Superman came off as this in his earliest stories, as he had yet to become the iconic beacon of hope he is today. One story showed him angry that a friend of his died to a car accident and hijack a radio stadio to declare war on all reckless drivers. Hundreds of dollars in property damage later, Superman has succeeded in his goal, as driving laws are now rigidly enforced by the mayor (after Supes kidnapped him and took him to a morgue so he could guilt him with all the victims of driving accidents, natch), and the story ends with Superman getting a ticket for parking in the wrong place. This leaves the reader wondering if it's just a kooky Ironic Twist Ending typical of comics of the time, or if Superman is receiving Laser-Guided Karma for his vigilantism. Hijacking a radio station to declare war on blank sounds straight out of a Saturday-Morning Cartoon villain's playbook. He sometimes slips back into this in modern comics, particularly some moments in Superman: Grounded where he refuses to do hero things just to make some kind of vaguely-defined point about non-interference, but it never gets as bad as that aforementioned story, at least in canon comics.
Fables gives us Jack (of beanstalk and giant-killing fame, but also every Jack in every fairy tale or nursery rhyme,) who tries to be a Lovable Rogue, but often comes across as having all the conscience of The Sociopath, just one who finds it easier and safer to con people rather than use violence. The discovery in his spin-off Jack of All Tales that he is half-Fable (ie a character in a story) and half-Literal (an Anthropomorphic Personification of a trope, like Dex the Deus ex Machina or the Pathetic Fallacy, the Anthropomorphic Personification of Anthropomorphic Personifications) leads to the conclusion that he is the incarnation of the Designated Hero.
Batman, if not handled properly, can fall into this category.
This is especially apparent in some of Frank Miller's later work. For example, in All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder, he outright kidnaps Robin, roughs up Alfred for daring to give the kid some food rather than forcing him to eat rats, gloats about his intellectual superiority to Superman, in general demonstrates little compunction for killing or abusing other heroes, and does barely any actual crimefighting.
New 52/DC Rebirth Batman. From his extremely abusive treatment of both Jason Todd and Dick Grayson (including beating the crap out of both boys, the former to near death), to neglecting Damian, to smacking Tim, this Bruce has become so abusive of his family that very few fans feel like rooting for him, with several even going on to outright disown him as Batman. The fact that the writers still insist on treating him like a hero and having said family forgive him for his actions with little to no secessions on his part did not help matters. There's a reason most 52 incarnations got nuked in the next multiverse shuffle/revamp.
In The Dark Knight Strikes Again he displays very little regard for human life, despite his goal being overthrowing Luthor. He breaks into Luthor's office early on and has the chance to end things right there, but instead just leaves. When Superman explains to his daughter why they shouldn't just take over the world, Batman actually argues against him, and perhaps his crowning Moral Event Horizon is that he assembles a rebellion composed of girls in costumes, who play no important role in the story and simply die and accomplish nothing. They were untrained, unpowered girls cosplaying superheroes, while he knows real superheroes, which didn't stop him from leading the "Superchix" to their doom. Also, he thinks nothing of letting an incident where many people are being killed continue because it'll be a good distraction from his plan. Even if that plan was for the greater good, neither Batman under anyone else's pen (including Frank himself even ten years prior) nor anyone worth rooting for would let civilians die because the distraction made his job a little easier. (Or any other reason, really, unless it was a Sadistic Choice of truly being unable to stop it and so focusing on what he could do. Clearly not the case here.)
Batman: "It's anything but trouble—for us. This'll keep those Justice League kapos good and busy— and out of our hair."
And how does he feel as he's busting Plastic Man out, knowing that "hundreds" have died in an incident he could have helped with but he's instead using it as cover - specifically, an Alien Invasion actually staged by Brainiac, and so is happening in part because he didn't stop Lex Luthor when he had the chance?
Batman, narrating: "Stay grim. Don't break into a run. Don't laugh like a schoolboy. Don't let them know how much fun you're having."
Also, he taunts Dick Grayson about having been a 'sissy' and Dirty Coward even though he knows that Dick's current state is due to a long series of experiments done on him - it's not his fault his brain has been screwed with. (It has been suggested that he's deliberately angering Dick because he knows the Dick he knew is gone and so is doing whatever it takes to get an edge on the new Joker. However, that's not said on panel, and this Batman is far enough from the one we know that it wouldn't be out of character for him to have meant every word he's saying.)
