Hoist By His Own Petard / The DCU

Often a Death Trope, so expect to see unmarked spoilers ahead.

Times where somebody is hoist by their own petard in The DCU.

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• Astro City: In "Confessions", the villains send the Confessor a message (via Altar Boy) that they know his secret, and they want him to not do something. The Confessor blinks, absorbs the knowledge that they only care about that act, and makes the deductions that allow him to throw a spanner in their plans. (Though he's killed, and other superheroes have to do much of the work to finish the job.)
• In the Atari Force second series, the Dark Destroyer intended to destroy Martin Champion's New Earth universe with an anti-matter bomb. However, as Dart tried to defuse the bomb, she accidentally deactivated the fail-safe mechanism and caused it to detonate. The Dark Destroyer, who at that point was defeated by Martin Champion in a fistfight, ended up dying in the explosion of his own bomb while the Atari Force team escaped.
• Batman:
  • In the mini-series, Batman: The Cult, Bats is able to turn Deacon Blackfire's own doctrine against him when he beats him within an inch of his life, then lets him live for his followers to deal with. His followers, who were broken by him into believing that their own suffering meant nothing in the greater scheme of things, are so enraged by his own weakness, they literally tear him apart.
  • Joe Coyne of the 1940s story "The Penny Plunderers" does this twice. A penny-themed criminal, when he traps Batman and Robin in a Death Trap, he smugly tosses them two pennies, to symbolize that their lives will only be worth two cents. However, one of the pennies is made of zinc, and Batman is able to fashion a makeshift distress beacon to call for help and is rescued. Later, when the Dynamic Duo track Coyne down, Coyne needs to call the rest of his gang for help. However, the only phone in the room he's in is a payphone. One that will only work if given a nickel.
    Coyne's hand comes out of his pocket carrying all the coins he is carrying- Five cents - but in pennies!
    Coyne: No... They're no good to me... No good at all! It's a pay phone! I need a single nickel to be able to dial!
    And then Coyne realizes he is lost! His obsession for pennies has become his doom!
  • Batman '66: Lord Marmaduke Ffogg's plan to take over Gotham City is foiled when his own fog prevents his minions from realizing they were beating up each other.
    Batman: We never lifted a finger. Hoist by your own petard, Lord Marmaduke!
    Robin: Defeated... by fog!
• Darkseid has had his infamous Omega Beams turned against him on a number of occasions, particularly against enemies with Super-Speed..Superman has done this to him at least twice, except that he dodges out of the way at the last second. The beams, while shown to be highly maneuverable, apparently can't turn as quickly as Superman and hit their sender.
• In Flashpoint, the Reverse Flash has suddenly appeared and begun attacking Barry Allen while telling him that the reason this timeline exists was because Barry tried to save his mother from Zoom and suceeded, only to screw up the rest of the world.. As he does, he tells him that, because how things are, Barry could never kill him lest he break time again. As he says that, he learns of a loophole too late as Thomas Wayne!Batman impales him with a sword.
• Final Crisis: Batman shoots Darkseid with the same bullet that Darkseid used to kill his son, Orion. Then, The Flash Wally West and Barry Allen turn intangible and run through him, causing the Omega Beams that were chasing them to hit the villain and blow him up.
• Final Crisis Aftermath: Run!: The Human Flame is defeated this way - fed up with being a loser even when he got a massive power boost, he decided to make himself larger and larger until the Square-Cube Law kicked in, effectively freezing him in place.
• In Justice League of America (Rebirth), Vixen ends up defeating Lord Havok by exploiting a major flaw of his - his steel-like body. As he constantly boasts, it's not armor, it's his skin. So, Vixen ends up just channeling a poison dart frog and slugs him until the poison takes effect as it's absorbed by his skin.
• Justice Society of America:
  • All-Star Comics: Professor Elba runs into a dark corridor in order to ambush the pursuing JLA members with a syringe full of his serum, he's then followed by Dr. Mid-Nite—who can see in the dark—and stabs himself with the syringe when Mid-Nite dodges the attack leading directly to his own death.
  • Super-villain Johnny Sorrow can kill people by making them look at his face. He does this to Dr Mid-Nite, believing he's killed him. Except Dr Mid-Nite is not only blind, but used the lenses in his goggles to record the image, and shows it to Sorrow himself, resulting in Sorrow's own death.
  • In a later story, Wonder Woman does something similar when she gets Sorrow to look at a reflective surface.
