Follow TV Tropes

Following

After The End / Comic Books

Go To


  • The Esperanto comic book 10 Jarojn Poste ("10 Years After") is set after a devastating nuclear war; the subsequent plague of male sterility, from which only a few men are immune, threatens humanity with extinction.
  • 2000 AD:
    • Judge Dredd is set after the nuclear apocalypse where outside of a few giant city-states (and a Lunar colony, for some reason), the entire world is a barren radioactive desert filled with bizarre mutants. Society has managed to survive but the situation has gotten progressively worse since then, with several Mega Cities wiped out in wars or other catastrophes, including Mega City One itself being reduced to a fraction of its size after a viral outbreak.
    • Strontium Dog is set on Earth after a nuclear war. The strontium dog fallout has resulted in the rise of Mutants in the population who are heavily discriminated against.
    • Age of the Wolf takes place during and after a werewolf apocalypse. After the initial outbreak that turned around half of humanity into bestial lupines, werewolves eventually start to evolve into sapient beings who hunt the remaining humans to virtual extinction.
    • Kingdom takes place after most of humanity has been wiped out by a race of Big Creepy-Crawlies known only as Them, and the majority of the survivors are Human Popsicles in Antarctica (and possibly New Zealand).
  • In Adam Strange comics, Rann suffered from a nuclear war that plunged the civilization into collections of warring city-states, except for Rannagar which still retained its technological advances and attempting to restore the remnants civilization into a more pristine state. In Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, the entire planet suffered from drought-borne famine and declining birth rate from lingering radiation.
  • Age of Apocalypse, needless to say, takes place in a world where Apocalypse has taken over North America, and turned it into a massive Crapsack World basic on his Social Darwinist beliefs. The rest of the world isn't any better, with Brazil destroyed by nukes, the Middle East oilfields also nuked, Japan also decimated, and Central America gone.
  • Avengers: Back to Basics: In the second story, the Magus brings himself and the Avengers into a future where Earth has been devastated by a global war, leaving only ruins. He states that every timeline he has ever seen ultimately leads to a future of this kind, and is amused by how the endless alien invasions that threatened Earth might as well not have bothered, since despite fighting off all threats humanity is destined to destroy itself anyway.
  • Batman: Last Knight on Earth follows a clone of Batman has he transverses a world where humanity turned their back on their heroes, the Justice League is gone, Superman is dead, Wonder Woman and a few others are left to try to rescue survivors, the survivors live in fear of a despot named Omega, and Omega himself is a Fallen Hero: the original Batman.
  • Cosmic Boy: Lydda and Rokk try to return home where at least they could ask Brainiac's opinion on what's happened, only for their trip to be hijacked by the Time Trapper who takes them to the end of time.
  • Crossed goes in this direction in Crossed + 100, set 100 years after the outbreak. The surviving uninfected have only recently discovered steam power. Also, the English language has undergone immense change, with many words no longer used and many remaining words having acquired new meanings.
  • El Marvo is set in a world destroyed by nuclear war and disease. It is now known as "Muck".
  • El Toxico: In this world, insects have grown to be as big as the average human being and brought society to its knees.
  • The End League: Post apocalyptic superheros who suck really hard at what they do.
  • Before The Flash merged timelines at the end of Flashpoint, the entire WildStorm universe was experiencing this. Just what happened and how many are dead is still up in the air.
  • Godzilla IDW comic, Godzilla: Cataclysm is set in a Mad Max-esque world where humanity is on the verge of extinction due a Kaiju apocalypse.
  • Gotham City Garage starts out many decades after a called "dark age" changed the world into a wasteland. The world's oceans evaporated and the human cities burned to ashes. Gotham is the last city on Earth and is ruled by Lex Luthor.
  • The Incredible Hulk: Two stories written by Peter David focus on the Hulk in post-apocalyptic futures with very different approaches. The first, The Incredible Hulk: Future Imperfect, has him transported to a future time about 100 years in the future where society has fallen into a new Medieval-like setting ruled by the Hulk's future self, the Maestro. The second, Hulk: The End, has Bruce Banner as the last man on Earth, having survived for more than two centuries after nuclear war wiped out mankind. In the end, Hulk gets his wish, and he lives to regret it. Al Ewing takes this to the next level in Immortal Hulk, showing a future wherein the Hulk is the last thing left alive at the end of the universe because he murdered all the rest while possessed by the One-Below-All.
