Crossed / Tropes N to S

Crossed Trope Examples
A - D | E - M | N - S | T - Z

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N

• Namedar: Given just how fast the infection seems to have spread, it seems a little odd that every group of survivors refer to the Crossed by the same name. Averted in "Wish You Were Here" since the survivors refer to them as "plus-faces" instead.
• Neck Snap:
  • In Homo Tortor, after Lewis is blown off his feet by the explosion and gets impaled on a tree branch, Warren has Ronnie snap his neck to fool the Crossed into thinking Lewis tried to open the hatch by himself and died as result. The plan still fails.
  • Smokey from Quisling has a habit of killing his most impulsive mooks this way, usually by twisting their heads 180 degrees. Oliver himself eventually meets such fate after infecting himself on purpose.
  • In the final Badlands issue, Smokey also kills the sailor that had been helping him and the twins homestead for years by breaking his neck, though the sad look on Smokey's face shows that even he didn't have fun doing so.
• Nice Guy: Deconstructed with Aoileann. The series looks at the traits that might make a person genuinely nice if they were deeply internalized (self denial, a desire to form connections with others, etc.), gives them to a random person, and then infects her with the Hate Plague that created the Crossed. Since those traits are such a strong part of her personality, they remain with her after she becomes a monster, only the ends they're directed to become warped and horrifying. While she does not kill anyone herself, she nonetheless has her Crossed kill or infect quite a lot of innocent people, including almost everyone from the Driftfleet, Dolores and Tabitha.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: One of the characters, convinced that salt will kill the Crossed, attempts to stand against them by putting a ring of salt around himself and his family when his wife twists her ankle running from a pack of Crossed. It really doesn't go well.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Smokey inflicts such depravities on Oliver and Cody that they turn on him and ruin his plans even though it costs them their own lives. Before him, Horsecock goes after people tough enough to kill him and his group when they'd just wanted to avoid him.
  • Of course, it's Horsecock's unusually . . . ambitious approach to depravity and evil that makes him and his group such a threat to begin with. The type of leader who wouldn't have bothered stalking Cindy's group beyond their initial encounter very likely wouldn't have even encountered them to begin with; the survivors would almost certainly have succeeded in circling around them without alerting the Crossed to their presence.
• No Bikes in the Apocalypse: Averted. In the Homo Superior arc of Badlands, Steve and Greg manage to survive out in the Florida sticks using bicycles to get around. They ditch them after reaching the Everglades.
• No Healthcare in the Apocalypse: The final Badlands arc starts by featuring rich doomsday preppers and their architect, who initially avoid the Technically Living Zombies by hiding in a survival bunker. One of their early casualties dies after his appendix bursts and the only doctor available to remove it is a dermatologist.
• No Name Given: Quite a few characters are never named in the story, including some that have relevant roles in the plot.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Discussed in "Wish You Were Here", with a mixture of Foreshadowing considering the true Big Bad turns out to be an intelligent Crossed.
  Shaky: This world, diary... In this world unknowns are evil. Unknowns are anxiety and horror and terror. [...] The Crossed are predictable. That's the only weapon we've got. They are predictable. They must be. We're all fucked, if not.
• Not in Front of the Kid: In the first arc, Cindy calmly reminds her companions not to swear in front of Patrick.
• No Zombie Cannibals: Averted, the Crossed will turn on each other if there are no regular people available. They just prefer humans due to the fact the Crossed are both sadist and masochist, which means torturing, raping and killing a fellow Crossed is far less satisfying. The fact they do attack each other when there's nothing else available is the reason many in the comics express optimism the Crossed will eventually die off. By the time +100 rolls around, it turns out this is exactly what transpired, albeit some Crossed managed to survive and adapt just as good as the healthy humans did.

O

• Obfuscating Stupidity: Smokey's child "Cunt", who was thought to be capable of only saying his own name but turned out to be much more smarter than thought, all thanks to his mother and aunt, who had been secretly home-schooling him. He and the twins waited a long time to off Smokey.
• Offhand Backhand: In "Family Values" Kate ends up delivering a baby in the middle of a Crossed attack, with Hannah helping. When Jethro tries to get Hannah to leave before it's finished, she elbows him in the face, all without losing her excited expression and still talking to Kate.
• Offing the Offspring: The First Child is murdered by his parents just when he thinks he's become a man, said parents call raising him "a practical joke 14 years in the making". When we next see him, his eyes have been gouged out and a fire lit in his guts.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted, several names are reused throughout the series.
  • There is Cody the friend of Emiko from Gore Angels and Cody the apocalypse bunker salesman from Badlands' final arc.
  • Harry is the name of both the soldier and Prime Minister's body guard from The Fatal Englishman and The Thin Red Line, and the ginger possible royal from Badlands' first arc.
  • There are also three characters named Tabitha (Clooney's cheating girlfriend in Golden Road, Shaky's lover in Wish You Were Here and the old woman in Richie's group in Dead or Alive).
  • Finally there is Richie the informal leader of the group in Lesser of Two Evils and Richie the sociopathic protagonist of Dead or Alive. The third Richie, a Kenyan student and a member of Jasper's group, appears in Wish You Were Here.
  • Wish You Were Here also averted this with presence of two men originally named John, the Cavaites solved the problem by nicknaming one of them Jon (the paratrooper) and the second one Don (a former college lecturer turned one of Cava's co-leaders).
  • There are several people named Mark: Anya's brother from the first Badlands arc, a survivor from Family Values and a cheesemaker from Wish You Were Here.
  • Patrick is the name of both Cindy's son from Volume One and also Butch's boyfriend from Anti-Crossed.
  • There are also two characters named Thomas: a member of Cindy's group from Volume One and the real name of Fleshcook from Mimic, Thomas Preiss. There is also Officer Thomas, who briefly meets Cindy's group in Volume One.
