Paranoia Fuel / Comic Books

• Astro City: Andrew Eisenstein is a petty crook who, by pure accident, manages to uncover superhero Jack-In-The-Box's Secret Identity. He immediately gloats about how he's going to blackmail the super, or sell the name to one of the big crime bosses and become rich... but then he starts thinking. How is he going to blackmail someone who hunts people like him for a living? Heroes don't normally kill, but they are comfortable with very extreme levels of violence and who knows what lengths they might go to when desperate? And what guarantees does he have that someone like the Deacon is going to pay him and won't just off him? In the end, Eisenstein has recurring nightmares about being hunted by a demonic Jack-In-The-Box, and chooses to leave Astro City and take his chances somewhere else without even mentioning the name to anyone else.
• The DCU:
  • Batman:
    • Batgirl: One of Barbara Gordon's enemies, a guy called Fugue, is seeping with this. Imagine: your old friend from when you were younger rides into town, and you let him crash at your place for a bit. Except he's not your friend at all—he's a complete stranger who wants to make your life miserable for something you did to him in the past, and his method of doing so is to tamper with your memories to convince you he's your friend so he can get close to you and gaslight you into believing you can't control your own life anymore. Oh, and in the process of toying with your mind, you gave up all of your secrets to him, and he's explained his endgame to you multiple times, and forced you to forget.
    • Death of the Family: Picture this... a Monster Clown has returned from a year-long, retrieved his own face, and wears it like a mask. He has always been unpredictable, but he's sticking to the shadows and leaving you to wonder when and where he's going to strike. Then he reveals that he knows your secrets, including your identity. Now you wonder if he's lying or if he's telling the truth. You know what he is capable of doing, and may have been on the receiving end of it yourself. He'll go after you, or he'll go after the people you care about most. If none of this makes you paranoid, then nothing will!
    • Night of the Owls: You will never look at owls the same way again. "Beware the Court of Owls, that watches all the time, ruling Gotham from a shadow perch, behind granite and lime."
  • O.M.A.C.: The O.M.A.C. Project in the lead-up to Infinite Crisis. The shadowy spy organization Checkmate has cameras everywhere on Earth. Anyone on the street could be one of their deadly O.M.A.C. cyborgs. Their leader, a psychic, can make you do anything he wants from any distance. And Brother Eye is always watching.
  • The Sandman:
    • Your bad dreams are living entities that can kill you if they so choose. The only thing keeping them under control is a vindictive, spiteful, and petty godlike entity who can easily condemn you to hell, or fates worse still with ease.
    • Your adorable cat, stretching her claws in her sleep? Yeah, she's dreaming about a world where giant cats hunt and eat humans. If enough of them dream it, it may even become real...
    • This is used as a punishment in Hell for Edwin Paine, one of the "young" Dead Boy Detectives — he's murdered and awakes in an endless corridor. He begins walking down it; soon, he becomes aware of a very menacing presence following behind him and that if he confronts it at all — looking over his shoulder, breaking into a run — he will be destroyed utterly. Cue walking down a hallway in absolute, unacknowledged terror for a few dozen decades.
  • Superman:
    • If Superman knows you well enough, he can identify your heartbeat from across the city. Sometimes, he can hear it from the moon. It's not as bad as it could be, seeing as it's... well... Superman, but still... and keep in mind the little fact that this flying indestructible superfast juggernaut with the laserbeam eyes has low resistance to the legions of mind-controlling psychopaths that infest your world.
    • Superman is very self-controlled, but his cousin Supergirl is just as powerful... and more short-tempered and reckless. Short-tempered enough to draw a Red Lantern Ring and become a mindless, living extinction-level threat.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: In the ten-parts story "Threat From the Infinite", the villains are weird beings that wield incredibly advanced technology and are looking for something in the Arctic, messing with the ecosystem there in the process, and once foiled there they just resume doing it somewhere else. It takes time before even their name, the Tz'oook, is revealed, and while they're confirmed to be aliens what they're looking for and why remains unexplained for over half the story... And when it's revealed it's even scarier: they're the ancient inhabitants of Earth before the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, which they caused, and they're looking for their ancient cities to wreck human civilization and retake the planet. The finale, that reveals they're actually from a parallel universe and they crossed into ours by accident, restores the paranoia, because if the Tz'oook didn't cause the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, then who did it?
• Fungus the Bogeyman: Downplayed: the story ends with "fear not the Bogeymen by day, but at night, watch out!", however Fungus and his family seem pretty harmless.
