Asshole Victim / Comic Books

• In ThunderCats: Dogs of War, Lion-O tries to get the Doberlord court-martialed for War Crimes, only for Lion-O's nemesis, Mumm-Ra, stab the latter through the chest from behind. When you consider how the mad dog enslaved and or massacred millions, if not billions, universal-wide, it'd be impossible for you to have any kind of sympathy for the bastard.
• Watchmen:
  • The Comedian, although that had nothing to do with the (primary) motivation behind his murder. By the end of the comic, some readers feel some sympathy for him. But he's still an asshole who tried to rape the first Silk Spectre and murdered a Vietnamese woman who was pregnant with his child, among other things.
  • Moloch, though he hadn't been an asshole in years.
  • Gerald Grice. The plot needed to show Rorschach violently murdering someone, to establish the full onset of his insanity. Grice being a murderer himself makes the story a very solid Black-and-Grey Morality type.
  • Rorschach's mother was brutally murdered by her pimp. Considering that she was shown as highly abusive toward her son, it's not hard to see why Rorschach simply said "Good" when informed of his mother's death.
• As bad as Doctor Doom is, King Vladimir Vassily Gonereo Tristian Mangegi Fortunov, the former ruler of Latveria, whom Doom deposed and killed, was a far worse tyrant by most accounts. The same goes for anybody who successfully overthrows him; every time it happens and he later seizes back his power, the citizens are always glad to have him back.
• The Punisher usually goes after some rather nasty people. The people he kills tend to be even worse. At least one (if not two) exception was the Punisher being unwillingly wacked out of his skull on drugs.
• Shadowland: Daredevil completely loses his shit and murders Bullseye after dislocating his arms. This was supposed to show that Daredevil was descending into darkness, but it backfired as most people wanted Daredevil to actually kill the man who blew up a block in Hell's Kitchen and gloated over it.
• Spider-Man:
  • After all the hell Sasha Kravinoff put Spider-Man through, including killing Mattie Franklin and Madame Web, not a single shit was given when Kraven snapped her neck.
  • Spider-Man 2099: Aaron Delgato's a huge jerk, and he dies after one of his own bullets makes a tank explode.
  • Spider-Verse: Very few people will miss Patton Parnel, an evil red-headed version of Peter Parker who mutated into a spider-monster before being killed by Morlun.
  • Superior Spider-Man (2013): The bullies that were picking on Anna Marconi for being a little person. Sure what Otto did was Disproportionate Retribution, but those guys were hardly innocents. Same goes for many of the bad guys that Otto has beaten up or killed.
  • Untold Tales of Spider-Man: Played With. Sally Avril was a cruel and uncaring Alpha Bitch who mocked and bullied Peter Parker and was desperate to be famous. When Peter's uncle dies, she didn't give a rat's ass, and when she saw her friend Liz Allan talking to him (she was offering him her condolences), she coaxed Liz away rather than offer her own sympathy to Peter. Eventually, to become famous, Sally tried to become a superhero and called herself Bluebird, and even tried to blackmail Peter into taking pictures of her superhero identity by threatening to reveal his Spidey photography to the rest of her friends, which forced Peter to announce it himself at school. Sally failed as a superhero because she was not much of a fighter, and her gadgets didn't work most of the time. What causes Sally to quit being Bluebird is that Spider-Man lets thugs beat her as a warning and tells her she can't be a superhero. So Sally decides to try and get famous by becoming a photographer like Peter, only to end up dying in a car crash when she forces Jason Ionello to drive faster than he should to take pictures of a Spider-Man fight. Peter starts blaming himself for Sally's death and acts like she was a good friend whom he failed. It takes the Human Torch to get Peter out of his funk, calling out Sally as a careless thrill seeker who would've probably gotten herself killed much sooner if Spider-Man hadn't held her back. All in all, while Sally's death is sad, she wasn't a nice person, and her own stupidity led to her death.
• Supergirl:
  • In the start of Red Daughter of Krypton, a crime lord is gunned down by one of the dancers whom he used to abuse sexually. No one sheds a single tear.
  • In Bizarrogirl, Bizarro Luthor gets stomped by the spawn of the monster he summoned to kill Bizarro #1, so it’s hard to feel sorry for him. Bizarro #1 certainly does not.