Batman at many times came off as just as bad as Superman due to his Jerkass behaviour and incredibly stupid decisions, such as getting Badass Normal superheroes to try to fight Darkseid then getting upset when Superman decides to kill Parademons rather than allowing millions of people to die during their attack. Batman's unwillingness to help Superman when his friend was at his most vulnerable also directly contributed to Superman's descent down the slippery slope, as he had no one to turn to except a very violent Wonder Woman and Sinestro.
Harley Quinn assists The Joker in nuking Metropolis and killing Lois Lane, then spends a great deal of the comic's initial run sexually harassing Billy Batson, a child and threatening to kill his friends and family if he won't fight her. She receives no comeuppance for either of these things at any time and is considered to be a hero because she's not working for Superman. Even worse, she blames Metropolis's destruction on Superman because he was supposed to stop them.
The Authority came to be this in later issues, being treated as heroes despite doing horribly amoral things (Midnighter paving through a bunch of civilians to take out a villain or stopping an invasion from a parallel Earth by destroying a whole country, even though it is clear that the invaders are completely outmatched anyways). Under the pen of series creator Warren Ellis this was deliberate as his vision of the Authority was that they were supervillains being used to take down worse supervillains. However when Mark Millar took over they were turned into his political mouthpieces and thus were always presented as being in the right, even when they committed terrible atrocities in the name of peace.
Black Canary and Dick Grayson are supposed to be seen as trying to help Roy when his grief over losing an arm and losing his daughter Lian cause him to spiral back into drug addiction while also becoming a violent anti-hero. The problem is just that they do more damage than they fix. Black Canary spends most of the arc looking like she's made of ice, and ultimately decides to wash her hands of Roy, considering him a lost cause. Dick abandons Roy in a center for villains with substance abuse problems, and does nothing to argue with Canary over her condemnation of Roy. As a matter of fact, Canary's behavior is called out in Birds of Prey when she's subjugated to Mind Rape by a villain forcing her to relive her past mistakes. An illusion of Roy specifically asks how she could let him become "this thing" he is now.
Donna Troy, Wally West, Cyborg, and Doctor Mid-Nite are equally unhelpful. Donna and Wally do nothing to help Roy, Doctor Mid-Nite is completely ignorant of how badly hurt Roy really is when he begins stealing pain medication and Mid-Nite never catches on, and Cyborg gives Roy a shoddy prosthetic arm that causes even more pain while making inappropriate jokes about the situation.
Roy himself didn't endear himself to the readers either. It seems he is supposed to be a Jerkass Woobie as he tries to come to terms with the death of his daughter Lian, the loss of his arm and a renewed addiction to drugs, but he's such a plain old Jerkass that the Woobie part is almost cancelled out. To their credit, all the above people do try to reach out to him and console him, but he throws their sympathy back into their faces along with some incredibly cruel, mean-spirited jabs while whining that none of them understand his pain, even if they clearly do or at least want to (his comments on the deaths of Donna's husband and son are in especially poor taste). Linkara has pointed out his behaviour, even when taken in context, still makes him Unintentionally Unsympathetic.
Just about the one thing that does gain Roy some real sympathy points back is when, after being sequestered in St. Virgil's and forced to sweat out his addiction by himself, he admits to himself the others were right that he was going way over the edge and was going to try and endure the night. Unfortunately, by then he starts hallucinating a ghastly vision of Lian's corpse telling him he's horrible and he has to kill the Electrocutioner. On the flip side, while his friends tried what they thought was helping him, none of them ever realized how badly their attempts backfired, and what keeps them in this trope alongside Roy is none of them own up to how badly they failed. Later on, Dick Grayson still thinks he did everything to help Roy instead of admitting he left his friend to rot. Really, the whole book is such a badly written cluster fuck of forced drama it's no wonder all the characters fell into this trope.
The only character in this series who retains any genuine sense of sympathy from readers is Lian Harper, because of how horribly she was killed off and the fact that she was killed off to make this story happen. Her status as The Woobie is only intensified when Roy uses her death as justification to go back to using drugs and to kill people, and later on when Cheshire uses her death to guilt trip Roy. That the only sympathetic character is one who's been dead for the entire story speaks volumes of how awful everyone else is.
