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Eye Scream / Comic Books

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The following have their own pages:

Other examples:

  • 2000 AD:
    • In The Ballad of Halo Jones, it's apparently standard military training to learn how to put an enemy's eyes out with your thumbs.
    • Judge Dredd:
      • Dredd himself loses his eyes to Zombie Dredd during the "City of the Damned" arc. And he keeps going. Because he is a Judge. And it is his duty.
      • In The Dead Man, the specteral witch Nausea (an ally of the Dark Judges) burns out a child's eyes in the Cursed Earth by making him think she can actually hurt him. He later has them restored by a thankful Mega City One after the Deadworlders are defeated.
      • In The Fall of Deadworld Part 2, a young Judge-Tutor Sidney De'ath (aka Judge Death) is shown "building morale" among a bunch of cadets (hinted to be the other three Dark Judges) by mutilating them, one by scooping out the kid's eye with a spoon.
    • In "The Final Solution" arc of Strontium Dog, Johnny loses his eyes when he tries to scan the Lyran monster to figure out how to kill it and return the mutants to Earth.
  • Albert Einstein: Time Mason: When Albert Einstein dips a time-traveling Nazi's face in a fountain of mercury, in addition to burning his face, it turns his iris red.
  • In the Atari Force sequel series, Dart accidentally shot out Blackjak's left eye in retaliation for her partner Dalia being killed, assuming that Blackjak was the one who killed her, but then realizing that he was going to be her partner in a vision she had. His left eye would be replaced with a cybernetic camera attached to it, and then for a brief time, by a new organic left eye by the Tazlings.
  • One Bloom County strip illustrated the idea that "television is bad for your eyes" by having a snouty monster suddenly pop out of a TV cabinet and suck out Opus's eyes (and then just leave them lying on the floor..)
  • Shows up in superhero deconstruction The Boys... as a power of one of the two sympathetic superheroes, Starlight, who can emit a flare of blinding light. she uses this power to blind The Flash Expy A-Train in one eye when he tries to rape her.
  • In an issue of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, Willow is being tortured by Warren Mears, the man she killed. He begins by popping at least one eyeball with a scalpel.
  • In the Minds arc of Cerebus the Aardvark, Dave Sim uses the "Injury to Eye Motif" to Cerebus, the main character.
  • In Clean Room Chloe stabs the Surgeon in the eye when he visits her in her home.
  • Played with in the Concrete story Straight in the Eye. The protagonist thinks he's been blinded when a bear slashes at his eyes and freaks out, only to find out his eyes are fine and he was only temporarily blinded by his own blood dripping in his eyes.
  • Dead Eyes Open has quite a few Returners get shot in the eyes by guns. One scene has a Returner junkie take tranquilizer darts to the eyes to administer a drug (since Returners' hearts no longer pump blood).
  • Dick Ayers was inordinately fond of eyeballs flying from heads in the horror comics he illustrated for Eerie Publications (not to be confused with the comic Eerie, from Warren Publications) in the 1960s and '70s.
  • ElfQuest's aptly-named One-Eye got his name after a human gouged out the other one with a sharpened stake. Not seen, just referred to as part of his back story. In a later storyline the human warlord Grohmul Djun punishes an inattentive guard by putting his eye out with a shard from the elves' temporarily disintegrated Palace.
  • Wily Pete of Empowered has found that, since he is a walking body of flame, only one part of the human anatomy lasts long enough for him to get his jollies. And one wonders why Thugboy has some issues. Even if you somehow survived this, his load slowly boils your brain.
    • This happens to Mindf** k when her brother forces her to gouge out her eyes so she'll rely on her powers to see.
  • Kay from Fables can see every evil thing somebody has ever done. Going by what trope this is, you can probably guess his means of dealing.... And since he's a Fable, his eyes keep growing back, and he keeps cutting them out.
  • In the fifth issue of the first G.I. Joe vs. the Transformers miniseries, Snake-Eyes confronts Starscream, who badly burned Snake-Eyes' face and cost him his voice the last time they crossed paths. Snake-Eyes gets his revenge by slashing open Starscream's left optic and shoving a live grenade into the open socket.
  • Frequently featured in Give Me Liberty.
  • A Running Gag in The Goon. One of Franky's favorite moves is "KNIFE TO THE EYE!". Also played straight with the Zombie Priest, who plucked one of his eyes out, then crushed it to a pulp and fed it to the zombie of a pregnant woman to turn her into Mother Corpse, due to his zombie army being decimated and the Buzzard having settled into the graveyard, preventing him from making more. Later, he gets the remaining one gouged out by the Indian man.
