Contrived Coincidences in comic books.
The DCU
- Batman:
- A Death in the Family: Even though Batman's hunt for the Joker and Jason's quest to find his true mother are separate and cross borders, the Joker manages to turn up exactly where Jason is going twice during the story, allowing Batman to team up with Jason again and ensuring that Bruce will be there when Jason is killed by the Joker.
- Prior to Crisis on Infinite Earths, Jason Todd had the same origin story as Dick Grayson. That means Batman encountered two orphaned circus aerialists whose parents were killed as part of a plot to extort the circus.
- Convergence: It's amazing how many heroes who aren't normally based in Gotham or Metropolis just happened to be in the city taken by Brainiac at exactly the right time.
- Superman:
- The fates of Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent crossed paths a good number of times before they ever became Batman and Superman, and even before they knew each other's secret identities.
- A Superman/Batman story featured Jor-El using a probe to take the mind of a human to Krypton, so he could ask what kind of planet Earth was. The human he selected went on to use the advanced technology of the probe as the basis of a great company called Wayne Enterprises.
- In Superman (1939) #76, Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne happen to take a cruise at the same time and are coincidentally assigned to be roommates. They are both in the cabin at the same time, changing into costume, when a bright ray of light beams through a port hole, lighting up the room and revealing the two superheroes' identities to each other. And Lois Lane wound up on the same cruise, because a female passenger chickened out at the beginning. Apparently only one person disappeared from the cruise, so Clark couldn't be given his own room. In the first Superman/Batman #Annual, which retold the story, it is said that due to an overbooking error, there are only two rooms to share between Clark, Bruce, and Lois, and obviously Lois isn't going to share a bed with either of them.
- In The Strange Revenge of Lena Luthor, Lex Luthor constantly talks to his cellmate Sam about his little sister Lena and her family, unaware that Sam was put in jail by Lena's late husband, and is willing to take revenge on a dead man's family.
- In The Girl with the X-Ray Mind, Dick Malverne is led to believe Lena Thorul is Supergirl through a convoluted chain of events: Lena goes to a costume party in Dick's house disguised as Supergirl. When a pack of thieves crash the party, the real Supergirl takes advantage of the smoke screen caused by their smoke bombs to take them out without being seen. When Lena sees the thieves have been knocked down, she gets to tie them up, causing Dick to believe she may be Supergirl. Later, Dick invites Lena over to his house. Lena is knocked out by a smoke pellet which accidentally slipped in one vase during the costume party, and Dick believes she has been hurt by a sample of Kryptonite which his geologist of a father conveniently keeps in his home. Still later, Supergirl gives Lena several diamonds as a birthday gift. Lena is admiring her present by the chimney when one of them drops in the coal bucket. Right when she is retrieving the diamond, Dick walks into the room and believes she has pressed one chunk of coal into a diamond; whereupon he "demands" the "truth".
- Supergirl (1984): When an immensely powerful device called Omegahedron gets thrown out of Argo City and into space, it randomly drifts towards Earth and crashes into the ground next to Selena, a black magic practitioner with world domination aspirations.
- The Death of Luthor: Downplayed due to being a plot-irrelevant instance. Supergirl and her Atlantean friends Jerro and Lori are looking for a rare isotope. Supergirl lifts a sunken ship to collect some samples, and it just happens that ship was sitting onto an Atlantean hero's long-lost tomb.
- The Super-Duel in Space: After entering the Bottle-City of Kandor, Superman seeks out a scientist, and he meets Professor Kimda...who happens to be Jor-El's former college roommate. Since it is not plot-relevant at all, it is surprising that the writer felt that Superman couldn't just run into a random scientist who would be willing to help him out.
- Justice League of America:
- JLA (1997): An issue begins with the team discovering that seven different supervillains, by pure coincidence, picked the exact same day to try kidnapping the president. The more and more contrived coincidences occur, including retroactively in time, eventually leading to the reveal that someone's been messing with probability.
- Justice League: Cry for Justice opens with heroes all across the world, all completely independently of each other, deciding to Rage Against the Heavens with "I want justice!" at the exact same time.
- The Green Lantern / Green Arrow / The Flash Crossover "Three of a Kind" begins with Conner persuading Kyle and Wally to go on an Arctic cruise, only to find that Sonar, Hatchett and Heat Wave are on the ship, plotting to revive a catatonic Dr Polaris. Not only do the heroes stumble upon a crime, but it's one that involves one villain from each of their Rogues Galleries! (Plus JLA villain Polaris.)
