Laser Guided Karma / Comic Books

Laser-Guided Karma in Comic Books

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• Anthony Bourdain's Hungry Ghosts:
  • In "The Starving Skeleton", a chef had refused to fix something for a starving man, only for that man's undead spirit to return and eat him as revenge.
  • The titular pirates in "The Pirates" make it no secret that they all intend to rape the woman they find adrift in the ocean. In-response, the woman (revealed to be a Sazae-oni) steals all of their testicles and swims off with them.
  • In "Salty Horse", a Spanish Lord develops an insatiable appetite for horse-meat and has every single one of his horses - including the foals - killed, cooked, and eaten. One of these horses manifests as a vengeful spirit and possesses him. If the story-teller is anything to go by, the rest of his life was very unpleasant.
  • At the end of "The Heads", a mugger tries to mug the protagonist after he has been through hell escaping a Rokurokobi and being accused of murder. He then gives him the detached head as compensation, whereupon it comes to life and eats the mugger.
  • In "Deep", a particularly sadistic chef that sexually molests his apprentice has his shirikodama ripped out of his torn-apart carcass and eaten by a Kappa.
  • In "The Snow Woman", the Yuki-onna spares the man — and even has sex with him — in exchange for not speaking of it to anyone. Years later, he confesses of his encounter to his wife. His wife turns into the yukionna and freezes him to death.
  • In "The Cow Head", the starving villagers kill and eat the kudan that had done nothing to them. Then youkai all burst out of their stomachs.
  • The chefs in the Framing Device reveal themselves as youkai and cook and eat their hosts, doing so to punish them for their Conspicuous Consumption.
• In Archie Comics, Veronica's schemes to beat Betty usually tend to backfire on her.
• Batman:
  • Batman: Dark Victory has these:
    • Former commissioner and Corrupt Cop Gillian Loeb briefly reappears in issue #2. Jim Gordon, who'd recently attained his iconic rank as Commissioner, is clearly less than pleased by the visit — and rightfully so as Loeb gloats about both Harvey Dent's transformation into Two-Face and the Hangman killing Chief O'Hara, and to not-so-subtly imply that he intends to use the latter to get the Commissioner position back from Gordon. The issue ends with the reveal that Loeb has been killed by the Hangman.
    • SWAT officer Pratt, another corrupt cop (whose crimes included partaking in a firebombing of a building ordered by Loeb and attempting to shoot a cat while searching through the wreckage for Batman) tries to shoot Batman as retaliation for Bats punching him through a wall (which itself was a response to Pratt's attempt to shoot the cat). Batman is saved from Pratt's shot thanks to his body armor but is knocked out from the impact. When he comes to, he finds that the Hangman got to Pratt while he was unconscious.
    • A stand-off between the Joker and Two-Face ends with Two-Face repaying a beating the Joker gave him in The Long Halloween with a similar beating of his own.
  • Batman: Contagion sees Armand Krol's efforts to get revenge on Gotham for voting him out (by appointing incompetent Dirty Cop Andrew Howe to replace Sarah Essen as police commissioner) and downplaying the Clench crisis to try to keep order. The governor, long fed up with Krol's crap, sends in the National Guard, anyway; tells Krol of this after the fact; and goes ahead and swears Marion Grange, the woman Krol lost to, as mayor ahead of schedule, who also informs Krol of this after the fact, while she's kicking him out of the office and firing Howe so she can reinstate Jim Gordon as Commissioner. During the crisis, the police just opt to listen to Gordon anyway, even though he was still a civilian at that point.
• Berrybrook Middle School
  • After being insufferable bullies to Jensen throughout "Brave", Foster and especially Yannic are caught red-handed while harassing him by his friends and some teachers. Yannic is seemingly suspended for good, while Foster comes back a very changed and regretful kid now on the receiving end of what he used to do alongside his worse companion. Jensen decides to forgive him regardless.
  • At first, James seems like a Karma Houdini when the last we see of him is mocking Jorge for being framed. But the trope is played straight with Offscreen Karma when it's revealed that he and his cronies were suspended. It helps that the events beforehand had him progressively lose what was important to him (his girlfriend and other kids' respect).
• From Black Science:
  • In the first issue, Grant impulsively rescues a slave during his smash-and-grab. They immediately run into her husband when they reach the surface. Overjoyed to be reunited, the husband leads his warriors against the slavers pursuing Grant so the latter can escape.
