All for Nothing in Comic Books.
- Astro City: At the end of "Lover's Quarrel", Crackerjack's attempt to get the Black Lab to rejuvenate his body has left him crippled and near death. Worse, Gormenghast has gotten away with a sample of Black Rapier's rejuvenation formula, and Quarrel has retired to tend to Crackerjack's recovery.
- A Walk Through Hell: Shaw actually manages to escape hell despite everything that happened to her partner and everyone else that went into that warehouse and winds up in a roadside diner. But then she hears on TV about a race riot erupting from a Black Lives Matter protest over the police shooting of a black suspect, and a white man in the diner openly talks about "stringing up" black people in their own streets. No one in the diner, including the man's own family, reacts to his utterance in any way except for a young woman who casts a disgusted look in the man's direction as she turns to leave. This, followed by her hearing on TV about a governor seeking re-election making bigoted comments towards gay and transgendered people, shows Shaw that open bigotry is becoming something acceptable to do. In response, Shaw sets off to assassinate the governor in some kind of attempt to fight against the growing evil engulfing humanity. She's gunned down in the attempt and ends up right back in hell for good.
- Batman: Beyond the White Knight: As Bruce discovers to his horror, his Heroic Sacrifice in Curse of the White Knight was rendered meaningless thanks to Derek's meddling. Bruce intended to dissolve Wayne Enterprises into various nonprofit organizations, only for Derek to put a stop to it as its new CEO and used Wayne Charity Funds to fund the GTO as his own personal army.
- Batman: Contagion: A bulk of the story has some of the Bat-Family trying to hunt down survivors of the plague from Greenland. The first is killed by St. Dumas assassins, the second killed himself believing himself invincible, but Catwoman is able to rescue the third and get her back to Gotham, only to learn that the three survivors only lived because they had a natural immunity to the plague, which made them useless. Azrael and his allies are able to find a cure through some documents they saved, but as Legacy reveals, even that was fleeting.
- The Boys: Vought's Stillwell did everything in his power to keep the company alive. At the end, he witnesses the presentation of the newest (and last remaining) superhero team, he begins to notice that something is off about them. (Specifically, he notes the unexplained erection of one member of the new team, and the telltale signs of drug withdrawal in another.) He realizes this batch of supers will most likely be worse than the last one and that Compound V is just a bad and, worst of all, unmarketable product. He appears to start the early stages of a nervous breakdown in the final issue, finally cracking as he realizes that his years of scheming led to nothing, and that there is no way to turn Vought's situation around.
- D.P. 7: In Issue 14, Randy tells a stunned Charly that, perhaps because of his upbringing, he can't see himself in a relationship with a black person. Charly is so hurt and angry that she joins a militant black faction, the Black Powers, and adds Randy's name to a list of racists the gang intends to beat up. A few issues later, they reconcile and become friends again. Over the next dozen issues, they experience adventures together, share many happy moments, and seem to be moving toward becoming a couple after all. But after Randy becomes trapped inside his dark antibody, Charly begins avoiding him. In Issue 31, Randy confronts her about it and Charly bluntly tells him that they had been the two normal-looking ones in their old therapy group, but now that he was trapped inside his antibody, he could no longer pass for normal. When Randy asks if they're no longer friends because of his appearance, Charly reminds him that he did the same to her. She tells him that she is rejecting him the same way he rejected her, and leaves. It's as if everything Randy and Charly shared with each other in the time since his rejection of her doesn't count for anything. One would think that the fact that Randy and Charly had saved each other's lives more than once would at least be enough to sustain a friendship, but apparently not. Because there was very little direct contact between Randy and Charly in the next (and last) issue of the series, the reader is never told whether Randy and Charly ever resolved their differences.
- Played for Laughs in one issue of Fantastic Four: a sleazoid photographer takes photographs of She-Hulk sunbathing topless and despite her trying both brute force and some legal means, she's unable to get him to not print the photos, meaning the world's gonna see her jolly green giants. Some time later, the Human Torch flies in with the issue they're in and reveals that, in the photographer's haste in getting them published, he forgot to tell the magazine that the figure in question was meant to be green-skinned and color-corrected her to look like a normal human.
