Didnt See That Coming / Comic Books

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• All Fall Down: AIQ Squared's plot falls apart when he fails to plan ahead for Siphon's Death Activated Super Power.
• The Avengers: In The Avengers #267, One an alternate Kang deciding to forego subtlety and just nuke the Avengers. However, he's then summoned up by the Council of Kangs, who show the logical end result; World-wide nuclear war. Then the Kangs kill him for being stupid.
• Dark Nights: Metal: The Batman Who Laughs is an evil alternate Batman who can effortlessly predict anything Batman tries. Until Batman resorts to teaming up with The Joker. That he didn't see coming.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: In one story, Rockerduck decides to steal the blueprints for Artificial Gravity technology Scrooge got from a stranded time traveler, and has his men disguise themselves as Guardians of Time and confiscate them with the excuse introducing a future technology before it's invented is forbidden. Cue the real Guardians of Time telling him he was spot-on on their rules, confiscating the plans, and telling him he's lucky to get off with a warning for trying to do that and Impersonating an Officer, at which point a baffled Rockerduck comments he didn't expect his idea to be so good it was actually true.
• Fables: Mr. Dark has the Fable community to the wall. They can't run any more, and he is slowly shattering Haven's defenses. The Fables are planning a last ditch effort to defend themselves, but the chance of it actually working are slim. Then Mr. North, the North Wind, Bigby's neglectful father who he has had a serious love/hate relationship with, and who has often been shown to not really care about much outside his realm sacrifices himself to shut Mr. Dark down permanently. That it allows him to let his zephyr grandson live is a bonus. A slam dunk with #4.
• Fantastic Four:
  • Frequent villain the Mad Thinker is often foiled by things that even his super-genius intelligence can't predict, such as random human behavior.
  • In James Robinson's Fantastic Four run, the Quiet Man pulls off a massive plot to turn the public against the FF, have the Thing in jail, the Human Torch depowered and Reed and Sue split up, all aided by the Psycho Man. His plan is to have Earth overwhelmed by aliens and alternate heroes from other worlds so the Quiet Man can be the big hero saving the day. When Reed tells him to go ahead and shut the portals down, the Quiet Man tries...and can't. He's totally stunned as Reed openly points out how stupid an idea it is to allow THE PSYCHO MAN to have ultimate power over two worlds. ("Seriously, the name alone...")
• Gotham City Garage: Dick Grayson and Kara Gordon are being chased down by a killer robot. Dick decides to split up so the robot chases her... but it goes after him. Dick's reaction?
  Dick: Ah dang. Not how I saw that going at all.
• The Incredible Hercules: Malekith the Accursed falls prey to this. One panel after he revealed his scheme. Who can stand against the mighty Grendell with Hercules and The Mighty Thor both weakened? Zeus. To add injury to insult, Grendell then fell on him.
• The Infinity War: A resurrected Magus employs a complicated scheme to seize all the Infinity Gems from Warlock and his Infinity Watch. Because the plan is too complicated requiring all his attention, the Magus literally doesn't see the combined efforts of Doctor Doom and Kang interfering with his plan.
• Mars Attacks! The Transformers: Megatron decides to use the Martian invasion as a chance to ally with them and take out the Autobots. Instead, the Martians capture both Autobots and Decepticons. As Megatron yells at the aliens and vows to kill them all, Cliffjumper points out that, as robots calling themselves "Decepticons", they should have seen this coming.
  • Similarly, the Martian commander assumed that shrinking Megatron removed him as a factor. It didn't.
• Midnight Nation: The Satan Captain Ersatz from J. Michael Straczynski's graphic novel literally says this line word for word after The Hero with the Meaningful Name of Gray turns down his offer, chooses self sacrifice, and turns the Balance Between Good and Evil right against him, something which thousands of predecessors before him had all failed to do.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics): During the "Dark Mobius" arc, Jani-Ca's plan is to try and get Enerjak in arm's reach so she can use the Sword of Acorns to depower him. She's quite surprised when, instead, it gives her all his powers.
• In a Dracula vs Superman crossover, Dracula's plan was to drink Superman's blood and thus gain the powers of a Kryptonian. Unfortunately he was not aware that Superman is solar-powered, and drinking his blood had a similar effect to trying to chow down on an active grenade.
• Spider-Man: In Ends of the Earth, Doctor Octopus' final grand scheme was to flash fry all of humanity save .08% of them, so they can rebuild and remember him as the greatest monster that ever lived. When confronted with this, Spidey points out the big flaw in that plan: they'll live... brain dead - their brains would be flash fried, too. Doc Ock promptly wigs out and Spidey takes him down.
• In a story in Vampire Tales, a man decides to become a vampire in order to get rid of his family (no payments or anything because he's considered dead) and be immortal as long as he avoids fire and sunlight. Three days after his death, he awakes just as he was told he would … just as his wife is having his disfigured remains cremated.
• The Wildstorm: Michael Cray's attempted assassination of Marlowe would've gone a lot differently had it not been for a few factors neither party saw coming: Marlowe being an alien, with xeno-biology detectors in his office which alerted him to Michael, and Michael's superpowers (which even Michael didn't know he had) saving him from Marlowe's attempt to defend himself... the result of which is that Marlowe gets blown out his office window anyway, and would've died if not for Angie Spice passing by with an advanced stolen flight suit in need of a test drive.
• Wolverine: In Death of Wolverine Dr. Cornelius has a plan to create an army of supersoldiers, and has everything he needs except the last ingredient: Wolverine, so he can extract his Healing Factor to allow them to survive his enhancements. After capturing Wolverine and explaining this, he then has to ruefully acknowledge that he tends to focus too much on the big picture as Wolverine cuts himself to reveal that he's lost his healing factor.
• X-Men:
  • In Immortal X-Men, Magneto steps down as part of the Quiet Council and a discussion is made as to who to replace him. Selene is one of the last to be interviewed before Hope Summers steps in at Exodus' suggestion. Sinister pushes for a vote, sure that Selene is bluffing at the idea of retaliation for not letting her on and believes the Hellfire Club members (Shaw, Frost, Pryde) would join Exodus in voting "yes" and Mystique and Destiny would as well as thanks for reviving the latter. When Destiny says "no", Sinster panics and flips his "no" to a "yes". Then, it turns out that, yes, Selene would retaliate for not joining the Quiet Council.
  • This happens twice in Sins of Sinister #1, as Sinister's corrupted Quiet Council votes against him, revealing that they have too much of their old personalities for him to control. Then when he decides he can't work with that, he finds his lab full of timeline-resetting Moira clones has been stolen, trapping him in the horrible timeline he made.

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