But inside... they'll never stop screaming.
• The Sandman: The first time Morpheus goes to Hell, he escapes by pointing out that "What terrors would Hell hold if those entombed within could not dream of Heaven?" This gets kicked up a notch when Hell is taken over by a pair of angels after Lucifer abandons his position. The two decide that horrible things will still happen, but for the purpose of reform instead of punishment. This makes everything so much worse because it implies a false hope that the torment of the damned might someday end. Keyword being "false." (The damned, for their part, are astonished that the angels achieved this.)
• Marvel's Lifeform storyline, which ended in Silver Surfer Annual #3, had the Surfer transport the titular mutant horror, a bio-engineered Blob Monster that absorbs all organic life it touches into itself, to a dead world previously visited by Galactus. When he prepares to destroy it, the creature's original human self momentarily forces itself to the surface and thanks him for ending his tormented existence as a slave to the virus's hunger to consume. But because the Surfer was recently traumatized by being involved in the apparent death of Thanos, he instead declares that he cannot kill the Lifeform now that he knows it has a human mind, and instead he just abandons it on the dead world, screaming for him to come back and give it the peace of death. And as the Surfer leaves, he wonders which of them is the greater monster because of this.
• In one Spider-Man story in the early 2000s, a particularly ugly fight between Spidey and the Green Goblin (the Goblin had just crippled Flash Thompson) ended with Spidey coming within a hair's breadth of finishing Norman off. Spidey spares him and later tells him that just being a person as horrible as Norman is its own punishment. Norman's reaction implies he sees the truth of this.
  • During The Gauntlet and Grim Hunt, the original Kraven the Hunter is brought Back from the Dead by his ex-wife Sasha, who put Spider-Man and his "spider family" through Hell in the process, killing Madame Web, Mattie Franklin, and Kaine, the last of whom was sacrificed in a Black Magic ritual to bring Kraven back. Having met his end by his own hand, Kraven is not happy to be alive again, especially since he Came Back Wrong because the ritual that resurrected him needed the real Spider-Man, not a clone. During Spidey's subsequent Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Sasha and the Kravinoffs, he nearly kills Kraven with a spear, but Julia Carpenter persuades him not to by showing him visions of a Bad Future that will result should he go through with it; Kraven is not happy, since he wants to die and, according to him, can only die by Spider-Man's hand.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • In one of the Star Wars (Marvel 1977) stories, the Millennium Falcon accidentally breaks through a Negative Space Wedgie to find a Pocket Dimension where a group of former Rebels have isolated themselves from the rest of the Universe. When a group of Imperial Destroyers follows the Falcon, they attack and ultimately destroy this refuge, but doing so eats up all their reserves, leaving them defenseless to the Falcon's guns and unable to cross the border again. The crew of the Falcon decides against destroying the Destroyer, opting to "leave them here, rotting away as a tribute."
  • In Star Wars: Empire, Darth Vader learns that an Imperial Star Destroyer gunner went rogue after they destroyed his homeworld of Alderaan and has been sabotaging his attempts to track down the Rebels. Instead of killing him, Vader tricks him into destroying a colony of Alderaanian survivors that were offworld at the time before sending him to a labor camp.
  • New Republic commander Mirith Sinn is captured and tortured to learn the location of an enemy of the Empire. She holds out until the Big Bad orders an orbital bombardment on her men's secret fallback position. She dejectedly gives him the information he wants...and he orders that the bombardment continue until every last rebel is dead. But he keeps one part of his deal... he lets her go.
• In Sub-Mariner: The Depths, a possible interpretation of the ending is that Namor lets Stein live as an act of justice, punishing him for murdering his crewmates by forcing him to live with the guilt of it for the rest of his life.
• Superman:
  • In Elseworld's Finest: Supergirl & Batgirl, Batgirl explains to Supergirl that she doesn't want Lex Luthor dead because she wants him to suffer. If he's dead she can't make him pay for his crimes which include her parents and Supergirl's cousin's murders.
    Batgirl: Stop. I need him alive.
    Supergirl: But why?
    Batgirl: Because... Because he has to suffer for his crimes!
  • In 'The Death of Luthor', Luthor kills himself accidentally. Since he shot himself with an experimental nuclear Kryptonite ray-gun, Supergirl is capable of finding a method to revive him. Enraged, Luthor claims she revived him so everybody mocks him for being saved by the person whom he intended kill, but she denies it. She saved him because he was sentenced to life, and she wants him to rot in one cell for decades.

    Lex Luthor: "You made me live again, so I'd be a gangland laughing stock!— Before, I was respected! Now the other criminals will laugh at me behind my back because I was saved by you!!"

