Disproportionate Retribution / Comic Books

• Archie Comics:
  • In general, any time anyone so much as looks at Midge, and sometimes even when someone wasn't looking at Midge (because "Why?! Isn't she beautiful enough?!") will spur Moose to swoop in and beat them up. One issue had Archie following a pair of footprints because he believed they belonged to Veronica, only for Moose to begin chasing him since the footprints just happened to belong to Midge instead. Naturally, it ends with Moose beating up Reggie instead, who actually was out on a date with Midge. Values Dissonance kicked in hard on this one into the Turn of the Millennium, as by todays standards it made Moose a Domestic Abuser more than anything else, prompting the writers to tone down on it considerably.
  • Moose's temper is also sometimes weaponized by Archie and the gang, sometimes for no real good reason. "Poetic Justice" for example is a story where Reggie was writing clever but largely harmless limericks about all of his friends and hanging them around the school, which prompts Archie to forge one insulting Moose so that Moose will beat the complete manshit out of Reggie. Apparently a poem about Archie having starchy clothes from his mother botching the laundry or Betty kissing a few boys is just so insulting and vile that it's deserving of tricking an alleged friend, by insulting him no less, into beating the author to within an inch of their life.
• Astro City:
  • The supervillains do care what you write about them in your comic books. Yes, even the cosmic ones.
  • The Blue Knight kills all of the criminals he encounters, whether mob bosses or Mooks transporting goods.
  • Gloo stuffs a family of litterbugs into a wastebasket (they survive), and nearly a dozen Mooks into a compact car (they don't).
  • And the Pale Horseman is worse, dispatching supervillains and jaywalkers alike. He incinerates a trio of teen boys for stealing shopping carts.
• Batman:
  • In Batman: Black and White, the serial killer in "Petty Crimes" murders people gruesomely for offenses like ignoring the Express Lane Limit, not cleaning up after their dog, and driving slowly in the fast lane of a motorway.
  • In Knightfall'', Bane tells Batman that he would kill anyone for the slightest thing, even looking at him.
    Batman: You'd kill just to "rule" this city?
    Bane: I'd kill for anything. I'd kill to silence a grating voice. To darken the light of the eyes that dared to look at me.
  • In Batman vs. Bigby! A Wolf in Gotham, when Bigby goes to the Gotham City Executive Exchange, he tries to get information about a book from someone. When the guy he's talking to insults Bigby's odour, Bigby grabs him by the collar of his shirt and shouts "Manners!". In response, everyone in the Executive Exchange immediately descends upon Bigby to beat him to within an inch of his life. Some person even spell it out for him.
    Random Man: Mister, you broke the one unbreakable rule! No one causes any crap at the Executive Exchange!
    Random Woman: At least nobody lives to do it twice!
  • One◊ of the Tales of Arkham comics features the Penguin, and uses this to explain why a criminal like him belongs in Arkham despite his relatively sane methods and motives. In the story, after a chef is seen laughing in the Penguin's general direction while he is eating dinner: "Maybe it was just a coincidence that the chef laughed while looking in the Penguin's direction. Maybe he just happened to think of something funny, some joke he'd heard the other day, while glancing around the room. Maybe there was nothing malicious about it at all. But in the end... it really didn't matter. And so they ate their dinner, and enjoyed their evening, and the Penguin never said a word about the chef who'd laughed. But a few days later, that building had a new owner, and the restaurant was forced to close, its employees all fired. And the day after losing his job, the chef found that his girlfriend had been suddenly deported to Romania and his best friend arrested for child pornography despite his insistence that he was framed. The day after that, a new tenant moved in next door and begin blasting their stereo at all hours of the day and night. The landlord stopped taking his calls. The church he attended was closed for fumigation, after a bizarre infestation of killer bees. The park where he liked to sit and read was annexed and bulldozed. And then the chef, who was a recovering alcoholic, woke one morning to find that a 24 hour liquor store had opened across the street from his apartment. Less than two months after he'd crossed paths with the Penguin, a night janitor found the chef in a bus station restroom. He'd hanged himself."
