Crossed / Tropes T to Z

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

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T

• Take a Third Option: Or rather, in this case, a fourth option. In issue 16 of Badlands Clooney, having escaped an infected Nathan and locked him in the freezer, finds everyone in Samarkand in a drug-fueled orgy inspired by Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death", with his girlfriend involved in a foursome with Jared, notorious author Gideon Welles and another girl. Having studied Clooney's personality, Welles thinks that Clooney will either a) attack him, b) join in the orgy or c) run away like a pussy. Clooney, however, has another option.
  Clooney (narrates): "You have all the possibilities worked out. What will Clooney do? Option a, b or c? Well, it's none of the above, you bastard. I've got a few ideas of my own. I'm going to seriously fuck you up."
• Take That!:
  • A given, as this is Garth Ennis we're talking about. It seems to be aimed at so-called "armchair survivalists" who believe themselves prepared for such an occurrence as a zombie outbreak, without considering that the real apocalypse might be something they haven't anticipated.
  • Emiko's retort in response to Cody's horror at her drawings could also be interpreted as this towards popular manga stereotypes.
  Emiko: Not all manga are big-eyes and panty shots.
  • The Anti-Crossed arc takes aim at the worst aspects of comic book fans, or at least the Fan Dumb. The trio of nerds who complain about too much feminism in modern comics use Leigha the female comic book artist they have captive as a sex slave and force her to write new issues for them. The arc also features pre-Crossed flashbacks drawing attention to the casual misogyny present in the comic book industry and Hollywood, which forces Leigha to go independent.
• Taking the Bullet: A morally gray version, when Ashoke does this for The Nun when Jackson tries to shoot her.
• Taking You with Me:
  • What Harry and his team's mission amounts to, with regards to the Crossed. They intend to locate a biological and chemical warfare center and set off all the weapons there. Needless to say, Father Dennis is horrified when he hears this.
  • How Tom and Jackie take out the Russian nuclear bombers in Thin Red Line.
  • Selene stays behind on the ship as bait and uses the last claymore to blow herself, Moses and Aoileann's whole army up in Wish You Were Here.
• Talk to the Fist: When the Drift Fleet arrives, Don immediately senses their a threat to his power and, in a private conference with Rab, Elisa and Des tries to talk them out of sending anyone to meet with the Drift Fleet. He comes outside rubbing his jaw and reluctantly consenting to send a delegation. A few issues later Jackson does this to Rab over the attack on the Drift Fleet.
• Technically Living Zombies: The Crossed are a twisted and nasty version of this trope.
• Technician vs. Performer: Shaky and Tabitha interestingly zigzag this in their first conversation. Tabitha clearly enjoys making artwork, with a very performer-esque demeanor, but she often writes over her (very good) old drawings without showing them to anyone, and claims that art doesn't have to be seen to matter. Shaky is generally more clinical and detached when it comes to his work, and says he isn't a real artist because he only wrote comic books for money. But he also admits that his art, particularly his diary, probably matters to him because he wants people to read it and know about him, which is a mentality better suited for a performer than a technician.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Rab and Don, who don’t agree on anything, ever, according to Shaky (at least until later in the series). Given how little they get along (and how ambitious Don is) it's actually a little surprising that neither ever tries to force the other out of power. Both of them even team up (with Shaky, too) when Jasper ends up on Cava halfway through the second volume of Wish You Were Here.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • A very rare trope used in the whole series, seeing as continuity is rarely used, it comes back hard as at the end of the third issue of David Lapham's arc of Badlands, Harold from Lapham's ''Psychopath" arc IS BACK.
  • Harold's victim Amanda returns in Badlands #21. And again in #33.
  • Harry and his friends appear in the Thin Red Line arc, where they are shown to have been Gordon Brown's bodyguards when C-Day occurred.
  • Emiko's friend Satoshi returns in Badlands #71.
  • Smokey returns in Badlands #93.
• The Dog Bites Back:
  • What Leon does to the white supremacist compound (which is led by his abusive father) in Homo Superior.
  • In Crossed: +100 Mimic, Archivist Julie and the other support personnel at Casper Compound pay back a lifetime of discrimination and abuse (including sexual abuse) at the hands of the soldiers by betraying them and siding with Fleshcook and his intelligent Crossed against them in the climactic battle.