  • America vs. the Justice Society: The Brainwave mined the approaches to his lair with explosives to prevent the Justice Society from rescuing their companions. Johnny Thunder's Thunderbolt gets through, though, and ends up replanting the explosives under the Brainwave's tower, so when he pushed the detonator plunger, he blew up his own lair instead.
• Legion of Super-Heroes:
  • In Legion of 3 Worlds, the Time Trapper sends Superboy Prime into the future, where he attempts to finally make his mark on the world and unleashes a plethora of villains. While the Legions of three different dimensions resurrect Kid Flash and Superboy to battle Prime, Superman and the Legion's three founders are dragged in to deal with the Time Trapper, revealed to be a future version of Superboy Prime. Eventually, the four drag the Time Trapper out and he and Prime confront each other. When the Time Trapper starts commanding Prime to aid him in eradicating them all, Superboy Prime flips out and slugs him, causing them to be seemingly eradicated. Braniac 5 sums up that moment perfectly:
    Brainiac 5: "What An Idiot"
  • In The Great Darkness Saga, Darkseid turns three billions of Daxamites into his slave army, but when Saturn Girl breaks his mind control and turns them on him, Darkseid -who was about to crush the Legion on his own- has to run off.
  • Supergirl's Three Super Girl-Friends: When Brainiac attacked Earth for the final time, Superman scanned his ship's deck and noticed Brainiac's pet had accidentally turned off the ship's forcefield (Superman knowing exactly what that button did because Brainiac had put an unnecessary label on it), and he then caused Brainiac to be hit by his own shrinking ray to get rid of him.
  • The Earthwar Saga: Lightning Lord fries one minion who suggested to kill his sister, unaware that Timber Wolf and the Winathian police were using a weather watch machine to detect and pinpoint any instance of unnatural lightning.
  • The Condemned Legionnaires: When Satan Girl builds a pair of bracelet-like devices to draw the Red Kryptonite from her and into other humans, she decides to target the female Legionnaires to scare Supergirl into believing she is meant to be another victim... and inevitably informing the Legion of her existence, alerting them to her scheme, and providing them a personal motivation to stop her.
• In issue #8 of the 1973 Mister Miracle series, the eponymous hero is sentenced to a trial by combat with the Lump inside the latter's mind. In the real world, the Lump is pretty much what his name implies — a vaguely humanoid, immobile lump of pink matter; in his mental world, on the other hand, he's a shape-shifter who, while still pink, can become virtually anything he can think of. A battle royale ensues between him and Mister Miracle until, after surviving a blast of near-nuclear strength, the Super Escape Artist forces the Lump back into something like his outside form, and then shows him his refection in a piece of "glass" created by the explosion. The Lump is horrified and retreats into his Id, allowing Mister Miracle to escape from the mental world.
• Amazing-Man was a very minor DC hero who had the ability to assimilate the properties of any non-organic substance he touched. He died in the pages of Starman when a villain tricked him into assimilating glass and then shattered him to pieces.
• Superman:
  • Subverted with Lex Luthor: the kryptonite ring that he used to bedevil Superman ends up giving him fatal radiation poisoning due to prolonged exposure. However, he cheats death by cloning himself.
  • Played straight in The Black Ring: Lex Luthor gains omnipotence and learns Superman's Clark Kent. However, he can only hold onto that power if he never uses it to hurt anyone. Ever. Not even Superman. The knowledge increases his anger and his desire to kill Superman, leading him to lose it all, and for good measure, sends him spiraling into the Phantom Zone.
  • Mentioned for being hilarious, the otherwise quite forgettable Superman vs. Dracula comic ended with Dracula draining Superman's blood and absorbing his power - at which point his head exploded. Superman, after all, is solar powered.
  • In Superman (1939) #338: Let My People Grow!, Brainiac shoots his shrinking ray at Supergirl, but she deflects it back at him. Struck by his own ray, Brainiac begins to rapidly shrink, and he pleads with Kara to save him, but she coolly states that the enlarging ray has not enough energy left to save Superman, Kandor and him, so Brainiac is out of luck◊ (note that Brainiac had previously shrunk both Superman and the city of Kandor). Even Superman begs her to use the ray to save Brainiac, and she replies: "Cousin... NO!"◊
  • In The Trial of Superman, Superman's brought to a tribunal to be judged in a case of Sins of Our Fathers for the near extinction of the Kryptonian race. This was brought on by Hank Henshaw, the Cyborg Superman. Not only was Superman deemed innocent in the end, but the tribunal member who had a major hard-on for trying to execute Supes is deposed for being blatantly insane, then executed for resisting arrest, and Henshaw himself is tried and convicted for the destruction of Coast City.