    • Penguin does it again in his miniseries Penguin: Pain and Prejudice. At a party, a guy bumps into him and starts to call him a fatass before he sees who it is and begs for forgiveness. Penguin responds by having him fired from his job, burning down his apartment, cutting the brakes on his parent's car and having his girlfriend infected with what's heavily implied to be AIDs.
    • Of course, while it in no way excuses these horrid actions, this fits the Penguin's character perfectly. He hates being insulted, mostly because being insulted by his peers when he was young is what drove him to his Start of Darkness in the first place.
  • In Death of the Family, Joker punches Harley Quinn in the face. He claims that it is because she had hubris on her face.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8 gives us Monroe. Disagree with your former teachers on what it means to be a werewolf? That's okay. Just slaughter most of the Buddhist monks of the monastery they live in.
• Chick Tracts: Abundant in various Chick Tracts, mostly by God Himself. However, one that stands out is "Fairy Tales?" In this Tract, a young boy goes on a killing spree, burns down his school, and is sent to juvenile hall. After his release from juvie, he becomes one of the FBI's top ten most wanted who is eventually arrested, tried, executed, and sent to Hell for his crimes. What exactly caused all of this to happen to him? The fact that Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and Easter Bunny aren't real.
• Civil War II: The event has Tony Stark flipping out after Rhodey's death, and kidnapping an Inhuman precog from the Inhumans. While this is bad, he did react out of grief and rage, and their response is extreme (and may be due to the fact that a normal human embarrassed them by defeating them in combat so easily): They take away his money, expose his secrets to the world, destroy anything of value to him and blow up his tower. So basically, they went and ruined his life and his company. Considering their reaction when Hellion tried to kill them all for the mists killing their people, it is interesting how they go about punishing people. Maybe Tony's actions were just more insulting.
  • It gets worse: Carol, who is opposing Tony in this war, had to beg them to stand down. For her to do this, it means that they most likely had something even worse in mind for Tony. After all, it was revealed that Cyclops' punishment for angering the Inhumans by neutralising the mist which was sacred to them but fatal to mutants was to be instantly and publicly executed by the Inhuman royals. Maybe that's really why the rest of the X-Men are so afraid to have any conflict with them.
• Daredevil: The Kingpin likes to think of himself as an intelligent man who doesn't let emotions get the best of him but in truth, he'll overact massively to mild slights. An underling attempts to point out how a vendetta against Daredevil is bad for business and the Kingpin has his legs broken. An innocent waiter makes the mistake of trying to give the Kingpin a check at a dinner and Fisk orders the poor guy's hand wrecked beyond repair. That's not to mention the slews of gang mooks killed simply for delivering bad news.
• Dazzler: In the series, The Enchantress wanted Dazzler dead for offending the gods by having a better singing voice than her. (Both of them auditioned for a part, and the manager, though obviously infatuated with Amora, reluctantly admitted that Allison was slightly better.) Her first assault against Allison to tap into a dimensional rift in order to kill her rival in the middle of her performance via Rapid Aging, only to attract the attention of New York's other heroes and was defeated (and as a result, ruining what was her true plan, using the rift to gain ultimate power). She then tried to get the Asgardians to punish Dazzler, kidnapping her and dragging her to Asgard and demanded a mock duel, which she tried to turn into a real one. Fortunately, Dazzler was saved by Odin's untimely arrival; he agreed that Dazzler does have a better singing voice, ordered Enchantress to drop the matter, then sent the girl home with the promise that the Asgardians would not hurt her.
• Diabolik: Diabolik was quite bad for this, at the start. In the third story Elisabeth Gay, his Unwitting Pawn and first lover (with whom he was about to break up) accidentally outed his secret identity to the police, so what did he do her after narrowly escaping a much deserved execution? Why, he waited for her to recover from nearly going crazy out of fear of what he'd do to her and fall in love with a doctor before driving her completely mad by appearing from nowhere in her room before faking the beheading of her fiancee a few days before the wedding. And he did it because she had once told him it was a Fate Worse than Death. And then made sure to drive her deeper into madness. Thankfully, modern day Diabolik has mellowed somewhat, and doesn't do such things anymore... Because of what he experienced when Elisabeth recovered enough to leave the asylum and managed to capture him.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe:
  • Donald Duck can be one mean avian. Even being the universe's Butt-Monkey doesn't exactly justify this. Once he also gave a woman a black eye because she gave him a gag gift (she didn't know it would throw a pie at him). One could even go so far as to call him Donald Dick.