- Wonder Woman Vol 1: In William Moulton Marston's final issue Diana calls appraisers asking if any have encountered gems resembling those that have just been stolen from her mother, as soon as one gives her the first name and a vague description of someone trying to sell a gem that fits Diana walks out of her office and the girl is sitting right there in the US Army intelligence office for some reason. It also turns out she was indeed trying to sell some of the pilfered content of the Royal vault and following her leads Diana right to Zara and Hypnota.
- In a The Question story in DC's 2023 Halloween Special one-shot, Renee is investigating a series of murders at Gotham Halloween Fashion Week. One of the designs is based on Thangarian clothing, complete with decorative Nth Metal mace, and this just happens to be the one she puts on as a disguise before learning she's fighting Gentleman Ghost, who can only be harmed with Nth Metal weapons.
Marvel Universe
- This deliberately happened in Cable & Deadpool. In the wake of House of M, Deadpool was searching for the real Cable trapped somewhere in an alternative timeline. But just as he teleported to the real world with the real Cable, Scarlet Witch had changed the real world into her image, thus the middle aged Cable was transported into a baby (It Makes Sense in Context). And despite everything changing to normal, baby Cable stayed as a baby (but not for long). It was all to being sold as a tie-in to House of M, and apart from some breather issues forward it didn't do much for the plot.
- Captain Marvel: The first arc had Captain Mar-Vell sent to Earth in order to spy on the human population and see if they pose a threat to the Kree. By sheer coincidence, Yon-Rogg, Mar-Vell's treacherous superior, accidentally killed a military scientist named Walter Lawson, who was on his way to a new assignment at Cape Canaveral. Because Lawson was a recluse who had rarely been seen in public, Mar-Vell was able to assume the dead man's identity and begin working at the same military instillation where (unbeknownst to Mar-Vell) a captured Kree Sentry was being held.
- Champions: How the short-lived 70s supergroup was formed: Iceman and the Angel have enrolled at UCLA, the Black Widow is applying for a professorship, Hercules is about to give a guest lecture and the Ghost Rider happens to be riding by just when Pluto's army is attempting to capture both Hercules and a professor who happens to be another goddess. Creator Tony Isabella, in his foreword to the Masterworks collection, acknowledged that he had "used up a year's allotment of coincidence" with that.
- Spider-Man: A common trope in the comics and adaptations is the cartridges of both of his hands running out of web fluid at exactly the same time.
- A pitfall both the comics and the original film trilogy have suffered from is that almost every major villain has had a personal connection to Peter Parker, to the point it ended up being a twist when they didn't.
- The origin of the obscure Marvel hero The Terror is one string of absurd contrivances. It starts on a dark, rainy night when Dr. John Storm (no relation to Sue and Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four) is attacked in his home by by an escaped gorilla. Storm's dog Rex kills the gorilla, but dies doing so. At that moment, a man named Laslo Pevely crashes his car outside Storm's house. Storm injects Pevely with the dog's DNA, believing that the dog's "survival instinct" will save Pevely's life. Then two gangsters show up, trying to enlist Storm for their criminal endeavors and kill him when he refuses. Unfortunately for the gangsters, Storm's experiment has transformed Pevely into The Terror, a superpowered form which manifests in the presence of evil.
Other Comics
- Disney Ducks Comic Universe: Frequently used as a Rule of Funny.
- One story has Huey, Dewey, and Louie try to play hooky, but everywhere they go they end up almost running into Donald, who had just gotten a new job delivering buckets. Their attempts to evade him (by stowing away on a truck, a train, and later an airplane), inevitably brings them to a school, and the one building they come across that wasn't a school was a resort that's hosting a gathering of truant officers. They end up getting sent back to school by an entire army of truant officers.
- In Flitheart Glomgold's introductory chapter, he and Scrooge try to compare riches to determine who among the two is the richest duck in the world. Somehow they manage to possess an equal amount of wealth down to the last cent that they had to wager on their "goofy balls of strings" that they have saved. While unrolling the balls, the pair got into various mishaps that severely downsized their balls, but somehow the end result have them tied again (despite the nephews saying how impossible this is before they start measuring), although Scrooge eventually wins because he has an extra piece of string in his pocket to tie his #1 Dime on.