  • Krypton No More: When Superman fights villains Protector and Radion, he tricks the Protector into becoming a reflecting surface, and Radion into shooting at him. Radion's beam knocks Protector out before bouncing back to Radion.
  • In War World an alien race known as the Warzoons built Warworld for the purpose of conquering the universe. However, their super-weapon was the cause of their destruction.
    Superman: Do you remember that mountain of graves we noticed on Warworld? That's what gave me the answer! The Warzoons weren't buried in a mass grave as there'd be if the race was destroyed by some great illness!
    Supergirl: You're right! The Warzoons must've died one by one! They buried each other — except for the last one buried by the peace-loving Largas!
    Superman: Precisely! And there's only one thing on that entire satellite capable of killing the Warzoon one at a time — the control helmet in the command console!
    Supergirl: The massive energy-drain must've proven too much for their minds to endure! One by one they were destroyed by the very weapon their warlike race had spent untold centuries creating — one by one, they died — victims of massive cerebral hemorrhage — and their own insatiable lust for power!
  • In Kryptonite Nevermore, two crooks run into a spirit who has possessed a statue and stolen two thirds of Superman's power. The ghost is naive, and they teach him to use his power to hurt and destroy. Suddenly he wonders why he should follow their orders instead of hurting them since he is more powerful than them.
  • In Superman/Doomsday: Hunter/Prey, we learn that Doomsday's creator, Bertron, never stopped to consider what would happen if Doomsday broke loose and, even worse, remembered all of the deaths brought upon him. He learns too late that the end result is having the monster turn his attention to you after he's killed everything else and murder him, too.
  • The Krypton Chronicles: The Vrangs had been ruling Krypton and using Kryptonians as slaves for decades until a Vrang soldier gunned down a slave called Val-Lor off for speaking up against his masters. Instead of squashing any thought of rebellion out of the slaves' minds, Val-Lor's execution sparked up a rebellion which led to the end of the Vrang Dominion.
  • In Two for the Death of One, evil sorcerer Syrene casts a barrage of fireballs to stop Lord Satanis from breaking into her fortress, but he deflects them towards the castle's walls. The ensuing explosion causes a gap in the wall, allowing him to step into the place.
  • In Demon Spawn Nightflame summoned a floating pentagram in order to drain Linda's powers and life-force. During her final bout, Supergirl grabs Nightflame and tosses her in the floating sign. Nightflame’s body dissolves instantly.
  • The story arc Red Daughter of Krypton provides several examples:
    • When Lobo fought Supergirl, he thought of driving her irrationally mad so she was unable to fight effectively. So he pushed her Berserk Buttons constantly, taunted her and mocked her until she flew off the handle... and pummelled him brutally.
    • The King of the planet Primeen got a judge shot to protect his son. His actions drove Sheko — the aforementioned judge — so furious that she became a Red Lantern and killed them all.
  • Elseworld's Finest: Supergirl & Batgirl: Lex Luthor hired a hit-man to kill the Wayne family. Joe Chill murdered the Gordons instead, and their daughter trained and prepared to take their murderer down. He also made a fortune researching the cells of baby Kal-El whom he killed. However Supergirl turned against him right away when she found out about it.
  • In Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade, Mr. Mxyzptlk manipulates events to bring Kara to Earth, collects her emotions during a year and builds a machine based on Kara's Kryptonian biology to process them and make him all-powerful. However, because his machine is based on Kara's biology and powered with her emotions, she can go after him and claim the power he wanted to seize.
    Supergirl: Your machine utilized and magnified my emotions... my energies... it never occurred to you that I could follow you? That I could claim this power?
  • At the end of The Unknown Supergirl, Lesla-Lar gets arrested because she uses her depowering ray on Kara so many times that Kandor's police ends up noticing that someone was using banned technology and traces the beam's heat signature back to its source.
