There Is No Kill Like Overkill / Comic Books

• The Avengers:
  • In the story arc Under Siege, it is noted that this is basically the reasoning behind the current line-up of the Masters of Evil as Baron Zemo mounts his latest campaign against the Avengers. Where previous incarnations of the Masters attempted to match the current Avengers line-up with only five or six members at a time, Zemo's line-up on this occasion had over a dozen members where the Avengers started with only six heroes, the goal being to overwhelm the team with sheer raw power rather than a more tactical approach.
  • In the story arc Age of Khonshu, after seeing a Bad Future caused by Mephisto, Moon Knight makes use of being supercharged by the a supermoon to steal the powers of Dr. Strange, Iron Fist, Ghost Rider(Robbie Reyes), and Mjolnir from Thor. Then he confronts Mephisto. After putting a hole in Mephisto's chest with Mjolnir, he gives this dialogue (though, as Khonshu then points out, even that may not be enough to kill Mephisto permanently):
  Moon Knight: I am going to burn his body to ashes with Ghost Rider's hellfire. Then I am going to pulverize those ashes with the Iron Fist. I will then use Mjolnir toto scatter the ashes across the universe.
• Batman:
  • The Joker is sometimes known to do this; most notably with Jason Todd (the second Robin), in which, after smacking him across the face with a gunbutt (causing him to cough up blood), then kicking him in the face, having him roughed up by two muscle bound henchmen, and beating him brutally with a crowbar to the point where the Joker was literally covered in Jason's blood, he finally finished him by blowing him up with a bomb. It should also be noted that he came back from the bomb, too...
  • Another example is when after Alexander Luthor lost a finger and got stripped of his powers. Joker comes out of nowhere and sprays him in the face with his acid spitting flower, fries his head with two electric buzzers repeatedly, then finishes him off by a point blank range shotgun blast to the head.
  • Joker just seems to be DC's go-to guy for being absolutely thorough in making sure a character is Killed Off for Real. Plus he was REALLY pissed that he didn't get in on the whole Infinite Crisis schtick.
• Black Moon Chronicles: Back in his This Loser Is You days, Wis hunted rabbits with a jousting lance and a charger.
  Wismerhill: Victory! The beast has perished!
• Convergence: If a dome's champions have failed, then everything and everyone inside it will be obliterated. The buildings and the people fall apart and turn to dust.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: One Donald Duck comic strip has Donald failing to win a target-shooting midway game. The carnie running the stand teases, "Ya couldn't hit 'em with a cannon!" So Donald takes him up on that- he wheels a flipping cannon up and blows a hole in the stand.
• Gaston Lagaffe: The firemen uses this approach the moment they get a call about suspicious smoke or smell going on in the office. This backfires when Gaston was working on a new soap and they end up turning the whole place in a bubble bath by accident.
• G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (Marvel): In issue #43, Cobra is chasing down Storm Shadow's uncle, the Soft Master, who has infiltrated Springfield to find out who really killed his brother the Hard Master. On his way out of town in a stolen cop car, he barely gets past an oncoming train, only to crash into a drunk driver who had passengers that just happened to have Cobra connections^note  Crimson Guardsman Professor Appel's daughter Candy, and Cobra Commander's son Billy. The drunk driver's car catches fire, and everyone inside is unconscious; when the Soft Master tries to rescue the others, Scrap-Iron, who has climbed a phone pole on the other side of the tracks, fires an anti-tank missile at him. The Soft Master, realizing his life is already forfeit, jumps into the missile to keep the blast from killing the others. Unfortunately, Scrap-Iron still had a missile left, and with Firefly's permission, he uses it to blow up the car.
• Gold Digger:
  • Brianna Diggers LOVES this trope so much that she made smart bombs with their own AI in them to "go boom" on "baddies". To date, due to her love of this trope, she has scared demons which once terrorized the planet and her bombs, hundreds of them, were able to knock out a giant Dynasty War Gigas. Don't even get started on how over-equipped she comes for a camping trip in an area with lots of target practi... er, wild monsters.
  • Her sister Gina is also fond of this trope at times, if less so.
  • Speaking of the Dynasty, they certainly follow this trope. The War Wind disables/destroys all of a planet's active defenses. Rio (the aforementioned crazy patriarch) takes this a step further with the 'Shield of the Patriarch,' which protects him from all attacks coming at him through normal time and space, while the 'Will of the Patriarch' is a faster-than-light magic laser that can change direction. Not to mention that in a flashback, what is likely a younger Rio is depicted as blowing up a planet/moon without external aid.