• The Ferryman: Skip in Wish You Were Here, whose boat is used on the sorties. This is lampshaded when Shaky calls him "our own personal Charon for our own personal [river] Styx.
• The Future: Crossed: +100 by Alan Moore and Gabriel Andrade takes place 100 years after C-Day.
• The Mole: Robbie Greer/Jokemercy, in Crossed +100. The Salt Clan trained him to speak normally and disfigured his face to hide his rash in order for him to infiltrate Chooga and move amongst the non-Crossed undetected for decades.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Rab gives one to Shaky, right before he breaks the latter's ankles.
  Rab: You are a crawling manipulative snake wi'oot a spot ay trust for anyone. Stands t'reason other folks couldnae trust you now if they tried.
  Shaky: Wh—
  Rab: Och— It's not that you're selfish exactly... it's more that you'll always act from the point ay view of the self— Y'know? It's different. You cannae share. You cannae empathise. You cannae even conceive of a world that wouldnae benefit from having you in it. [...] Shakespeare, here is the very simple truth: folks around you die a wee bit too much. We're leaving this place, laddie. Everything's set. We're leaving and you're not coming.
  • To his surprise, Smokey receives a devastating one from his son Cunt, whom he thought had been one of the dumb Crossed:
  Cunt: Shoot him. We'll finish him off.
  Smokey: Cunt...?
  Cunt: What, my vocabulary surprises you? Because I couldn't speak in complete fucking sentences when I was a year old? You poor retarded fuck. At least the dumb ones don't know how moronic they are. How pathetically sad must it be, being you?
• The Remnant:
  • Shaky and his team come across Fort George, the real-life garrison/HQ of the Black Watch, 3rd Battalion, Royal Regiment of Scotland. Besieged by hordes of Crossed, the fortress is still manned by the uninfected Black Watch, which means they have been holding out for as long as 18-24 months. Also doubles as a Badass Army. Unfortunately, the Fort is later overrun by the Crossed, leaving no survivors. And Shaky's theory as to how it happened is later proved to be incorrect.
  • A sizable remnant of the U.S. military centered around Naval Base San Diego is shown to be holding out against the Crossed in the Gavin Land arc several days after C-Day, trying to evacuate over 250,000 of the remaining inhabitants of San Diego before it's overrun. Only one ship (commandeered by Land) is able to make it out.
  • Cheyenne Mountain is still operational in Quisling. Oliver leads Smokey there in the hopes they will be able to kill him. Unfortunately, prior outbreaks had weakened the facility enough so that Smokey and his army of Crossed are able to overwhelm the site.
  Oliver: So much for continuity of government.
• This Is Reality: Shows up often. Anytime one character gets the idea of fighting back or finding a cure, the viewpoint character will harshly remind them that fighting back is suicide, there is no cure, and they're all going to die.
• The Lost Lenore: Aoilean for Shaky, although this is heavily complicated by the fact that she’s alive, infected, and stalking Cava, posing a danger to everyone but Shaky. Harold feels this way about Lori but she infected herself to get away from him and would probably disagree. Although their last meeting ended badly while she was alive, Serena was this for Mattias so much that he keeps repressing her death when he finds her body. From the first issue of Badlands, there's Ian's wife Penny, whose death clearly made a serious impact on him. Played for laughs with Edmund’s feelings about Betty Ford, as he quickly gets hung up on a different girl afterwards.
• The Virus: The Crossed transmit the virus via fluids, as mentioned above.
  • Issue #50 is the beginning of a new arc by Ennis, "The Thin Red Line," which deals with the origins of the infection and how it was allowed to spread. It began in multiple areas across the world simultaneously although the earliest infectees do not have the trademark facial rash initially.
  • There also seems to be different strains to the early virus in this arc as some people become catatonic, some become suicidal, and others become hideously violent and sadistic. However, all of these strains lack the same amount of cruelty that the later strains have.
  • In Crossed Volume 1 the survivors come across the journal of a soldier who'd had a rather chilling theory on how the Crossed had seemingly appeared everywhere in equal measure and at the same time, with no apparent points of origin to have spread out from: "Maybe they were there from the beginning, a strategically triggered infection designed to ripple out and take us all."
    • This also comes back in the The Thin Red Line arc where it is revealed patient zeros appeared in seemingly every country on earth at the exact same time, and seem to have been ordinary people who were mysteriously possessed by some unknown force to carry out horrific acts of sadism and brutality in imitation of the worst crimes of human history.