  • A woman murders her alternate universe clone and takes her place. Grant reveals evidence of the murder to her family and calls the police, knowing that she can't furnish any realistic defense.
• In Camelot 3000, Sir Tristan's reincarnation as a woman initially seems purely random, until it's revealed that he'd raped at least one woman in his previous life. His new female form is therefore both a deterrent and a karmic lesson, especially when he/she is stalked by his/her reincarnation's former fiancee, who won't take no for an answer.
• Countdown to Final Crisis shows karma being paid onto a resident of Earth-3. Superman-Prime kidnaps Annataz Arataz, the evil doppelganger of Zatanna, and forces her to help him torture Mr. Mxyzptlk for information on Earth-Prime's whereabouts. When Annataz is first shown, she's a sniveling coward who begs Prime not to kill her, but as her ordeal goes on she finds the strength to help Myx and turn against Prime, foretelling that he will never find his home. Myx offers to help Annataz escape, but she sends him away as a way of acknowledging what a horrible person she truly was, and that Prime's torture was karma getting even. She pulls a Heroic Sacrifice as a way to fully atone for her past deeds, allowing Prime to kill her when he brings down his headquarters on top of them. Even Mxyzptlk, the mercurial trickster that he is, feels Annataz doesn't deserve to die that way.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: In Scrooge and Flintheart's second confrontation for determining who's the world's richest duck, they convert all their holdings into silver dollars and will have the piles measured. Glomgold, worried he might lose, tries to cheat by purchasing a special liquid that can shrink things with the goal of using it to shrink Scrooge's pile of money. His plan is thwarted, and he ultimately loses... by the same amount of silver dollars that he spent to buy the juice.
• Poison Ivy (2022): Beatrice Crowley used her chemicals to turn people and plants into monsters. Ivy turns her into a giant, monstrous-looking tree, unable to move or talk.
• An interesting one that took a few storylines to get to. In Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes an elderly couple, acting on the xenophobic drive of Earth-Man, murder a crash-landed alien child and bury him in their field. Flash forward to Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds, where the same couple discover Superboy-Prime in their field. They make the mistake of pissing him off and he vaporizes them both, unwittingly avenging the young alien.
• The Final Crisis Aftermath: Run! mini-series is this trope's race to catch The Human Flame. After being pegged as the man who photographed the Martian Manhunter's final moments, he suddenly finds himself the most wanted man ever and he decides he's not going to be pushed around anymore. He gains what he feels is ultimate power, only to for karma to finally catch up, leading to Firestorm, Red Tornado, and John Stewart to haul him away in a prison in space, unable to move or use his powers. John even calls this karma.
• In the early days of Firestorm, the villain Plastique tried to blow up a building full of innocent people with a suit that had a bunch of bombs attached to it. So how did Firestorm defeat her? He vaporized her suit to get rid of the bombs, leaving Plastique herself naked in public, laughed at by her would-be victims.
• The Flash:
  • In one issue early in his time as the Flash, Wally West expresses contempt for a homeless man who seeks shelter in his apartment building. Then he's evicted, and thanks to various other misfortunes (his credit cards being inexplicably declined, his superspeed shorting out from hunger, losing both his luggage and his mother) he's reduced to eating pretzels from mud puddles in less than a day and getting the same amount of scorn from passersby (one of whom dropped that pretzel in the puddle to see if he was desperate enough to eat it). It eventually turns out that it's all due to machinations from aliens who were deliberately putting him under stress.
  • Zoom (Hunter Zolomon) tried to ruin Wally's life because he thought Misery Builds Character and he wanted to make him a better hero. It was also partly out of revenge for not helping him prevent his paralysis at the hands of Gorilla Grodd. So Wally shoves him through one of his time rips, where Zoom is forced to watch His Greatest Failure: Sending his father-in-law to his death because he (a criminal profiler) told him a criminal he was meeting with wouldn't be armed. Again and again and again. Hearing himself say "He won't have a gun. Trust me Ashley..." over and over. The last we see of Zoom in that story, he's vibrating from impotent rage. So... How about that misery, Zoom?
