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Other Comic Books
Because
Status Quo Is God, just about every time a superhero
Saves The Villain turns out to be this. The villain rarely if ever appreciates the effort or even makes an effort to mend their ways or refrain from endangering the city and stay in prison. It just means the villain will live to make life hell for everyone else another day.
- The end of Brody's Ghost sees the titular Brody facing life as a wanted fugitive for helping nab a serial killer. To say nothing of the Penny Murderer's modus operandi. If any of the women who buy ice cream from him return the excess penny he gives them, he chooses them as a target for being "pure" enough to show such kindness. This after seeing his first victim Talia originally return a penny she saw someone drop.
- The Donald Duck comic "Good Deeds" by Carl Barks; Donald is convinced by his nephews to do good deeds for people, but each one goes wrong in increasingly bad ways. To start with, in trying to toss a newspaper to his Grouchy Neighbor Jones, Donald ends up hitting Jones in the face. And it only escalates from there...
- "Everything Must Go" was a story with The Powerpuff Girls where Mojo Jojo has a yard sale of his arsenal of weapons. The Amoeba Boys buy one them, an electromagnet that pulls the moon on a collision course with Earth. While the girls deal with the Amoebas, Mojo arrives to reverse the magnet's force and send the moon back in its proper place in space. Mojo thinks the girls should thank him. Instead, they put him in jail for selling the thing to the Amoebas in the first place.
- Red Sonja: A double case of this occurs in "Vacant Shell". During her travels, Sonja happens upon an injured man who is caught in a trap and helps him out of it. He tells her that his village has been afflicted with a curse by an evil wizard. Sonja goes to the village and is told by a young woman that another one is also cursed, this time by the man she helped earlier. This turns out to be a trap for Sonja by the man who is using the young woman to lure Sonja to him. The woman only went along with it because her mother was enslaved by the wizard and the wizard kills her anyway.
- In Seconds, Lis gives Katie the mushroom to fix time and space so that Hazel never burns her arms. This results in Katie finding more mushrooms and using them to manipulate time in her favor, to Lis' anger.
- In Serenity: Leaves on the Wind, the Alliance has apparently had Inara's Companion's Guild membership revoked as payback for her role in the revelation of the Alliance's role in Miranda and the creation of the Reavers.
- The Sin City story "That Yellow Bastard" is this trope in a nutshell. All Detective John Hartigan wants to do is close his one unsolved case and lock up a Serial Killer. The killer happens to be the son of a powerful and ruthless U.S. Senator, one who will not stand for anyone messing with him, no matter how justified it is. As a result, Hartigan pays dearly for saving Nancy Callahan, the eleven-year-old girl slated to become the monster's next victim. The corrupt senator pays to have Hartigan's heart fixed, and then sets him up to take the fall for raping the girl (who didn't even get raped). Worse, he has to let his wife think he's the monster everyone says he is, because she'll be killed if he ever claims innocence. As the story begins, Nancy is again threatened by the killer, and Hartigan must sacrifice himself to protect her.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW):
- The second arc uses this for a major Kick the Dog moment, as Eggman repays the village that helped him when he was the amnesiac Dr. Tinker by making them ground zero for the Metal Virus. This is even lampshaded when he names this very trope verbatim as he infects the town.
- On the same note, Sonic himself is indirectly responsible for the entire Metal Virus arc. He spared an amnesiac Eggman after confirming he was no threat, only for Eggman to regain his memories and unleash the Metal Virus on the world. In issue 23, Sonic acknowledges that he blew it, remarking that he thought Eggman had a tiny bit of good in his heart, and the entire planet is now paying the price.
- In the Vampirella story "The Running Red" the Traveller plays to beat Kruger for the sake of good rather than hedonism and loses his immortality for it. He dies shortly afterwards when Kruger's goons attack.
- In Transformers: More than Meets the Eye, Trailcutter and several Autobots find an unknown bot, close to death. Trailcutter decides to perform an emergency transfusion to save his life, despite the wariness of everyone else present, and even after finding out said bot is a member of Decepticon Justice Division, insists on going through with saving him. How do the DJD thank him? By brutally dismembering him of course!
- The Walking Dead: After everything he's done, Rick Grimes — The man long considered The Hero of The Walking Dead — gets shot to death by Sebastian Milton after convincing his mother to step down as leader of the Commonwealth. No Heroic Sacrifice. No Famous Last Words. Not even any loved ones there to comfort him in his final moments. Rick suffers THE most Undignified Death in the series at the hands of a spoiled, entitled brat, then gets put down by Carl after he reanimates.