  • There are also two guys with the name of Ricky: the paramedic from Ian's group in the first Badlands arc and the biker gang leader from Yellow Belly.
  • There are two guys named Lloyd: Lloyd Thackery, who used to employ the Gamekeeper in Wish You Were Here, and the Lloyd who employed Cody the bunker designer from the second Smokey arc. Ironically, both of them end up dead by the hands of those who used to work for them.
  • Jock is the same name of one of Harry's companions from The Fatal Englishman and Thin Red Line and one of Ricky's bikers from Yellow Belly.
  • Lance is the name of both Skip's son from Wish You Were Here and one of the rapists that had been holding Leigha captive in Anti-Crossed.
  • There are at least five guys named Frank: the boat fisherman and Amanda's incestuous father from Grave New World, the hippie from American Quitters, a father (Frank) and a son (Frankie) whom Amanda briefly travels with (and then murders) at the start of The Livers, and finally Frank Giacoma from +100.
• Only in It for the Money: Openly stated by Martin, one of Wentz's Psycho for Hire's, who only protects Wentz and the rest of his entourage because he's getting paid, and starts raping Shirley as soon as he's left alone with her, after Wentz had apparently asked him to protect her.
• Only Known by Their Nickname:
  • The protagonist of "Wish You Were Here" is named Shaky, short for Shakespeare, which he was mockingly called by another survivor after telling him his occupation as a writer. He's never revealed his actual name, and none of the other characters have called him anything else. (Unless you count "cunt" as a name.)
  • Similarly, most smart Crossed go by their nicknames, examples include Horsecock, Face, Stump, Smokey, Captain Cuntbeard, Nose and also Salt's descendants.
• Orderlies are Creeps:
  • Averted with Dr. Tang's orderly Joe, who helped her and her nurses evacuate the sick kids out of the city, and later goes back with her to salvage meds from their old hospital.
  • Apparently played straight with the rest of the staff at Aoileanns nursing home, who seemingly abandoned the patients.

P

• Painting the Medium: All Crossed talk in a red, jagged font. One poor bastard gets the font before developing the rash.
• Papa Wolf:
  • Skip is an easygoing version of this in Wish You Were Here. Though it turns out he's not even Lance's biological father per se.
  • Mr. Masoud is also pretty protective of his children.
  • In +100 Frank Giacoma desires to lash out at the Crossed after the death of his daughter Hope.
  • Edmund's father hides his sons in barrels and then rushes to take care of a Crossed that spotted them. Especially notable since he is mentioned to never have stood up against anyone, including his own wife.
  • Sweeny's father might be an abusive drunkard, but the second a Crossed barges into their house, he exchanges a worried look with Sweeney and tells him to run, right as he is killed in front of his own son. Said son proceeds to blast the Crossed with a shotgun and decides to join his classmates in their Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Parental Incest:
  • Joseph Pratt is not above raping his own daughters.
  • Frank from Grave New World is mentioned to have outright fathered two children from his own daughter, and he had been sexually assaulting her even before Barnes's crew found them.
• Patient Zero: This is explored in the Badlands arc, Thin Red Line. In it, it is revealed that the infection started in the summer of 2008 and that there is no single "Patient Zero", but individuals in every country on Earth that mysteriously became infected after seeing visions of the worst atrocities in human history. So far there have been several Patient Zeroes explicitly or implicitly identified including a Russian soldier, a French villager, and a mysterious man in the UK who seems to be immune to the effects of the virus through sheer willpower.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Whatever Clooney has planned for depraved writer Gideon Welles and whoever is part of the Edgar Allan Poe-inspired orgy, including his own girlfriend. (After going with the one option that not even Gideon thought of) in The Golden Road. Even though his plan to assasinate Gideon fails, his efforts still lead to Samarkand being taken over by the Crossed army and Welles receiving a gruesome comeuppance.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Clint does this literally, caring deeply for his militia's pack of guard dogs, especially their Alpha, who is named after his wife.
  • Shaky covering Lance’s eyes and ears so he won't hear or see what his infected mother is doing and saying.
  • Bobby Lee bringing Tanya and Anna to the bunker with him might be this.
  • The closest Harold Lorre comes to this is sincerely apologizing to Claire and admitting she doesn’t deserve the Cruel and Unusual Death he’s about to inflict on her.
  • As bad as shooting Greg in the knee was, Steve did stitch his wound and give him a loaded pistol before leaving him behind afterwards.
• Pistol-Whipping: Harold breaks Rick's jaw with the butt of his pistol before killing him.
• Playing Both Sides: Morgan and Olivia. Although their conversation with Tyree leaves it vague if they wanted to kill everyone or just weed out the poorer survivors.
• Police Are Useless: Zig-Zagged but often played straight.
  • Alan, Joe, and Hunt MacAvoy are all cops who prove to be competent survivors and assets to their groups, but are the exception, and not the rule.
  • The first arc shows that several cops (like Officer Thomas) tried to capture and interrogate Crossed about the infection, but only ended up turning as soon as any blood or spit got on their skin.
  • In the first Badlands arc, Ian recalls a constable in a group he briefly stayed with wanted to hunker down and wait for The Cavalry, even though said cavalry weren't coming, and also got into a shouting match with a couple other survivors that they wouldn't stop even after being reminded that the noise risked drawing in the Crossed. We never find out what happened to them.
  • In Yellow Belly Bobby McCann's father is a sheriff who upon hearing Edmund's story finds it outrageous, yet still decides to check out the overrun circus. He is never heard from again.
  • In The Golden Road Lorna largely averts this, she’s pretty competent, ties to rescue her family members and briefly advises Clooney and Nathan to fall back to Samarkand and try to organize a defense, while planning to head out there.