• One issue of G.I. Joe: Special Missions juxtaposed positive and negative examples of this. Just before a mission, pilots Ace and Slipstream are friendly and cordial with their ground crews while Cobra's Strato-Viper is mean and abusive to his. During the mission, the Strato-Viper shoots down Ace, only to be shot down himself by Slipstream. The Joe ground crew rushes to Ace's aid and rescues him, but the Cobra ground crew takes their time and gets to the crash site just in time to see the Strato-Viper's Night Raven slip beneath the ocean surface. Not only that, the Strato-Viper was unable to escape from the cockpit because one crew member stole his breakout tool.
• Green Arrow: Deconstructed during the Cry for Justice & Rise and Fall storyline, where Green Arrow I (Oliver Queen) murders Prometheus for destroying Star City and causing the death of his adopted granddaughter Lian Harper. During Oliver's capture and trial, his family washes their hands of him, with his wife Black Canary (Dinah Lance) returning her wedding ring and declaring their marriage over. His adopted son Speedy I/Arsenal/Red Arrow I (Roy Harper) and biological son Green Arrow II (Connor Hawke) tell him they are through with him. It is implied that Oliver killing Prometheus is the last straw, with Oliver constantly cheating on Dinah, his neglect of Roy, and his abandonment of Connor and lying that he did not know he was his son was the main cause of them leaving Oliver. However, before that storyline, Oliver Queen works hard to repair his relationships with them, and they had forgiven him before. It is also implied that they were traumatized by the events of the story, Star City being destroyed for Dinah, the loss of his daughter for Roy, Connor being in a coma and losing and regaining his memories, and with the resentment they have for Oliver despite forgiving him, they all lash out at Oliver.
• Literally in Halo: Blood Line. After the Covenant warrior Reff goes mad with power, kills his brother, and tries to take over an ancient Forerunner superweapon, the facility's robot caretaker fires an Eye Beam of doom and fries him to a crisp.
• The Incredible Hulk: Bruce Banner's father, Brian Banner, was, not to put too fine a point on it, a complete and utter monster. He brutally abused his wife and son, eventually killing his wife and forcing Bruce not to testify. Eventually, he broke out of an insane asylum (where he was put after drunkenly gloating about getting away with murder) and confronted Bruce at his mother's grave. The two fought, and Bruce knocked Brian down... which caused him to smash head-first into his wife's tombstone, killing him.
• Immortal Hulk: Darrio Agger, CEO of Roxxon Corporation, has spent his entire life getting away with everything, including trying to sell out Earth to an invasion. Unfortunately for him, there's a new writer in charge, so instead of being a Karma Houdini, his plan to get back at the Hulk results in his chosen monster turning on him the minute Dario stops being useful to him, and Dario being eaten alive.
• Happens to Iznogoud in almost every episode. Whatever trap he's trying to set for the Caliph, he's the one who will fall into it, so that he ends up blasted into space, trapped in the Stone Age or the 20th century or an alternate dimension, turned into a dog or a frog or a woodlouse or a gold-plated statue or a photograph, turned invisible, and so on and so forth. One particularly memorable example happens in "Scandal in Baghdad" when he has a scandalmonger who can literally sniff out scandals plant a fake story in the papers about the Caliph having an abandoned illegitimate child. When the plan backfires, Iznogoud jails the scandalmonger... who sniffs out that Iznogoud himself has three secret children whom he had imprisoned so that he didn't have to deal with them — and when Iznogoud is jailed for being a deadbeat dad, the family reunion is far from happy...
• In Jupiter's Circle, J. Edgar Hoover tries to blackmail Blue-Bolt into becoming his pawn through photos of him in a tryst with another man. He later drops the scheme when Skyfox blackmails him with his own photos of Hoover engaged in sex with his right-hand man.
• After Red Mist is revealed as The Mole, Kick-Ass soundly beats the shit out of him the first chance he gets, and without much effort to boot. And this is pre-Took a Level in Badass Kick-Ass, for those keeping track.
• In Love and Rockets, Gato and Sergio are killed in a car crash immediately after murdering Fortunato, because Sergio injured his hands beating Fortunato to death and consequently lost control of the car.
• Some of the strips Sergio Aragonés does for MAD feature this. One notable example is from "A MAD Look at Racism", where at a restaurant, a black man is treated poorly by the head waiter, ignoring him in favor of white patrons, placing him at terrible tables, etc. The waiter gets his comeuppance when he later finds out that the black man was a food critic for a local newspaper, who proceeded to give a scathing review to the restaurant.