    • Even in his 'superhero' version of some Italian stories, Paperinik the Devilish Avenger, he's quite mean. His first story as Paperinik in a nutshell: Scrooge offered him an underpaid job as a fanner and insulted him for kicking a ludicrously overpaid job as a dog-sitter that went to Gladstone, and Donald as Paperinik stole Scrooge's money-filled mattress while he slept on it and framed Gladstone for it (the destruction of a manor that Gladstone won at a lottery wasn't part of it: Gladstone did it on his own by lighting a candle with explosive hidden in it that Paperinik left around). While these almost murderous tendencies of Paperinik have been toned down and he now tends to reserve them for people who actually deserve the treatment, he still loves putting his quarry in Humiliation Conga, like that time he convinced Gladstone he had lost his luck due a fake curse launched on him by Donald. Donald himself is the victim of disproportionate retributions far more often than he's the instigator.
    • Paperinik set up a lynching mob twice, and for rather petty offenses. The first time, it was the Beagle Boys who had decided to empty Duckburg to sack it and thus organized a marathon whose prize set him off: Paperinik's secret identity (that they didn't even know. It was just the one thing that would have convinced every single citizen but Paperinik himself to take part), only for Paperinik to detour the marathon right back in town. The second time the husbands of Duckburg, fed up with being beaten and humiliated by their wives for not measuring up to Paperinik, tried to ruin his fame as a gentleman by playing pranks dressed as him, and Paperinik reacted by having them discovered by their very pissed wives (plus Daisy. Who recognized Paperinik as Donald, guessed he was one of the pranksters and beat him up for it).
  • The inhabitants of Plain Awful, whose body features are very square. They are surprisingly affable and hospitable, with one single exception: if you possess or create a round object (body features don't count), they will punish you. At best, you'll be sentenced to forced labor until you (or your friends) will fulfill their request to make amends; at worst, they'll immediately kill you.
• Doctor Who: In the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Comic Book series, "Prisoners of Time", Adam Mitchell decides to get revenge on The Doctor after he was kicked out of the TARDIS for bad behavior by teaming up with The Master, kidnapping all of The Doctor's companions and trying to force him to choose one and let the rest die.
• EC Comics: In the Vault of Horror story "Let the Punishment Fit the Crime," a group of children end up murdering another child by pushing him into live wire. Why? He stole a girl's doll and wouldn't give it back. The local lawyer had told the kids that "robbery and kidnapping" were offenses punishable by death in the electric chair, so ...
• ElfQuest: Used many times by the insane elf, Door, in the New Blood stories, against his human servants including at least three boys and several men (one boy whose ultimate fate is unknown was threatened with death for simply dropping a bowl of fruit).
• Evil Ernie: Physically and emotionally abused by his parents, one night Ernie sensed through his telepathic powers that his neighbors knew about his abuse for years, but were afraid to inform the police because his parents happened to own the business that was the number one employer in town, which was enough to turn Ernie into a serial killer. Now that a supernatural being named Lady Death has turned him into a superpowered zombie who can turn his victims into zombies too? He's out to wipe out the entire human race!
• Fantastic Four:
  • Doctor Doom's grudge against Reed Richards reflects this trope. In this case, however, the yearned-for retribution is really disproportionate, in that Reed didn't even do what Doom blames him for; Doom blames Reed for causing the accident which disfigured him, whereas all Reed did was bring to Doom's attention flaws in his calculations which had the potential for disaster if they weren't fixed. Doom went ahead with the experiment anyway, and when disaster happened as Reed predicted, Doom's ego couldn't let him admit fault and that Reed, in identifying Doom's error, was smarter than him. In response, he has attempted to kill Reed and his family on numerous occasions, and at one point possessed his daughter and trapped his son in Hell.