- The Flash
- Barry Allen/The Flash II went into the future to find an atomic clock that threatened to explode like an atomic bomb, that was sent into the future in a time capsule that included an old Flash costume Professor Zoom a.k.a. the Reverse Flash used to recreate the superhero's speed powers to commit crimes with it. With no other clue where the clock was, the Flash chased down Professor Zoom in hopes he knew. After an extended fight, Flash managed to capture Zoom. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a waste of time: Zoom knew nothing about the clock and Flash had to search even more frenetically to find it and just barely managed to succeed.
- Ashley Zolomon, the estranged ex-wife of Hunter Zolomon, was once happily married to her husband; the two of them married before graduating college and joining the FBI, working under her father, Derek, who had a great fatherly relationship with his son-in-law Hunter. However, things come crashing down for the couple when during an FBI mission, Hunter predicted that a suspect wouldn't have a gun and thus urged his team to arrest him without waiting for backup. Hunter turned out to be wrong, and the killer shot him in the knee, crippling him, before gunning down his father-in-law; in response, Ashley filed for divorce and was let go from the FBI. When Ashley later learns of Hunter's transformation into Zoom, she doesn't hesitate to leave her entire career at the FBI behind to come to Keystone City to take over his former spot as the local metahuman profiler to help reform him. When Ashley visits a comatose and imprisoned Hunter, she makes it clear that she still loves him, regrets leaving him, and promises never to leave him again. Unfortunately, Ashley was unable to help Hunter as she wanted.
- First, when Hunter was comatose, Ashley was unable to talk to him; all she could do was tell him stories of their relationship, how they were happy together, how he taught her to be a great detective, and finally, shamefully admitting that she was the one that got him discharged from the FBI and helped destroy his life. While things did look up when Hunter got out of his unconscious state when Ashley was in a car accident and left flowers at her hospital bed while returning to his cell. Hunter escaped before Ashley could talk to him; she was devastated and wanted to know where he was, and while Hunter protected her when Ashley was attacked by The Rogues when Pied Piper kidnaped her to make a profile on Captain Boomerang for the FBI, but at the end of the storyline Hunter disappears in time, and the story ends with Ashley keeping to the Flash identity a secret and going to have dinner with two colleagues and his wife, with Hunter appearing as she left saying sorry Ashley. Hunter was eventually depowered and in prison. But before Ashley could possibly talk with Hunter, Flashpoint changed the universe, and the two of them disappeared and were perhaps were erased from the universe.
- When Hunter Zolomon returned, and it was made clear that his history with his father-in-law and ex-wife was still in continuity, Ashley Zolomon did not make an appearance and was only mentioned; what made this worse is that it was revealed that the tragic mistake Hunter made that cause his father-in-law death was no mistake - Hunter had correctly assessed the situation, and things would have ended there and then if a time-traveling Professor Zoom hadn't given the killer a gun in order to start Zolomon down the road to becoming Zoom. When Hunter learns of this, he turns against Professor Zoom and sacrifices his life to defeat him while apologizing to Wally West. Ashley was never shown learning the mistakes that caused her father's death, and the breakdown of her marriage was engineered by a supervillain or her former husband's fate of learning the truth and sacrificing his life. All in all, Ashley Zolomon's attempt to help her husband and be there for him was all for nothing because of circumstances beyond her control, and she never got the chance to reunite with him despite declaring that she would never leave him again.
- Subverted in Green Lantern with the origin of GL Sodam Yat. As a boy, he grew disgusted with his planet's murderous xenophobia, including when his fellows murdered an alien astronaut whose ship crashes on his planet. In response, he labored for years to repair the alien's ship and leave, but just as he was finished, a power ring arrived to induct him into the Green Lantern Corps. While that meant that now he didn't need the ship to leave the planet, the fact that he worked with that much determination to repair a ship he didn't know, nor how to pilot it or even where he could have gone after he launched, all for the sake of leaving a place and its evil is an incredible display of courage worthy of the Corps, and likely what attracted the ring to him in the first place.
