His run on The Punisher and Nick Fury replaces that last one with "inept politicians who don't understand the situation and make everything worse for all involved, on both sides" in Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua and the Middle East.
Other Comics
Brat Pack: Think it would be fun to be a Kid Sidekick? Wrong. Daily crime-fighting would take serious toll on the physical and mental health of teenagers, turning them into emotional wrecks and/or some type of addict. Furthermore, any superhero who takes an underage child into that life would have to be a complete psychopath who only uses said child to keep a wholesome public image.
Youngblood (Image Comics) tries to answer the question "What if superheroes were real?" The answer? They'd basically be reality TV stars. The series deals with similar themes found in Tiger & Bunny, such as the use of corporate sponsors and the pressures of stardom that a hero might encounter in the real world. A shocking number of the "heroes" are also shown to be outright assholes, especially in later volumes that tried to comment on the '90s Anti-Hero tropes that the title initially played straight.
Princeless deconstructs a number of tropes pertaining to European fairy tales, such as the black lead becoming angry after a potential suitor refers to her as a "fair maiden". There's also some skewering of Stripperiffic superheroine costumes and the impracticality that would come with them.
The Valiant Comics flagship title, Harbinger, featured a groups of super powered teens on the run for their lives from a seemingly unbeatable business man who, at least at first, seems to be an Expy of Charles Xavier. While the man seemed to genuinely care for his subordinates, he never hesitated to mistreat them for the sake of what he felt was the greater good of humanity (which is to say, a better world that would be completely under his control). He was desperate to hunt down their protagonist because their team leader has the same powers as him - the near-unlimited telepathy and telekinesis and ability to activate superpowers in others. The hero, incidentally, wasn't exactly pure either - early issues in particular showing him using powers in selfish and potentially dangerous ways. It also does a good job showing the mental and emotional toil this kind of thing would have on a group of teens, constantly moving from town to town, and being the only thing keeping this guy from becoming dictator of the world.
Most of Valiant's titles were Deconstructive in nature. For another example, Shadow Man. The classic comic book plot "Heroes travel to the future to fight evil" is deconstructed in the Unity Crisis Crossover, where Shadow Man learns he's going to die in 1999. Shadow Man's book takes this and runs with it, showing him growing gradually more reckless and angsty as 1999 grows closer. In 1995 he even tries to kill himself, thinking that this at least will let him choose his own destiny. Sadly, the line was discontinued before 1999, so we never learn how this story arc ends.
Planetary, as an archeological survey of comic books, pulp fiction, and B-Movies, deconstructs any sci-fi trope it doesn't reconstruct or parody. The Hulk was captured by the army after his first rampage and took decades to starve to death in a silo. The Narmy B-Movie monsters are the result of horrifying Cold War experiments in American concentration camps. The Fantastic Four didn't just come back changed, they came back wrong. And Reed Richards isn't useless. He's the American Doctor Mengele.
Warren Ellis did a "thematic trilogy" for Avatar Press in which he deconstructs the superhero genre (yes, again). The first part, Black Summer, shows us what would happen if superheroes were too human. The second part, No Hero, shows what would happen if they put themselves above human laws. The third part, Supergod, shows what would happen if superheroes weren't even remotely human.
Kick-Ass in regards to superheroes in their teens. If you're not trained or otherwise prepared for fighting crime, then you get your ass kicked if you're lucky. If you are trained for fighting crime then you're a Child Soldier who likely has a mess of mind issues.
After all these superhero deconstructions, one might expect a supervillain deconstruction. Wanted (the comic book, not the movie) is about an Unlucky Everydude who gets invited to join a society of supervillains known as "The Fraternity." It's a world filled with eccentric, costumed renegades who spend their days doing just as they please, with nothing to fear from law enforcement - and what they please is decidedly unpleasant. Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds with a Dark and Troubled Past comes under fire as the Villain Protagonist goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against all the people who ever wronged him... including guys who made fun of him back in high school, and culminating in killing his own father. And looming over it all is the death's-head visage of Mister Rictus, who makes sure that we never forget the true face of Nightmare Fuel, or the consequences, both moral and aesthetic, of a life without concern for boundaries. In the end, it turns out that the only thing worse than This Loser Is You is This Loser Is Having Delusions Of Grandeur While Fucking You In The Ass.
