Misplaced Retribution in Comic Books.
- A rare humorous example appears above, from the Asterix adventure, Asterix and the Roman Agent. Fulliautomatix, having just been bashed in the foot by village elder Geriatrix (for laughing at him), whips around and punches innocent bystander Cacophonix in the face.Cacophonix: But I didn't say a word!
Fulliautomatix: I know, but all the same, I can't bring myself to bash that old relic!
- Leading to a village-wide brawl as usual... with Geriatrix on the sidelines jumping up and down in rage and demanding to be punched.
- Astro City: For decades, the Drama Queen believed that the original Jack-in-the-Box was responsible for killing her grandfather, the mob boss known as Mister Drama. She confronts Jack-in-the-Box III at the scene of the death, only to learn that her grandfather killed himself and the original Jack because he was dying of cancer. Shocked by this revelation, she tries to immolate herself instead.
- Batman: Lewis Bayard was the son of an Arkham Asylum security guard who was murdered by Doctor Phosphorus during an asylum riot. Years later, Lewis took on the name of The White Knight; a self proclaimed savior to the world. Believing that anyone who appears corrupt must have come from a corrupted bloodline, the White Knight targeted the relatives of Arkham Asylum's inmates in order to save their souls by dressing them as angels and forcing them to commit suicide.
- Daredevil: When he was a boy, Matt Murdock pushed a blind man out of the path of an incoming truck carrying radioactive chemicals. While this saved the man's life, it also cost Matt his sight but enhanced his other four senses. In the limited series Father, Matt takes on a woman named Maggie Farrell as a client. It is ultimately revealed that she is the serial killer Johnny Sockets who has been blinding and murdering Matt's other clients. When she tries to kill Matt and Foggy, the FBI swoop in and shoot her. With her dying breath, Maggie reveals that she is the daughter of the man whom Matt saved as a boy and the reason she was killing Matt's clients was because her father had molested her as a child and she blamed Matt for letting him live long enough to destroy her childhood.
- There is the origin of Doctor Doom. When they were in university, Reed Richards perused Doom's notes for his grand experiment and tried to warn him that some of his calculations were off, which threatened disaster. Doom refused to listen, and when the experiment blew up in his face, as Reed warned, Doom could not accept that he made a mistake and irrationally accused Reed of sabotage, starting their lifelong enmity.
- It actually might not be so misplaced. A recording of the Thing (left in the event of his death) reveals that the night before Doom’s experiment he snuck in and pulled some wires to get back at him for mistreating Reed. So Doom is right that somebody sabotaged his experiment, he just blamed the wrong person. However, the same storyline had time travel prevent Doom's scarring, only for him to wind up becoming a super villain anyway.
- In Issue 62 of Elephantmen, Panya snatches Horn and Sahara's child from Gabbatha and hands the baby over to Serengheti, who promptly kills Panya afterwards and flees with the child. Despite having done nothing wrong, Gabbatha is immediately murdered by Horn in a fit of blind fury.
- The Flash: Barry Allen's Arch-Enemy Eobard Thawne blames Barry for everything bad that happened in his life, and has dedicated himself to ruining Barry's life as a result. While Thawne has numerous backstories, in each of them the consistent thread has been that Thawne's troubles have either been because of bad luck or because of his own immoral choices and actions. It's heavily implied and eventually outright stated Thawne's real motive is jealousy and a desire to force Barry's life to revolve around him.
- One of Green Lantern's Silver Age antagonists was the Aerialist, who was under the delusion that someone at Ferris Aircraft had murdered his beloved (her death was in fact a freak accident) and therefore sought revenge against the company. Notable for being one of the few times Hal Jordan thought the Insanity Defense would actually work, even citing the M'Naughten guideline.
- In the comic book interquel The Eat. Bang! Kill. Tour between season 2 and Season 3 of Harley Quinn (2019), Poison Ivy eventually admits to both herself and her girlfriend Harley that she's taking out her self loathing for her actions out on Harley.
- The Incredible Hulk: Most of the Gamma Corps hunted the Hulk because they wrongly believed he was responsible for their personal tragedies. To their credit, they stop hunting the Hulk once they realize this.
- Mess' child was killed during a battle between the Hulk and the Abomination and she was led to believe that the Hulk threw the bus that killed him. It was actually the Abomination who did it, which was even more galling to Mess because she let the government alter the left half of her body to be Abomination-like.
- Gideon Wilson blamed the Hulk for his son Jim, who was friends with the Hulk. Jim actually died of AIDS (which, to be clear, he did not contract from the Hulk). The Hulk pointed this out to Gideon and then asked asked Gideon why Jim was a runaway pretending to be an orphan in the first place.
