Considering that, in The DCU, Death Is Cheap and villains easily escape from prison in most comic books, and the fact that comics are generally written as unending serials, this trope is pretty much the rule rather than the exception.
- Black Orchid: Junkin Buckley, a wily Dirty Kid, is last seen in the 1993 series escaping yet again, avoiding any punishment for lying to Suzy as well as his actions in The Children's Crusade (Vertigo), where he willingly assisted the slaver in trying to make slaves of the children in Free Country.
- Empire: Supervillain Golgoth rules all humanity with an iron fist (yet finds it's not everything he thought it'd be). Even as his problems mount, though, the Resistance finds itself abandoned by its allies and betrayed from within (their fancy new weapons don't work). Oops. Golgoth manages to snap out of his funk long enough to personally crush the last embers of freedom. He is forced to snap his daughter's neck after seeing how his lifestyle has turned her into a monster, but this probably counts as the token loss.
- Fables:
- Gepetto runs an evil empire killing thousands of beings, and enslaving millions. After his empire comes crashing down, the good guys offer him amnesty and move him into an apartment in New York City with all amenities paid. Which was what all the Fables got.
- Bigby Wolf, the lovable rogue sheriff, used to eat villages for the giggles. Not villagers, mind you. Entire villages.
- Most of the characters did horrible things but in the Real World their crimes are in the past, by Fabletown decree. Anything they do now is punished. The Three Little Pigs mutiny and two are guillotined.
- In "The Last Jack Tale," Jack of Fables is finally caught by a lot of devils he cheated on deals for his soul, and imprisoned on a barren planet. However, he spends his time there thinking up and writing down every detail of a world exactly to his liking "without all those consequences," and when he's ready, he summons his old friend the Pathetic Fallacy, and makes it real, to spend eternity in his version of Paradise.
- Heroes in Crisis does end with Wally West jailed for the deaths that occurred at Sanctuary. Meanwhile, Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman receive absolutely no punishment at all for the fact their half-assing of Sanctuary and abdication of the work to an abusive computer program led to multiple heroes being psychologically tortured and abused (in fact, Wally's nervous breakdown happened due to the way Sanctuary treated so all the deaths that occurred were technically their fault) and are allowed to just keep running Sanctuary as is with the excuse they apparently have no other options. Meanwhile, Lois Lane also receives no punishment for publishing all of the secrets and private information Wally sent her during his suicidal breakdown, despite that realistically the Daily Planet should've received a civil liberties lawsuit and Lois herself should've been fired for such a massive violation of ethics. Even after The Flash (Infinite Frontier) saw Wally being absolved of the deaths thanks to it being retconned into Savitar escaping the Speed Force and Gold Beetle revealing all of the heroes who died (aside from Poison Ivy and Arsenal) are alive in the Timepoint, nothing is done to excuse or acknowledge the blatant emotional and mental torture the Trinity were responsible for, nor Lois's violation of civil liberties.
- Manhunter: when the metahuman serial killer Copperhead is let free because they treated his metahuman status as an excuse for his murders, she gets so fed up that she decided to settle things personally.
- Superman:
- In The Immortal Superman, the Time Trapper, gets away with preventing Superman from going back to his own time, since Superman does not even figure out someone is messing up with him.
- In The Strange Revenge of Lena Luthor, the crook who was paid to capture Supergirl and the scientist who designed the maze-like death trap for her manage to get away when she breaks free and takes their partners out.
- Elseworld's Finest: Supergirl & Batgirl: Lex Luthor commits awful crimes — which include the murder of baby Kal-El, getting Barbara Gordon's parents killed, and who knows what else — but Supergirl and Batgirl only manage to expose publicly one of his crimes. And Barbara knows that he will buy his way out of jail.
- The Great Darkness Saga: After spreading chaos and destruction all over the galaxy, and enslaving a whole sentient race, Darkseid just teleports himself and his power base away when his mind control upon the Daxamites gets broken.
- In Death & the Family, Silver Banshee murders several persons while looking for her clan's relics, gets what she wants, and teleports away before nobody can stop her. And since she was not seen again in Post-Crisis continuity, she did get away with it.
- In The Supergirl-Batgirl Plot, Mr. Mxyzptlk keep Supergirl and Batgirl trapped in another dimension for days while they pull practical jokes on Superman and Batman. When their gambit is finally uncovered, Batmite simply leaves, whereas Mxyzptlk is forced to leave without his money bet (which he finds merely annoying).
- The Leper from Krypton: After getting Superman infected with a lethal alien disease, Lex Luthor demands $1,000,000 in payment for the cure (this story was written in 1968; taking inflation into consideration, this is roughly equivalent to $8,276,559.03 in 2022). Although Superman advises to not trust Luthor or give in to his blackmail, the money is raised and paid. After he has sent the money to one of his secret lairs using an untraceable delivery method, Lex Luthor reveals he has conned them: there is no cure, and even if he developed one, he would never give it to Superman. Even though Superman ultimately survives, Luthor keeps the blackmail money.