Kingdom Come intentionally invokes the trope as part of its satire of Nineties Anti Heroes, which were popular around the time it was written. The story displays an alternate universe where the anti-heroes have evolved into full-on designated heroes after Superman retires; they quickly kill all the villains, and then, bored, turn on each other. The end result is that we open In Medias Res of a world where the costumed neo-fascists, Bomb-Throwing Anarchists, Torture Technicians, and Right Wing Militia Fanatics gun each other down in the streets for nothing more than amusement, all the while still having the gall to call themselves "heroes."
This was often a problem for Wonder Woman outside of her own book. In Justice League stories or hare shared title with Superman when they were a couple, she was portrayed as a haughty, ill-tempered, remorseless killer who lectures people in danger for being weak instead of saving them (at first). Wonder Woman (Rebirth) would later turn most of this run into magically implanted and altered memories rather than things which actually occurred.
Cassie Sandsmark in this reality is a thief who steals artefacts from museums and dig sites that her mother works at purely for fun. This is never presented as bad and just a fun thing. No, she doesn't donate them or the money she gets from them or anything, it is literally just for fun.
Bart Allen, real name Bar Torr, is... weird. He started a space revolution against an oppressive government but immediately regretted all of it the instant it got his sister killed, because that apparently nullifies the oppression and all, because someone he loved was killed during it, even though people were obviously dying during the violent revolution. He becomes an informant against the revolution he started and gets put into witness protection and has his memory altered (for some reason), and it's painted like some kind of redemption thing for him... then it's not, because somehow he faked all of it and it was all to get the space politicians in one place for his trial so he could murder them all, and he's clearly painted as a villain for this — meaning the previous characterisation probably was meant to be the "heroic" version — and then... it doesn't work, his sister tells him their parents sucked for not listening to the space government, and he's painted as a tragic character now. There is a good reason some readers thought he was meant to be a new version of Inertia, the villainous version of Bart Allen (a flashback has him in an Inertia-looking outfit too).
Solstice was a generally heroic character... until she murdered a judge. She does this so she can be incarcerated with her lover Bar Torr, but it's played as a sad ending for her and the characters sympathise and say it's wrong she's incarcerated. As opposed to, say, exactly what she deserves for, again, murdering a judge.
That same story has Tim Drake also come off this way, because Tim is completely on board with the space government capturing Bar Torr for his crimes. However, once they decide to imprison him for life after the whole attempted murder of political enemies thing, Tim decides "fuck that, we must free Bar!" Apparently justice is only worth upholding if you think your friend won't be punished for what he did.
Bunker got this big time in Will Pfeifer's run. He saves a bunch of people from an incident, and one of the guys says that, of all the heroes, they're saved by the two that look like... we'll never know what he was going to say, because Bunker slams the dude into a brick wall assuming he'd say something homophobic (Bunker himself is also gay), when the guy hadn't even gotten the first letter of what he was going to say out. We were obviously supposed to side with Bunker as he dressed down this guy afterwards, but people ended up siding with the guy since he was being brutalised for being ungrateful. Yeah, not exactly heroic behaviour right there.
Heroes in Crisis does this with Harley Quinn. She breaks into Sanctuary, the superhero therapy center, to hang out with Poison Ivy when Ivy was there for therapy. Everyone there except Harley and Booster Gold is murdered, and each thinks the other is the murderer. Booster wants to find out what really happened, while Harley... wants to murder Booster Gold. Batgirl tries to keep her in check and help her find the real murderer, but Harley still constantly brings up wanting to murder him and does actually attempt it. She is never presented as a villain throughout the story, just as a misunderstood hero out to avenge someone she cares about.
I Am Not Starfire: One of the biggest problems some people have with the book is the fact that Mandy is a pretty unlikeable protagonist due to her constant Wangsting and being a self-centeredJerkass to people. Nor do she really have much in the way of Character Development, many pointing out she only starts turning around after she gains powers which many feel isn't truly earned and that she only does so because her powers give her self-worth which is not a good message to give to the story's target audience.
Tandy Computer Whiz Kids: Alec and Shanna in Community Action Program come across as overly narrowminded in regards of graffiti. At one point, Alec refuses to call it art and insists that it is one of the worst kinds of pollution. Zeke's arguments, on the other hand, sound rather reasonable, as he calls graffiti "Art for the masses". Of course, Shanna and Alec are totally right and graffiti is evil.