- Prodigy's parents claimed that he suffered birth defects because of the Hulk. Prodigy became a Leader-like Gamma mutant and joined the Corps for payback. He later discovered that his parents blamed the Hulk to hide the real reason for his birth defects- their heroin addiction.
- The only members who don't fit this are Grey and Griffin. Grey actually hated his brother Glenn Talbot and just wants to prove himself more capable than his brother by beating the Hulk. Griffin just wants someone to hate.
- Injustice 2: In an alternate universe where Superman turns into a dictator and gets ousted, his adoptive parents Jonathan and Martha Kent are subject to public scrutiny for having found and raised the alien baby that turned into a tyrant... Despite them having nothing to do with the circumstances that made him turn evil. Their family home is destroyed and they move into the Fortress of Solitude, which has since been abandoned since Superman was arrested.
- The Marvels Project: As the Nazis' attempts to secure Atlantean bodies for experimentation lead to scores of his people dying as depth charges fall upon them from the surface, Prince Namor naturally seeks retribution against the perpetrators of the atrocity. However as he sees the surface dwellers as one people, he mistakenly takes out his vengeance upon the people of the United States - whom he does not know are opposed to the Nazis - by first attacking Coney Island followed by flooding all of New York before being stopped and imprisoned. He does not learn that he had been targeting the wrong people until an Atlantean collaborator to the Nazis is captured and brought before him for interrogation.
- My Little Pony Generations: Grackle and Dyre want to follow their mothers' orders to avenge their loss against the ponies, but end up targeting the Equestrian ponies, rather than the Dream Valley ones that their mother originally fought, since they sent their familiar through a wormhole that led to their dimension. Issue 2 even addresses it when Grackle asks if they should be targeting ponies that aren't their own. Dyre just shrugs it off, figuring as long as they just target ponies, their mothers should be fine with it either way despite the G4 cast having never met the witches before.
- In Nightwing, it is revealed that, once a generation, the Court of Owls takes a single child from Haley's Circus to become one of their Talons every time the circus visits Gotham City. This child would then be tortured, trained, and experimented on. Dick Grayson himself was supposed to become a Talon, but of course, his parents are killed and he is adopted by Bruce Wayne. So instead, his friend Raymond is taken, but washes out and has his eyes pecked out. Years later, Raymond returns as Saiko and claims that Dick Grayson is the worst killer
evarghever and tries to kill him, along with everyone else in the circus at the time. Except: 1. Dick couldn't have possibly known about this (Batman himself didn't know about the mere existence of the Court of Owls, let alone their methods) 2. Dick was in mourning and had found a kindred spirit who could help him achieve his goals (good old vigilante justice) 3. Dick didn't kill him 4. The audience has nothing to do with this. - One issue of The Punisher (who is himself this trope writ large against any and all criminals whether they were involved in the murder of his family or not) had its villain, a Serial Killer who targeted cab drivers by catching their cabs in the wee hours of the morning and then shooting them in the head from behind, ultimately be revealed as engaging in this. The killer was a woman who failed to get a cab one night after her car broke down, so she was forced to walk home...and she wound up being raped. Instead of targeting her rapist(s), however, the woman targeted cabbies because, in her mind, she wouldn't have been raped if even one of those she'd tried to hail that night had bothered to stop for her.
- Lilith from Rachel Rising is an immortal witch and Master Poisoner who regularly engages in Disproportionate Retribution, but even for her, pursuing revenge on a town where she and her followers were the target of a literal Witch Hunt more than 300 years after the town went all Burn the Witch! is excessive.
- Artemis Zogg partakes in a particularly malicious example in the Ratchet & Clank comic miniseries. To summarize: Zogg has a vendetta against the series' Idiot Hero Captain— er, Galactic President Qwark due to Qwark rescinding his endorsement of Zogg for Galactic President, taking the presidency for himself, and shutting down Zogg's Helios Project. Instead of going after Qwark directly, however, Zogg instead begins kidnapping entire planets from three different galaxies (two of which are not within the president's jurisdiction), enslaves their citizens, and ultimately plans to leave them all to freeze to death in the middle of the universe all while trying his damnedest to kill Ratchet and Clank, all in a spiteful attempt to break Qwark down.
- In Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics), Thrash the Devil, like the other dwindling Mobian-type Tasmanian Devils, had been told that the echidnas were evil due to the fact that, centuries ago, a group of scientists modified them, turning them into Devil Dogs slowly over the years. Thrash ended up getting his revenge, leading to the last leader of the Devils realizing that what she had told the other Devils had Gone Horribly Wrong: Thrash had sent every last echidna outside of Knuckles himself into another dimension out of spite.