  • The Jetsons: With a mix of climate change, the Hanlon Meteor striking and seismic activity, the majority of the planet's land had since been flooded, forcing what remained of humanity to flee into Earth's orbit.
  • Hex, the follow-up series to Jonah Hex, had Hex transported to a Mad Max style 21st Century Earth following a nuclear war.
  • Just a Pilgrim is set in a world where the sun went nova billions of years early. The Earth's a barren desert waiting for the sun to burst.
  • Kamandi, The Last Boy On Earth. This Jack Kirby series had Schizo Tech run rampant and Funny Animals ruling feudal nations. Done by DC Comics, although it didn't originally tie into The DCU.
    • Kamandi's world later became the setting for a bevy of other post-apocalyptic DC comics that got lumped in with it when they were incorporated into The DCU, including the Atomic Knights, Hercules Unbound, and Hex.
    • Hex actually emerged in a separate Post-Crisis apocalypse that was confirmed to be survivable by later accounts. OMAC was later retconned to be the prequel to this world, while Atomic Knights and Hercules Unbound were majorly retgonned by later accounts.
  • Killraven was set in a world where the Martians from The War of the Worlds came back in the '90s and won this time. It focused on one of the few free human rebels and his attempts to overthrow the alien scourge.
  • Legion of Super-Heroes storyline The Great Darkness Saga reveals Apokolips became a forgotten and -almost- uninhabited world after the twentieth century, littered with the abandoned ruins of a super-technologically advanced civilization. Nobody knows or remembers what happened to the Apokoliptians, not even Darkseid.
  • In the French comic Les Eaux de Mortelune (The waters of Deadmoon), most of humanity has either been wiped out or degenerated into grotesque mutants hunted for their meat. Pockets of humanity remain in places (such as Paris, renamed "Mortelune") where they have both the technology and the fuel to purify the toxic water, and buildings that can resist to acid rains, but it is later revealed that Lyon is now inhabited by giant flies, Avignon by giant termites and Les-Baux-de-Provence by giant telepathic praying mantis. All three races are actually more advanced and way more prone to long-term thinking than what's left of humanity.
  • The Luther Arkwright story For a Few Gallons More in parallel 02.79.10 is set in a world where civilisation collapsed after a bacteria with a psychedelic effect was released after an attack on the research institute. The only people who survived the prolonged and massive psychedelic experiences where those already used to psychedelics.
  • The DC comic miniseries Me and Joe Priest: All human males (save the eponymous cleric) and most human females losing the ability to sire children. Much like Children of Men, the population largely gets older and older and waits to die.
  • The Wastelands takes place in an alternate timeline where all the Supervillains banded together and took over, turning the world into a wasteland.
  • Scooby Apocalypse: Not technically after, but during the end, as Scooby and the gang find themselves at the beginning of everything. After a few Time Skips, however, the series ends up firmly in this category, with the gang and other survivors trying desperately to stay ahead of the monster hordes and eventually trying to build a new society in the midst of it all.
  • Scud the Disposable Assassin: Not until late in the series that we learn the rapture began not long after the release of Ghost Busters 2 and has been going on ever since because the Devil was usurped by a mechanical stuff-collector named System. There weren't any raging wars or apocalyptic scenarios, but there was an influx of supernatural creatures, black magic, random mutations, and intergalactic alien businesses opening up on earth. Society is the same but a little more messed up.
  • Implied in Shadoweyes. Dranac, the city that forms the setting, is situated in the middle of a wasteland that looks like a bombed-out former city.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
    • The world of Mobius is actually Earth ten-thousand years later, and Mobians the result of the alien Xorda's gene bombs — which wiped out most humans, mutated most of the surviving humans into Overlanders, and created the Chaos Emeralds — mixing human DNA with animals.
    • And then there's the time Silver comes from (200 years in the series' future), where an unexplained disaster has completely destroyed the world, except for a few isolated pockets of civilization.
  • Storm: The main character is transported to a far future where civilization has fallen and rebuilt several times, and is currently quite primitive. He helps rebuild, and then promptly time travels again to a yet further future where society has again fallen.
