As a Death Trope, expect spoilers, both marked and unmarked.
Times where somebody is Driven to Suicide in The DCU.
- Batman:
- Cassandra Cain attempted suicide by throwing herself from a building in her first appearance in Batman: No Man's Land, due to the trauma and guilt of being forced to kill a man, which was reawakened by an encounter with her father. Thankfully, Batman saved her, and while she was a Death Seeker for some time afterward she never straight-up attempted to kill herself again.
- Implied to have happened to Joe Chill in one Grant Morrison story. After being tormented by Batman for a long time, he's seen reaching for a gun and repeating "I can't live like this!"
- The Post-Crisis backstory of Matches Malone, the gangster Batman pulls a Dead Person Impersonation on, involves his brother, Carver, shooting himself in the head after the pair accidentally kill a homeless man during one of their insurance schemes, as Carver couldn't live with the guilt of what they'd done. To save face for Carver, Matches tried to make it a random robbery gone bad — only for it to result in looking to Batman, the GCPD, and a then-still District Attorney Harvey Dent that Matches himself killed Carver to squeeze him out of the operation. That said, all of this results in Matches faking his own suicide by setting fire to his apartment and using the corpse of the homeless man to escape Batman and the law.
- Two-Face's story in Joker's Asylum has him meet another partially disfigured man named Holman Hunt and try to manipulate him into shooting what appears to be a restrained Batman by holding his wife hostage. After the charade is revealed ("Batman" was actually Two-Face's henchman Mr. Castor's twin brother Pollux in disguise), Hunt's wife is mad at her husband for hesitating his instruction to kill Batman and the Joker closes the tale by instructing the reader to flip a coin to decide Holman Hunt's fate. Should the coin flip land on tails, the ending is Holman Hunt shooting himself after his wife leaves him.
- Batman Beyond: The Batman Beyond 2.0 arc "The Bat Men" ends with Kirk Langstorm killing himself with his own sonic weapon due to being unable to live with his actions as Man-Bat.
- Batman Beyond (Rebirth): The "Long Payback" arc has Kenny Stanton's father Gray becoming the new Payback to avenge the death of his son, who was the previous Payback. It turns out that Kenny was driven to take his own life after being constantly bullied in juvie and his father wants revenge because he holds Batman responsible for his son's death.
- Crisis on Infinite Earths: In the first issue alone, Ultraman and his Crime Syndicate partners work together to try saving Earth-3 from being devoured by the anti-matter energy wave, but their efforts are all for naught. Ultraman, realizing how powerless he was and how hopeless the situation was, flies straight headlong into the energy wave and dies, with Power Ring watching before he too dies.
- In DCeased, Darkseid is corrupted by a modified Anti-Life Equation and kills himself by driving into the core of Apokolips.
- Dial H for Hero: The first arc of H-E-R-O has a dial user named Jerry Feldon with very low self-esteem who starts feeling like even more of a failure because of his attempts at using the dial to be a superhero going terribly awry. He attempts to end it all by using the dial to turn into a superhero capable of flight and then dialing back into human form mid-flight, only to come to in a hospital after Superman prevented his fatal plummet. After he finds that the old woman he got the dial from wants to kill herself, he talks her out of it and from then on stops being so depressed and suicidal.
- Green Lantern:
- John Stewart nearly killed himself after being unable to stop the destruction of an inhabited planet (partly due to his own overconfidence). Martian Manhunter used reverse psychology to talk him out of it.
- Black Hand killed himself (and his family) only to be raised as the first Black Lantern by Nekron and Scar, beginning the Blackest Night.
- Solomon Grundy received a self-titled seven issue series in the lead-up to Blackest Night where it was revealed that his past life as Cyrus Gold was ended by his own hand.
- Justice Society of America:
- All-Star Comics: Some racketeers try to blackmail Preston Nevel into paying them $50,000.00 by threatening to publicize an old conviction and prison sentence he'd long since moved past and which his family and bosses didn't know about. As he couldn't afford the charge and was too ashamed to face the public humiliation or his wife and children being disappointed in him he chose to drive his car off a cliff instead.
- Per Degaton, in his aged form in America vs. the Justice Society, decided to kill himself rather than let himself be taken into custody for the murder of Professor Malachi Zee of the Brain Trust when he arrives at the present time in the story to finger his assistant for the murder.
- In Justice League Elite, after watching one of his few friends, Manitou Raven, take the full force of a bomb that was headed his way, an utterly depressed Major Disaster tried to kill himself by slashing his wrists in a bathtub. Luckily, he bungles the attempt and decides that getting sober would be a better way of paying tribute to his friend.
- Superman:
- Villain Manchester Black killed himself with his own psychic powers after realizing that Superman was a true hero, which meant Black was the villain.
- Happened on a mass scale when an entire planet conquered by Mongul I chose suicide over continuing to accept his rulership. Given Mongul's power and brutality, this may have been a thoroughly reasonable decision.
- New Krypton: Sam Lane killed himself rather than face a war crime tribunal after his crimes had lead to the destruction of New Krypton and the murder of its 100,000 innocents, including Supergirl's mother.