  • In "The Unknown Supergirl", Lesla-Lar is a jealous, arrogant madwoman who attempted to destroy Supergirl's life out of petty envy and was willing to destroy Earth just for amusement. She is murdered by the Phantom Zoners in "The Girl with the X-Ray Mind" when they need a target to try their weapons on.
• Johnny the Homicidal Maniac:
  • Most of Johnny's victims are this. Or are implied to be people like this. Or hung out with people like this. Or stood too close to people like this (i.e., around two kilometers). Come to think of it, Johnny doesn't really discriminate once he's gotten going, but it takes a soon-to-be Asshole Victim to trigger his homicidal rampages... Mostly. Most of the people he takes back to his Torture Cellar (who will be dead pretty soon) are prime examples however. Or at least implied to be.
  • Jimmy, Johnny's creepy fanboy/admirer, murders several innocent people for no reason other than being like his "hero", Johnny. But without a doubt his worst crime is raping and killing an innocent girl, just because she looks like another who dissed him in school. He's the title character with no sympathetic qualities. When the reader witnesses his brutal murder at Johnny's hands, not a single tear is shed.
• From Dark Times, Dezono Qua who was a Rich Bitch who thinks his wealth puts him above the common man and enables him to do whatever he wants to indulge his petty hedonistic impulses, up to and including killing and eating children. Needless to say, no-one shed a tear over his death.
• Tommy Monaghan, the titular protagonist of Hitman, only takes contracts out on those he considers to be "bad" people.
• In the backstory of Kingdom Come, Magog kills the Joker while he's in police custody. This is The Joker, and he was arrested because he went on a rampage in the Daily Planet offices and killed 75 people — including Lois Lane. When Superman protests, the public sides with Magog for this very reason. This kind of mindset is gradually deconstructed, however. The public deciding that it's okay for heroes to kill someone just because people think they're an asshole eventually leads to an entire generation of out-of-control and reckless heroes who don't hold back for anything — including innocent bystanders.
• In Superman Smashes the Klan, no one's going to mourn Dr. Wilson, the founder of the Klan, after Matt Riggs strangles him to death.
• Speaking of the Joker, he kills Sheila Haywood, Jason Todd's mother in A Death in the Family. She'd lost her medical license for performing back-alley abortions (one of which killed a patient) and was embezzling from her aid agency. She turned over her son to the Joker to save herself (instead of using her gun), but the Joker decided to kill both of them anyway.
• As another Joker example, Batman: Bloodstorm sees him become the leader of a group of vampires after the death of Dracula leaves the other bloodsuckers basically incapable of planning any further than their next meal. He single-handedly helps them take control of all of Gotham's major crime families, only to be stopped when the now-vampire Batman's daylight allies stake his followers during the day and the last few are dealt with by Batman himself. After Joker kills Selina Kyle, the were-cat-woman who was the only person able to help Batman control his thirst for blood, the Dark Knight finally loses his self-control, slapping the Joker so hard that he breaks the clown's neck and then drinks his blood. This is regarded by Batman himself as the moment he crossed the Moral Event Horizon- made even more explicit as he loses his immunity to crucifixes when he first drinks blood- but literally nobody actually mourns the Joker's death.
  • Taken even further in the sequel, Crimson Mist, as Batman gives in to his new thirst for blood and turns on all of his old enemies. They're all ultimately reduced to begging the terrifying nightmare for their lives as Batman rips their throats out with his teeth (save for Killer Croc, and that was only because Batman killed him too quickly), but it's always clear that they basically deserved it; Gordon and Alfred's only true objection to the deaths is that the Batman they knew would never have done such a thing when he was human.
• Out of everyone the Joker has killed over the years, his most deserving victim was probably Psimon. His reason for killing Psimon was rather petty (Psimon was boring him), but Psimon had a body count in the billions by this point, and was trying to enforce breeding slavery of a number of female villains at the time. No one can say he didn't absolutely deserve to have his head smashed in.
