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Gory Discretion Shot / Comic Books

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  • Many Asterix comics offscreen fights or block them with big dust clouds. In one comic, the narrator pulls an actual curtain over the fight, explaining that it is entirely too violent to watch.
  • In Avatar: The Last Airbender – North and South, Hakoda gets stabbed by a Southern Water Tribe nationalist revolting against his reforms, but the wound is constantly obscured.
  • Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe : Tom Sawyer's death. A white fence, some amused reactions to "that pigsticker"... and then a slash, and a BIG splotch of red (with brain matter) on the otherwise white fence.
  • In Eternals (2021), Thanos invades Lemuria and grabs an unfortunate Deviant by the jaw, demanding directions to his enemies' hiding place. The narrator (the great Machine) apologises and cuts away, but not before telling the reader what's about to happen when Thanos squeezes.
  • This trope in action is probably the reason for the naming of the trope Stuffed into the Fridge. In Green Lantern, the Sacrificial Lion death of Alex was made worse by censoring the view of her body. The original uncensored version showed her corpse intact; obscuring the view with the fridge door made many readers think she'd been dismembered.
  • In the Hellblazer issue Confessions of an Irish Rebel, John and Brendan return to their hotel suite to find a friend tied from the light fixture being held hostage with a shotgun stuck up his arse. Squick. The hostage-taker loses the plot and accidentally fires. Cut to John looking horrified with a blood-spattered face. Admittedly, two pages later you do see what remains of their friend, asking, quietly, "What's that on your coat?" Very nasty.
  • In The Infinity Gauntlet, when the Earth heroes confront Thanos, his captive brother Eros narrates the issue and watches as the Mad Titan kills the heroes in various creative ways. However, when Thanos turns his attention to the Scarlet Witch, the only woman in the group, Eros looks away, not wanting to see her death.
  • Kid Colt (2009): When the body of 'Colt' (actually Bounty Hunter Sherman Wilks) is handed in for the bounty, dialogue mentions that the face is almost entirely gone. It’s only pictured in silhouette, with a ragged outline suggesting the damage.
  • Shows up in, of all places, Issue #3 of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW). Chrysalis grabs one of the luvcats and taunts the CMC for their "innocence". What she does with the luvcat in the following panel is never shown, but the splattered black amongst the blank white panel, the "THUMP" and the CMC's screams make it clear that it is for the best. In the same issue, right after Fluttershy points out a natural species rivalry in the monsters that are chasing the ponies, the ponies look epically horrified while said monsters presumably disembowel each other just off-panel.
  • In The Nail, when the Joker traps Robin and Batgirl in a force field using Kryptonian gauntlets while Batman is powerless to stop him, he then begins to torture them by twisting and contorting their bodies while they scream in pain. He then describes to Batman that he is going to tear them apart piece by piece, and we then cut to Batman's horrified reactions as he kills them. We don't see their bodies afterwards, but Batman describes their conditions, and the act traumatizes him so much that he eventually beats the Joker to death.
  • When Gammid rips Javi's sigil-enhanced arm off in Negation, a silhouette is used to imply the action.
  • Nemesis the Warlock: After Torquemada successfully ousts Mazarin as the new ruler of Termight, he tortures his rival to death in a way so gruesome that the comic explicitly leaves it off panel.
  • In Pocket God, the more gory deaths tend to be obscured.
  • Preacher is heavy enough on the directly-portrayed bloodshed, but one scene is particularly notable: When Jesse's friend Billy-Bob is attacked by T.C. in the second volume chapter "How I learned to love the Lord", the comic cuts to T.C.'s bloodied knife... And then, two panels later, we see Billy-Bob clutching his slit throat. This is sometimes used straight, though such as when Tulip is killed by Jesse's family, but for style rather than for censorship. The only instance where this might be used for censorship is the death of God. Even Garth Ennis might not have been able to get away with showing that particular messily-killed corpse.
  • Revival does not shy from gore at all through its run except for when November Dismember takes a knife to his own genitals, which mercifully switches to Em's reaction panel.
  • In issue #4 of Garth Ennis's run of The Shadow, the Shadow and co. encounter a village that has been massacred by the Japanese. There are plenty of male corpses, but the females... All we get to see are the horrified reactions of two characters.
