The following have their own pages:
A fairly common stock superhero plot consists of bad guys managing to finally defeat or capture the heroes, only to have the entire plan foiled by the appearance of an unexpected new recruit.
Other Comic Books
- Archie Comics:
- Reggie Mantle tends to be this purely for the sake of being a dick. Most of the time.
- Archie Comics (2015): How Betty ends up critically injured in "Over The Edge". Reggie challenged Archie to a racing duel with the intent of taking him out. His gang had set up an oil slick for Archie to hit and to go over the edge. However, no one expected Betty to find out what was going on and, in an attempt to find and stop Archie from doing this, instead hits the oil slick instead, causing the crash.
- Astro City:
- When the Ion Empire has captured Honor Guard, Quarrel managed to follow the robots to one of their ships. Since they were unaware of her presence, she was able to blow up the power supply for the "stasis lens" and rescue Honor Guard.
- Professor Borzoi's Belief Ray created a giant gorilla powerful enough to challenge the Gentleman. Unfortunately, it also brought Loony Leo to life, who smashed the ray and made the gorilla disappear.
- Krigari Ironhand's second defeat against Honor Guard came because he abducted all of their members except for Mermaid, whom he didn't think was worth bothering with. She manages to free them all.
- Karnazon's campaign to discredit Winged Victory is foiled when an abused boy sneaks into their secret base and informs the heroes of its location.
- In Cerebus the Aardvark, the title character possesses a "magnifier" quality that influences everything and everyone around him to varying degrees. This causes the plans of everyone who tries to do anything that directly involves Cerebus to succeed wildly then crash spectacularly.
- Firefly: The Sting: River throws off Saffron's plans by separating her from her remote.
- Groo the Wanderer: One of his more memorable derailings involved him going up against a mind-reading sorcerer. Groo fights his way to the sorcerer's throneroom, is confronted confidently by him... followed by a full page of the sorcerer making strange faces at Groo while the latter stared at him in befuddlement until he finally screamed "There's no mind to read!" and ran away.
- Knights of the Old Republic:
- Zayne Carrick basically sets in motion the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of the Jedi — the one that they were trying to escape by killing their Padawans — when he (unintentionally) misses the knighting ceremony and then escapes. He continues to thwart their plans, intentionally or not, ever since.
- He also thwarts Arkoh Adasca's plan (with the help of Lucien and Alek) by tricking the Mandalorian leader into thinking Adasca is working with the Republic to trap him, which results in a three way brawl which culminates in Adasca's ship getting eaten by giant space slugs.
- In The Legend of the Chaos God, Solego's plans to escape his imprisonment and Take Over the World are constantly disrupted by the protagonists he runs afoul with Darkwing Duck being the biggest of them all.
- In Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: Shattered Grid it turns out Finster-5 unwittingly lead to Lord Drakkon's defeat. Finster-5 sends Ranger Slayer — a Brainwashed and Crazy version of Kimberly from Drakkon's world — to find and rescue him only to completely miss and land in the past of the original Power Rangers. That point's Alpha 5 ends up freeing her from her spell and, as a last act, finds and hits Tommy with an arrow laced with the Green Chaos Crystal shard she used to try and find Drakkon. When Drakkon later murders Tommy, his soul is pulled in and is later able to free and resurrect himself.
- Cebolinha/Jimmy Five from Brazilian comic Monica's Gang is known for "infallible plans" against Monica. They usually work up until a certain point, when "accomplice" Cascão/Smudge screws up, usually by revealing it was a plan.
- Paperinik New Adventures: In the Xadhoom trilogy, the Evronian plan to defeat Xadhoom fails twice because of the titular hero showing up where he had no place to be:
- Initially the cruiser Zermatt is sent to capture Xadhoom for all the five seconds they need to teleport her where the Evronians are keeping hostage the Xerbians, her people, thus forcing her to surrender. They manage to do so before she grows bored and wrecks everything, but Paperinik, who has wandered around the ship, has tried some sabotage, and the teleporting device ends up sending Xadhoom back on the ship, and annoyed to boot. The Zermatt is quickly disintegrated, with Paperinik wandering through space on one of the escape pods.
- Later the Evronian mobile homeworld stumble on the planet where the last free Xerbians had escaped, and use them and the other Xerbians to capture her. Thing is, Paperinik has wandered there and joins forces with the captured Xerbians, and manage to bring them what they need to assemble a device that free every single Coolflame on board (powered by Xadhoom's energy, that she provided when Paperinik showing up led one of the Xerbians to find out who she was and talk to her about their plan). And once the Coolflames and the Xerbians are in revolt, Xadhoom is free to kill the Evronian emperor, a majority of his council, and every Evronian who wasn't fast enough to run away at the first explosion.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
- Snively describes Sonic as this in the 200th issue, after the blue blur defeats Eggman yet again, causing the doctor to go mad. It's only after Eggman himself realizes this and rationalizes that Sonic's near constant exposure to chaos energy has turned into a literal force of chaos that he makes some semblance of recovery.Snively: Eccentrics aside, he really is a genius. He can build the most amazing things and plot a hundred steps ahead ... And then there's you. All the building, calculating, and planning in the world couldn't beat you.
