Warning: As a potential Death Trope for successful examples, many unmarked spoilers are ahead.
Burn the Witch! in Comic Books.
- Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld: In Crisis on Infinite Earths #11, she was surrounded by a mob accusing her of being a witch and thinking the red skies are her doing. Fortunately, other mystic heroes came to her rescue.
- A recurring element in the Black Magick series:
- In the first issue, a man who knows that Rowan possesses true magical power attempts to kill her by setting fire to her, because that is the traditional method used to kill witches. She uses her abilities to redirect the flames to him instead.
- Backmatter in the series includes journal writing and musings from a member of a witch hunting organization from the sixteenth century, and he reflects on the first time he saw a woman being burned as a child. This woman was not a witch, but had been falsely convicted by the zealotry and paranoia of the Catholic Church, and he had been brought to the burning by his father and grandfather so that he would never allow himself to make such a mistake himself.
- The Chick Tract dealing with the Salem witch trials is called Satan Comes to Salem
, but the Satan he refers to is not in the form of witches. Instead he blames wicked Puritans that have innocent Christians hanged for witchcraft. Perhaps surprisingly (given the comics' usual tone), Chick elaborates that "to justify the execution of witches...they used the Old Testament law (Exodus 22:18), but never considered New Testament grace (Matthew 5:44 & John 1:17)." - Les Compagnons du crépuscule:
- Carmine and the knight are accused of witchcraft - a sentence which also applies to Mariotte and the actors (which go into hiding). The two former are burnt at the stake. At the beginning of the story, the villagers invoke it against Mariotte, effectively dooming themselves in the process.
- Mariotte is also captured by a mob in volume two, invoking the same trope.
- In Detective Comics #49, a Theme Serial Killer attempts to kill one of his victims by reenacting Joan of Arc's execution by burning at the stake. The victim is saved by Jim Gordon who is wearing the Bat-suit at the time.
- In Fables, Hansel (of "Hansel and Gretel") develops an obsession for burning witches after shoving the one from the story into her own oven. When he escapes to the Mundane world he is disgusted to find the witch survived, and the amnesty laws prevent him from doing anything to her. So, he travels to Europe and spearheads dozens of 'witch-burnings' because he can't do anything about the real ones in the world.
- The spin-off novel "Peter and Max" has the same witch threatened with a trial, to which she responds "The trouble with witch trials, is that once in a great while you actually capture a real one. And then the spectacle never turns out the way you anticipate. Often the one who ends up hanged, or drowned, or burned, isn't the one in the docket." Given the power she demonstrates throughout the series, this is not an empty threat from her, though it's possible that a less powerful practitioner might have legitimate reason to fear a trial.
- Agatha Harkness, babysitter for the Fantastic Four and the most powerful member of a Mage Species, has this happen. It's only a minor inconvenience, though, and she goes around as a ghost for a while before eventually resurrecting herself.
- After the Monster leaves Antarctica in The Frankenstein Monster, the first thing he is greeted with when he comes in contact with civilization is a woman tied to a mast of a burning boat. He thinks she is victim of superstition, but it turns out she is actually a werewolf.
- Parodied in an issue of the Futurama comic book when Bender gets sent back through time into a Salem-esque area where townsfolk, having run out of witches to burn for their sour milk, spoiled crops and bitter wives, have started hunting robots. Of course, being prejudiced morons, they asked the robots for a list of their weaknesses, and promptly got handed a book of such "facts" such as "robots feel no pain when their hair is cut", "robots are ticklish" and "robots float in water". Once the final test is complete, they try burning the poor sap, only to find ponds aren't easily set aflame. This gets the guy trying to do this some suspicious looks. Bender steps in and tries telling the townsfolk that their deeds are wrong, only to clue them in on the real robots. One Smash Cut later they're both being burnt alive. Of course, being robots, they don't burn at all.
- In Lori Lovecraft: The Big Comeback, an actress playing a witch in a film is tied to a pyre for a scene when a demon causes the pyre to ignite for real: burning her to death.
- In one article MAD suggests that the convicted Salem witches did a music tour before their executions.
- In one story arc in Madame Xanadu, flashbacks reveal how Madame Xanadu's lesbian lover was burned as a witch by The Spanish Inquisition. The executioner takes pity on her and snaps her neck before lighting the pyre.
- Averted in an issue of Marvel Team-Up in which Spider-Man time-travels to Salem and tries to save the victims of the Witch Trials. He fails but the witches were not burned (he finds them hanged, which is historically accurate).
- Mélusine: Even though Mélusine is generally trying to help the local villagers with her magic, a group of them are always trying to subject her to this. The pastor is the most persistent of them.