  • The first issue of Quisling also shows another small town cop (or maybe just a security guard) who lasted several months with a group, although Smokey finds them in a U-Haul and brutally kill the guy before he can get a shot off as Oliver watches grimly from a nearby building.
  • In The Thin Red Line a few cops are among the crisis personal brought to Gordon Brown’s bunker and while they don't do that much, they are successfully able to barricade Patient Zero and a few infected soldiers inside a room although not before they yank Alistair inside.
  • In the annual Lockdown, the prison guards seem somewhat competent, both before and after the outbreak starts, but none of them last very long, with the last surviving guard releasing the inmates before getting killed.
  • Pre-apocalypse this is played straight with the LAPD, who tell Land they know Curtis Wentz is a pornographer and heroin trafficker but can’t prove it (not even after Wentz sends Land letters gloating in prison), and Land himself doesn’t inspire confidence by going Cowboy Cop and managing to kill nearly everyone in the room except Wentz and his henchmen.
  • The Coast Guard also play this straight. Captain Barnes in Grave New World is a complete SOB with delusions of grandeur and a poor long-term plan, although his rescue of various civilians initially camouflages this. The patrol boat captain from the final Badlands arc has clearly made no efforts to save (or even take aboard) civilians or strike at the Crossed, instead focusing on simply staying at sea to survive until his ship runs out of food (not that this isn’t somewhat understandable given the setting). The fact that he casually offers to be Smokey’s collaborator and shows little concern for his crew beyond noting he needs some of them to keep the ship going cements his useless status. Naturally, that captain doesn't even make it to the end of the issue he's introduced in.
  • Conquers All, set in Los Angeles during the first few days of the apocalypse, portrays the LAPD riot police attempting to disperse the Crossed with tear gas and truncheons. It goes as well as you would expect.
• Pregnant Badass:
  • Steve is an unusually unsympathetic version of this but seeing her struggling to fight and evade the Crossed while in labor is the highlight of Homo Superior.
  • Kate is pregnant (or has only just given birth) for all of her page time in Family Values and is one of the coolest heads and best shots of the survivors in that arc, all the way up until the last few days of her pregnancy.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Mr. Masoud gets a chilling, tragic one right before killing his infected son.
  Mr. Masoud: Your gloves. And the mask. And now everyone please go away.
• Preserve Your Gays:
  • Jamie, a gay character from Wish You Were Here, manages to survive through the entire comic.
  • Butch and Patrick from Anti-Crossed also make it to the end.
• Pretend We're Dead:
  • The group in "Psychopath" disguise themselves as Crossed as part of a plan to make two different groups kill each other. It works, but they always keep their distance. Trying to fool the Crossed at close range is probably a really bad idea, especially as the Crossed have no aversion to brutally slaughtering each other if no other victims are available.
  • This was Father Dennis' plan in The Fatal Englishman. Harry and his men intervene because they have never seen it work.
  • This option is discussed in Quisling. It apparently can work at short distances (and was used by Oliver's group to escape a bookstore), but you will need to use blood (uninfected blood in particular as infected blood being placed on the skin will cause you to go Crossed) and not linger too long.
  • At the end of American Quitters, Frank gives himself cig burns across the face so he can walk up to Zeke the Geek amidst his horde undetected and stab him to death in Errol's stead. Of course, the rest of the horde turns on him immediately after.
  • In Lesser of Two Evils, Morgan and Olivia use cosplay makeup to disguise themselves as the Crossed. It's not clear if their approach worked on the Crossed themselves or if they just managed to avoid their attention, but it is sufficient enough to initially fool the survivor group they encounter.
• Prison Rape:
  • Callahan in Lockdown, apparently engages in this, although the level of consent is debatable.
  • Martin invokes an unusual version of this in the Gavin Land arc. He isn’t a prisoner but (apparently through bribed guards) is sent into prison to rape Land.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: Oliver, Amanda, Clooney and arguably Shaky all adopt many villainous traits as their stories progress.
• Psychosexual Horror: Sexual violence is a very prominent theme in the series and it's not just limited to the Crossed themselves...

Q

• The Quisling:
  • Oliver, in the eponymous Quisling, becomes a human slave for Smokey after he is captured and gets forced to wipe out his own group.
  • Cody in the final arc of Badlands fills a similar role.
  • The ship captain is set up to become another one but then he angers Smokey and gets killed. Smokey makes one of the crew his Quisling instead.
  • In Crossed +100 it is shown that using non-infected humans as Quislings is SOP for the Salt Clan.

R

• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Quite often, although frequently they lose some or all of their members in short order.
  • While the group referred to as soldiers in ‘’Crossed 3D’’ are dressed in army fatigues for some reason, they come closer to this. Hunt Macavoy was a SWAT team leader, Matt was a science teacher, Phil was a mentally ill shut-in, Elmer was a prison inmate on C-Day and Preacher (whose real name is Jake) claims he’d never shot a gun before C-Day.
  • The first Badlands arc included a group that includes a heavily bandaged Cold Sniper in military fatigues who may be a royal, an oil rig employee, a paramedic, a bookstore owner, a pregnant woman and her brother, and three men whose pasts are never mentioned (one of whom serves as The Load while the other two are Plucky Comic Relief).
  • Quisling features science teacher Oliver, small town cop Alan, hunter Pat, his grandson Tommy, Tina the Brainless Beauty, Deadpan Snarker Daniel and Eve (whose dressed in a Punk Rock manner).
  • Jasper's group consists of an army reservist (Jasper himself), Rugby player Miranda, Kenyan exchange student and football/soccer player Richie, cheese maker Mark, aging dental nurse Dolores and Barry The Immune.