• The Invisibles: Lampshaded.
  Boy: Jesus, KM, how many times can you shoot two guys?
• Iron Man:
  • War Machine's Mark IV armor can add more weapons to his armor; by using a complex system of powerful magnetic fields he can literally rip his opponents weapons apart and freely integrate them with himself. However, even this form doesn't hold a candle to the armor he used against the Skrull fleet: an entire transforming orbital weapons platform/base. When you've got a cannon on your shoulder that can spit unstoppable plasma death into the face of an oncoming alien battle cruiser and it's not the biggest gun you're using, then that, my friends, is overkill.
  • In the story arc Armor Wars, the Firepower armor was designed to be like this. The armor proved to be more powerful than the Silver Centurion armor but weaker than the Neo-Classic Armor. However, it originally wasn't meant to battle Iron Man; it was meant for riot control. And it should be added that it had a nuclear missile loaded on there.
• Lucky Luke: In one album, Joe planned to do this to Luke (although he obviously didn't execute it): "One bullet for every day we had to spend behind bars!"
• Nick Fury: In Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strange Tales), in a possible Lampshade Hanging, Hydra calls its superweapon The Overkill Horn. Its function? Remotely activating every single nuclear weapon on the surface of the planet the whole world over.
  • More recently, the Overkill Horn has become the sentient Overkill Mind. Because that's going to end well.
• Paperinik New Adventures: One of the Omakes about Evronian culture parodies this to the extreme:
  Commander: So?
  Soldier 1: Everything is done, sir. We burned the villages, destroyed the harvest, poisoned the wells...
  Soldier 2:...blown up the bridges, looted the lootable, imprisoned the population and mined the planet, sir.
  Commander: INCOMPETENTS! I said show NO MERCY!
• Preacher: Pretty much Standard Operating Procedure for the Saint of Killers, whose standard response to just about everything is to get to work with two Angel-forged Walker Colts that never misfire, never miss, and never need to be reloaded.
  • Attempted on the Saint by Starr, during the War In The Sun arc, after Starr has seen just how lethal the Saint can be. Starr sends an entire Tank battalion in, which fails. Then he drops a nuke on him. It fails.
  The Saint Of Killers: Not enough gun.
• The Punisher:
  • On occasion, Frank Castle will do this, when an enemy is just too dangerous to leave solid.
    Punisher: Harry "Heck" Thornton. Hitman and all around Arkansas redneck. Heard a story about Harry that four state troopers managed to surround him once. He draws and kills three of them, the fourth one gets off a shot, Harry ducks it and shoots him dead. Dodged a bullet, so I use thirty.
    Punisher: It was enough to kill most men, but with him it was just unfinished business. Barracuda was dead when you shot him to bits and shot the bits and burned them. Anything less just left nagging doubt.
  • Yet another example: in one story Frank Castle expounds on the capabilities of a minigun as an anti-vehicle weapon, then finishes by saying:
    Punisher: Pure overkill. Twelve point seven-millimeter Dushka's just like our fifty cal. Really designed to be used on aircraft. You use it on people, you turn them into paint.
• Robin (1993): The Jury not only goes around murdering people for all kinds of petty theft and other suspected criminal behavior, they like to do so by shooting at them with automatic riffles and bazookas. Apparently in their minds it's a public service to blow up a purse snatcher (and purse) on a busy public street, collateral be dammed.
• Sin City:
  • The story "The Big Fat Kill" ends with just about every prostitute in town emptying guns into an alleyway to kill anyone who could possibly connect them to the death of a famous cop. It's one of the more... impressive images. Manute sums it up with his last words, delivered to the man who organized it: "McCarthy, you shit!"
  • Earlier in the story, Miho cuts off Jackie Boy's hand. And then plugs his gun so when he fires it, the slide goes into his own head. She is explicitly described as "toying" with him. And then, when Dwight instructs her to finish him already, Miho proceeds to "make a Pez dispenser out of him."
  • Miho actually does this a lot. She never kills someone when she can almost kill him and then destroy him. Family Matters has one particularly disturbing case where she repeatedly cuts a fat man until he's choking on his own blood, and then when McCarthy tells her to end it because they need to hurry up, she punts off his head.
  • Then there's John Hartigan finishing off Roark Jr. in That Yellow Bastard. As he puts it, he's eventually just pounding wet chunks of skull into the floorboards.