• In Preacher, Cassidy the vampire is captured and tortured mercilessly by a hitman until Jesse arrives to save him. Jesse knocks the hitman into the pit where Cassidy's been contained, breaking his neck in the fall and paralyzing but not killing him. The last shot is of Cassidy leaning right over him with a big grin and saying "How're yeh?".
• Rick and Morty (Oni): When the Meeseeks escapes prison, the guard viciously beats his legless cellmate, who stayed behind, not wanting to get in trouble. Once the guard's finished, he realizes that the Meeseeks, on its way out, let all of the other prisoners out of their cells.
• If you encounter the Runaways, stay far away from Molly Hayes. Do not yell at her, spook her, be mean to her, point a gun at her, breathe fire at her, or try to hurt her in any other way. And definitely do not kidnap her and try and kill her, even if her evil parents killed your whole gang and psychically paralyzed you. It never ends well. Just ask the Punisher.
• The Spectre: Overlapping with There Is No Kill Like Overkill, those who find themselves on the wrong side of the Spectre almost always end up facing the most gruesome form of poetic justice.
• Spider-Man:
  • In his origin story Spider-Man allows a burglar to escape from a pursuing policeman. One page later his beloved Uncle Ben is dead, killed by the same man. Not a Tragic Mistake, as this event then galvanizes him to devote his life to heroically fighting crime instead of propelling him towards a tragic catastrophe. This is also why Spider-Man decides not to interfere with the event when he travels back through time in Amazing Spider-Man #500.
  • J. Jonah Jameson's poor treatment of Peter Parker and his financing attempts to capture/kill Spider-Man have repeatedly come back to haunt him.
  • Flash Thompson seems to be an aversion, as he ends up sharing an apartment with Peter Parker. Averted/lampshaded when he loses his legs when serving in Iraq, saving a fellow soldier, fulfilling the jock ending up crippled aspect of this trope.
• Karma finally catches up to Prince Namor in the All-New, All-Different Marvel reboot of Squadron Supreme — after willingly destroying the Black Panther's kingdom of Wakanda in Avengers vs. X-Men and pairing up with Thanos and his group to speed up the Incursions in the lead up to Secret Wars (2015), he finally gets his comeuppance as he ends up getting killed at the hands of Hyperion, whose homeworld was destroyed by Namor's actions.
• Star Wars: Doctor Aphra: Aphra spends the entire Catastrophe Con arc manipulating and using a hapless, innocent shapeshifter despite his kindness towards her, even admitting to him that "it's used or get used" when he tries to protest her treatment of him. Turns out he wasn't an innocent shapeshifter after all, but Dr. Evazan, and Aphra's actions gave him an idea to use her for a little entertainment.
• In Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade, Mxyzptlk and his kind initially find messing with Linda Lee funny as part of a game they're playing together. But then he gets greedy, breaks the rules (never take the game too far), traps his kind in a separate dimension, and tries to gain power for himself. After he's defeated and poofs back home in humiliation, his kind punish him by sending him to the 1st dimension, which is just a flat land akin to a kid's scribble drawing.
• In Tintin:
  • In The Blue Lotus, Tintin defends a rickshaw driver from an abusive racist bully. Later, when the Japanese put a price on his head, he manages to escape the town with the help of the driver's brother.
  • Likewise, in Prisoners of the Sun, he defends Zorrino from bullying foreigners, and is given a talisman which will save him from death.
• The The Twilight Zone comic book "Specter of Youth" features Villain Protagonist Max Tiberias running a shady antiques operation that rips off impoverished scavengers for rare artefacts that can then be sold for a thousand times the buying price. Also, when some representatives from a local orphanage ask him for a donation to help homeless children, Max coldly refuses them despite having started out as a penniless orphan himself. Soon after, a sponge diver approaches him with an amphora filled with a mysterious liquid that turns out to be the Fountain of Youth. Naturally, Max rips off the diver like all his other suppliers and claims the whole thing for himself, gloating as he drinks the liquid... only to find too late that he drank too much. Max is regressed to infancy, and because the orphanage doesn't have the resources to take care of him, he's left with caretakers that expect him to repay their charity once he's old enough. The end result is that Max ends up right back where he started - a penniless orphan.