• The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil: Everyone in here is always paranoid about the idea of There. There eventually breaks through to Here in a way nobody would have suspected — through a man's facial hair. Rapid Hair Growth has never been so existentially terrifying.
• Hack/Slash. All those unkillable fiends you see on the big screen? They're REAL. And they will kill you just because they can.
• The Invisibles: Gods and angels exist, and they are not your friends. Demons are watching you through closed-circuit television systems, and God is being dissected in an underground lab.
• Marvel Universe:
  • Galacta: Daughter of Galactus: The series is ripe Paranoia Fuel if you think about it too much. That cute girl with the glasses you always see ordering lunch at the local cafe? She's a Physical God that is always hungry and is constantly suppressing the urge to eat you. You and everybody else. And she thinks of everything as food.
  • Marvel Zombies: If you're unlucky enough to live in Earth-2149, then... well, congratulations! Hiding is useless since Zombie Daredevil is gonna find you with a Quinjet, in order to trick you into thinking he's there to rescue you! Good thing he just proposed such an idea... not that it makes the horror any more bearable, that is.
  • Ms. Marvel (2016): In-universe. During her first confrontation with Doc.X, a sapient virus, Kamala finds it particularly intimidating due to its ability to enter and look through any electronic or online network. In the information age, nothing is truly private — there's always a wifi-capable object on your person, a security camera on a wall, or at least a passerby with a cellphone, and someone with enough tech savvy can theoretically spy on every second of your life from halfway around the globe. As a result of this combination of effective omnipresence and unlimited access to private information, Kamala considers Doc.X to be the most intimidating foe that she has ever faced.
  • Runaways:
    • If you're a teenager who gets along reasonably well with your parents (Like Karolina), the whole first series is this. No matter how nice your parents seem, they could be evil... and how would you ever know?
    • In the Runaways/Young Avengers Civil War crossover, there's this gem. Imagine you're a teenage superhero. You decide to help another team. This leads to you being kidnapped and forced to watch as the boy you love gets sliced open and operated on, while you can hear and see everything, and can't do anything about it. This leaves you brokenly wishing that the man doing this will die, and you can escape this nightmare. All because you wanted to help...
  • Secret Invasion (2008): Earth is invaded by shape-changing, reptilian aliens called Skrulls — and some of the invaders have supplanted certain people on Earth. Even worse, there is so far no way to distinguish the impostors from the people they're impersonating. To make matters still worse, the Skrull impostors have gained access to Earth's most advanced technologies — and sabotaged a lot of them. Furthermore, it's been suggested in places that some of the people they have replaced are sleeper agents who don't know that they're Skrulls until they've been "activated" — you could be one... the "Skrulls'" official website for the Embrace Change campaign, which portrays them as a benevolent but Dying Race that have come to help us, really isn't helping the Paranoia Fuel any. It's just making it worse.
• Rom: Spaceknight: The entire premise of the book has ROM searching down Dire Wraiths, who wielded black magic, could shapeshift, and furthermore had a disgustingly long tongue/drill-thing that could pierce skulls and suck out both the memories/personality and lifeforce of human victims, leaving behind nothing but a pile of dust and allowing the Dire Wraith to impersonate their victim flawlessly. All this for a child's action figure robot comic-book tie-in.
• Tex Willer:
  • Mefisto, being a formidable warlock, can see you from anywhere, and if he wants he can show up with an Astral Projection and summon hallucination so terrifying they have driven people to madness in less than a minute. Then there's the fact he's a Master of Disguise (in one occasion Tex and his pards even helped him with his capsized wagon, and didn't know it had been him until much later, when he decided to taunt them) and knows how to brew and make people consume poisons...
  • Yama, Mefisto's son, has his own ways. He's not as good at disguising himself, and his Astral Projection can only appear relatively close to him unless there's an Amplifier Artifact near the apparition zone... But his Astral Projection can interact with the physical world by grabbing things. Including weapons.
  • Sumalkan, the Black Tiger, is already terrifying in normal conditions, to the point one of his minions decided to betray him and talked about it to Madison, another minion. Madison then leaves the room to take something that should make the other think about what he's proposing... And then the Black Tiger comes in, very far away from his lair, and knows everything, because Madison was him in disguise. He's so good with disguises, and smart at using them, you could be talking with him while he's planning to murder you and not know unless he decides to drop the disguise.

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