  • The Cavaites include a former comic book writer, a University lecturer, a crusty fisherman (and part-time gun runner according to the first annual) an Australian parasailing tour guide and his wife and son, a London petty criminal and his daughter, a Cold Sniper with several facial piercings who'd formerly been a caregiver, a deaf Spanish prostitute, a pair of old ladies from the countryside, a gay Goth, a paratrooper, a hippie art teacher, an aging former salesman who’d been in prison for murdering his wife and her lover, an American tourist, a Pakistani family and eventually the survivors of Jasper's group. In addition, a former special agent visits the island while supply trading several times.
  • In Shaky's flashbacks, the Gamekeeper's crew consisted of a comic book writer (Shaky), an upper-class couple (the Thakerys), their former employee turned leader (the Gamekeeper himself) and a Pakistani student (Ashoke) among others. Later on, an Irish nun (Aoileann) joins what's left of the group.
  • Aoileann's horde consists of an Irish nun (Aoileann herself), a large army of blue-beret soldiers, a church vicar, the above-mentioned Ashoke, the human Gamekeeper who is held captive and many other Crossed with no clear background.
  • The Five Bloody Fingers, despite their shared background, are pretty different people, including an aspiring manga writer, an Otaku, a Yakuza head's daughter, an escort and an eventual member of said Yakuza.
  • The group in Homo Tortor is led by a college anthropology student and includes two Canadians (one of which is implied to having been a soldier), a competitive archer and a Crazy Survivalist.
  • The main trio from American Quitters consists of a biker, a hippie and a pregnant Mexican woman.
  • The final badlands arc begins with a survival bunker salesman, an ex-military chopper pilot, and various one-percenters (or in some cases friends and relatives) such as a computer tycoon and a dermatologist who marketed skin cream.
  • Harold Lorre's group consists of a blue-collar worker he speculates was a carpenter, two medical students, and a park ranger. Downplayed given that Harold (a psychopathic former novelty shop owner) is the one who poses the most danger to the others.
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • Rab in Wish You Were Here is highly intelligent and cares about his people.
  • Prime Minister Gordon Brown in Thin Red Line makes several good judgment calls, though it's hampered by his initial indecisiveness. His aide in the green suit is also fairly level-headed.
  • Sutter's second-in-command Joe Collins for his tolerant attitude with Esperanza thinking the camp is Too Good to Be True and also for recognizing the logistics of taking in too many people, but not advocating that they kick anyone out when he brings the matter to Sutter's attention.
  • Alan, the leader of Oliver’s group, who listens to others ideas, as shown by how he as willing to try Oliver's Pretend We're Dead strategy, and keeps a level head.
  • Lady of War Dora in Wish You Were Here is strict but fair.
• Recurring Extra:
  • In the first volume, one member of the group of Zombie Apocalypse survivors is an unnamed man in a red baseball cap who never gets a name or really interacts with any of the others but still outlives a few named and semi-prominent characters before being killed by a Wacky Wayside Tribe in the fourth issue, after which he’s never directly mentioned again.
  • The first volume of Wish You Were Here has lots of people in the survivor colony (Viceroy, John, Edith, Christine, Chanice, Maria, Jackie, Boy, Sofia, Jamie, and Tabitha) who spend a lot of time loitering around group meetings, doing chores, joining firing lines against the Crossed and such but take a long time to get proper introductions and (with a couple notable exceptions) often suffer a Death in the Limelight or remain fairly unimportant even after they do get named and/or directly interact with Shaky.
• Redeeming Replacement: The Sailor from the last four issues is this to Smokey's previous collaborator in the eyes of both Smokey and the audience. Unlike Oliver and Cody, he didn't prostate himself before Smokey and promise to help him willingly, didn't directly sell out any other survivors upon becoming Smokey's Quisling, never gets forced to rape anyone and helps care for the Crossed children. It's doubtful that some of that meant anything to Smokey, but he probably felt happy having a Quisling who didn't turn on him in the end, and who he could actually see as a friend, to the point he gives him a Mercy Kill.
• Redemption Equals Death: Edmund redeemed himself by going back into the bar to save Donna from the infected cops and he did lead her to safety. Donna appeared to be grateful when she had sex with him but she was still furious at Edmund for killing Nicole. At the first opportunity, she brutally beats Edmund to death with a rock, staving his head in as she calls him a "yellow bellied sonofabitch" and a "fucking coward."
• Reformed, but Rejected: Geoff and Edmund try to make up for their despicable acts at the worst timing possible, and it ultimately doesn't work out well.
• Retirony: One + 100 side story has some East Coast hunters sent to clean out some tunnels of the last known Crossed enclave in the state. Veteran hunter Bloom comments that the stress of the job has been getting to him and that if he never sees another Crossed face again after this, then he'll be as happy as if he were at a family reunion. A couple of pages later, he's killed in a surprise attack.
• Rhetorical Question Blunder: Edmund’s classmate Sweeny is insulted by his dad and asked who pays the bills, to which Sweeny points out the welfare checks from the government do.
• Right-Wing Militia Fanatic:
  • White supremacist militias show up in Homo Superior and Quisling. In the former, a redneck militia is led by Leon's dad and is destroyed by tainted meth created by Leon. In the latter, Oliver spends a few days gaining their trust before leading Smokey's horde to them. In spite of their heinous views, Oliver still feels guilty for handing them over to the Crossed and one of them telling him about more intelligent Crossed provides the impetus for his realization that Smokey needs to die.
  • Camp Casper in Mimic is a futuristic example of this. It is unclear in the story whether they are descended from a remnant of the US military or simply from a band of white supremacist militia cosplaying as one, but given their very regressive and abusive society - where the mostly male "soldiers" are at the top of the hierarchy and the mostly female "civilians" are at the bottom - the latter is likelier.