  • The Thin Red Line also establishes that the Crossed virus is explicitly supernatural in nature; part of why it drives its victims mad is that it gives them vivid, ongoing hallucinations of human atrocities. The "patient zero" for the UK, once he stops trying to fight the infection, gains a bizarre amount of knowledge that he shouldn't have, such as Harry's nickname for the Prime Minister's secretary, which suggests the virus gives its hosts a particularly cruel brand of clairvoyance.
• They Look Like Us Now: In +100, it's revealed Salt came up with a plan to let Crossed infiltrate survivor outposts by conditioning them from birth to disguise their voices, and then hiding the cross scar with even more facial scarring.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: The first Crossed annual is told from the point of view of self-proclaimed loonie Jackson, first introduced in "Wish You Were Here". He generally just hallucinates strange creatures appearing around him, and mentions that his memories have degraded so that he does this in flashbacks to before he went crazy. He also realizes at the end that the person he was talking to wasn't who he thought it was.
  • Harold and eventually Amanda aren't much better.
• This Cannot Be!: At the end of "Lesser of Two Evils," as a now-Crossed Morgan prepares to rape/kill Olivia, Olivia shouts about how "We followed it! Every word! The book said we'd be OK!" referring to the Expy of The Zombie Survival Guide they brought with them. Morgan's response is "The book lied too!"
• Throw-Away Country:
  • India (or more specifically, New Delhi) is mentioned as having been nuked in a few story arcs something that is outright confirmed in "The Thin Red Line".
  • In the original series Stan mentioned that at least Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and most of Egypt had been nuked by Israel, though whether the Israelis did it as a last resort against invading hordes of Crossed or because the Israelis were themselves Crossed is unknown.
  • Pakistan is mentioned by a white supremacist militia as having been wiped out as well, but it's unclear if this is in fact true. A CNN reporter claims that India did not retaliate and Gordon Brown's own cabinet claims in The Thin Red Line the same.
  • In The Thin Red Line, during the early hours of the pandemic, outbreaks are mentioned to have taken place in France (specifically in Aix-en-Provence, a suburb of Marseille), Chad, Pakistan and South Africa (specifically Capetown, which got bad enough fast enough that the British Embassy requested permission to evacuate) but none are further elaborated upon.
  • The last arcs of Badlands have the "Worldwide" edition covers which show Crossed individuals wreaking havoc in other world countries, including Holland, Germany, Nigeria, Argentina, Guatemala, Jamaica, France, Sweden, Vatican City and New Zealand, among others.
• Token Good Teammate:
  • For an example that applies to Crossed collaborators rather than the Crossed themselves Archivist Reed to Kingstenn.
  • Shirley to Wentz's gang before C-Day. Her dialogue implies that she started out as one of the coerced actresses in Wentz's porno films as a teenager, and she was the one who tipped off Land about what really happened to his daughter when he seemed to be believing Wentz's lies. It's not enough to save her from Land's revenge, although he at least makes it quick, when she isn't expecting it. Whether he felt that she should have done more to help his daughter, resented that she didn't speak in his favor after he was arrested for shooting up Wentz's porno shoot, or something else is unclear.
• Too Dumb to Live: Most of the time, the Crossed benefit greatly from non-infected characters having moments of stupidity.
  • In the final issue of the fourth Badlands arc, the Crossed have to get across a wide river to reach the survivors at Samarkand. They solve this problem by driving several cars and trucks into the river, eventually forming a bridge through the waters. This means they'll be walking in a line, two or three wide at the most, across an unsteady surface with dangerous waters on either side, and survivors armed with assault rifles and plenty of ammunition who can easily pick them off one by one ahead of them, with each fallen infected making their bridge even more slippery and difficult to traverse. The survivors response is to immediately declare the situation hopeless and run back to the house.
  • Yes Edmund, blurt out the fact that you killed Nicole and had sex with her corpse to Donna, tell the whole biker gang you did it, while you're at it. That'll work out swimmingly.
    • For that matter, why did he even have sex with her corpse in the first place? Harold flat-out admits that it had nothing to do with hiding her body.
• Took a Level in Badass: Daphne in the 2013 special. Goes from a self-described "reliant" and victim to a hardened survivor who avenges her husband and takes over Todd's road train, in the process becoming one of the most powerful people in post-C-Day Australia.
• Torture Technician: Various Crossed.