    • The disproportion is enhanced further in some tellings of this origin, which state that Doom was not even injured that seriously in the accident to start with. His injuries amounted to a small scar on his cheek, but Doom's vanity could not tolerate even such a minor blemish. He himself caused the horrific injuries by putting on his iconic metal face mask immediately after it had been forged without waiting for it to cool down first. So not only did Reed not cause the accident in the first place, he apparently had no connection with Doom's horrific injuries at all.
    • In Books Of Doom, one of the tellings of said origin from Doom's perspective, Reed didn't even do that. He looked at Doom's notes and couldn't even make sense of them because Doom was blending magic and technology. He got the scar from Mephisto, the machine being designed to send him to Mephisto's realm so he could find his mother. Why he blames Reed isn't explored.
    • A more recent comic revealed that Reed wasn't even responsible for Doom's accident. Ben Grimm, later the Thing, didn't like Doom's attitude, and he decided to purposefully sabotage the machine. So Doom's hatred of Reed is even more disproportionate.
  • In James Robinson's run on Fantastic Four (2014), he introduces the Quiet Man, who reasons for attacking the FF make Doom look justified and rational. He frames the Thing for murder, causes Johnny to lose his powers, has the city of New York kick the FF out of the Baxter Building, their children taken away and ultimately intends to frame Reed for launching a massive attack from another dimension. Why? Because back in college, the Quiet Man had a massive crush on Sue but never got the guts to tell her before Reed asked her out and thus is seeking revenge for Reed "stealing" a girl who had no idea this guy existed. Even Reed himself points out how incredibly stupid it is to launch an entire crusade over that.
  • In Fantastic Four (Lee & Kirby), a two part story revolves around the Fantastic Four having to fight the Hulk. Why, you ask? Because Rick Jones started hanging around with the Avengers, and the Hulk came to the conclusion Rick would tell them he was Bruce Banner. Ergo, he had to DESTROY THE AVENGERS! (And yes, Rick does try to tell the Hulk he didn't, but Hulk's not in a listening mood.) The Fantastic Four just happen to stumble on to Big Green first.
• In one of the 1950's Felix the Cat comic books (Felix The Cat #54), the story "A Fishy Official" has Felix get a job at a Census Bureau to count how many fish are in the ocean. He uses a submarine and film to estimate a count of 2,000,000,000 fish and reports the info back to his boss—who has just come back from fishing with six hanging from his hand. His boss immediately fires Felix for inefficiency.
• The Flash: Eobard Thawne's defining trait is his desire to horrifically punish anyone he feels has wronged him. He's dedicated most of his supervillain career to ruining his Arch-Enemy Barry Allen's life for "betraying" him… said betrayal ranges in the telling from stopping Thawne from committing crimes, to simply repeating motivational advice he gave Thawne. Thawne also makes a habit of doing this to anyone else who pisses him off; he's erased numerous people from existence simply for annoying him, and left a woman catatonic for not wanting to go on a date with him.
• Lobo: In the Lobo vs the Mask crossover, Lobo destroys about a dozen planets in anger simply to find the guy who wrote "YOU SMELL" on his bike. (Of course, he was possessed by the Mask at the time...)
• Greyshirt: Indigo Sunset: In one issue, mobster Vinnie Assapunto goes on a rampage, murdering five people because they were connected to someone who had been telling jokes about him.
• Hack/Slash: After witnessing her daughter being mistreated by a group of bullies, Delilah Hack immediately proceeded to abduct, kill, and cook said bullies, before ultimately feeding them to their friends.
• Hellblazer: In Hellblazer: Rise and Fall, Lucifer responds to a security guard barring him from interrogating Mr. Henderson by ripping out his kidney. When Constantine steps in and deters him with holy fire, John finds his apartment in flames.
• Johnny the Homicidal Maniac? Even being near the wrong person can result in one's horrible death.
  • Excuse me, what was that? Did you say... wacky?