  • The Waco bunker group from Badlands #95 appears to be a subversion. Given their location and the way they're armed and dressed they appear to be one of these but don't seem hostile or unreasonable in their brief page-time and Cody didn't seem to think that there'd be a problem with the African-American Ben seeking refuge from them if he made it there in his chopper.
  • Lewis in Homo Tortor is a rare heroic example of this. Before the outbreak, he lived off the grid stocking up on canned food and firearms out of fear the government would confiscate his guns. He has since mellowed out considerably, pokes fun at attributes of this mindset and acts as an expert on survivalist plans of action for Washington's group before his death.
• Royal Brat:
  • The First Child from Homo Tortor, assuming he really existed. His first onscreen act is to declare he wants to rape a man, and is slapped for saying he wants to do it instead of doing so. He's murdered by his own parents at the end, who'd raised him that way specifically to be killed.
  • Prince Harry (assuming it is actually him) is a subversion, as while capable of being ruthless and unsentimental, he doesn't display any entitlement and carries his own weight.
• Rugby Is Slaughter: We never actually see a game obviously but former rugby player Miranda is escribed as a “tank” and half-seriously considered by Shaky to be capable of ripping a man in half.

S

• Sad Clown: Possibly Skip, who acts pretty confident and relaxed most of the time, but is shown to have regrets and insecurities as Wish You Were Here progresses.
• Sanity Has Advantages: Played with to varying levels, but generally in effect. The Crossed aren't mindless zombies, and from an intellectual standpoint can be surprisingly intelligent - enough to catch survivors off guard to their peril. Fundamentally, however, the greatest weakness of the Crossed is their extreme impulsivity, making long-term planning difficult. Most of them don't bother to feed and clothe themselves or seek shelter in winter - quite a few even mutilate themselves for fun. Those don't last long. The Crossed relied on sheer weight of numbers in the early days, but most died off the first winter after C-day...by which point the global population had already fallen from 7 billion humans to 2 million humans and 100 million Crossed. Natural selection (and AIDS) set in after that, and the smarter, more "sane" Crossed survived and are a lot more dangerous while the dumber Crossed have tended to die off over the course of the next century.
• Say Your Prayers: On occasion, although religion is burned out of a lot of people by the nature of the apocalypse. A notable example is that when the Cavaites unsuccessfully try to flee the infected Drift Fleet only to be forced back there by Aoileann’s army to watch them fight, Shaky notes that Edith (or Christine), Seline and Maria all started praying desperately.
• Scary Black Man: Smokey, Deacon White (after his infection) and Jokemercy. Wentz's Faux Affably Evil Sadist right-hand man Omar is also one both before and after his infection. Blood Knight Des is a (relatively) heroic version.
• Scarily Competent Tracker: Several of the Crossed show a remarkable ability to track their chosen victims, across miles of land if needed.
  • Human examples include The Gamekeeper, Xavi from American Quitters, and David in the Australia annual who backtracked to Ayers rock with broken legs after being infected.
• Science Hero: Dr. Chopra is a failed example and too early in the story to be a Sole Surviving Scientist.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Bobby Lee embodies this in his brief page time, threatening Cody while ranting about how he got the investors for the bunker in the first place.
  • Earlier in that issue, Red Mitchell shows some of this in his even briefer page time, showing up outside the bunker with Crossed right behind him and demanding to be let in, yelling that he paid for several floors (although to be fair it was a pretty desperate situation for him). Lloyd points out that Red did in fact pay for the place but Cody says that doesn’t count next to practical concerns.
  • The rest of the bunker people, the Thackerys from Wish You Were Here, and the Stillwells and Peter from Grave New World'' avert this, being aware of their own precarious chances, only making reasonable complaints, and not throwing any weight around.
  • Curtis Wentz and Gideon Welles had a lot of this before the apocalypse, but it seems to go away once things turn bad and they go into survival mode (and in Wentz’s case even altruism towards other survivors).
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Among the refugee spokesmen in Murfreesboro is a man who says that his community voted to take the Sadistic Choice offered by the Salt Clan, and that he and a few others made a run for it on bicycles while the others were drawing lots to see who got sacrificed.
• Seadog Beard: Rab sports an impressive one.
• Semper Fi: Carl, the Marine from DOA is described by Richie as being a little too hung up on the ideals and mentality of the Marine Corps to be a good survivor (although Richie is an Unreliable Expositor).
• Sequel Escalation: Each series in the universe, from the Ennis original to Family Values to Psychopath, tries its damned hardest to be more shocking, gorny and full of Black Comedy than the one that came before it.
• Serial Killer: Geoff, in the Jeffrey Dahmer vein. Also Beauregard Salt.
• Series Continuity Error:
  • The timing for Smokey's two arcs seems pretty tricky, given the long amount of time he spends with both Oliver and Cody and how he seems to catch both of them at the end of the summer of the outbreak (Oliver wanted to get to Wyoming before the cold, hoping it would kill the Crossed, and Cody specifically stated that timeline, plus his group's gasoline hadn't gone bad). Also counts as Writers Cannot Do Math.
  • Also occurs with regard to London in the beginning of the outbreak. Shaky's flashback scenes from Wish You Were Here quite clearly show the city falling to the Crossed early on, with London turned into a gigantic slaughterhouse in hours if not minutes. The Thin Red Line, however, indicates London as having been among those areas less hit by the initial outbreak, with Whitehall still being in contact with Gordon Brown's command center, as one of his aides explains to him that the security cordons south of Nottingham seemed to be holding. He also relays to him Whitehall's suggestion that they be relocated to a point south of the Thames "as a precautionary measure."