  • Superman:
    • Every Superman story, perhaps especially those dealing with other survivors, such as Supergirl, the floating city of Argo, the bottle city of Kandor, etc., is set After the End of Krypton.
    • In Krypton No More, Superman fought a villain that planned to cause a nuclear holocaust and rule the post-apocalyptic world.
    • The Krypton Chronicles: The first great Kryptonian civilization was brought down by a great deluge that flooded the continent of Urrika. The survivors dwelled in little settlements, gathering algae as food for five generations until their civilization started thriving again.
    • In The Immortal Superman, Superman travels to the far, far, far future and finds out hundreds of thousands of years of war and environmental damage have turned Earth into a lifeless husk of rock.
      Superman: "After a million of years of pollution, war, and untold abuses from man— Earth has been simply used up! It's just a contaminated globe of waste material now!"
    • The Super Duel In Space: In his first appearance, Brainiac is stealing alien cities to repopulate his home world after a plague wiped out his then-unnamed people. Later stories would retcon Bainiac into being a living computer spy created by the computer tyrants which ruled over planet Colu before being overthrown and destroyed during a rebellion.
    • "The Unknown Legionnaire": The Legion of Super-Heroes travels to a planet which had been settled by an alien race called the Llorn a long time ago. A sequence of brutal climatic changes, violent quakes and environmental changes caused by a lengthy cycle of sunspots brought the colony down. Their original city was destroyed by super-storms, and their second underground city was torn apart by an earthquake. At the end, the Llorn were forced to leave the planet, leaving crumbling, empty ruins in their wake. However, the world's original inhabitants, called the Proteans, survived thanks to their shape-shifting abilities (a final gift of the Llorn's science to ensure their species' survival).
  • Toxx takes place in a future where something screwed up the atmosphere and caused the surface of the Earth to be bathed in radiation. Everything above the ground is horribly mutated, and those who've managed to shelter underground are slowly dying from radiation. The human race is sterile... or so they thought. When a young woman named Claire gets pregnant, it kicks off a power struggle between what's left of humanity and the mutants who are eager to replace them.
  • Vampirella: The titular character's planet Drakulon was subjected to severe droughts that evaporated the oceans of blood and destroyed the civilization of her world. Later comics would depict possible post-apocalyptic futures where Earth was taken over by vampires and demons, and the 2017 relaunch published by Dynamite Entertainment takes place a thousand years into the future where Vampirella remained in hibernation for centuries only to wake up in a bizarre, cyberpunk world.
  • The Walking Dead, and the TV series franchise based off of it, take place in a world where a Zombie Apocalypse has caused modern society to collapse, leaving only scattered pockets of survivors. As time goes by, however, they start banding together in settlements to begin rebuilding.
  • Wacky Raceland takes place in one such setting where every possible disaster imaginable under the sun took place simultaneously: eldritch abominations invaded the Earth, natural disasters all over the place, nanite swarms and zombie hordes consumed everything in its path. Now all that is left is a Mad Max styled wasteland populated by mutants, crazed psychopaths and monstrous dark entities where the survivors are forced to participate in a race so they can earn the last, safest place left in the world.
  • Wasteland takes place after some unspecified disaster called "The Big Wet".
  • Wonder Woman: Dead Earth: Civilization and most of humanity was destroyed long before Diana wakes in a nuclear war and a "Great Fire". She goes on to learn that the "Great Fire" was her fight with Superman after a nuclear warhead he redirected destroyed Themyscira and she lost her mind and control to rage in her grief.
  • Y: The Last Man is a comic series that takes place in a world where a biological event has wiped out half the mammals on Earth; specifically, the males. The main character and his monkey, plus a few exceptions, are the last living Y-chromosome carriers, and since our protagonist's fiance was in Australia at that time and he's still loyal to her, things are nowhere near as rosy as that scenario might suggest. The civilization of the world falls into chaos as infrastructure and industry collapse (not so much because women can't run things, but because there aren't enough of them, and fewer with the necessary training) but, a few years into the series' real-time run, the all-female society has more-or-less started to function again.


Top