  • In The Thin Red Line, two of Gerry's soldiers became this while serving in the Middle East and are turned loose on Patient Zero to try and find out what he knows about the source of the infection, which just gets the two of them infected as well.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: The First Child is a 14-year-old whose first onscreen act is to rape a man after being encouraged by his parents (who aren't even Crossed), even slapping him for saying he wants to do it instead of doing it.
• 20 Minutes into the Past: The Thin Red Line arc, beginning in Badlands #50 and written by Garth Ennis, tells the story of the very first person to become Crossed. It also features Gordon Brown as Prime Minister of Great Britain, placing the outbreak in the summer of 2008. Incidentally, the first issue of Crossed came out on August 6th 2008, during Brown's premiership.
• Two-Faced: Cristos of "The Golden Road" has burns all over the left side of his body, exactly like Two-Face. He says he did it to himself to be more interesting.

U

• Uncertain Doom: The bunker from The Thin Red Line arc is still operational by the end of the story arc and most of the personnel inside left alive and uninfected. While the base is safe in the short term, it is shown that the facility's perimeter is littered with Crossed corpses killed by the base guards, indicating that the Crossed have located it. Based on prior history of the Crossed, more will be attracted by the gunfire. By the time of The Fatal Englishman arc five years later, Harry states that the British government and military are essentially defunct, with no facilities of any kind left or people left to run them. Like Darwin from Psychopath said:
  Darwin: "The Crossed overrun anything that stands still."
• Undignified Death: The series has quite a few (often combined with Cruel and Unusual Death), especially on the covers, but a notable one which the Crossed don't participate in is Wentz's henchman/porno actor Donnie. When Land arrives at Wentz's mansion looking for Wentz's crew, he finds everyone gone or infected except for a half-naked Donnie. After realizing that Land is there to avenge his daughter, Donnie goes from saying that Wentz and the others are in Catalina and might be dead to saying that a guy like Land could survive this if he just heads for the hills rather than going after people who might get killed anyway to talking about how Land can repopulate the Earth by impregnating as many women as possible and masturbating at the mental image at which point Land smashes his head in with a baseball bat.
• Unholy Ground: Though it's not (depending on what you believe caused the Crossed virus) a supernatural version of this trope, the Homo Tortor's "camp of camps" is the focal point of their immensely evil actions. Their evil — ranging from institutionalized cannibalism, slavery, rape, and murder — was so immense, it was even implied to have lead to the emergence of a Crossed outbreak. As a bonus, Kieron Gillen confirmed that the Homo Tortor's city was built next to the Toba Supervolcano (in what is now modern-day Sumatra). Ultimately subverted though, as it turned out that everything about the Homo Tortor was a made up story.
• Unreliable Narrator: As communications broke down extremely quickly, it's only to be expected that the survivors would have fragmentary and contradicting information about the world at large. One notable example is the fate of Pakistan, as in Quisling a white supremacist militia tells Oliver (gleefully) that Pakistan was erased in a nuclear holocaust. However, in the original series a person claiming to be a former CNN journalist said that the Indians had not retaliated against the Pakistanis despite New Delhi being nuked. Which is confirmed in The Thin Red Line.
• Unsexy Sadist: Harold Lorre is noticeably more grungy looking then most of the other characters.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • Shaky does this so many times in Wish You Were Here that recording it all down at once would take the better part of an hour. For context, by inadvertently causing Aoileann to get infected and then not having the courage to put her down he probably dooms more people to death and/or infection than Oliver and Cody combined, and that’s not even counting various minor screw ups and errors or judgment throughout the series.
  • In light of the above arguably John and Maria for finding Shaky and getting him to come back to Cava in the first place, might count as this.
  • Amanda from Psychopath choosing to save Harold Lorre and aid him on his "quest" not only results in him killing off everyone in the group except for her, but also in Amanda herself going insane due to trauma.
  • Oliver, while less well-intentioned than the other examples here, by making Smokey interested in human collaborators in the first place.
  • Randall from Volume One, by setting the seeds for Cindy’s group to go to Alaska - which led them to encounter Horsecock and Ann Cooke - then getting infected and killing their paramedic.
• Upper-Class Twit:
  • The Thackerys, to some extent, especially given how Shaky and the Gamekeeper treat them, although by the end they show some savvy but are trapped in a bad situation.
  • The man in the penthouse Steve was working as a bodyguard for on C-Day. She has no problem leaving him behind when making her escape.