  • The Thin Red Line establishes that communication with the White House was cut off very early into the outbreak, with both NORAD and the governments of Britain and Russia struggling to reach the US president to discuss the situation with the Russian nuclear bombers. It is then revealed that George W. Bush is infected or has at least been killed by the Crossed. However, The Lesser of Two Evils has the media reporting on criticism of the White House's response to the outbreak as though the US government is still in functioning order, and Volume 1 has Captain Juneaux's journal note that Air Force One was shot down over Oklahoma with no mention being made of Bush getting turned or killed. Granted, it is possible that the reference to the White House was to the US federal government in general rather than specifically to the location, and that the (short-lived) president by the time Air Force One is shot down is Dick Cheney, Nancy Pelosi or another relevent member of the line of succession, but it is not made clear.
    • The Thin Red Line also establishes that India does not retaliate to Pakistani Crossed nuking New Delhi (something mentioned by a CNN journalist survivor in Volume 1), which contradicts the white supremacist militia in Quisling claiming Pakistan was wiped out by nuclear war. Admittedly, the apocalyptic nature of the outbreak means some information may have been muddled - it's also possible the militia conflated Pakistan with the Middle East as a whole owing to their racism and referring to Israel nuking its neighbors as established in Volume 1 and shown on one cover of Badlands.
  • Both examples of Shown Their Work from the second issue of Volume One aren't followed up on. A year into the outbreak it's stated that Texas is largely burned from the refineries and New York City is flooded, but when New York is seen two years after C-Day in Crossed 3D it shows no signs of this, and at least part of Texas is untouched by flames or smoke at the end of Cody's story, 6-8 months after C-Day in Badlands #96, although the following issue shows Smokey walking through a part of the state which does have burning oil fields.
  • Yellow Belly seemingly takes place in early May, judging by the circus billboard performance dates, even though it had been established later (most notably, in Thin Red Line) that the C-Day occured in summer 2008.
• Sex for Solace: Between Amanda and Rick in "Psychopath" after their lovers are murdered.
• Sheep in Sheep's Clothing: The Drift Fleet, whose biggest flaw (albeit a crucial one) is being too inexperienced at fighting Crossed to go against The Nun and her army. The Black Watch soldiers, apparently, although it's never explained why they didn't send Seline back out with the supplies she'd came for. Arguably Wentz (in the present that is, definitely not in the flashbacks), as he really did seem to be just trying to save people rather than taking them out to his island for some dark ulterior motive, given his past as a pornographer, rapist, drug dealer and sex trafficker. Fleshcook appears to be this by the end of MIMIC, but he might also just be a really good manipulator.
• Sheltered Aristocrat: The Thackerys are a sympathetic example of this.
• Shoot the Medic First: Scott is one of the first members of Cindy’s group to die, while he’s treating Randall who turns out to be infected, although this is less intentional than most examples and has limited repercussions for the group. Harold Lorre kills Darwin, a medical student, first but since Amanda is also a medical student and remains alive this is less noticeable.
• Shown Their Work: In Crossed #2, a survivor mentions what's happened to Texas and New York in the months since the Crossed showed up. Both are realistic depictions of what would probably happen following the abandonment of either state. Texas's oil refineries eventually overloaded and exploded, and New York City flooded without the continuous pumping of its subways and sewers. [[Series Continuity Error Too bad both of these examples get contradicted by future installments on some occasions.
• Shoot the Dog: Cindy and Stan kill a group of kindergarteners whose guardian they had accidentally killed in order to keep traveling with minimal impediment. While still bad, it's not quite as bad as it sounds. With resources stretched thin, the guardian in question had been teaching the children to live off whatever they could find. Specifically, other survivors. Given the choice between having to stretch their own thin supplies to account for a dozen cannibalistic five-year-olds or shooting a bunch of children, Cindy went for option B.
• Shout-Out:
  • Morgan and Olivia in "The Lesser of 2 Evils" are carrying around a copy of ''Surviving D-Day," a book by BrooksMaxwell.
  • Anti-Crossed features an in-universe comic book team-up between Anti-Crossed and a character clearly meant to be Ashley Williams, complete with a chainsaw hand.
  • In Wish You Were Here after Selene seemingly dies during the Black Watch fort destruction, Shaky starts making theories about the reasons of the explosion, and the one that comes up to his mind is how soldiers stationed there were raping Selene, and this situation reminds Shaky of a certain film.
  • In Five Bloody Fingers, the scene showing the Crossed doing their thing at the cosplay convention has cosplayers identifiable as Mario and Spider-Man being murdered by the Crossed. One of the Crossed is in cosplay resembling Goku. Other Crossed are cosplaying in outfits similar to Cammy, Judge Dredd, and, of all things, a female Pikachu. Another cosplayer that shows up later also resembles Raiden, down to his straw cone hat.
  • One comic wrap cover has a jet pilot shoot a Crossed through the windshield. The colonel's name written on that plane is George Jetson.
  • In Yellow Belly, the three towns listed on the circus billboard from the opening are Emerson, Lakeside and Palmer.
  • Crossed +100 has this at least Once an Episode, with each issue being titled after a classic work of "wishful fiction" Future has read. Just to name a few, Return of the King, A Canticle for Leibowitz, I Am Legend, Last and First Men and Foundation and Empire are all namedropped.
  • In the last Badlands arc, a person with some medical knowledge trying to perform a surgery on a patient and accidentally killing him is oddly similar to the same scene from The Stand.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: In the second webcomic, Dead or Alive, a badly injured Richie hurls abuse at each member of his now ex-group as they're walking away from him, leaving him to the Crossed.^note He had tried to abandon them by knocking out Carl and leaving him for the Crossed, leaving them without a rear-guard and hence also likely facing certain death, and he had also been hoarding vital supplies from them. He tries to imply that none of them are any better than him. Their answer?
  Tabitha: Who do we think we are, Richie? Honestly, I have no idea. These days I don't think anyone does. But I do know we're not you.
• Skewed Priorities: After Prince Harry is captured by the Crossed and they start dismembering him, Ian's first reaction is simply disappointment that now they'll never know if he was the real Prince Harry or not.