• Another deserved victim of the Joker's was Alexander Luthor in Infinite Crisis. The man became a Fallen Hero who directly or indirectly murdered countless people in his quest to find the perfect Earth, either by his own hand or by the work of the Society (like the Wretched Hive Bludhaven) or fellow Fallen Hero Superboy-Prime (who ended up killing the Conner Kent Superboy and other heroes, C-List Fodder or not). While Joker's reasoning is just as petty (Alex refused to let him be on the Society, something our Lex Luthor knew was a bad thing to pull), Lex Luthor leading Joker to Alex and letting him spray him with acid and flash fry him with a powered up joybuzzer before blasting him in the head was seen as a fitting end for most.
• In the first Deadshot miniseries, Deadshot—at the time a Boxed Crook working for the government—went on an unsanctioned spree of torture, maiming, and murder. However, since every one of his victims was complicit in the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Deadshot's young son, neither his boss nor the readers cared all that much.
• Anyone the Secret Six killed in their eponymous series for the exact same reason as the Punisher example above. Standout example goes to a serial killer rapist whose victims included a nine-year-old girl. Catman and Deadshot take him from police custody and hand him over to the father of that very little girl he raped and killed. Catman even gives the man torture pointers before leaving him alone with the killer, who is strapped to a table and left miserably pleading for his life.
• As he's moved to being a more heroic and less serious character, Deadpool often ends up with these kind of targets when he's working as an assassin.
• Much like for the Punisher, the people Spawn kills usually are douches, making it easier for the fans to cheer as he dismantle them gruesomely.
• X-23: Innocence Lost
  • When she kills Zander Rice, she puts away the claws and beats him for ten minutes in a truly brutal No-Holds-Barred Beatdown. Rice tortured and both physically and emotionally abused Laura all her life to that point,^note Forcibly activating her Healing Factor at age seven with fatal dosages of radiation, removing her claws one at a time for coating in adamantium without anasthesia, torturing her into responding to an olfactory trigger that sends her into a berserker rage whenever she smells it and using it to force her to murder the only two people at the Facility who cared about her, intentionally leaving her behind to be killed on a mission out of spite, and placing her in the "care" of the sadistic Kimura, among other things. And he only did this because Wolverine killed his father and Laura was created using his genetic material. so it makes the scene far more satisfying to read than watching someone get pounded into an unrecognizable pulp would normally be.
  • Martin Sutter, as well. Although he didn't take a direct hand in her brutal upbringing that Rice did, he fostered the environment which enabled him to do so. Sutter summarily rejected every suggestion or warning Sarah Kinney made, and his entire motivation for the project was sheer greed. He never once had misgivings about what he and Rice were doing, and it's hard to feel a shred of sympathy for him when Rice manipulates him into turning over full control to him, and then sends X-23 to kill him.
• Happens in quite a few EC Comics, as often someone invokes a Karmic Death by driving another person to kill them.
• The Batman Adventures: Harvey Dent's father, Lester, in Issue #2 of Gotham Adventures. After winning big in a game show, he's attacked by Dent, as Two-Face who makes him call a coin toss for his life (Lester used to do this to decide whether he'd give him a beating) He loses, but Batman blocks the bullet. But Two-Face, naturally, made two plans: He rigged the money with an explosive, which he activates. Lester desperately scrounges up the ten grand that remains, claiming that he'll be able to triple it if he can just make it to Atlantic City by midnight. Gordon doesn't let him, bagging the money as evidence, and Lester just sits there, defeated. No tears are shed.
• Batman: Dark Victory involves a Cop Killer called the Hangman. Among the victims are the Dirty Cops from Batman: Year One: former commissioner Gillian Loeb, Gordon's former partner Arnold Flass, SWAT Lt. Branden, and SWAT officer Pratt. While Flass and Branden only appear in the mini as corpses, both Loeb and Pratt each get a moment to further cement their asshole behavior before they die: Loeb swings by recently promoted commissioner Gordon's office to gloat about Harvey Dent's transformation into Two-Face and Chief O'Hara being the first victim of the Hangman (and not-subtly imply he's gunning to get his job as police commissioner back) and Pratt tries to shoot Batman in retaliation for Batman punching him through a wall (which Pratt earned considering he fired at a cat).
• Several of the heroines in Misty were unpleasant Jerk Asses or Alpha Bitches, in order to justify the many Downer Endings of the stories.
• Harley Quinn: in the 2014/Rebirth series, there are maybe two or three people she kills or maims who didn't completely deserve it.