  • In one issue, Johnny couldn't get his world's equivalent of a Slurpy in the middle of the night (they turned off the machines), and he felt the appropriate response was to throw a scary tantrum, murder the cashier with his own gun, and then turn it on himself. Although he then gets distracted by cherry soda. But we kinda know the protagonist by now — you don't really need to highlight the spoiler to guess what happened.
  • There is the mitigating factor that Johnny has to commit murder frequently to keep an Eldritch Abomination sealed away. Doesn't really make him any less crazy though.
• Judge Dredd: This is pretty much how the entire legal system works, which makes a degree of sense given how much of a Crapsack World Mega-City One is. A cover for one issue of 2000AD played it for dark laughs, showing a young kid dressed in a bad Dredd costume - presumably, dressing that way out of hero-worship - with Dredd himself barking "Impersonating a Judge. Five years in the Juve-cubes."
• Kick-Ass:
  • In Volume One, Kick-Ass leads with violence, in the face of non-violence. In particular, during his first foray into vigilantism, he brutally ambushes some young graffiti artists. Although he loses the battle, there's no indication that what he did was immoral. And this would lead to Unreliable Narrator — it's the perpetrator that's narrating the story. And the narrator is a supremely bored high schooler.
  • What Red Mist does to destroy Dave in Volume Two. Unmasks him, murders Katie's parents and rapes her, kills his dad, and bombs his funeral.
  • Mother Russia supposedly killed the other bodyguards of the Russian Prime Minister when they accused her of cheating at cards.
• Laff-A-Lympics: In "The Discount of Monty Cristo", while buying a car, Dread Baron threatens to return it if the radio isn't tuned to his favorite station.
• Les Légendaires: The Legendaries suffers this from the population of their native world Alysia. After they accidentally caused a magic incident by breaking a magic stone from the Arch-Enemy and accidentally turned everyone on their world into a child, the population of Alysia start hating and despising them : they are mocked, insulted, forced to hide their identities for five years, considered as failures, and everyone who has connections to them (brothers, parents, former teams...) are considered as ashamed as well. While it's understandable on the first look, it become excessively ridiculous if you take account of the fact the Legendaries also saved those same people countless times from their said Arch-Enemy (who was an homicidal, megalomaniac Sorcerous Overlord feared in all Alysia), making the mere fact to have trapt everyone in child form not bad in comparison. The inhabitants of Alysia seems to have quickly forgotten about those heroic actions.
• Lucifer: Early on, two Jin en Mok are having a discussion in a diner. When the janitor accidentally interrupts them with his sweeping, one of the Jin gives him a coin. The janitor will be compelled to look at the coin for increasing amounts of time each day with a corresponding increase of both pain and pleasure. The Jin en Mok estimates that janitor will last about a year before the coin kills him. It's implied that the Jin does this to people all the time, just because he (it) finds it funny.
• Luke Cage: In Luke Cage Noir, Luke examines a body for clues after being hired to investigate a murder. "The black and blue marks around her neck meant she was choked — which is usually personal. Though I did once choke a cellmate because he ate my peanut butter."
• The Mask: The very first story arc features Stanley Ipkiss using the powers of the eponymous mask to wreak frequently lethal havoc on anyone who's slighted him in the past, making a deliberate effort to invoke this very trope. After a while, he starts to suspect that he's overdoing the entire revenge-thing.
  Stanley: I mean, just because Mrs. Gazzo embarrassed me as a kid was no reason to off her.
• Max and Moritz: Worst things Max and Moritz by Wilhelm Busch do: Putting gunpowder into the pipe of the teacher (OK, that's pretty harsh, but he survives.) Their punishment at the end (not by him): They're killed and ground to grit in the mill.
• Misty: A common theme, as even innocent acts could lead to a Downer Ending.
• The Powerpuff Girls: In the final DC story, "Smart and Smarter", Mojo Jojo goes about terrorizing Townsville simply because there was nothing to watch on his DVR.
