Capepunk in Comic Books.
- The Boys: The series is pretty much built on how much super-powered humans suck and do not live up to their claims of heroism. They range from Smug Super jerkasses to utter horrors with very little in-between, with the few good supers being shining examples of Dumb Is Good.
- Civil War (2006): The miniseries played with the idea that superheroes were an unregulated bunch of amateurs needing supervision after a supervillain blows up a school. Instead, much of the story devolved into illustrating how the government would do anything to gain complete control over superhumans.
- Invincible: The series thrives on providing a sense of continuity and world-building for someone entering into a superhuman world for the first time. It runs on a basic premise of what if there is no status quo and the world and the characters within it continue to grow and evolve? Sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.
- Irredeemable: The series takes a lot of the Silver Age tropes built around Superman and then proceeds to tear them down ruthlessly as well as the idealism behind them to create a Villain Protagonist. Its sister series Incorruptible then switches to taking an utter monster and showing just how much work it would take to turn him into a hero.
- Jupiter's Legacy: The series is about a group of long-lived superheroes who now have to deal with the modern world, where Thou Shalt Not Kill results in needless death, their children are dysfunctional due to high expectations, and one of them is so hellbent on averting Reed Richards Is Useless That he's willing to have his own brother killed. And even then his efforts are thwarted simply because his ideas turned out to be terrible.
- Miracleman: Alan Moore's series is one of the earliest examples of the genre and a Deconstructor Fleet of the goofy Captain Marvel-esque stories about such a hero, which are shown to be lies, propaganda, and subversions. It remains one of the most influential comics most American readers had never heard of - until Marvel finally acquired the publishing rights.
- The New Universe: The line was one of Marvel Comics' earliest attempts to do realistic superheroes, which was intended to be more grounded in reality than the mainstream Marvel Universe. The setting was explicitly stated to be the real world until a Mass Empowering Event provided a Point of Divergence. Several of the super-powered "paranormals", instead of fighting criminals, were on the run from people who wanted to exploit their abilities. A few of the protagonists were Jerkasses who didn't want to help anybody. Star Brand briefly tried to be a traditional superhero, but it didn't work; in one memorable scene, he met an Author Avatar of writer John Byrne, who explained to him that it would be easy for someone to learn his Secret Identity.
- Spider-Man: The series was originally quite revolutionary. The idea of a superhero struggling with his normal identity's everyday problems as well as crippling guilt for his failures was something new to the genre. It soon became Marvel's standard and a case of Once Original, Now Common but worked well for bringing in new readers.
- Squadron Supreme: The series is another early example of the genre, dealing with a group of Justice League Expy characters who attempt to avert Reed Richards Is Useless only to have it backfire on them horribly.
- Its successor, Supreme Power is all about how human beings would drive the superhumans of the world to insanity.
- In the warped reality of Heroes Reborn (2021) they turn out worse. They are now jingoistic, bloodthirsty sociopaths with all the backing of the US government. Their ability to handle world ending crises with ease results in tons of collateral damage, and are willing to turn everywhere outside of America a Crapsack World, with Doctor Spectrum turning space into hell due to being an Absolute Xenophobe. Even the more stable members of the team starts to end up as horrible people as time goes on. And there's also the fact they aren't even real people, just simulacrum's created by Mephisto's Pandemonium Cube used by a corrupted Phil Coulson on a power high.
- Ultimate Marvel: One of the original ideas behind the Ultimate Universe was to try and update the superhero franchise to a modern day 'real-world' context. Superheroes were all registered with S.H.I.E.L.D., death largely meant death, and real-world events affected events in the comic book and vice versa. While Darker and Edgier, it was a wildly successful experiment that saw many elements adopted into the 616 continuity. That was, however, before they went off the deep-end with the concept...
- Wanted: The series is ultimately revealed to be one of these. It's not until the last panel the satirical nature of the story is revealed. This used to be a world of hope, joy, and love but the villains have stripped it of such and it was because of fans like the reader who let it happen. It's a Take That! at comic book fans who wanted less wonder and joy in their entertainment.
- Watchmen: The series changed the way superhero comics were written forever, by focusing on the kind of neuroses which would afflict people drawn to fighting crime in costume and how superpowers would affect the world.
- X-Men: The series was one of the earliest to treat superpowers as a Blessed with Suck situation. While they were initially treated as heroes by the public, their reception became gradually worse and worse with hate-groups, discrimination, and a number of attempted genocides against them. Events in their past have included: Operation: Zero Tolerance, the destruction of Genosha, Weapon X creating a death camp, the attempt to "cure" the mutant gene, and the Scarlet Witch getting rid of the vast majority of their powers. These are just some of the crappy situations they've had to deal with.
