No Sympathy / Comic Books

No Sympathy in Comic Books.

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• In issue 22 of Batman: Gotham Adventures, Commissioner Gordon and Barbara hunt down a violent criminal who's broken out of prison... to see his dying mother. Due to their interference, he doesn't make it in time, and tearfully asks why they couldn't have given him a break so he could have had five minutes with her. Gordon's having none of it, and coldly tells him that if he wasn't a multiple murderer, he could have spent the last twelve years with her, and none of his victims got the chance to say goodbye to their loved ones. Ultimately, the criminal is an morally myopic Entitled Bastard who doesn't deserve sympathy, since he never had it for his victims to begin with.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe:
  • Donald Duck is his universe's The Chew Toy. Girlfriend Daisy is particularly prone to empathy failure. No matter what catastrophe befalls her beau, Daisy won't bother to staunch the bleeding before she sets in with a vicious rant-a-thon.
  • After Uncle Scrooge was accidentally pulled through a clothes shop by a hoverbike-thing gone mad, screaming in fear, he was arrested by the police because he got a few pieces of clothes stuck to him and people assumed he stole them.
• Justice League of America: Subverted in Justice League: The Rise of Arsenal after Roy Harper wakes up and learns he's lost both his right arm and his daughter Lian thanks to the villain Prometheus. While Roy's friends and family try to be sympathetic to his situation, they do an incredibly poor job and their efforts only make Roy's situation worse. While Roy's acting like a Jerkass due to the pain in his infected arm and reeling from the loss of his only child, Black Canary repeatedly tries to be there for him, even despite her own grief, but he proceeds to use her as a punching bag (emotionally and physically), even making a mean-spirited remark about her inability to have children, that when she finally gets to the point she can't do anything more for him, he accuses her of having this and abandoning him.
• Preacher: Arseface got his distinctive looks by trying to kill himself by putting a shotgun under his chin; he was trying to emulate Kurt Cobain's suicide. His cold-hearted father's first words to him in the hospital? "Shoulda put it in your mouth, you dumb little fuck."
• Spider-Man:
  • Peter Parker is often the recipient of this kind of attitude. Of course, from the perspective of the characters who usually demonstrate this attitude towards him, Peter is flaky, unreliable and possesses almost no sense of responsibility; the audience, of course, are more than aware of the real reasons why Peter acts this way, thus making it particularly painful and unfair for him to be condemned for his behavior when he can't actually reveal the real reasons for it in his own defense.
  • To make matters worse, he also gets it as Spider-Man as well; his motivations and actions are often genuinely noble, but the prevailing All of the Other Reindeer mood of the Marvel Universe (helped, of course, by J. Jonah Jameson's obsessive vendetta against him - and since Jonah owns and publishes a newspaper, it's not exactly difficult for him to get his viewpoint wide distribution) means that he's constantly subject to widespread public criticism, condemnation and fear, and even blatant acts of heroism on his part will usually trigger a loud public outcry accusing him of being a public menace. They get him coming and going.
• In the "Homeschooling" arc of Runaways, an accident results in the team's house getting wrecked and Klara and Old Lace getting buried under rubble. Old Lace dies, while Klara lives and is mostly unharmed, but is so terrified that she loses control of her powers and floods the house with hostile plant life, preventing her teammates from leaving. On top of that, the accident has attracted the attention of a paramilitary unit. In spite of the fact that the team's survival actually depends upon getting Klara to calm down, Chase does nothing except yell at and threaten her... because she won't stop crying about the fact that he's yelling and threatening her.
• Superman: Kryptonian criminals Az-Rel and Nadira care for nobody other than themselves. In The Phantom Zone, when Mon-El is explaining how he cannot get out of their dimensional prison because he would die from lead poisoning, both Zoners bluntly tell him they could not possibly care less.
  Nadira: He shields his thoughts from no one. His sympathies are with the tactile world— and with Superman!
  Mon-El: Should I apologize for that, Nadira? As a youth, Superman placed me in the Zone to save my life. I'm affected by lead the way Kryptonite would affect you. I can never leave the Zone— until a cure is found!
  Nadira: Look elsewhere for pity, Mon-El...
  Az-Rel: ...And for information. You disgust us.

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