• The Punisher:
  • The Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe runs on this. While Frank Castle had every right to be pissed about his family being accidentally killed by the Avengers and the X-Men, he still went overboard by indiscriminately killing every superhuman on the planet at the behest of an organization of people unintentionally harmed by superheroes who stubbornly keep on believing that the heroes harmed them on purpose. A fair number of the heroes Castle slaughtered without remorse had loved ones of their own and did their best to avoid civilian casualties.
  • Way back when he was still part of Daredevil and Spidey's rogues gallery, Frank went about killing people for the heinous crimes of... littering, and running red lights to get away from the psycho killing people for littering. When Marvel decided to make the Punisher an anti-hero, this was retconned in The Punisher: Circle of Blood as Frank having been drugged by another villain, and he'd got clean while in prison.
• Robin (1993): The Jury "sentences" people to death for all kinds of petty crimes, and when Tim puts a hand out when their members try to leave the scene after blowing up a purse snatcher the whole group swings their guns in his face to sentence him for daring to "lay a hand on an officer of the court". Luckily they take the time to do their sentencing out loud before murdering people, giving him and the police officer on scene a chance to escape.
• The Sandman (1989):
  • Morpheus of the Endless is also known for this: he sends a lover who refused to become his queen to suffer in hell and he didn't let her out again for ten thousand years.
  • When Delirium was justly pulled over by a cop (she Drives Like Crazy), she condemned him to forever think that he is covered with spiders. Lampshaded to an extent as Morpheus started to call her out on this, to which she promptly told him to mind his own business, and that with the aforementioned 10,000 years affair and all that he has little to no rights to complain at all.
• The Sentry: Bob finds out that some Yoga instructor is pulling some moves on his wife; sometime later his alter egos, presumably, act; The Sentry saves 150.000 people from a crashing boat while The Void hurls a jet airliner into a building killing 150.000 people, Ramón the Yoga instructor was in that building.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics): Thrash the Devil. Your people are almost extinct thanks to horrific experiments caused by a group of Echidna scientists. You've been drilled into your head that all echidnas are evil. What do you do? Punish what's left of the echidna race that had nothing to do with those experiments by tossing all but one into an alternate dimension, possibly never returning. That one? Knuckles the Echidna.
• Spider-Man: Spider-Man is a frequent victim of this, as his opponents' goals shift from "get money/recognition/cured" to "revenge on Spider-Man" as he stops them. Justified in that nearly all of them are selfish, arrogant, unhinged bastards as foils to Spider-Man.
  • Venom was a particularly bad example of this: Eddie Brock hated Spider-Man because his journalist career had been ruined when he brought forward a man claiming to be the murderous Sin-Eater, but who turned out to be a compulsive confessor instead as Spider-Man caught the real Sin-Eater.
    • It's even worse in some retellings, where he used his constitutional right to protect the fake, who did, in fact kill several people on his own. To reiterate, he hates Spider-Man for inadvertently getting him fired while doing the right thing when he was protecting a serial killer for his own selfish gain.
  • Hell, Spidey's whole origin could be considered disproportionate retribution mixed with Can't Get Away with Nuthin'. After obtaining his powers for the first time, Spider-Man decides to use his powers for selfish gain. Unfortunately, a cop asks him for help in catching a robber. Spider-Man selfishly refuses to do so because he wants to look out for "Numero Uno". The robber later ends up killing Uncle Ben (Spider-Man's uncle). In other words, Spidey's uncle was murdered because Spidey refused to help catch a criminal. Spidey planning to use his powers for personal gain isn't very nice, but did he really deserve to have his uncle murdered for it?
  • Lampshaded in Ultimate Spider-Man when Peter was captured by former joke villain the Shocker, who chained him up and tortured him, intending to kill him as revenge for sending him to jail so many times.
    Shocker: The way I see it, kid... you owe me hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not including — not including the months I've lost in and out of the joint. Legal bills.
    Spidey: Hey man, AGH!! You rob banks. What did you think was going to happen?? OW!! What did you think the outcome was going to be??
    Shocker: The outcome?? The outcome is I get what is coming to me.
    Spidey: You got what was coming to you. That's my point.