- In issue #181 of Volume 2, Congressman Jason Bloch is confronted by the villain known as Predator. As it was, Bloch was attacking Fenris Aircraft via learning that Hal Jordan was Green Lantern. However, his attacks pissed off the people Predator was working for, so he was sent to kill him. With his last breath, Bloch stumbles out of his office and tells a lady who tries to help him that Hal is Green Lantern and she must tell everyone with his last breath. The lady in question? Air Force Major Diana Prince, who tells Steve Trevor that he said nothing at all.
- Guardians of the Galaxy: Vance Astrovik volunteers to be sent on a mission to Centauri IV, which is a thousand year-long journey. He has to be sealed inside a special suit to prevent him dying of old age on the way there, and cryogenically frozen, with the occasional while spent making sure the ship's still on course. He Goes Mad From The Isolation, but his Mutant powers kick in as a result. ... and when he finally gets there, it turns out mankind figured out how to go faster than light a few centuries after he left, making his entire mission superfluous.
- And then, a few minutes after he's unfrozen, the Badoon appear and try to wipe out mankind, and do a damn thorough job of it, making Vance one of the last humans alive.
- In The Avengers (Jonathan Hickman), the possibility that this trope is in effect looms over the story, with the Avengers questioning if they'll be able to stop the Incursions threatening to destroy reality. It's a bigger threat than anything they've faced before and things are looking increasingly hopeless... but even if everything is doomed, would that justify doing nothing? Ultimately subverted; many plans truly were for nothing, but many others came together to save the multiverse, and it's clear that everything would've died if people like the Avengers and Fantastic Four hadn't fought to the bitter end. Even if they had lost, they would've at least gone down fighting.
- Explicitly averted, or for the moment very explicitly attempted, by Kieron Gillen on his run in Journey into Mystery (Gillen). Major Spoilers ahead. Well aware that there was no way Loki could be left good when he was the major villain of the third biggest film of all time, having his run end with Kid!Loki triumphing and changing "for good" would really just become "for the next week or so until the next writer comes along." In order to avoid his story losing any of its impact, he didn't just kill Kid!Loki, he erased him from existence utterly to be replaced by his older version.
- Mini Marvels: Cereal Quest: Wolverine discovers someone ate his cereal. In anger, he slashes the X-Men's table leg, causing the cereal to fall on top of Angel. Wolvie then embarks on a quest to get more cereal, encountering many thoroughly unpleasant individuals, including the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, who try to steal his cereal or otherwise impede his progress. Finally, Wolverine returns to the X-Mansion, cereal in hand. Then he discovers he has no milk. But then Nightcrawler offers to simply teleport to the store and buy more milk, so Wolverine takes it and pours it into the bowl... which then falls to the ground. Because of the bad table leg.
- In the Mortadelo y Filemón story Valor y... ¡al toro!, the entire plot of getting back some secret plans is rendered all for nothing when it is revealed that the plans never left the pocket of their inventor in the first place. The title agents are not amused by this.
- The Sandman (1989): Lyta Hall makes a deal with the Furies in an attempt to avenge her husband and son who she believes was killed by Dream of the Endless. Sadly, her son Daniel turns out to be alive but Lyta is unable to recall the Furies after learning this, and when the Furies kill Morpheus Daniel 'dies' alongside him, permanently ruining any chance she had of getting him back.
- Superman:
- "Those Emerald Eyes Are Shining": Lightning Lord finds out that his sister Ayla "Light Lass" Ranzz has left the Legion of Super-Heroes, and believing he can talk her into joining him, attacks the super-team's base to learn Ayla's current whereabouts. After tearing the place down and fighting most of Legionnaires, Lightning Lord is knocked out by Lightning Lad, who reveals that his brother Mekt was wasting his time in trying to blast Light Lass' location out of everybody. Ayla did not tell anybody -not even her own twin brother- where she was going to. And Garth did not ask her either out of respect for her privacy.