  • In Grendel: Devil's Legacy, child-molesting serial killer and vampire Tujiro saves the eyes of his victims as souvenirs.
  • In a particularly memorable Hellblazer story arc, three of John Constantine's children (The result of a Deal with the Devil) set about destroying John's life, systematically killing his friends, family, and any and all of his remaining allies, John is brought to his knees by their use of HIS methods. It seems like John's met his match in them. When he finally regains his Magnificence it is illustrated by extinguishing his still-lit cigarette in his son's eye and telling him to "Let the grown-ups talk".
    • At the end of "Confessional", Father Tolly commits suicide by putting two pencils to his eyes and headbutting the pew in front of him.
    • In "Hunger", John and an African shaman "share a vision" — by the shaman plucking out one of John's an his eyes an exchanging them. One could argue that John was hallucinating, the ritual also featuring a herbal drug ("Christ. I hate psychedelics"), but he promptly complains "Why does primitive magic alwasy hurt!"
    • In "Son of Man", a mob interrogator uses his own nail clippers to.... no, wait. You'd better read this one for yourself.
  • Not shown, but suggested in The Invisibles when the Conspiracy is subjecting King Mob to Cold-Blooded Torture. Sir Giles reads an excerpt from the handbook on how one should take care when removing the eyeball so as not to sever the optic nerve, thereby allowing the victim to see everything.
  • In Jew Gangster, Monk Shapiro gets stabbed in the eye with a broken pool cue.
  • Happened once in Johnny the Homicidal Maniac where Johnny was torturing people, one was a guy with his eyes nailed to the wall above him, out of their socket, but still attached to his head.
  • Legends of Baldur's Gate: A dragon gets a double one while trapped on the ground, losing one to Boo after Minsc throws him and the other shot with an arrow.
  • Anathos inflict this to Shimy in Les Légendaires by burning and piercing her eyes with a Flaming Sword. Because he didn't like the way she was looking at him.
  • The Mice Templar has several characters receiving eye injuries. The most disturbing case is when King Icarus removes his own eye with his claws.
  • In Miracleman, one of the signature moves of the sociopathic and sadistic Flying Brick Johnny Bates is to make eye contact with someone, then use his Eye Beams to incinerate their head eyeballs first.
  • In The Movement, A serial killer called the Cornea Killer is on the loose. The killer murders homeless people and cuts out their eyes as an M.O.
  • In a tie-in comic to the G1 branch of My Little Pony, this is used to explain the "Twinkle-Eyed Ponies" toyline that had been recently released, at that time. Essentially, the Twinkle-Eyed Ponies were originally ponies enslaved by a jewel-obsessed wizard, forced to mine magical gemstones in pitch-black darkness deep below the Earth, where the darkness and/or the light from the gemstones rendered them blind. Though Applejack saved them, in the process, she triggered an explosion that embedded gemstones into their eye sockets. Though this worked out, as it restored their sight, it's still shudder-worthy.
    • At least one fanfic that mentions this comic, A Mighty Demon Slayer Grooms Some Ponies, notes that the Twinkle-Eyed Ponies eventually separated from the other pony tribes because, to normal ponies, their eyes caused an Uncanny Valley reaction that left them freaked out.
    • Even that comes from the comic, or at least them fearing that: the next batch of Twinkle-Eyed Ponies from the toyline was intro'd to the comic with the explanation that, until being discovered in that story, they'd stayed in the caves for fear of being seen as freaks by other ponies.
  • In Neil Gaiman's Teknophage, published by the short-lived Tekno Comix (1995-1997), the title Teknophage (a 65-million-year-old ruler of many worlds) had a use for every part of a human, including the soul. Before you were tossed into the pit that would presumably render you down for parts, they sucked your eyes out with a vacuum device so you wouldn't have to see what was about to happen to you (the closest thing to 'mercy' that the Phage had.)
  • Oxymoron: Oxymoron starts his rampage by scooping out the eyes of a middle-aged waitress.
  • In the Planetary issue "The Torture of William Leather," part of the eponymous torture is done with needle lined goggles.
  • Preacher: It's not shown, but the story behind Herr Starr's mutilated eye is enough to evoke sympathy for an often monstrous character... when he was a little boy, the local bullies carved "a star for Starr" into his face with a piece of broken glass.