- Almost happens in an old Mickey Mouse comic where Mickey and Gyro Gearloose are transported back to Puritan times and Gyro uses his lighter to start a fire, getting him and Mickey accused of using witchcraft.
- Monstress: As a way to anger her, Maika tells Lady Sophia that the devastation of Constantine happened when the Arcanics burnt five witches at the stake. While what happened in Constantine was caused by something else, there may be some truth to Arcanics burning witches, because Sophia took the bait.
- The National Lampoon did a brutal comic-book parody of Bewitched where Samantha and Endora are practicing really dark magic, ending with their irate neighbors burning them at the stake - along with Darrin, whose dying words are "I never should have married you!"
- Nemesis the Warlock: Torquemada and his Terminators purge humans condemned as traitors by throwing them into a great fire in the Earth's core. Nemesis foils their plans by rigging a dimension portal to send the rebels to safety.
- Red Ears #33 has a play on this. A mob is ready to sentence a woman to death, she then asks what she's been accused of. The leader of the mob screams out that she loves sex, multiple men at once, women, sodomy, fellatio.....cue the mob tying up the leader instead, freeing the woman and having a huge gangbang.
- Rivers of London: In Body Work, both instances of possession, in the present and 1929. have origins related to this. The possessed BM Ws in the present come about because the Mapstone sisters and their friends burned an old ducking chair that a woman drowned in while being tried for witchcraft, and the 1929 incident came about because four wizards made an impulsive attempt to dispel a haunting at a monument to people who died by burning.
- In a Sabrina the Teenage Witch comic, Sabrina thinks that her aunts had a great life in the "good old days" and as a result is given a magic mirror that can let her go back in time to colonial Salem. This trope is pretty much averted while there. Sabrina first comes across a witch stuck in the stocks and releases her. Sabrina is then put in the stocks herself for not stopping the witch's escape and is released by a perverted dude who demands a kiss for saving her. She's caught turning him into a toad and has to escape an angry mob that calls for her to be hanged.
- In Salem's Daughter, Darius influenced the people to start one of these.
- The Scarlet Witch was mistaken for an actual witch when her mutant hex power first manifested by way of accidentally setting a barn on fire while working as a farmhand, and her boss whipped up a mob of villagers to burn her at the stake along with her brother Quicksilver (said boss conveniently left out the part where he tried to rape her and that was when her powers lashed out). The villagers would've succeded if not for timely intervention of Magneto, who used his rescue to guilt them into joining his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. An issue of Avengers West Coast shows an alternate reality where Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver were indeed burned at the stake.
- In The Scorpion, Armando's mother was burnt as a witch by the Inquisition for misdirecting a priest from the church and his Christian duties.
- In Seven Soldiers, Klarion the Witch Boy nearly gets burned by the women of Limbo Town after trying to warn them of the impending invasion by Melmoth, because the Croatoans have long been taught that there is no world beyond theirs.
- The Pat Mills comic Sha is all about the spirit of a young witch who was wrongfully burned at the stake in the fourteenth century awakening in her reincarnation in The Future to seek revenge against the Knight Templar demons who killed her.
- In the "History Lesson" arc of Peter Milligan's Shade, the Changing Man series, Shade and his companions are nearly burnt at the stake when they travel back to Puritan New England, where the natives mistake the Madness for the Devil's own sorcery. It doesn't help when they find out Lenny's last name is Shapiro, calling her "filthy Jewess."
- In Soulsearchers and Company #2, Janocz's tribe attempt to burn him at the stake for being a cursed shapeshifter, in accordance with ancient gypsy law.
- In Superman/Batman #72, a group of crazed religious fanatics kidnap Lois Lane and attempt to burn her at the stake. They think Superman is God and seek to punish Lois for "rejecting" Superman for the "mere mortal" Clark Kent and thus failing in her "duty" to give birth to the messiah. Fortunately, she is rescued by The World's Finest.
- A bleak story from the Tales of the Slayers collection features a reluctant Slayer who nonetheless saves her town from an army of marauding vamps... and for her pains is burned for witchcraft by the townsfolk. The townsfolk pay for their stupidity when the Slayer's Watcher, out of revenge, opens the town's gate, letting the remaining vampires in for the slaughter.
- In Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose, the townies want to do it, and the fact that it happened in the past drives Raven's hatred.
- Nightcrawler of the X-Men has this (actually, he's about to be staked, but it's the same principle) happening to him in his very first appearance - though the crowd thinks he is a demon, not a witch, due to his blue fur, pointed ears, fangs, and barbed tail. Also, a number of their children had recently been murdered.
- The first time we see Wolfsbane, she's running from a mob led by Reverend Craig trying to do this to her (in the 1980s). They're stopped by Moira MacTaggert pointing out A: They're on her land now, so they can't do squat, and B: They're being bloody idiots.