- Spider-Man:
- The leader of the Jury, Orwell Taylor, sought revenge against Venom for the murder of his son. So far, so good. Then he failed, and went after Spider-Man for bringing the symbiote to earth, which is less reasonable because Spidey didn't know the black costume was a symbiote when he did it, and even then, he isn't responsible for Venom's actions with it. Then he joined the Life Foundation, most famous for making more symbiotes from Venom.
- The original Mysterio, Quentin Beck, wanted to have one last good outing as a supervillain before he died of cancer. Unfortunately, Spider-Man was Ben Reilly at the time so he went after Daredevil instead.
- The big twist at the end of Super Crooks, is after the team rip off notorious super-villain the Bastard while in costume. The Bastard goes to the pack of mobsters who had threatened the gang's friend (forcing them to do this heist) and murders them all while they're baffled as to why. It turns out the mobsters were all once costumed crooks... the same costumes the team wore to rip the Bastard off so he ended up taking out their own enemies.
- In the story "A Lady's Hands are Cold" from Through the Woods, a young woman in an Arranged Marriage with a rich man hears a ghost singing a sad song every night, and gradually realizes that her husband murdered his first wife for her fortune. The second wife finds the pieces of the first wife, which are scattered all around the house, and puts her body back together. Unfortunately when the first wife sees the second standing there in her former dress and jewels, her first instinct is to attack the second wife, assuming that it was the second wife who turned her husband against her.
- Superman:
- In The Trial of Superman storyline, Superman is sentenced to death by an alien tribunal... because one of his ancestors had perfected a device that made it so that most of the Kryptonians couldn't leave their planet without dying, which meant they couldn't leave when the planet blew up. The fact that Superman was only a baby when this happened was ignored by the judges: all that mattered to them was that Superman was related to a killer, therefore he would have to pay for the crime.
- In a DC Rebirth story, Mister Mxyzptlk is kidnapped and tortured by a mysterious and powerful being called Mister Oz. When he escapes, he gets pissed off at Superman for not doing anything to save him, even though there is no way Superman could have known he was in trouble since he normally inhabits the Fifth Dimension. He seeks revenge by taking Superman and Lois' son Jon away and trying to erase him from existence.
- Wonder Woman:
- Sensation Comics: Mona Menise tries to crush part of a crowd gathered around Wonder Woman and Holliday College's Glee Club with a large statue because she's angry at Wonder Woman for having gained Steve Trevor's attention.
- Wonder Woman (1942): Mavis, one of the victims Paula tortured into being her agent, decides to take revenge on the former Nazi when she's saved following Paula's Heel–Face Turn...by abducting Paula's toddler Gerta to give to the Axis powers to kill.
- In one The Simpsons comic story, Marge and Homer begin starring in a series of commercials advertising Marge's home-made spot remover. Then the advertising executives decide to replace Marge with a younger woman, claiming that that is what viewing audiences are used to. To make matters worse, Homer is contractually obliged to do the commercials or the advertisers will sue. Marge is understandably upset about this, but instead of getting mad at the advertisers, she takes her anger out on Homer, even though (as she herself admits) she is fully aware that he is completely blameless in all this.
- Lady Deathstrike is one of Wolverine's greatest foes, right? But most people don't even remember why she has such a vendetta against Logan. She first appeared as a normal human, Yuriko, in an issue of Daredevil, as Daredevil was in Japan trying to hunt down Bullseye, who had been kidnapped from the hospital after being paralyzed. Bullseye's kidnapper, Black Wind, replaced his broken spine with metal in exchange for his assassination services. Daredevil and Yuriko stopped Bullseye and Yuriko killed Black Wind, who was her abusive father. Daredevil left Japan in pursuit of Bullseye and Yuriko was ready to begin her life anew. A few years later, Wolverine and Alpha Flight were ambushed by Yuriko and her men. Retcons flew like the wind where it was revealed that Yuriko's lover, who was alive and well at the end of the Daredevil story, committed seppuku out of devotion to Black Wind. Maddened with grief, Yuriko then decided to take on her father's mantle, involving creating an army of adamantium soldiers, which required hunting down Bullseye and taking back the metal from his spine (which wasn't even identified as adamantium in the original story). She had been using a scanner to detect someone with adamantium bones and found Wolverine instead, and decided to take his skeleton on her way to apprehending Bullseye. She failed and was devastated when her father's sword was destroyed in battle (not even by Wolverine himself - the blade shattered against Vindicator's force field), and was forced to flee. And then she underwent Body Horror to give herself a skeleton like Wolverine's to get revenge on him, for... being there when she was hunting Bullseye. In every appearance afterwards her only obsession is killing Wolverine, with Bullseye being completely forgotten, to the point that in Civil War, the two worked on the same team with no issue or mention of their shared past.