  • Gerry Stillwell from Grave New World has shades of this due to being an Extreme Doormat and having gotten his son killed by falling for a trap, but its undermined by his pathos.
  • Gordon Brown's aide Alistair has shades of this but it's undermined by his deviousness and the frightening authority he actually has.
  • Cody the bunker-builder views most of his group this way, although they don't actually seem worse than the usual crop of survivors- save for one whom he executes before he even sets foot in the bunker, having recognized him as useless and a liability, and two who never make it inside the bunker. They might have actually had a good run if Smokey hadn't stumbled across them.
• Uriah Gambit: In the first issue of "Grave New World", one of the children in Captain Barnes’ group says that fundamentalist leader killed Melissa and Leo, two other members of the group, for breaking his rule against anyone having sex. Another kid protests that Barnes only sent them out on a scavenging mission, with the first kid replying that this is a Distinction Without a Difference. The beginning of the next issue shows Melissa and Leo finding a barge loaded with valuable supplies. Melissa wants to use it to get accepted back by Barnes while Leo recognizes that Barnes sent them to die in the first place and never wants to see him again. This disagreement leads to Melissa striking Leo with a hatchet and getting accepted back by Barnes later on.

V

• Villain in a White Suit: Gideon Welles has a fancy white suit which futher appeals to his evil aristocrat nature.
• Villainous Incest: Shows up in "Family Values", in more ways than one.
• Villain Protagonist: Any Crossed or villain who ends up being the focal character of the story arc qualifies, though some characters put the emphasis on the villain part more than the protagonist.
  • Harold Lorre, the titular psychopath of Crossed: Psychopath
  • Steve, from Homo Superior.
  • Leland Barnes in Grave New World.
  • Matthias, a Russian gangster turned Crossed, of Conquers All.
  • Smokey, the Alpha Crossed and the main antagonist from The Quisling, shows up as the main character in #93-100 of Badlands, with the entire story revolving around him trying to build a new civilization of "Super-Crossed" during C-Day.
  • Washington in Homo Tortor.
  • Richie from Crossed: Dead or Alive webcomic.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Wentz (before C-Day, and after it as well, although by then he’s less of a villain), Robbie Greer and Bailey, if you see his actions as villainous and not falling under I Did What I Had to Do.

W

• Wardens Are Evil: Played with.
  • Barnes from Grave New World is pretty evil but we never get to see him in his capacity running a naval brig before D-Day.
  • The warden of Gavin Land's prison deals with him nicely but seems apathetic to Land's situation with Wentz and deals with him for pragmatic reasons.
  • The authorities at Elmer, the Bullocks' and Viceroy’s prisons all let out the prisoners rather than leave them to die (although at Elmer's prison that was done to get more manpower against the Crossed).
• Wasteland Elder:
  • In Wish You Were Here, Rab is a tough, cagey old fisherman with a Seadog Beard that's starting to go gray. He leads about thirty people in eking out a living on a previously uninhabited Scottish island and defending it from the Crossed (with a scheming former university lecturer as his self-appointed co-leader).
  • In the Family Values arc, Jospeh Pratt is a dark example. He leads his immediate family and a couple dozen other survivors of the Crossed apocalypse about a year after Day Zero. It ends badly due to his Egocentrically Religious attitude and Parental Incest habits.
  • In the '+100'' storyline, 100 years after the Zombie Apocalypse, most of the resettled American settlements are governed by elderly, generally female, leaders and "Oldwoman" and "Oldman" are leadership titles. Most, if not all, of the ones to appear onscreen are killed by the Crossed or submit to them.
  • Murfreesboro, a community of Muslims (whose belief system has altered somewhat over the last century) is led by a woman called the Ima'am, who seems younger than most of the other leaders, although not by that much. She's kind of a Jerkass to the protagonist and has some bad Head-in-the-Sand Management moments, and is eventually forced to surrender her power to a Knight Templar following a coup.
  • One Mimic side story set in 2076 features a colony led by a man named James, a rugged survivalist type who is the only one of the group who was alive during C-Day, sixty-eight years earlier.
  • Joe Collins is a shrewd, amiable, middle-aged man who serves as the cook and advisor for a Cosy Catastrophe camp ground of about sixty-five people hiding deep, deep in a forest. Collins' boss, Crazy Survivalist Sutter, probably doesn't count due to his relative youth and how he only established the camp to lure large numbers of Crossed into the area for him to kill (despite knowing that this will eventually lead to the camp's destruction, a fact he lies to the others about) and doesn't interact with the others much.