  • Marv pretty much embodies this trope. He basically made it his goal to kill every single person involved in the killing of his beloved Goldie, capped off with the twin slaughterings of the man who did the deed: he sawed one's arms and legs off, had a wolf partially eat him and for good measure sawed his head off.
• Soft Desire: In the opening sequence of the first issue, we meet a woman who is trying to steal a mysterious box. Because of this, a fight ensues with a guy who just won't die.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics): An increasingly unstable Eggman elects to use a Wave-Motion Gun that has enough power to not only take out the Freedom Fighters, but also half of the Eggdome and everyone in it at the time, all just to finally be rid of Sonic; both Shadow and Rouge note this as proof that Eggman is losing his mind, but Sonic is not so easily convinced.
• The Spectre: The titular entity is infamous for extreme overkill when not restrained by a host - and sometimes even when it is. In one of the more infamous incidents when the Spirit of Vengeance was untethered from its host, before Hal Jordan took on the job, it buried a small child who stole six dollars from their mother's wallet in pennies.
• Star Wars: Kanan: After falling from the initial shot to her back following the execution of Order 66, several clone troopers gather around Depa and fire several more shots into her body to ensure that she is dead.
• Superman: In the story The Unknown Supergirl, Lesla-Lar suggests Lex Luthor he isn't thinking big enough: instead of using Kryptonite rocks or Kryptonite rayguns he should build a giant Kryptonite-powered beam cannon to kill Superman.
• Top 10:
  "Permission to use extreme force, sir?"
  "Kick her !@#$%ing ass, son."
• Ultimate Marvel:
  • The Ultimates: S.H.I.E.L.D. takes every superhero, plane, hellicarrier and whatnot to Micronesia, to deal with the alien invasion. Fury's not messing around.
  • Ultimate X Men: Wraight had several soldiers shoot Wolverine with a strenght to demolish a building. Justified case, as with his healing factor it's the only way to take him down for some minutes. What a pity for his little friend...
• Varmints: Pa had a bunch of outlaws get on a train to off them. To make sure it went off without a hitch, Pa set the train to explode either from some dynamite or an over heated boiler, and had the train headed for a steep drop into a chasm.
• Werner: In the German comic, "Lehrjahre sind keine Herrenjahre 3: Knallhart verrissen!", Röhrich loads his front-loader rifle with everything he can find in his workshop to kill the rats in his pigeon shack. He fires it and destroys everything from his pigeons to his clothes to every single window pane in sight. Needless to say he doesn't even manage to harm a single rat.
• Wonder Woman Vol. 2: After Widow Sazia's three metahuman assassins catch Paulie Longo at Micah Rains office (since Longo is being incredibly pubilc about his wherabouts for someone who knows there's a contract on his head) and Longo manages to escape due to Wondy's help Longo has his pal the White Magician conjure up a squad of towering stone giants to stomp the base Sazia is at flat with her inside. Sazia escapes anyway, though her base is left a crater of toothpicks and dust.
• X-23: After her creator/mother helped her escape and turned loose against the Facility, Laura Kinney could easily have killed Zander Rice in less than a second with her claws. However such a quick, clean death was way too good for him after the thirteen years of physical and emotional abuse he put her through. Cue Laura putting up the claws to beat him for ten minutes before leaving him to be blown up by the bombs she placed to destroy the building.
• X-Men:
  • This appears to be at least part of the attitude behind the use of Sentinels. In this case, it's fuelled by ignorance and fear. A mutant who looks innocent could be (and we the readers/viewers know in a few cases, definitely is) able to rewrite the very fabric of reality to suit their wishes. Of course, that may very well lead to Taunting Cthulhu or (in Harry Potter terms) tickling a sleeping dragon.
  • At the climax of The Dark Phoenix Saga, when the Dark Phoenix suddenly reemerges, Empress Lilandra desperately invokes Plan Omega: destroy the entire solar system and pray they can kill Dark Phoenix in the process. At that point, Xavier has no choice but to order his X-Men to kill Jean themselves to preempt this measure.
• During the early years of the Cold War, atom bombs had a habit of showing up in fiction as the Finishing Move in situations where it'd seem like overkill, or even dangerously self-destructive, to use them. One example is the cover of the 1951 propaganda comic "Atomic War!◊", featuring two American bombers fighting a Soviet submarine, and the following quote from one of the pilots:
  "His bomb missed! But even a near miss will get that red sub when I fire my atomic rockets!".

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