  • Sin City plays this trope with many different variations (Blood sprayed on the killer's face, a silhouetted headshot, etc.). This is mostly for artistic purposes, as the film had no problem showing other gory scenes.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) is exempt from most forms of gory violence, but it's not immune when discretion shots are involved:
    • In the milestone issue #225, Sonic and Sally infiltrate the newly-built Death Egg Mark II, where they are then immediately confronted by Silver Sonic Mark II. Sonic decides to fight, while Sally runs down a corridor to trace Eggman's intercom signal, where she encounters a giant gun turret that pops out of the wall and blasts her off-panel. (The reader's imagination about the fate of Sally is possibly made worse by the art detailing in the onomatopoeia of the blasts.) The only thing we see afterward of her is her shattered goggles and a silhouette on the floor of her lifeless hand, while Mobius reboots.
    • Another one occurs in issue #234. Antoine D'Coolette is charged with protecting King Elias while Dr. Eggman launches another assault on the Freedom Fighters and the Royal Family. Metal Sonic Mk. II is about to infiltrate the Royal Family's escape vehicle when Antoine catches up and distracts Metal Sonic enough to let go. Eggman, in frustration, activates Metal Sonic's self-destruct mechanism, catching Antoine's entire body, throwing him to the ground, unconscious, and presumably mortally wounded. Every other panel scene with Antoine in it after the explosion obscures his face, whether by special angles, or someone obscuring his face. For example, Sonic's head while speeding as fast as he can with Antoine off to the hospital.
  • Stabbity Bunny: In Issue #1, when Larry is chasing Grace with a knife, the scene cuts to his shadow on the wall behind him... noticing the even bigger, more menacing shadow behind him. Said shadow knocks Larry to the ground, and we see a bloody knife and blood splattering appear in the foreground.
  • Subverted in an issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures. Bebop and Rocksteady are at the zoo when they see all the animals trapped in cages. They point their guns and start shooting, and it looks like they've killed the animals... but when they meet the Turtles, we see that Bebop and Rocksteady actually shot out the bars of the zoo cages to free the animals. They take the animals back to a Garden of Eden-like alien planet that they've decided to call home, stopping off only to drop the villains the Turtles have defeated back on the prison planet they escape from.
  • Ultimate Spider-Man was much more open with dark and edgy topics but still refrained from graphic violence, being a mainstream comic aimed mostly at teens and young adults. However, one discretion shot in particular stands out, when the Kingpin executes an insubordinate... subordinate by crushing his head between his massive hands. Most of the event takes place in a panel that shows only Fisk's tower viewed at a distance, though later on in the comic a clip of security footage does show the moment where the man's head caves in (still a discretion shot, however, because Fisk had put Spider-Man's confiscated mask over his head).
  • Scott McCloud mentions this technique in Understanding Comics. Since in a comic book, a gory discretion shot is nothing but two divorced images that rely on the reader to make the connection, it is through the conscious effort of the reader to combine the two images into a violent act. "All of you held the axe and chose your spot. To kill a man between panels is to condemn him to a thousand deaths."
  • In Violine, several scenes of crocodiles eating mooks are offscreen, however, we see them with bloodied jaws later. A lion that attacks the main villain is mauled offscreen, and we see it covered in blood later.
  • Happens many times in Watchmen, most notably during Rorschach's prison break. After Big Figure's attempt to kill him fails, Rorschach follows him into the men's room, to the annoyance of Laurie and Dan, who are trying to rescue him. A few moments later, he exits the restroom and leaves with them, and we see blood flowing under the door. It's far more disturbing than the violence that's actually shown. Even more impressive is the fact that, even though they turned the gore up to eleven in the movie, this scene remained intact, and was still way more unsettling than anything they actually showed. Keep in mind, those included a man's forearm bone puncturing through the skin as his arm was broken, Dr. Manhattan literally exploding people with his mind, and a mook getting his arms sawed off with a grinder. The gore is relatively easy to accept once the shock value wears off; trying to imagine what happened is far more likely to keep you up at night.
  • Wings of Fire: The Hidden Kingdom has Starflight's body blocking most of the dying sloth and the panel only shows Glory when he asks Clay to end its suffering.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): Mayfly's messy death is not actually shown, just a bit of the splatter and the reaction of the prison guards who are revolted and worried about whose job it's going to turn out to be to clean up what's left of her.
  • In the last X-Wing Rogue Squadron comic, Isard got rid of one of her superiors by having a left-handed shopkeeper kill him with a Sith lanvarok he'd been wanting to buy. We never see the lanvarok or the death, but Isard looks through a little, bloody window and muses that being left-handed is a distinct advantage when using a lanvarok.
  • With the exception of the Ghost of Christmas Present's death, the worst deaths in Zombies Christmas Carol are off-panel or covered by the hordes of zombies.

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