  • In Man of Steel (2018), if Rogol Zaar had dismissed the mere existence of a couple of Kryptonian survivors, he and the Circle would have continued to get away with their crimes. Instead, he travels to Earth because he absolutely must ensure that all Kryptonians are dead, boasts needlessly about being Krypton's real killer and gets his posterior kicked; likewise, his actions compel Supergirl to investigate his claims in The Killers of Krypton, which ultimate gets the Circle and himself exposed and punished.
  • Also in The Killers of Krypton, Splyce fires an energy blast at Supergirl, expecting to fry her. Instead, Supergirl is healed and recharged by Splyce's solar blast.
  • In Starfire's Revenge, the titular villain had done a good job of building a criminal empire, while staying under the radar of police and super-heroes, until she decided to test a power-nullifying pill on Supergirl. Her attempted assassination causes Supergirl to learn about Starfire's existence and take interest in her operations, which results in Starfire being arrested after her organization has been destroyed.
  • Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow: If Krem had waited for Supergirl leaving the planet before ambushing Ruthye, he would have certainly killed the young girl and taken his valuable sword back. Instead, he attacks both women and gets Supergirl involved in Ruthye's revenge, which leads to his death.
  • In The Death of Superman (1961), Lex Luthor's need to gloat about his actions instead of disposing of Superman quietly becomes ultimately his undoing when he is captured and put on trial, since everybody listened to his radioed voluntary confession broadcast worldwide.
  • In The Hunt for Reactron, a member of Perseus Hazard's K-Squad, which is trying to capture the heroes, plants a white dwarf grenade on Nightwing's chest. Nightwing takes it apart with his telekinesis, unintentionally setting it off. The ensuing blast knocks the K-Squad soldiers out and away, and lets Nightwing and his companions escape.
  • In The Girl with the X-Ray Mind, Lesla-Lar imprisons Lena Thorul/Luthor in Kandor and heads towards a deserted island to break the Phantom Zoners out of their dimensional prison. The Zoners are not interested in teaming up with Lesla, though, and test a disintegrator gun on her. Their raygun kills Lesla and destroys one mountain, causing one earthquake which lift Atlantis above the waters, drawing Supergirl's attention. When Supergirl appears to fix the mess, Lori Lemaris reveals she telepathically listened to the villains' conversation after seeing Lesla flying over the sea. Now Supergirl knows what the Zoners are plotting, but she cannot stop them without help. So she turns to Lex Luthor, who agrees to help Supergirl just because Lesla-Lar imprisoned his sister Lena in Kandor.
  • The Phantom Zone: Kryptonian criminals Az-Rel and Nadira were caught when the victim whom they ambushed and robbed turned out to be a police decoy carrying a stun-grenade.
  • In The Plague of the Antibiotic Man, Amalak tries to shoot Supergirl's brains off, but he realizes that his star-cannon's trigger has been jammed by Superman's heat vision. Amalak drops his ray-gun and prepares to attempt to dispose of Supergirl in another way, but he does not realize cosmic energy is building up within the obstructed barrel. Finally, his star-cannon explodes, obliterating Amalak's space base.
  • The Super-Revenge of Lex Luthor: Lex breaks Brainiac out of prison to help him carry out his scheme to drive Superman crazy. The evil duo then kidnaps and impersonates a pair of psychiatrists looking to evaluate Superman's mental health and ability to use his powers safely. During testing, though, they ask Superman to use his X-Ray Vision to identify one bomb out of objects, failing to realize that Superman would recognize Brainiac's tech. Superman stealthily scans both "psychiatrists", and he sees through both their disguises and Luthor's gaslighting ploy.
  • Supergirl (1984): As dodging the demon summoned by Selena (a shadow-copy of the witch herself), Supergirl takes Nigel's advice to turn the witch's powers against her. Supergirl creates a cyclone that traps Selena and the demon together, and since it now has nothing else to go after, it turns on Selena, who is scared of her own "reflection".
  • In Girl Power, Lex Luthor tests the effects of black Kryptonite on Supergirl, thinking it will "draw her inner darkness out". Rather than making Kara evil as he expected, though, the Black-K creates an evil Supergirl duplicate which nearly kills Luthor.
  • In The Death of Luthor: As trying to murder Supergirl, Luthor accidentally shoots himself with his own ray gun.
  • The K-Metal from Krypton: When tinkering with Craig Matthews' will, his business partners Gizzard and Buzzard let his nephew John Manners keep the "Hidden Gold", figuring out that they could mock him for owning a worthless picture. When John learns his painting hides a map to a gold mine, he swears to sue them for every last cent.