- Supergirl (1984): Nigel, a sorcerer who owns trinkets of "unspeakable evil", is the one who taught Selena black magic. He also helps Selena kidnap Ethan, but he takes no direct action against Supergirl, so Nigel simply walks away after the climax. He even gets his youth restored when Selena's aging spell is undone.
- "The Super-Steed of Steel": Maldor faced absolutely no repercussions for transforming Biron into a horse and later banishing him from the planet, keeping Biron trapped in an asteroid for several millennia.
- Discussed and Zig-Zagged at the end of Transmetropolitan, where nobody's really sure what's gonna happen to the Big Bad after he has been exposed to the public. His considerable wealth is allowing him to pay people off left and right to avoid indictment for his many crimes, but there's just so many people out for his blood now that he's bound to run out of money eventually, and when that happens...
- Watchmen, in which the Well-Intentioned Extremist commits a massive act of unadulterated mass murder and not only gets away with it scot-free, but is actually aided in covering it up by the heroes - because to expose the scheme would endanger the world even more. Although it's left open to interpretation whether or not his plan will ultimately succeed: before chasing Adrian, and with strong suspicions about his plan, Rorschach left his personal notes at the local newspaper. In the last page, after the Happy Ending, a guy in the newspaper reaches towards a stack of papers ("the crank file"). The diary is near the top. The End... Or Is It?.
- In the film adaptation he at least gets given a damn good beating from Dan and a lecture on why his actions were wrong. Of course, he knows his actions are wrong, but inaction would have been catastrophic.
- It is left ambiguous whether he will ultimately be able to live with his actions. He reveals to Dr. Manhattan that he has been having nightmares in which he becomes a monster despite his intentions (Yes, that's another parallel to the Black Freighter story), and essentially asks whether what he did was right, since it ended well; since he's talking to Dr. Manhattan, the response is, naturally, "Nothing ever ends, Adrian." The look on his face after that, which is the last panel in which we see him, indicates that he is extremely unsure of himself by that point. He mentioned feeling the weight of the dead on his shoulders.
- Doomsday Clock:
- Despite being a thorn in Ozymandias, Rorschach, Batman, and The Comedian's sides in both their world and DC's, Mime and Marionette are left unscathed by the end of the comic series, even taking over Nite Owl's former ship Archie as their mobile home for their unborn daughter. Justified as Ozymandias believes that Doctor Manhattan will grant the couple mercy as a reminder of himself sparing the couple before for having their (yet future) son be given to his former lover's family (which it happens), and that the couple will need to remain in the DC universe as an 'anchor' so that their son can traverse from the Watchmen world into the DC world.
- Doctor Manhattan himself also faces no real consequences or punishment for his outright violation of the DC Universe and everyone living in it. While he atones for his actions by restoring the Justice Society as well as Jonathan and Martha Kent, there's no acknowledgment to the destruction of everyone's individual lives and the damage he caused since Flashpoint (murdering Pandora after using her as a scapegoat, making time so unstable multiple versions of the Legion of Super-Heroes have burnt out with Superman not realizing his childhood friends are all dead, trapping Wally West in the Speed Force and trying to drive him insane by forcibly tampering with his memories while also shunting his children into the Dark Multiverse and making Linda Park forget he ever existed). That's not even factoring in the implication that once the universe tried to fight back to restore everyone's memories when Wally escaped, Manhattan doubled down and forced those memories to conform to the timeline he set up.
- Wonder Woman:
- Wonder Woman (1942): In the Pre-Crisis continuity Paula von Gunther is able to leave the Nazis and come to America to help out the war effort after the rescue of her daughter—whom the Nazis kept hostage to get her to work for them—and face no repercussions for the many atrocities she committed while working with the Axis powers and she was not remorseful about the lives she ruined and ended in the service of the Nazis.
- Wonder Woman (1987):
- Vanessa Kapatelis/Silver Swan III was never legally punished for her acts of destruction or murdering Cassandra Sandsmark’s friends after destroying her school. Then again, she was brainwashed into doing it so punishing her would be rather cruel. On the other hand, Circe, who was behind Vanessa's brainwashing, was imprisoned.
- Widow Sazia orchestrates and wins a brutal mob war and the closest thing she gets to punishment was The Joker taking an interest and forcing her to work with him in chains for a couple of days which she escapes at the first opportunity.
- The Legend of Wonder Woman (2016): Tomas Byde (aka the Duke of Deception) faces no repercussions beyond his own guilt after the Lasso of Truth forces him to face the truth of how he was misled and the thousands he has killed to aid the Nazis because of it. He is able to leave and traverse the Earth and then go off to confront Ares instead of making any kind of reparations for what he did.