- Red Sonja: The Art of Blood and Fire shows Sonja tracking down the great chef Gribaldi, currently enslaved by swamp-dwelling cannibals. Gribaldi has secretly been freeing their human captives and cooking small lizards and eggs in their place for several weeks. Sonja just happens to arrive a couple of hours before lizardmen, enraged by the theft of their offspring, assault the swampdwellers. Sonja and Gribaldi escape in the confusion.
- Most of Revival is restricted to a small radius around a Michigan town so coincidences can be handwaved with one exception: the general assigned to coordinate the concentration camp happens to personally know that a secret ninja assassin is living in an Amish community less than fifty miles from the town and have enough influence to call in a lethal favor over said assassin's protests.
- New York City is unusually small in The Sculptor.
- Early in the book, David Smith is unwittingly involved in a large flash mob prank. That same night, the party his friend takes him to happens to include the participants of that same flash mob.
- That same night, he makes friends with a woman from the group, Meg. Six weeks later, David nearly throws himself at a train, and Meg is there to rescue him, and to nurse him back to health since she apparently has a habit of treating people from off the streets.
- David loses contact with his friend Olly when his phone service is canceled, but a week later randomly runs into him on a street.
- In Swordquest: Waterworld, a war between the air-breathers and the Aqualanians is interrupted when the leaders of both factions are knocked unconscious, and the protagonists' rival convinces everyone that the protagonists — with no recollection that they're actually brother and sister — should settle things with a Duel to the Death.
- Y: The Last Man:
- The most successful human cloning scientist in the United States happens to be a woman who is the daughter of another scientist who may or may not have wiped out all the men in the world except him and Yorick and he tested on Yorick's monkey, Ampersand, who was probably the reason Yorick survived the gendercide and Yorick happened to get Ampersand through a shipping error because it was next to the monkey Yorick was supposed to get but didn't because they both escaped and the shipping guys didn't know which was which. There are plenty more.
- The latter one isn't as much a coincidence when you realize that, once you grant the existence of the shipping error, someone would have gotten the vaccinated monkey, and they would probably be the last man instead of Yorick.
- Very few names start with Y, so it's a pretty big coincidence that the only person (in fact, the only mammal) with a Y chromosome after the Gendercide would just happen to have a name that starts with the letter Y. But on the other hand, that's the selective reporting fallacy. M is a much more common initial letter (Mark, Matt, etc.), so if someone with one of those names had got the monkey he would have been "M: the Last Man", which also looks coincidental. Likewise, L (for "last"), V (for "vir", Latin for "man" in the masculine sense, "Homo" means Man in the human sense) and T (for "testosterone", which he has more of than anyone) are also common initial letters. It doesn't take too much imagination to come up with an epithet that goes with almost any initial letter, so the name thing isn't actually much of a coincidence even though it looks that way.
- It's also not a huge coincidence that a successful biologist has a father who's also a successful biologist, given that parents often encourage their children to choose the same profession they have, and help them on their way. Which seems to be exactly the case in Y: The Last Man. Since cloning is implied to be both the cause and the solution to the gendercide, it doesn't take a huge leap of faith to accept that the expert they seek to help with the problem is also the daughter of the man who might've caused the problem.
- On the topic of coincidental parentage, let's not forget that the last man alive just coincidentally happens to be the son of the woman who ends up as US president once all the men are taken out of the equation.
- However, the fact that at the exact same moment Yorick is proposing to his girlfriend, 355 is carrying an ancient artifact that's prophesied to kill an exorbitant amount of men when it leaves the country it's in, and Dr. Mann and the woman her father impregnated give birth to their clone babies fits this trope rather well.
- Played for laughs in Transformers: More than Meets the Eye when Brain Storm develops a Contrivance Engine that causes Starscream to declare a new holiday with decorations that looks suspiciously like Christmas lights and a Christmas tree just in time for the comic book to have a Christmas Episode.
- Chick Tracts: In "Gomez is Coming
," Ricky randomly fires a gun into a crowd in a drive-by shooting, injuring two and killing one. The person he killed just so happened to be Luis Gomez, the younger brother of infamous gang member Carlos "The Butcher" Gomez, and Gomez happens to be about to be released from prison.