• Slasher Smile: This is the only expression the Crossed seem to have. Except for Super-Crossed like Smokey.
• Slept Through the Apocalypse: Taro spent the first several hours of it on a video game binge and napping it off in an Internet cafe (only bothering to go out when the internet got cut off), making this literal in his case.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: This series makes its home on the cynical end of the scale.
• Smug Snake:
  • Don, one of Cava's two "leaders" in WYWH. Though competent in some matters, he is supremely arrogant and is more often than not ignored by the other Cavaites. Shaky refers to him as a "poison dwarf" and "sly, string-pulling, venomous little politico."
  • Alistair, Gordon Brown's political advisor in "Thin Red Line." Constantly tries to manipulate his boss for his own ends (with Harry implying that Alistair is trying to ingratiate himself with Tony Blair so that he can join his team instead), is openly contemptuous of him behind his back, looks down on Harry and engineers Gordon Brown's arrival at the government facility where Patient Zero is being kept, thereby causing John Duff's entire security team to become infected/killed.
  • Richie, the protagonist in Garth Ennis' Crossed DOA webcomic is initially introduced as a cynical man who is competent enough to have survived for five years. As the chapters go by, however, he increasingly reveals himself to be this as it is revealed that he hoarded vital supplies from the other members of his group, was always a sociopath who viewed other people as objects, always intended to abandon his group and leave them to the Crossed the moment they were no longer useful to him, and it is also heavily implied that he has gotten other people killed this way.
• Snow Means Death:
  • Two-thirds of the first Badlands arc, Of the World in Its Becoming, take place during winter in the highlands, and this is where Ian's entire group ends up dead or infected.
  • The second volume of Wish You Were Here has the sortie group make their way through a snowy area. In addition, Barry from Jasper's group gets killed in the winter forest.
• Sociopathic Hero: Richie in Dead or Alive is a deconstruction of the archetype. He fits every single one of the symptoms of The Sociopath, but instead of making him into a deadly survivalist unbound by conscience, he just ends up coming off as a selfish, short-sighted asshole. He spends most of his internal narration silently judging his fellow survivors for being weak, annoying, and wimpy, and thinks they'd gladly abandon him at a moment's notice, which results in him having no real friends among them. His own plan ends up being a spur-of-the-moment mess (amounting to "hit the guy next to me while we're on guard together during an attack, and then run in the opposite direction"), and it ends in his fellow survivors leaving him to the Crossed for his failed betrayal, all while he whines about them being horrible people for betraying him. For all his alpha-male bravado, he turns out to be little more than The Millstone, while the genuine fellowship of his companions stays strong—their last words to him say it all.
  "Who do we think we are, Richie? Honestly, I have no idea. These days, I don't think anyone does. But I know we're not you."
• Sole Surviving Scientist: Generally averted or played with due to the grim and/or deconstruction nature of the series, but not entirely absent.
  • Dr. Chopra in Thin Red Line is arguably the most prominent example, as she and her team arguably learned more about the Crossed virus than anyone else before they were all infected or killed.
  • Jackson kills a bunker of these in Iceland who'd previously worked on a serum to cause psychosis which he is convinced was a prototype version of the Crossed virus and was used on him in the first Annual. It wasn't. He was already mad to begin with, but the harmless steam that Magda sprayed on him made him think he had been turned insane, and his mind did the rest.
  • Jack from Shrink is an interesting version of this: a psychologist trying to study Crossed and find a cure through their mental workings (interestingly, it wasn't his idea, but that of his brother, who voluntarily infected himself and locked himself upstairs in Jack's house after describing the plan). After it's revealed Jack had molested his brother during childhood, he willingly gets himself infected.
  • Oliver (an anthropologist studying Crossed and their behavior and taking notes) and Cody (an architect who built survival bunkers) could have been these if not for their Face–Heel Turn.
  • Harold Lorre claims to know of a convoy of doctors working on a cure as they travel cross country but it’s quickly revealed to the readers that he’s lying to make sure the people who found him, injured and alone, will take him with them.
  • Denise Tang from Crossed 3D checks a lot of this in that she’s a highly qualified researcher who survived with a few assistants and is on a quest to recover some stuff important to her work, needing to be saved by a hunch of ragtag misfits led by a SWAT veteran, but she subverts this given that her field was pediatrics, she’s trying to get medicine that will save the lives of her patients and has no knowledge or affect on the big picture stuff related to the Crossed infection that this trope would imply.
  • Professor Nelson looks like an example of this given his research into an ancient Crossed-like virus and how he’s hiding in a bunker after C-Day, with people looking for him and his work, but he didn’t survive uninfected. It’s never revealed if he was actually right with his theory, and even if he was, it had few if any practical applications for people fighting the Crossed (Washington just let the others think that to have protectors in his search for Amy).
  • The cover of one issue shows a few scientists in an underground lab vivisecting Crossed prisoners and studying their brain patterns, but this is not shown in the issue itself.
  • In Wish You Were Here Shaky lampshades the absence of these after the first few years, noting that when they actually do find someone who might be The Immune, if there was a movie they’d rush him to some bunker to make a vaccine out of his blood but there’s nowhere left to do that anymore.
• Sour Outside, Sad Inside: Lance can act a bit bratty and self-assured at times, but Shaky suspects that he's putting on a facade, trying to "copy his Dad's cool", noting that Lance cries in his sleep most nights, and he's occasionally caught him sucking his thumb.
• Spiteful Spit: In the first arc, the current group of survivors come across a cop who's been keeping a Crossed locked in the back of his police car. The Crossed manages to anger him to get close enough to spit on him, infecting him.