  • As it happens, the real reason is because Spider-Man made fun of him so many times, which is arguably even worse. He planned to torture a 15 year old hero to death not because he wouldn't ever stop or because he got sent to prison dozens of times, but because he was laughed at.
• Squad: One boy gets eaten for merely finding Becca and Marley attractive.
• SpyBoy: Even Schweitzer (who is The Bully) finds a little absurd the reaction of his father to the Class president's campaign: hire a hitman to take out both Alex and his ex-girlfriend.
• Star Wars Legends: In Star Wars: Legacy, Darth Krayt orders the genocide of the Mon Calamari species in retaliation for the theft of a prototype Star Destroyer that was being built in the shipyards above their home planet. Even some of his fellow Sith find this excessive.
• Supergirl:
  • In Supergirl (2005), the enmity between Supergirl and Reactron was born because the latter got hired to assassinate the former, and Supergirl had the gall to fight back and wreck his radiation-containment suit. During the New Krypton debacle Reactron doggedly and obsessively attempted to kill her, murdered her parents and volunteered to become a human bomb which blew her planet up and wiped out her race. He hated a teenage girl and did his best to ruin her life because she didn't let him kill her.
  • In Bizarrogirl, the titular character kills a man because he shouts aloud. She hates loud people (and is backwards).
• Superman:
  • In the Pre-Crisis era, Lex Luthor's lifetime animosity to Superman was triggered by Superboy saving Lex from a laboratory fire. During the rescue, Lex got some chemicals spilled on him that made him go bald! He has more reasons to hate Superman, such like an important experiment being destroying during the lab fire, and Lex not being able to stand being inferior to him. Wanting a man dead just for being there might be one of the most disproportionate retributions on here.
  • In Superman: Red Son, he breaks off his engagement and relationship to Lois Lane in order to devote his entire life to beating Superman because... the deformed clone of Superman beat him in Chess! This is particularly hilarious because earlier he had explicitly stated "I have no doubts that [Superman] and I would get along if we had been born in the same country."
  • During the time Superman was dead, Lex Luthor, in his clone body of Lex Luthor II, murdered a female training instructor because she beat him in one of their matches. Then, he gloats at Superman's grave as proof that, with Superman gone, he can do whatever he wanted to. Too bad, a little while later, she came back and tried to kill him.
  • The Bruce Wayne: Murderer and Bruce Wayne: Fugitive storylines? Bruce protested Lex's presidency by cancelling his defense contracts with the government. In return, Luthor hires David Cain to frame Bruce for murder. Turns out that he chose the one guy who knew Bruce was Bats and he used it to fuck with everyone. Said assassin's main motivation for agreeing to the job and handling it the way he did? Mostly petty jealousy since his daughter Cassandra liked Bruce more than him.
  • In Action Comics (New 52), Mr. Mxyzptlk is a 5th Dimensional imp who works as the Court Jester for the land of Zrfff. He entertains the kingdom by annoying the heroes of several worlds, including Superman, and letting Zrfff watch. Enraged with jealously over Mxyzptlk's popularity and success, the kingdom's other jester, Vyndktvx, decided to uses his powers to secretly make Superman's life a living hell before eventually killing him, even assembling an "Anti-Superman Army" — and do it all before Superman ever met Mxyzptlk in the first place. Of course, Superman has no idea who he is, but Vyndktvx holds him responsible for Mxyzptlk's success because the kingdom really liked how he was the only hero to best Mxyzptlk.
• Super Crooks: The Bastard is considered the most terrifying super-villain on Earth with a story told of one guy making the mistake of trying to rip him off. Another villain might kill the guy. Another might go a step further and kill his family. The Bastard methodically tracks down and murders every single person this guy has ever been close to. Family, lovers, his drug dealer, his banker, right down to second grade classmates. Then he kills the guy.
• Three: When Terpander makes a drunken joke about a group of Spartan soldiers who were killed in a Helot uprising, the Ephor responds by ordering his men to kill every Helot in the room.
• Tintin: In The Adventures of Tintin, the entire reason Tintin and Rastapopoulos was put at odds with each other is because the former stopped the latter from assaulting somebody. Which lead to the latter to send people to kill the former.
