Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in Comic Books.
- The Beano: In one issue, Fatty reads about a bean shortage in the paper. He promptly buys all the beans he can find and causes the shortage.
- Civil War II: This is a problem in the story, as many of Ulysses' visions towards the heroes seem to prove true because of the heroes' paranoid attempts to stop them, especially if they involve Carol Danvers. It's because Ulysses' visions work by extrapolating from the now, and Carol is the most prone to paranoidly jump on every one of them, which became a variable in his data pool. They got locked in a prophecy self-fulfilling feedback loop so to speak.
- The example of the Hulk stands out particularly. Ulysses has a vision of a mindless Hulk on a hero-killing rampage. Carol takes a massive team of heroes to confront a supposedly depowered Bruce about whether he actually is depowered, which ends with Bruce getting shot in the head. So, no more Hulk? Nope. A few months later, HYDRA brings Bruce back to life, and the trauma of dying (again) has created a new mindless Hulk, who goes on the rampage Ulysses saw.
- Captain Britain: A comedic variant occurs in one issue.Zeitgeist: You didn't warn us because I was going to insult you? You mean I hadn't even insulted you at that point? You just predicted I was going to and didn't warn... Cobweb, you are the most thoroughly irrational squack-head I have ever set eyes upon.Cobweb: There! I knew you were going to say that!
- Disney Ducks Comic Universe: In the 2003 Gyro Gearloose story "The Accidental Factor", a future telling device predicts a rampaging elephant ruining the mayor's parade. In order to prevent it, Gyro tracks the elephant down and tries to keep him in place with a large number of peanuts, but the animal goes crazy after the peanuts and causes the exact accident Gyro was trying to prevent.
- Doctor Who (Titan): In the comic story "Weapons of Past Destruction" the Unon's (a centaur race that decided to look after time after the time war) try to prevent the excroth, a technologically advanced race, from developing time travel which will somehow make them become the lect, a destructive race that will hunt the unon's, by destroying their entire planet. Unfortunately, some excroths survive and try to get their revenge by putting their bodies inside some tanks to kill the unon thereby becoming the lect.
- The Flash: Eobard Thawne was obsessed with superheroes in the 26th century when everyone has forgotten about them. Mainly the Flash (Barry Allen). Studying him to the point of knowing every recorded detail on his life, successfully replicated the experiment that gave Flash his powers, and traveled back in time to become The Flash’s sidekick and best friend. Except in the Flash museum he saw an entry on Professor Zoom, a psychopath who was bent on destroying Barry and everything he loved. His identity? Eobard Thawne! Angry, he did what we all would've done: Ran further into the past to kill Barry's mother and frame his father. Constantly bullying the young Flash through the time barrier in the most petty ways imaginable note before becoming a full blown supervillain.
- Gold Digger: The rat lords discover a prophecy that a were-cheetah would attempt to thwart their plans of reaching paradise and stand at their downfall. Naturally, they cause the genocide of the were-cheetah race, and when that just ensures the sole survivor, Brittany, is honed to stop them, they banish her to the far reaches of another dimension. This somehow does more good than harm, as this chain of events ended a 10,000-year old curse on an entire planet of semi-undead goblins - and one goblin warrior serving Brittany easily breaks through everything the rat lords throw at her. They manage to win anyway. To their horror, they discover that the prophecy meant the Were-Cheetah could have prevented their true downfall; allowing Brittany to thwart them would have been the merciful option, as they accidentally sent themselves to Dreadwing's domain. He grafts one of them to his supercomputer.
- Green Lantern: This is how Hal Jordan got his ring. Green Lantern Abin Sur heard a prophecy from Qull that his ring would fail and he would die, setting off a chain of events that would lead to Sinestro turning evil and spreading chaos across the galaxy. When Sur went to Earth to investigate this prophecy, he was terrified of his ring failing; so much so that, with prodding from Atrocitus, he lost his belief in his own abilities and succumbed to fear, thus ensuring the ring would indeed stop working for him. This led to his death, Hal getting the ring, and everything else that came after.