• Wasteland Warlord: In the +100: Mimic miniseries, Commander Chief Nathan is the leader of a group that was either a Right-Wing Militia Fanatic group before the end of society or regressed to one afterwards. His society has a great deal of military strength, is extremely misogynistic, and has no prohibition against rape. The (mostly female) lower classes of his outpost actually view the ruthless and torture-prone Crossed hordes as A Lighter Shade of Black than Nathan.
• Weaksauce Weakness:
  • A gentleman in the second issue believes that the Crossed have become deathly allergic to table salt as a result of their infection. Boy, is he wrong.
  • Alternatively, he was right, but overestimated the weakness. He had seen a violent reaction to physical contact with salt...and thus concluded that putting an easily reached-across thin ring of salt around himself, his wife, and his child would keep them safe.
  • Of course, the alternative put before him was mercy-killing his wife (which he might not have even had enough time for) before the Crossed got her, so he tried to take a different option and failed.
• Wham Episode:
  • Chapter 24 of the second volume of Wish You Were Here reveals that Aoileann's group of Crossed has Selene.
  • A crippled Jackson commits suicide in Chapter 24 of the third volume in order to prevent the Crossed from either killing him or turning him. And at the very end, it is revealed that the Gamekeeper is still alive.
• Wham Line: From Volume 1:
  • Patrick: "Mommy, YOU FUCKING CUNT!"
  • Also, this one:
  Geoff: I used to pick men up. Young men. And take them home.
  Thomas: Geoff, there's nothing wrong with it...
  Geoff: And I'd torture them until they were dead and cut them up into pieces, and then I'd bury them beneath my house.
  • Much later in Badlands #53 (though at the chronological start of the pandemic) we have Gordon Brown attempting to avert a nuclear Armageddon caused by infected (or proto-infected at this stage) Russian nuclear pilots carrying a huge payload to wipe out the east coast of the US (in the middle of the growing British epidemic nonetheless) and desperately needs to get in contact with the US president in order to coordinate a defence and find out just what the hell is going on. At long last they are finally able to contact the White House and...
  George W. Bush: ''Fuckalong, fuckalong, fuckalong Jack! Fuckalong, fuckalong, fuckalong Jack! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA...! (cue Mass "Oh, Crap!" from Brown and everybody else in the room)''
  • A little earlier in the same issue, by one of Gordon Brown's aides:
  PM's aide: Prime Minister, we have a confirmed report of a nuclear airburst over Delhi.
  • From "Quisling," the most disturbing and terrifying thing Oliver has ever woken up to:
  "Smokey is reading my journal."
  • From Badlands #55, the penultimate entry in the "Thin Red Line" arc, Alistair (Gordon Brown's aide) has been locked into the room containing Patient Zero and two of the new Crossed, who are currently fighting for the right to rape him. The following line is fairly innocuous until one realizes that it confirms the truly supernatural nature of the infection.
  Patient Zero: Catamite. Yes?
  Alistair : Wh...?
  Patient Zero: Isn't that what he^note Harry at the start of the story, long before they encountered Patient Zero called you?
  Alistair : How... do you...?
  Patient Zero: I know all sorts of things I couldn't have known. It's all going away. It's going along with everything else, down into dark red slurry. But for now— I know.
• The War on Straw:
  • The series, as mentioned above and below, is supposed to be a Take That! to self-professed "zombie survivalists" and show how helpless they'd really be in such a situation. However, other than their massive numbers and the inability to be reasoned with, there's actually a lot of differences between the Crossed and most zombies; your average zombie cannot use projectile weapons (or, indeed, any tools at all beyond maybe a simple bludgeoning/stabbing implement), has pitifully inept senses and no logical capacity. The Crossed, on the other hand, have all the capabilities of regular humans added to their Axe-Crazy behavior — naturally they're going to be a lot more dangerous than the mindless to animalistic flesh-eating ghouls the series is mocking.