• The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: The Decepticon Justice Division believes that the best way to keep Decepticons from defecting or deserting is to ensure that those who do so meet ridiculously horrible ends. Smelting, electrocution, dismemberment, even the destruction of the Spark - nothing is beyond them. It doesn't matter if the target is a rogue One-Man Army or one of the Scavengers, the most useless Decepticons ever; you abandoned the Cause, you're on the List, therefore you need to be killed. Painfully.
• Ultimate Fantastic Four: In the ultimate universe, Doom has even less reason to blame Reed for his problems that the regular universe version, as he was the one who, after being told not to, reprogrammed the coordinates for the transporter due to his egotistical belief that he knew better than the man who created the machine, transforming himself into a creature of living metal. This version of Doom... just say he has issues even beyond the Reed Richards issue.
• Ultimate X Men:
  • The Brotherhood of Mutant Supremacy, a mutant terrorist group, attacks the Capitol in Washington. The U.S. government releases an army of Sentinels to kill all mutants on sight — either if they're a terrorist, or someone with 6 fingers having a walk with his dog.
  • Charles tried to escape from their mutant city and return to civilization, so Magneto crippled him with a spear through the back. Ultimate Origins changed this a little to Charles also trying to mess with Magneto's mind while he was there.
• Ultimatum: The reason why Magneto caused the apocalypse was to get back at the Ultimates for the deaths of his children. Bit of an overreaction there, dude. It should further be noted that he was horribly, horribly abusive to said children, to the point of crippling his son at one point just for siding against him, further adding to his hypocrisy.
• Vampirella: In the story "Into the Inferno" Granville decides to repay Pendragon's abandoning of his family by addicting Vampirella on cocaine.
• Wanted: The main character gains the resources to do whatever he wanted. As an example, he deals with the frustration of a neighbor being too cheery with... a bullet to the face. BLAM.
• Weapon X (2002): Director Malcom Concord... If BUILDING A FREAKIN' CONCENTRATION CAMP for mutants, just because one scarred up your face a bit isn't disproportionate retribution, we don't know what is.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: In "Ectoplasmic Death" Etta decks Oscar because she thinks he's going to try to take her candy, that he just gifted to her. Though their dialog makes it clear he usually tries to eat as much as possible of the sweets he buys her her violent reaction is pretty extreme.
• X-Men: In The Defenders #16, Magneto is fighting the Defenders and Professor X when his genetically engineered reality warper Alpha turns on him and transforms him into a baby. Years later, in X-Men #112, a rejuvenated Magneto captures the X-Men — none of whom were involved in the Defenders story in any way, but Xavier's not around — and takes a cruel "eye for an eye" revenge on them. He locks them into chairs that not only inhibit their powers but also disrupt their neurological functioning so that physically they're at the level of toddlers even though they retain adult intelligence. He then leaves them to the care of Nanny, an android with a sickeningly sweet personality to care for them as if they were babies. ("Oh Beast, you've such marvelous silky fur. You are a joy to brush. I've an idea. Would you like bows for your hair? I'll see if I can find some.") His intention is that they will live out the rest of their lives in that state, and it is implied that they are trapped that way for several days if not weeks before escaping.
• Zatanna (2010):
  • While she was feeling cranky about they're partying in her apartment without permission and turned them back pretty quick, Zatanna turns some party girls into birds after they mistake her for a waitress.
  • One-shot villain Backslash murders some merfolk solely because they failed to tell him where he could find a McDonald's, his reluctant fairy companion rightly calling him a monster for doing so.
• Zipi y Zape: Sometimes, Zipi and Zape are chastised for really stupid reasons, one notably one is when Mrs. Jaimita punish them to cutting grass in the garden just because they didn't know how to use a flypaper.
  • And Jaimita is by far the nicest one of the parents. Pantuflo, the father, borders on the Abusive Parents trope, as he's able to punish them for things they've clearly done not deliberately just as if they've done that way, and sometimes for things he's actually the one to blame.

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