- Death & the Family: Captain Jonathan Tanner hang himself after finding one ancient enchanted coin belonging to the McDougal Clan (villain Silver Banshee's family). Although the exact circumstances of his death remain unclear, it is known that said haunted heirloom's discovery led to his suicide.
- The sad story of Hank Henshaw, the Cyborg Superman. He and his space shuttle crew crash-landed after going through a radiation storm. Parodying the Fantastic Four, they gained powers or transformed. One was driven mad by his powers and allowed himself to be swallowed by the sun and the other was in so much pain he opted to be torn apart by a powerful MRI machine. Hank's wife was spared, but she went mad and killed herself when Hank revealed he could make bodies through machines. After becoming the Cyborg Superman, years of failures lead to him joining the Sinestro Corps with the promise of Suicide by Cop.
- In the Teen Titans spinoff Vigilante, after the deaths of several friends attempting to take up his mantle during a period of retirement and being unmasked on live TV lead to him becoming more angry, violent, paranoid and obsessed with dispensing justice not caring if he murders even innocent cops who get in his way, Adrian Chase (the title character) reaches this point by the end of the series. He succeeds as the final issue ends with Adrian shooting himself in his apartment.
- Wonder Woman:
- Sensation Comics: After spending years in prison for murder after striking a man who had grabbed her while threatening her in the head and fleeing Gay Frollik emerges to a world where her fiancee has abandoned her and her mother has passed away. As these were the only people she had been close to and she now can't get work due to her record she tries to kill herself, and is despondent when Di rescues her.
- Wonder Woman (1942): Pre-Crisis Odin killed himself out of shame after his second defeat at Wonder Woman's hands left him without even any Valkyries on his side as Aphrodite took the warrior women and convinced them to live a life with no more killing and join her Amazons.
- Wonder Woman (1987): Artemis' use of the Lasso of Truth is not as refined as Diana's and she is horrified when angrily questioning a villain while having them restrained with it causes them to eat their gun at the realization of the true cost of their murders rather than turn over a new leaf like those questioned by Diana tend to do.
- When Diana's lasso is stolen and used by Genocide in Wonder Woman (2006) she is horrified that the abomination is going to use it to torture people with a twisted cruel version of the "truth" and drive them to kill themselves.
- Wonder Woman: Odyssey: Jason manages to hang himself out of shame for working for genocidal magic users who casually order him to murder children by using the golden lasso after he admits to Diana who his employers are.
- The Legend of Wonder Woman (2016): Ares drives Tomas Byde to suicide by messing with his perception and ensuring he received a letter falsely informing him that his little brother had been killed in an allied air raid.
Vertigo Comics, WildStorm, Other Imprints
- Minuteman Jack "The Monster" Daw from 100 Bullets. He's addicted to self destructive tendencies: alcohol, heroin, and violence. He makes remarks about wanting to die yet he teases death with the needle or the gun as Graves puts it. The gun being a metaphor for violence. Jack got clean but he hasn't really changed since he keeps seeking the kick (violence) that diverts him from facing his pain. There is a moment where he avoids violence and seems to be getting better. Jack "relapses" (violence); kills a guard by squeezing his head with his foot followed by challenging candidate-minuteman Crete. Jack dies fighting crete when alligators devour them both. It shows us that he stayed married to his self destructive nature until the end.
- Minuteman Milo "The Bastard" Garret. He earned that nickname by being the most ruthless of the minutemen. In sleeper mode he worked as a private detective and when he was reactivated he didn't like who he was. Disguised in bandages he commits suicide by Lono, taunting and challenging him, pulling his famous knockout punches so Lono would kill him.
- Clean Room is full of them. Chloe's fiance Philip loses his mind and goes this route before the series opens. Chloe, distraught by his loss, attempts the same in the opening pages. It's apparently pretty common within the Mueller organization due to their ongoing conflict with the demons.
- In The Intimates, Dead Kid Fred attempts suicide out of depression and disgust at being a zombie. Punchy, who stumbled upon his LiveJournal and saw the warning signs, rushed to stop him, but it was later revealed that he wished he had been too late. Because then he would be a hero. That and he felt his "origin" wasn't up to snuff; his sister getting killed wasn't enough, he needed another tragedy to make him more credible as a superhero.
- The Sandman: Endless Nights: Portrait of Despair #14 is about a woman who commits suicide by driving into the snowy woods. She's miserable when she realizes that not even killing herself made her happy.
- Y: The Last Man
- Yorick Brown becomes a subconscious Death Seeker out of survivor guilt after the Gender Cide. Culper Ring agent 711 tortures and abuses him until he's fully suicidal... but he has an epiphany and decides to live, which 711 reveals was the goal in the first place.
- Alter also puts a gun to her head in one scene. She doesn't pull the trigger because Alter wants to die in combat and therefore only a man (Yorick) has the right to kill her. Alter's self-destructive actions are motivated by Survivor Guilt, most likely over the accidental death of her sister at the hands of the Israeli military.