  • The anti-survivalist aspect of the story is far from constant, but it comes up repeatedly, from the original series to the "Wish You Were Here" webseries to the "Lesser of Two Evils" arc in Badlands. (In "The Lesser of Two Evils," the group of survivors is explicitly (actually, deliberately) undone by poorly-chosen advice from an Expy of The Zombie Survival Guide.) The point that the authors come back to again and again is that rather than being decisively non-human like standard Zombies, the Crossed are just exaggerations of humanity's worst traits ... and those traits will always be lurking inside the fences protecting the would-be "good guys" in an apocalyptic survival scenario.
  • One could, more charitably, interpret the message to be that zombie survivalists are setting themselves up for Crippling Overspecialization, and that even in the extremely unlikely (and in real life, likely impossible) event that something akin to a Zombie Apocalypse actually happens, there'd be no guarantee that the zombies would behave the way fiction has portrayed them, or if the monster horde would even be zombies at all, and wouldn't be something much more dangerous than zombies. "Lesser of Two Evils" more or less makes this explicit, with a pair of self-proclaimed zombie apocalypse survivalists who turn out to be Wrong Genre Savvy in the worst way possible.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • The fate of Captain Juneaux's military A-team in the original series. Though a few of them were killed in the emergency landing of their helicopter and Juneaux himself was badly injured, as shown in the flashback, the remainder of the unit survived. Forced by Juneaux to abandon him, their ultimate fate is unknown. However, with their equipment and military training, their odds of survival, at least in the short term, would be better than that of most other survivors and they went down in the Cascades, which are relatively close to Alaska, where survivors generally had a better chance.
  • The fates of the two surviving teenaged girls in Grave New World aren't shown. They're last seen waking up, and looking scared shortly before the Crossed attack, but neither is clearly shown to be among the bodies or infected in the background afterwards.
  • In The Thin Red Line, there are several examples.
    • Gerry, Lofty and the other SAS soldiers are still alive at the end of the story, but in The Fatal Englishman, Harry implies that he and his men are the last soldiers left in England (although that could also mean that Gerry and his men just retreated to a bunker or the Channel Islands eventually).
    • Harry all but states that by the time he and his team have met Father Dennis and his charges five years post C-Day, the British government and military have ceased to exist, with any continuity of government facilities and military bases long overrun. Even if Gerry or any of the men of his squadron are alive and uninfected, its unlikely they are still acting as soldiers of the British Army anymore. Same applies to all the personnel in Brown's bunker.
    • Several unnamed aides to Brown (the dark-skinned man in the green suit who first brings up the stealth bombers and borders on being a Hyper-Competent Sidekick, the man who discussed social media's reactions to the outbreak, etc.) are present helping deal with the crisis for several issues but vanish near the end. It is unclear if they were sent down to Brown's bunker ahead of him, in which case they would have likely fallen victim to the infected medical team, were dispersed to other bunkers to provide leadership and coordination (as other such bunkers are mentioned and at least one of Brown's senior people, Alistair, apparently wasn't going to be sent down before the bunker was sealed), or were simply remaining on the surface with Gerry and his men (which again would leave their final fate unclear).
    • The mechanics at the hanger where the stealth bomber was kept are left behind as Harry and his team and Tom and Jackie leave. It was already stated that none of them had much combat experience, and its unclear if they were being left to the mercy of the Crossed, or whether Harry and his men killed or diverted all of the nearby Crossed so they could hunker down.
    • At the end of the arc, Harry encourages his team to evacuate their loved ones to safe locations before they rendezvous to resume fighting and its never revealed if they succeeded (although Jock's Berserk Button in The Fatal Englishman hints he at least may have failed).
  • The fates of most of the soldiers and civilians Wentz and Land encounter in San Diego aren't shown, and it's unclear if any of them were on the Sea Star or any of the other ships that might have made it out.
  • Smokey spares several crewmen from the patrol boat alive to sail it to Florida, but only one of them, who becomes his final Quisling is seen afterwards. It's unclear if he just killed or infected the others once they got there, or perhaps let them go as a way of proving his capacity for mercy to the sailor he kept.
  • In Crossed 3D Elmer mentions that the prison he'd been an inmate at released all of the prisoners to join the guards in taking arms on the wall, but that they were overrun after running out of ammo, but never mentions if he was the Sole Survivor or not.
  • Steve and her baby are never seen again after they approach the twins (although it's likely that Steve turned into a dumb Crossed (or, given her past atrocities, at least a bit more intelligent one), and the baby probably would have been killed or infected shortly afterwards).
  • Ashley and Ashlyn are shown to have had kids before Smokey arrived who turned out to be dumb Crossed, but it's never revealed if they took those kids with them when they followed Smokey out of the city.