  • Superman seems to do this to Lex Luthor on an almost daily basis without even trying. Apparently, Lex's ego is so enormous that having a man more powerful than him, who uses his might out of genuine altruism and refuses to work for him, is so incomprehensible that it galls him like nothing else ever could.
  • In Crucible storyline, when Korstus goes ahead with his plan to take over the titular academy he has the chance to kill his main opponent, Lys Amata. However Korstus leaves her alive because he wants Amata to see her dream's destruction.
    Korstus: "Place her in stasis inside the Assembly Chamber. I want her to witness the destruction of all that she's built."
  • The Killers of Krypton: After Supergirl has defeated Splyce, the Omega Men agree to spare the villainess and let her go back to her master because they cannot imagine a fate worse than facing Harry Hokum after having failed him.
  • In The Day the Cheering Stopped, King Kosmos intended to leave Superman alive to see Earth people forgetting him and starting to hate aliens. Since his plan fails, Kosmos decides to simply kill him.
    King Kosmos: "I would only have destroyed morally, Kryptonian... But now I will kill you!"
• Thanos Rising: During his confrontation with his father at the end, Thanos decides to leave him alive just so he can continue to witness his son's atrocities while being unable to stop him.
• In the final arc of War Machine Vol. 2, Rhodey and his friends hatch a complex plan that ultimately results in a group of extremely dangerous White Collar Criminals suffering a collective Fate Worse than Death. When Norman Osborn asks Rhodey why he was spared, Rhodey says that he studied Osborn's psychological profile extensively, and came to the conclusion that leaving him unharmed, but with the knowledge that Rhodey and his friends were too smart for him, would be far worse than any other punishment they could dole out. Osborn laughs this claim off as ridiculous, but as soon as Rhodey leaves, he falls to his knees in anguish, indicating that Rhodey's assertion was 100 percent accurate.
• In the 2010 Wolverine — Mr. X one-shot, the titular villain, having lost once before to the titular hero, trains obsessively for months to prepare himself to counter Wolverine's berserker rage, then lures Wolverine into a fight. But Wolverine refuses to let him trigger his rage and ultimately refuses to fight him at all, realizing that leaving Mr. X forever wondering Who Would Win will cause him more torment than simply defeating him.
  • A particularly nasty example is Wolverine's treatment of Matsu'o Tsurayaba, the Yakuza boss who killed Wolverine's lover Mariko. Every year on the anniversary of her death, Wolverine fought his way past Tsurayaba's defences, took a piece of his body, and left him alive. This was taken to the point of Wolverine actively stopping Tsurayaba from killing himself or anyone else from killing him because Wolvie wanted him to suffer as long as he did. By the time we find out about this, Tsurayaba is missing a hand, an arm, a leg, half his face, and his body is covered with scars and medical implants.
  • Wolverine isn't a stranger to this sort of treatment himself: during Chris Claremont's run, his Arch-Enemy Sabretooth had his "yearly tradition": every year, on the day that Wolverine believed to be his birthday, Sabretooth would track Wolverine down, regardless of where he was or what he was doing, beat him to within an inch of his life... and then walk away, just so that Wolverine knew that Sabretooth could kill him whenever he wished.
  • In a story published in X-Men Unlimited(1st series) #40, 2003, Sabretooth did the same to a man who was hunting him. The hunter was treating Sabretooth like any other beast he hunted, and it was working. Sabretooth turned the tables when he suppressed his instincts and animalistic tendencies and started to act like a human, using his brain to outsmart the hunter. The hunter then thought he would be killed by Sabretooth...which didn’t happen. Sabretooth, instead, took the hunter’s clothes, weapons, and technology, leaving him alone and naked in the woods, telling the guy that all he needed to do to survive was behave as an animal.
  • In Uncanny X-Men #205, the villain Lady Deathstrike begs for a mercy kill after being defeated by Wolverine. Wolverine refuses.
    Lady Deathstrike: Show me mercy, I beg you. Let me free!
    Wolverine (pulls his claws back) Earn it.
• In World War Hulk, the Hulk comes back from Sakaar looking to smash the Illuminati (and anybody stupid enough to try to stop him) for sending him into space and their starship blowing up, killing his wife Caiera (although that was not their fault). When he arrives to the Xavier School, he discovers the aftermath of M-Day^note the revelation that only nearly 300 mutants are left on the planet and the memorial to the many teenage mutants the X-Men buried when were killed by anti-mutant terrorists almost immediately after and decides to leave Charles Xavier alone because killing him right now with all of this suffering piled on him would be a mercy and there is no way he will grant Xavier that.
• In the 1993 X-Men storyline Fatal Attractions (Marvel Comics), Magneto's new Mouth of Sauron Exodus explains to Fabian Cortez that the sole reason why he doesn't "hurl you into oblivion like the insignificant flea you are" is because Magneto himself has decreed that Cortez live for the purposes of this trope, knowing that being stripped of his power and authority over the Acolytes — being reduced to a "victim of someone else's legacy" as Exodus calls it — is a far more painful punishment for the ambitious Cortez than death alone could ever be.
  • In the "Acts of Vengeance" storyline, Magneto captures Red Skull and buries him in an underground tomb. He says he should kill him, but he's not like him. He instead leaves him there, with only air and ten gallons of water.
• This is what Cyclops decides to do to Kaga, the crippled evil genius Big Bad of Astonishing X-Men #31-35, who hates the X-Men because they're a bunch of incredibly attractive people with superpowers, whereas he is a realistic mutant, sickly and deformed as a result of being born to a Hiroshima survivor. After Kaga's Motive Rant, Cyclops decides to arrange for Mutants Sans Frontières^note Warren Worthington's X-Men-affiliated charity organization medical funding to be used to take the best possible care of him until he dies of natural causes.
• After Loki's confession in Young Avengers that he is a copy of the original Loki who pulled a Kill and Replace on his well-intentioned child self, that he summoned and double-crossed the Eldritch Abomination plaguing them, and that he has been manipulating the whole team all along, America Chavez decides to leave him to his guilt.
  Loki: End it. Before I can talk my way out of this.
  America: ...I'm not going to make this any easier for you, chico.
• Played with at the end of the Young Justice comic book; when Secret turns back to the light side, Darkseid takes "revenge" by restoring her to life as an ordinary mortal. Though he considers this cruel mercy, in reality, it's exactly what she wanted.

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