While a few elements are questionable, The Unfunnies is still a clever commentary on how writers are corrupting the once-innocent world of comics by injecting their own perversions into it. The story begins with a stereotypical Hanna-Barbera cartoon world of talking animals, then introduces prostitution, child pornography, and violence. Then it's revealed that the world's creator is a child rapist and murderer who's on death row, and created the world so he can switch places with a character there, and thus live forever. The whole "man in prison creates cartoon world that turns out to be real" plot is also lifted directly from Cool World. The Unfunnies asks why is he in prison? Wouldn't the world he created be just as insane as he is?
Tintin: The Castafiore Emerald, Flight 714, and Tintin and the Picaros are deconstructions of the Adventure genre and of the Tintin series in general.
The Castafiore Emerald is a intentional Random Events Plot in which Tintin and Haddock stay at Marlinspike Hall. It is full of anticlimaxes, such as Haddock's attempted escape to Italy being foiled by an accident, the Roma community's plight is immediately solved by Haddock’s generosity, Haddock never has the chance to make An Aesop about tolerance because of various distractions, the emerald’s thief turned to be a magpie, and said emerald is lost again by Thomson & Thompson, found again by Snowy, and then dismissed as a mere MacGuffin.
Flight 714 has Tintin and Haddock swept into a plot to blackmail a millionaire by a Contrived Coincidence. The recurring villains Rastapopoulus and Allan suffer intentional Villain Decay, ultimately coming off as ridiculous and stupid. And all of the characters would have died in an eruption without the bizarre, out-of-the-blue intervention of aliens. Only Snowy remembers how they were rescued, making the whole thing something of a "Shaggy Dog" Story.
Frank King's long-running comic strip Gasoline Alley was originally intended to be this; King believed that the idea of comic strip characters not aging was unrealistic, and set out to make a strip where they did. Unfortunately, adherence to the policy has made the strip even more unrealistic as a result due to its longevity; the original protagonist, Walt Wallet, is still included in the cast after its run of just short of a century, and is almost 111 years old. To make that worse, a few characters are exempt from this rule, like the comic relief characters Joel and Rufus, who never age a day.
Although not quite the stated goal of the comic or anything, Crossed deconstructs the idea of a Zombie Apocalypse, or more specifically, the idea of a zombie apocalypse portrayed as a fantasy world for armchair survivalists. Part of this is done by showing that zombies as we know them are a fictional entity, and if something like a zombie apocalypse actually happened in real life, there would be no guarantees on how they would work or what they would act like. The Crossed themselves seem to have been designed, at least in part, to show this off, by cranking the danger zombies present up to eleven, to the point that no amount of preparation could possibly prepare a real person for them. In this case, The Virus is a Hate Plague that removes all of the infected's inhibitions and turns them into a Combat Sadomasochist and is heavily implied to be something akin to a Biblical plague, and not only can they think, they actually frequently outsmart humans by taking routes a normal human's physical and moral limitations prevent them from even seeing as viable options.
DIE: To the Trapped in Another World genre that has become popular due to various Isekai stories. All the teenagers, like those common to the genre, were brought to the game world unwillingly. However, rather than being given game-breaking powers and having a fun time their powers are reliant on unhealthy behavior and all of them want to go home. And when they do escape, every member of the party is traumatized by their experience and suffers both physical and mental wounds. Then, when they return, powers that were once arguably a teenage power fantasy become even more harmful. Matt’s power relies on grief and negative feelings. What was once easy for an angsty teenager just draws him into the dark pits of depression again. And all the characters except for Chuck want to return home, but their conflicting opinions on what should be done regarding the fantasy world split the party apart.
The party later learns something that deconstructs the isekai elements more directly. When someone dies in their fantasies, they are reborn as Fallen on Die.
Love Everlasting is a deconstruction of romance comics, a genre that was popular in the around the 1950's before effectively becoming extinct in the 70's. The series hinges on the conceit that most romance comics of this era were extremely formulaic flim-flam, often with recycled setups and Romance Arcs but transposed between different-named characters and settings, with the serials that didn't just end on a marriage and Happily Ever After instead finding themselves a slave to the status quo just to keep the series going. Love Everlasting plays with it primarily with the fact that the main female lead is aware of all the love stories she's being recycled in and has become desperate to escape by any means necessary, with dark and psychologically intense results by mysterious Powers That Be trying to enforce her in the role, often brushing against the conservative, traditional ideals of "love" and womanhood that these sorts of stories tended to appeal to (ideals which faded over time as social mores in general changed, a big part of why the genre fell out of popularity).