  • Archivist Reed is last seen being offered as a sacrifice to the Salt Clan, although it's shown in later issues that the Crossed do keep some of their human prisoners as uninfected slaves, and it's possible she may have survived to be liberated after Bailey went on the offensive against the Salt Clan.
  • A few members of Cody's group (notably the passengers in Karen's car) aren't actually seen being killed or infected on screen, although their odds aren't good, especially since Karen herself appears as a Crossed not long after.
  • For a nonhuman example, most of the survivors who reached Cody's bunker came their by car, yet there's no sign of those cars in the next issue, when they have to abandon the bunker and only people who can drive stick can serve as getaway drivers for the four classic cars that were stored in the bunker since before C-Day.
• When You Coming Home, Dad?: Chanice wants her Blood Knight father Des to spend more time with her, but is rarely willing to admit it. When Des perishes halfway through the final volume, she doesn't take it well.
• The World Is Just Awesome: Strangely, yes. There are a few moments in the series where the characters will stop to take in the natural beauty of the world. It usually doesn't take long for the Crossed to spoil the view...
  • One such moment occurs in Volume 1, Chapter 19 of Wish You Were Here, when Shaky and Sofia, a deaf/mute Spanish woman, sit down on the grass and together watch the aurora borealis. Even a hardened cynic like Shaky can't help but be impressed by its beauty. This is right before he realizes that Sofia has committed suicide by slitting her wrist with a razor.
  • Another memorable example comes with Stan taking in the sight of the Rocky Mountains as Cindy's group crosses them, and when they see a pack of wolves.
  • Matthew Pratt tells his sister that while he has grief “There’s beauty in the world Adeline. If we stop seeing it we're just like [a Mook bandit group]. No better than the Crossed”.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: As mentioned in Take That!, plenty of people in the series think they know how to survive a Zombie Apocalypse. They're proven wrong in the most horrific ways possible.
  • Father Dennis' Pretend We're Dead plan of fooling the Crossed in The Fatal Englishman is this. Fortunately Harry's team intervenes.
  • In Quisling Tina proposes just finding a boat and taking it to an island. Oliver shoots this down, telling her this "isn't Dawn of the Dead (2004)" and the Crossed could just drive boats after them.
    • The people on Catalina who didn't leave with Wentz also fell victim to this, believing that they'd be safe as long as they stayed on the island. That has not turned out well for them by the time Land gets there, looking for Wentz, Soaks, Shirley and Martin.
  • Olivia and Morgan from The Lesser of Two Evils keep following the Zombie Survival Guide in an attempt to survive the Crossed outbreak, even going as far as manipulating a survivor group into destroying itself. The guide still fails to save them from being infected at the end.
  • Gideon Welles from The Golden Road foolishly deludes himself that he can take out a whole army of Crossed storming his mansion with just two pistols after most of the students and employees are infected. He gets overwhelmed pretty quickly.

Y

• Yank the Dog's Chain: Very often. One of the worst examples is in the Gavin Land arc, when a mother trying to defend her children with just a rolling pin gets a Hope Spot when soldiers arrive at the house, only to realize that they're infected.

Z

• Zombie Apocalypse: Subverted and deconstructed in a way. Despite using plenty of zombie tropes, the Crossed are not zombies at all, not even technically living zombies. Instead, The Virus is a Hate Plague that gives the infected an insatiable lust for sex, violence, cruelty, and pain. People in the story who were expecting this trope to be played straight end up horrified and caught off guard by what the Crossed are really like.
• Zombie Apocalypse Hero: Among the main protagonists who do a lot to fight against the rape and torture-happy Crossed in their respective story arcs are a waitress whose grandfather taught her to shoot, a horse rancher’s daughter, three comic book writers (two in Japan, one in England), a crusty Scottish fisherman, a Badass Biker, a science teacher, a medical student, a writers' retreat guest, an anthropology student, and a bunker salesman. Given the Darker and Edgier Deconstruction nature of the series, a good number of them take up monstrous actions themselves, suffer horrible deaths, or both.
• Zombie Infectee: Generally not a problem, as becoming Crossed happens in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. However, getting shot with a bullet soaked in Crossed blood... or other fluids gives the infection enough time to creep up on one.
• Your Mom: This comes up sometimes as one of the Crossed's obscenities.

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