    • To be more specific, they cut five gashes around Starr's right eye, which made the shape of a star.
    • And during War in the Sun, Jesse Custer loses his left eye entirely — God tears it out with his teeth.
  • Rulah, Jungle Goddess: In "Satyrs of Satan!" (Zoot Comics #13b), Mongol princess Zenpha attempts to put out rulah's eyes with a white hot spear.
  • One of the creepier villains of The Sandman (1989) is the Corinthian, a nightmarish Serial Killer who escapes from the Dreaming and has toothed mouths in his eye sockets. He feasts on the eyes of his victims. (There's a different kind of eye squick entirely in a different scene, where his shades get knocked off in a struggle and his additional sockets bite the fingers off one of his attackers. Oh, Lord.)
    • For added eyeball trauma, there's the issue where Doctor Destiny uses Morpheus' dream ruby to control the patrons of a diner and eventually drove a teenage girl to stick skewers in her eyes. "I can see the glory!"
      • As the Sandman Companion points out, nearly every issue has some Eye Scream moment in some form. Neil Gaiman admits to being overly fond of/disturbed by the trope.
    • The Corinthian's own personal spinoff, Death in Venice, has less of this trope than you'd expect. Still, high points include the Russian soldier who the Corinthian swaps an eye with, who gouges out both his own eyes afterward, desperate to get rid of the realization of what the future of his revolution held, and still can't stop seeing it, and Amedeo being possessed, body-switched, something with the Corinthian and suddenly beginning bleeding copiously from the eyes, as the eye-mouths begin to grow in.
  • Chaos & Control from The Savage Dragon would hardly be as memorable without the Eye Scream. Chaos is a big, horned monster. Control is a little guy who controls it by sticking its horns into the sphincters he has where his eyes should be.
  • The unnamed antagonist of Shadoweyes is missing an eye. This isn’t entirely clear until the very last page, when we see her full face. The fact that the empty socket is mostly covered in scar tissue does not help.
  • Simon Says: Nazi Hunter: Simon uses his dead friend's lighter to burn a Nazi's eye.
  • In Sin City, Marv beat Manute so badly that he tore an eye out.
  • In Spawn, Spawn shoves a shard of metal into Overtkill's eye.
  • The Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers: Stalker gets Twin Twist, Impactor and Springer in his lab. When Twin Twist is next seen, his face has been mutilated, one eye is missing, and the other has its lens broken. In the final battle, Impactor harpoons Overlord in the eye, which he shrugged off, and Overlord rips off Springer's face, destroying half his head, including knocking an eye out.
  • In Transmetropolitan, Spider injects some sort of horrifying Fantastic Drug concoction into his tear duct while listening in on a presidential candidate.
  • Usagi Yojimbo: In the Treasure of the Mother of Mountains story arc, Usagi fights an oversized thug. Usagi manages to gouge the thug's left eye before the thug's buddies overwhelm him and take him prisoner. They continue to trade eye-related insults for the rest of the storyline until Usagi escapes from imprisonment, the thug tries to take him down-and Usagi intentionally slashes out the thug's right eye and leaves him there instead of striking a finishing blow.
  • The Walking Dead:
    • The Governor suffers a particularly vicious torture fest, including having one of his eyes dug out with a spoon. Later he's shot in the back of the head, which pushes his other eye out.
    • And then there's the super-disturbing story about a guy who got really stoned and ate his four-year-old son's eyes.
    • Carl gets shot in the eye, which also somehow manages to blow off half of his head.
  • In Watchmen, Sociopathic Hero Rorschach takes his first step toward that status as a kid: some bullies, one of them smoking a cigarette, mock him (accurately) about his mother being a whore, then when they start getting physical Rorschach grabs the cigarette and sticks it into the kid's eye.
    • Spider Jerusalem does the same thing to an obstructive, mouthy Transient in Transmetropolitan.
  • We Kill Monsters: When Andrew kills the monster attacking Jake, he does so by driving the blade of his shovel into where its third eye is located.
  • In Wildstar, Deadstar had an alien symbiote attached to his eye until he pulled it off.
  • In Zero, Carlyle shoves glass in Zero's eye. He just has a hole there now (or in 2018 a glass eye).
  • In the Topps Comics Zorro, Roman Santiago is blinded when a flintlock pistol goes off in his face, releasing a cloud of superheated gas into his eyes. The results of this are not pretty. It is his blinding that causes his sister Anita to adopt the vigilante identity of Lady Rawhide.


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