  • Brainiac's Blitz: Brainiac wastes his weapons, which he intended to destroy Superman with, and his ship's power attempting to kill Supergirl. When he weaponizes his force field as a last resort and fails, Brainiac is left with nothing to fight Superman or Supergirl, and no defense to keep them away from him, so he must run away.
  • The Life Story of Superman: Luthor's plan to blow up a Superman expo (by replacing the real Superman with a clone, which will trigger a bomb when leading the public back to the exit) fails because Luthor cannot refrain himself from tinkering with the clone's memory to make himself to look good. Thus, the attendees are too astonished at the sight of "Superman" describing Luthor as a misunderstood and innocent genius who was brought down and vilified by Superman's own petty jealousy to think of leaving the building, buying the real Superman enough time to escape from Luthor's trap.
    Superman: "Once again, his hatred for me clouded his judgment! He overlooked the fact that in altering my recollection of the incident that started our feud...he imprinted his own attitudes on the clone's mind— complete with his own biases, distortions, and paranoia!"
  • "The Super-Steed of Steel":
    • Gorbin intends to capture two merpeople to exhibit in his sea circus. By chance Gorbin catches Lori -Superman's college girlfriend- and Jerro -one of Supergirl's would-be suitors- , thus painting a HUGE target on his back (of course, the Supers would have wanted to intervene no matter what if they had known about Gorbin's human trafficking, but capturing two friends of theirs who have telepathic powers ensured that they found out about Gorbin's activities right away).
    • Vostar was not even on Supergirl's radar, but when she and Comet accidentally ruined his attempt to get rid of Lori and Jerro, Vostar decided to take revenge. His attempt to mess with Kara gets her to take notice of him and take him down in a quick and effective fashion.
  • "Supergirl's Big Brother": As soon as he finds out that Linda Danvers is Supergirl, Biff Rigger gives up his original plan to con the Danvers out of their money by pretending to be their son Jan-which could have worked- in lieu of convincing Supergirl to give him superpowers. After managing to talk her into giving him one pill which grants powers for one hour, Biff uses them so carelessly that he burns off his fake birthmark, tipping off Supergirl that he is a fraud. Since his attempt to blackmail her into making him more super-power pills fails, Biff tries to make his own pill, but he gets the ingredients wrong and gets killed when his powers wear off too soon.
  • The Super-Duel in Space: Mistaking the first manned space flight launched by Earthmen as an attack specifically directed against him, Brainiac attacks the spaceship and then steals several Earth cities, thus putting himself in direct conflict with Superman (who did not even know of his existence). Brainiac's strike will not only cause his first defeat and the loss of his stolen cities, but will lead to many defeats and humiliations at the hands of Superman and his cousin through the years, culminating in his final death in "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?".
• In Teen Titans story arc The Judas Contract, Terra died by accidental suicide when she imploded the HIVE complex out of sheer rage, trying to kill Deathstroke when she thought he betrayed her.
• Thunderworld: It happens several times in the first issue. From Dr. Sivana and his counterparts across the multiverse foiling their own plans of creating a 8th day (Sivanaday) where they're allowed to win by cheating themselves out of suspendium to make it an 8-hour day, to Lady Sivana (Georgia Sivana) getting tricked into depowering herself by Captain Marvel Junior out of her own desire to use her beauty to get her way.
• Neron in Underworld Unleashed is defeated when he gets what he wants - the soul of Captain Marvel. However, because Cap gave it to him selflessly, his soul was too pure to keep and he's hurt by its pureness.
• In Watchmen, Dollar Bill was killed when his cape was caught in a revolving door in a bank, and was shot by some thug. It becomes double when the bank happens to be the one who he worked for, and made him put on a cape.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Wonder Woman (1942):
    • Master De Stroyer set up mines around the Sargasso Sea Kingdom to prevent the people he'd enslaved there from escaping. In his own haste to escape the heroes he ended up ordering his sub directly into the minefield and killed himself.
    • In the Huntress back-up feature in issue #290 the "Crimelord" gets pulled over the edge of his own fortress while trying to grab Huntress and falls to his death due to the weight of the armor he'd bragged about.
  • Judgment In Infinity: When Wonder Woman breaks free out of her cage, the Adjudicator shoots his eyebeams at her. Wonder Woman deflects them so they hit the cages of Supergirl, Power Girl and Starfire, who proceed to release the remaining imprisoned heroines.

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