• Caballistics, Inc.: Demon Jenny hits the bars a few times in search of fresh victims, one of whom was apparently a serial rapist and another one a child molester. Justified because she mentions that she feeds on human sin.
• 100 Bullets has this trope as the impetus for its plot: ordinary people, selected seemingly at random, are given a chance to get even with someone who has done them a great wrong and get away with it. Many take the chance, and many other assholes are similarly dispatched even if they aren't the primary target. Examples have included...
  • A pair of murderous, racist Dirty Cops perfectly willing to kill children.
  • A Russian mafioso who burned down a nursing home.
  • A criminally negligent landlord who used dangerous chemicals in his building's paints and covered it up.
  • Members of an underground poaching ring.
  • A corrupt, abusive prison guard.
  • Mexican sex traffickers.
  • A deranged couple who cut open a pregnant woman to raise her baby as their own.
  • Various members of an Ancient Conspiracy and their henchmen.
• Arawn: Math and Engus were two vicious and bloodthirsty warlords that betrayed their own kin for ultimate power, murdered several innocents and were depraved rapists (the former raped his brother's wife and the latter was a pedophile). When Arawn finally becomes King of Hell, inflicts eternal torture upon them by having Math to be quartered forever and Engus beheaded and forced to look to a mirror for all time with his eyes stitched open. Even with such brutal punishments, Arawn feels they got off too easy.
• [1] Has Rod, who physically abuses his wife Brenda and regularly picks fights with other townsfolk. One night, after Brenda mouths off to him after having enough of his abuse, he tries to kill her with a knife, only for the predator to kill him. No one sheds a tear. (Except oddly enough, Brenda, who hadn't wanted Rod to be killed.)
• Deathstroke's bastard Titans went up against these types of villains on most of their missions, including a crime syndicate that manufactured a highly addictive drug literally made from children, a serial child molester with an hypnotic voice, the man who remorselessly murdered Tattooed Man's son, and the leader of an organization of underground human death matches where the fighters are experimented on and mutilated before they fight. This was on part of writer Eric Wallace's attempt to make the team of self-admitted villains seem better in comparison and thus earn sympathy from the readers. For a variety of reasons, it didn't work and fans hated the Titans just as much as their enemies.
• Subverted in The Mask comics: the fates "Big Head" inflicts on people are often so extreme that even when the victims are assholes, it's usually more horrific than cathartic.
• Notably averted in Tom King’s Mister Miracle (2017) run. Orion acts like a total Jerkass to Mister Miracle and Big Barda for most of the story, culminating in trying to have the former executed out of fear he may be infected by the Anti-Life Equation. Yet when Darkseid brutally kills him, Miracle is horrified and nearly collapses in grief; Orion may be a total dickhead, but he’s also Scott’s brother and Scott will always love him as one.
• Druuna: Morbus Gravis: A sadistic soldier is dragged offscreen and eaten by one of the mutants while he was in the process of raping a female captive.
• X-Men: Reality-warping serial body-snatcher Proteus' first victim is a man who previously had refused to lend the X-Men a boat which they'd paid for, then refused to give them their money back, resulting in the X-Men hanging him from a pipe and taking the boat anyway, only for it to get totalled by Magneto. In response to this, the man travels to Muir Island to blow up Moira Mactaggert's lab, even thinking that if any innocent folk get hurt "so much the better". Then Proteus comes along looking for a new body... Then, Proteus' last victim is his own father, who really had it coming.
• X-Force: After being drugged and brainwashed by the Purifiers, Wolfsbane winds up killing and slightly eating her father, Reverend Craig. Given he was an abusive arsehole, who spent Rahne's childhood instilling her belief she was automatically damned to Hell, and is responsible for Rahne's laundry list of issues even before he tried lynching her as a teenager, the only one who actually feels he's a loss to the species is Rahne herself.
• Fables: In an arc set before the story proper, Snow White had her husband, Prince Charming, train her in swordplay all to enhancer her skill so that she could secretly murder a group of dwarves that had taken her hostage and raped her. The Dwarf King threatens war for the deaths unless the culprit is found and even though Charming realizes it was his wife all along, he covers it up by framing an unrelated man for the deed, executing him, and sending the head to the Dwarf King. Said man was a notorious killer and on death row anyway, so Charming's actions weren't entirely unsympathetic.