• Spoiled Sweet:
  • Hazuki Yamada. Although through her father she has more money than she knows what to do with it, and is constantly spoiled and pampered by her father due to her life-style induced by her father's wealth, she is cheerful, friendly and fervently loyal to her friends (who by and large are considered losers by society at large).
  • Unknown to her friend Miku, who goes on "compensated dates" with men and steals their money, Hazuki had her father use his connections with the police to protect Miku from her clients.
  • This is taken further because even becoming Crossed doesn't fully remove her sweetness. When Crossed and having the opportunity to kill her friends who she sees as her real family, she refuses to. She does convince them to give up trying to survive against a giant horde of Crossed and join her as a group of Crossed, then go out having tons of violence and sex though, all while they value their friendship. So even when she's a cannibalistic, sadomasochistic, violent Crossed, she still can value people close to her in a way; which is more than most Crossed can say.
  • Cody in Gore Angels is one of the nicest characters in the arc and had enough money to buy three plane tickets to Japan for himself, Ryan and Nathalie.
  • Peter from Grave New World was the son of a construction magnate who take pride in how many of his family's buildings are still standing but carries his weight in the group and shows horror at many of Barnes' darker actions.
  • The Thackerys come across as adult versions of this, especially early on.
• Spoiler Cover: Not often (normally Covers Always Lie for this series) but Badlands issue 3 is accurate showing a surrounded Ian going for a grenade to kill himself and and Badlands #93 features Smokey on the front cover even though his appearance near the end is built up as more of a Wham Shot and/or a Cruel Twist Ending for that issue. The twins are also on that cover, foreshadowing how Smokey will join up with them in that arc even though they aren’t mentioned for another two issues and he doesn’t find them until a couple of issues after that.
• Spoiler Title: Quisling given how the first issue builds up like a quest to reach Wyoming using Oliver's Pretend We're Dead strategy, with hints that Smokey will chase them like Horsecock did Cindy’s group. Psychopath and Breakdown to some extent but we get a feel of Harold and later Amanda’s craziness quickly enough anyway. In Yellow Belly we’re told Edmund’s nickname fairly early but it also foreshadows how he’ll live up to it as time goes by.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Shaky and the Nun provide a somewhat disturbing, or at least alarming, example of this, retaining feelings for each other even after her infection.
• Stealth Expert: Pat (a lifelong hunter), Tommy and Daniel are this among Oliver's group. He doubts that he would be able to find them after selling out to Smokey, so instead, he makes a lot of noise to get them to find him.
• Stepford Smiler: Joyce Pratt. Generally, her forced smiles become wider the more screwed up the situation around her is. Eventually replaced by a permanent slasher smile as a Crossed.
• Stiff Upper Lip: Harry from The Fatal Englishman and The Thin Red Line maintains this attitude to an almost absurd degree. Absolutely nothing fazes him; not the Crossed, not civilisation falling to pieces before him, not the end of the world as he knows it. The only time we ever see him lose it is his reaction to his family's deaths at the hands of the Crossed.
• The Straight and Arrow Path: Downplayed with Curtis from Homo Tortor. While he prefers to use bow in favor of firearms, he nonetheless has no problem with using guns as well.
• Strange-Syntax Speaker: In the future of "Crossed + 100", everyone speaks strangely to the point where even abbreviations and cuss words are a part of normal vocabulary.
• Suicide Attack: Tom and Jackie do this in The Thin Red Line, when the engine of their Tornado fighter (which is carrying the nuke) dies and they're forced to make a kamikaze attack on the incoming Russian nuclear bombers.
• Suppressed Rage: A few of those who become Crossed turn out to have been this, with the infection taking away all their inhibitions and allowing them to really say what they feel about the person close to them. Notable examples include Joyce Pratt toward her husband Joseph and Hazuki Yamada toward her father.
• Surprisingly Elite Cannon Fodder: Two of Boss Yamada's goons make it pretty far into Five Bloody Fingers.
• Surprisingly Happy Ending: There's enough entries on Downer Ending to have its own page, so any happy ending is this by default. Still, the ending to Dead or Alive stands out: the Villain Protagonist has his misanthropic philosophy thoroughly refuted and he meets a Karmic Death, while the more goodnatured survivors he spent the whole story insulting escape and live on.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • At one point in "Wish You Were Here", the main character decides to analyze a recently-destroyed military base where one of his cohorts, Selene, went missing. After a Sherlock Scan, he comes up with a Crime Reconstruction that the reader sees: the soldiers turned out to be Sociopathic Soldiers who wanted to turn Selene into a Sex Slave a la 28 Days Later, and she managed to escape but sacrificed herself by detonating a grenade that destroyed the fortified entrance and let the Crossed inside. Some time later, it is revealed that his theory is totally, totally wrong: the soldiers were actually quite welcoming to Selene, and the destruction of the base was completely unrelated to Selene's presence. He admits to himself when he sees Selene alive and well that thinking he could flawlessly piece together the events of a prior disaster from limited evidence when he's a writer by trade was probably kind of stupid.
  • Homo Tortor has Washington try to open up a fusebox while trapped at the professor Nelson's bunker doorstep. With the full expectation of having to put little of electrician skills he actually has to use, Washington opens the electrical box... and finds three simple tumblers inside which he has no problem flipping back on.
  • The same issue has Curtis try and shoot down the Crossed with a bow. While the Crossed no-selling the shot in the eye is fantastical, Curtis himself finds out the hard way that firing a modern bow is also very difficult. It is just awfully easy to fire too early and miss entirely which is exactly what happens shortly thereafter.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Luke from DOA feels eerily similar to Kitrick. They're both Dark and Troubled Past black men who show little emotion after the trauma they've experienced, and even have that aspect of their personalities introduced with almost the exact same phrase (that what happened to him was worse than anything the narrator of the arc had heard of). The biggest difference between them is that Luke lives and Kitrick doesn't.

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