- Superboy (1994): Amanda Spence thought that Superboy was the enhanced clone of her father, Dr. Paul Westfield, one of the scientists in charge of the cloning. She then decided to make Superboy's life miserable, feeling he was a disgrace to her father and his memory. This includes creating the more powerful and unstable second clone Match, causing Superboy's body to start falling apart and gruesomely killing Superboy's love interest Tana Moon. Her vengeance was already badly misguided and hugely disproportionate, but when you add in that Westfield was retconned out as being the clone donor, it makes it this trope big time.
- The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: The Shadowplay arc becomes this, thanks to the Foregone Conclusion of being a flashback. The villains are trying to make the Decepticon Registration Act mandatory, via a circuitous scheme involving murdering the current Prime and putting a massive bomb in his corpse. Orion Pax and his allies foil this plot, though at the cost of one of the few truly good members of the Senate, and Pax's friend. Then, some years later said friend's student Zeta will become Prime and make the Act mandatory anyway, pushing Cybertron right over the edge into full-scale war.
- And that Senator? Just happens to be Shockwave.
- The entire quest for the Knights of Cybertron turns out to have been this, to wit the Knights of Cybertron died a long time ago and they actually stumbled upon a massive euthanasia clinic that makes dying patients see their greatest fantasy and they made a map to it after they thought it was a utopia. Meaning all the pain, death and betrayal was for nothing.
- Getaway's mutiny also never comes close to achieving anything he wanted it to. He got Rodimus and Megatron off the ship, but neither the Galactic Council nor the Decepticon Justice Division manage to kill them. Far from being an opportunity to find the Knights of Cybertron without delays or inconveniences, Getaway ends up spending more time trying to maintain his control over the ship than actually pursuing leads or following the map. When he does get to Cyberutopia, the above detail about the quest is still true, but for bonus points, Team Rodimus — the people he dismissed as continually getting them caught up in distractions — has still beaten him there, and end up curing most of his army of sparkeaters and defeating him. Needless to say, he doesn't get to be a Prime like he wanted, although he does get a vision of Primus... except it's a hologram being used by a swarm of scraplets, and when he touches it, he gets eaten.
- Megatron specifically tells this to the DJD as he kills them.Spoiler Character: Goodbye, Glitch. I want you to die with one thought in your head: everything you did was for nothing.
- Uncanny X-Men Vol 3: Cyclops begins the mutant revolution — a peaceful demonstration that shows that mutants can co-exist with regular humans. After the 8 month Time Skip following Secret Wars (2015), mutants are going extinct because of Terrigenesis and are hated more than ever.
- The Ultimates: The Chitauri tried to harmonize Earth with the help of the Nazis, and that led to WWII. But the survivors regrouped in the jungles, started a mass infiltration, arranged many plans to achieve their goals through more indirect means... and it was all pointless. The Chitauri main fleet shows up, without even bothering with cloaking devices, and informs them that there is no more time. Because of intergalactic reasons, they have to leave the area ASAP, so Earth will have to be blown up and be done with it.
- After creating worldwide peace through making a false alien invasion by Ozymandias in Watchmen, Doomsday Clock depicts how much Ozymandias went through amounts to nothing after seven years of worldwide peace, where the United States and Russia went back to start World War III when Rorschach's Journal containing Ozymandias's schemes were exposed to the public.
- Hellboy: The Osiris Club are a secret society of immortals who have been prophesied to survive Ragnarok and use the power of Hellboy's right hand to become gods of the new world. After living for hundreds of years and surviving the return of the Ogdru Hem, they obtain Hellboy's severed hand and use it to absorb the lifeforce of the Ogdru Jahad, bringing their plans to the brink of fruition. However, it is at this moment that Hellboy's ghost returns and reclaims the hand, destroying them all in the process. In their final moments, at least two of them lament that it had all been for nothing.
- Wonder Woman Vol 1: It turns out that Diana and Etta's landlord Russell Abernathy is a former senator who was convinced by Russian agents that if he gave them intel on weapon development programs and military movements they could and would save his dying wife. They lied, and he lost everything that had ever mattered to him and spends the rest of his life with a target on his back.