• Dynamo5: Zigzagged. The more we learn about Captain Dynamo/William Warner, the more despicable he appears to be. It is revealed in the series that he was a habitual womanizer who cheated on his wife, Maddie Warner, even when it compromised his crime-fighting duties. He also was not above using his shape shifting power to impersonate married women's husbands in order to sleep with them. He had an affair with one of his enemies, a supervillain named Chrysalis, and had a daughter with her named Cynthia, and led a second life to help raise her. The worst thing he did was when he fathered a child with an alien woman that he had met in outer space, after coming to the aid of her malfunctioning starship. When the mother gives him the child because she can't raise him herself, he leaves the infant at a F.L.A.G. research facility, where the child grows up without parents. When one of the scientists bonds with the child and begs Captain Dynamo to free him, Captain Dynamo refuses. However, his wife Maddie Warner and best friend Augie Ford still very much respect his memory and miss him, despite learning about his faults. It is implied that Captain Dynamo/William Warner truly did love his wife Maddie Warner and his best friend Augie Ford and aside from the cheating and womanizing, he took his crime-fighting duties as protector of Tower City seriously.
• Done rather humorously in Marvel Zombies, where one of Zombie Spider-Man's victims is J. Jonah Jameson.
• Marvel Graphic Novel Issue #18 has S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Roger Dooley who subjects She-Hulk to a number of painful and invasive "examinations" and threatens her boyfriend to make her comply. Dooley ends up being possessed by a colony of radioactive, sentient cockroaches who make him sabotage the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier and he dies when the roaches try (and fail) to possess She-Hulk.
• The Incredible Hulk: Most people who get beat up by the Hulk usually have it coming. Bruce Banner just can't stop running into assholes who go out of their way to make the poor guy mad.
  • Years before he became the Hulk, Bruce Banner killed his own father, mostly by accident. The shock and horror of this caused Bruce to forget the entire event, burying it in his memories for years, and he ran off into the night, until he came to the next day and called the police. Fortunately, the rain covered up any evidence of what'd happened, and the police knew what kind of person Brian Banner had been like (he'd just been released from a mental asylum where he'd been sent for bragging about murdering his wife), so they didn't feel the need to investigate too hard.
• In Über The sociopathic, sadistic and fanatical Markus/Siegfried is the first Nazi Battleship to die in the comic, by a deservedly Cruel and Unusual Death with his throat being slit, half his skull being blown up and massive blood loss finally doing him in. Siegmund was torn about whether to save him or not, but wasn't particularly upset at being ordered to retreat.
• Calico (2020): While all of Calico's victims apply for this because of their history of hurting animals, the most egregious example would have to be the one in Issue #3, who was running a dog fighting pit downtown. He meets his end when Calico sicks his own dogs on him.
• S.W.O.R.D. (2020): At the end of the series, Henry Gyrich, who for years has generally been a Karma Houdini for pretty much anything they've done, gets spaced. The killer makes a note to act more irritated than sad, because nobody who knows either of them would believe they actually were sad. Come X-Men Red (2022) it's an Open Secret that it wasn't suicide, but when called on it the killer just shrugs and goes "so what if I did? Is anyone here going to say it was wrong?" Despite one or two people looking uncertain, no-one actually objects.
• Zatanna (2010):
  • The victims of Brother Night's massacre turn out to be ruthless gangsters, which is why neither Zatanna nor Cole are too horrified by their gruesome deaths.
  • The only people that Sargon the Sorcerer manages to kill are a pair of unsympathetic drug dealers and a mugger.
• Squad: Most of the men the pack kill are this. They purposefully seek out rapists and the like so that they feel less guilty about killing them.
• Animal Man: The alternate future miniseries The Last Days of Animal Man ends with the villains Bloodrage and Prismatik crippled for life after Buddy defeats them by infecting them with the bubonic plague and permanently loses his powers before he is able to cure them as a show of mercy. While Buddy is upset that he can't undo what he did to the villains, the fact remains that they deserve their fate for remorselessly threatening countless lives and attempting to extort a fortune from the world by holding the League of Titans hostage.

---