- Mammoth Mogul has told Sonic that he will not attempt to conquer the world while Sonic's alive because the hedgehog is invariably able to foil his plans. Sadly, in Silver's timeline, this turned Mogul into his own spanner — because he refused to act, Princess Sally was roboticized, only being remembered as an unidentified traitor, turning her against the Freedom Fighters and helping to ravage Mobius.
- Snively describes Sonic as this in the 200th issue, after the blue blur defeats Eggman yet again, causing the doctor to go mad. It's only after Eggman himself realizes this and rationalizes that Sonic's near constant exposure to chaos energy has turned into a literal force of chaos that he makes some semblance of recovery.
- In the Polish Cyberpunk comic Status 7: Overload the Terrorist plot is foiled because one of the terrorists put a killswitch in the virus so he could hold the city for ransom (The plan the rest of the terrorist group had involved launching the virus no matter what), this is further complicated by the killswitch itself being extremely complicated to trigger, with destroying either of the components making the virus impossible to disarm ( it's a random retina scan that has to be entered into a specific terminal, the former coming from a child trying to rob an ATM by using his dad's card making the terrorists think the retina scan was from the father, the latter is the terminal of the CEO of the MegaCorp one of the main villains is working for, meaning if anyone tries to disarm it his boss will inevitably find out.)
- Street Fighter: A large part of Cammy's eventual freedom from her brainwashing stems from Vega actively reprogramming her twice. Largely because he feels that beautiful people such as him and Cammy shouldn't have that done to them and partly because he just likes screwing around with Bison's plans.
- Tintin: In Tintin and the Picaros, Colonel Sponsz plots to have his old enemies (i.e. Tintin, Haddock and Calculus) be the subjects of a fake kidnapping by Tapioca's nemesis (and Tintin's old friend) Alcazar so they can all fall victim to an ambush on a back road. The spanner is a monkey in the road, which causes Alcazar's getaway truck to suddenly swerve the moment it comes into firing range.
- Transformers:
- In IDW's Transformers comics, Shockwave's ultimate plan, stretching across over a dozen planets and thousands, if not millions of years, is given a good old monkey-wrench simply by the Dynobots looking for petty revenge. Getting things back on track when he wakes up takes a lot of speed chess, and a good couple of years. Even later, his plans still had consequences — mainly Ore-13, which helped drive the plot of the miniseries Revolution, which had villains from the newly-established Hasbro Comic Universe battling over it. In The Transformers: Unicron, Shockwave's plan is undone by a series of these. First, the Autobots warp many Cybertronians off along with the Talisman as Unicron physically tears Cybertron apart. Then, when Shockwave tries to reestablish his plans, Bludgeon and the Maximals betray him, Bludgeon being a servant of chaos while the Maximals are angry at the fact that they served a lie (Shockwave, as part of his plans, had killed the real Onyx Prime millions of years ago and disguised himself as the Prime). Shockwave is only saved when Prowl and his group arrive and kill Rhinox before taking Shockwave into custody.
- The Transformers (Marvel): For the super-logical Shockwave Dinobots are his natural enemy - the first time they were created (for the sole purpose of stopping Shockwave from getting to the crashed Ark) he completely dominated them in battle, threw them down a cliff and started shooting at them from higher ground, knowing that they couldn't even fight back, but he overlooked the possibility that someone would be stupid enough to attack the cliff itself. Later on, in Target: 2006, Impactor and Xaaron come up with a plan called Operation: Volcano to kill the Decepticons' Ten Deadliest Killers. However, Galvatron, Cylconus and Scourge traveling back in time results in Optimus Prime being displaced to Limbo and the Matrix Flame going out so Ultra Magnus is sent to Earth to investigate. When Impactor tries to cancel it, Xaaron asks what would happen if Magnus did come back on time while the Wreckers are galvanized back into action by defending an innocent piano Transformer from Fang. Then, right before the ten Decepticons can walk into the trap, Megatron uses a communicube to demand the Coneheads and the Insections come to Earth via space bridge as soon as possible resulting in most of the Decepticons turning back, not wanting to disobey Megatron (Macabre continues on but Impactor takes the bullet for Xaaron and a ranting Macabre is killed by the Wreckers).
- In the Vampirella story "The Resurrection of Papa Voudou" Paul Giraud manages to stagger into the ritual chamber, where he falls beside the altar. As a result, the spell intended to resurrect Papa Voudou splits its power between repairing the villain's mind and restoring Paul's body. Thus, Papa Voudou is raised as a sapient zombie but his body remains decayed.
- Margaret from Yoko Tsuno's story The pray and the shadow. Forced by her boss to be his adoptive daughter Lady Cecilia's Body Double and be a part of his cruel plan to get said daughter killed and inherit her wealth, Margaret is shit scared of continuing in the plot, and she secretly contacts Yoko to both help save Cecilia and free herself from her evil boss...