- Judge Dredd: In the classic storyline The Judge Child Quest, the Judge Child makes predictions that make the people who hear them cause the accidents that they just heard predicted.
- Knights of the Old Republic: The Covenant, a clique of extremist Jedi, murder most of their students and begin ruthlessly hunting down the Sole Survivor after receiving a vision of themselves all dying and a powerful Sith Lord wearing a red environmental suit arising. They had assumed that because their students happened to be wearing the same kind of environmental suit at the time, the vision is the Force trying to warn them that one of said students would become the Sith Lord in question. Naturally, it turns out the vision was actually the Force warning them of what would happen if they continued down their dark path, and by attempting to defy the prophecy by doubling down on their fundamentalism, they simply seal their fates. All but one of them dies over the coming days, the last survivor goes into hiding after being disgraced and maimed, and Darth Malak arises partly/indirectly because of their actions… complete with briefly wearing the environmental suit.
- Spider-Man: A couple of stories deal with his Time Police counterpart from the year 2211 and his arch-nemesis Hobgoblin 2211. It's revealed the Hobgoblin 2211 is really his daughter Robin, who, while researching breaks in the "multiverse" throughout history, and how to stop them from continuing to destroy reality, is arrested by her father for things she is innocent of now, but will do in the future (namely murder and screwing around with reality), and placed in a virtual reality prison/paradise. Her boyfriend, however, attempts to free her by using a virus to shut down the computer she's attached to, which also drives her completely insane as her mind is affected by the virus. Now nuts, she then dons a dimensional/time traveling suit and goes on a rampage through time and reality, erasing people (usually Spider-Men) from existence with Retcon bombs. As a result, not only do her father's attempts to stop her from becoming the Hobgoblin directly cause her to do so, but she herself becomes the cause of the very breaks in reality that she had discovered (though that's less a prophecy than merely an ironic turn).
- Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen: One issue has Jimmy helping a scientist who has a psychic transmitter that might prove reincarnation. To his horror, he discovers that all his past incarnations were close to one of history's great men (Julius Caesar, Richard the Lionheart, and Abraham Lincoln) and somehow brought about their deaths. Concluding that he has to separate from Superman to protect him, he crashes a helicopter on an island that Superman knows the Superman Revenge Squad booby-trapped. Superman refuses to be deterred, and in the process of trying to get his guilt-stricken friend to listen, he gets hit by a kryptonite beam, apparently killing him. Luckily, it turned out Superman was momentarily Playing Possum to get Jimmy to stop running and hear him out.
- X-Men:
- Bolivar Trask was inspired to create the Sentinels because his son was having visions of a Bad Future, and he assumed this meant a mutant-controlled one. The visions were actually of the Days of Future Past, a Sentinel-controlled future. Trask's son also saw visions of various mutant supervillains' crimes. What he didn't see was mutant superheroes were the ones who stopped them.
- Another case of this is Genosha. Prior to the 2000s, this island nation depended on brutally enslaving mutants in order to exploit their powers, which one Genoshan justifies with the logic that if mutants were allowed to live as free people, they would exterminate the humans of Genosha. When Magneto conquers the island and frees the mutant slaves, their bitterness over the inhumane way they were treated during their stint as slaves causes them to rise up and drive off/massacre the humans who had enslaved them.
- Wonder Woman:
- Wonder Woman (1942): During the Silver Age of Comics the reason Circe kept attacking Diana was that a prophecy claimed Diana would be her doom. Diana ends up accidentally unmaking Circe's immortality while defending herself from the witch, something she'd have had no reason to do otherwise, given that Diana hadn't even approached Circe before she started attacking her.
- Wonder Woman (1987): Hippolyta's attempts to save her daughter after hearing a prophecy that Wonder Woman will die by instigating the events of The Contest while siphoning Diana's powers in order to ensure she'd be defeated and have to give up the title lead directly to Diana's death due to having her power drained when fighting Neron. To add insult to injury the plot also gets Artemis killed after she wins the contest and temporarily replaces Diana as Wonder Woman.
