Harsher In Hindsight / The DCU

The DCU

• Watchmen: After Ozymandias detonates his psychic squid, an airship can be seen crashed into the side of a New York skyscraper.
• Superman:
  • In Action Comics #275, Supergirl dreams that Superman never turned up and she lived her cousin's life. In Elseworld's Finest: Supergirl & Batgirl, written 37 years after, Superman never turned up and Supergirl was the world's greatest hero... because Lex Luthor found Kal-El's rocket and murdered the baby.
  • Demon Spawn stated that Kara had an internal death wish. It was written by Marv Wolfman, who fourteen years later wrote Crisis on Infinite Earths #7, where Supergirl made a Heroic Sacrifice to save The Multiverse.
  • The cover◊ of Adventure Comics #383 (1969) has Supergirl turned into a ghost and trapped in an alternate universe where no one knows she's alive... Flash-forward to the Post-Crisis universe where no one remembers Kara Zor-El ever existed and she's merely an invisible spirit (until the appearance of the Post-Crisis Supergirl).
  • Our Worlds at War: Adventures of Superman #596 sent the US into a panic when the LexCorp Towers (Metropolis' version of the Twin Towers) were shown to be in a state of near-total collapse after being hit by an alien spaceship. The day that comic was due to hit newsstands? September 12, 2001. DC assured retailers that they would be allowed a no-fault return for the issue, given the situation, and encouraged them to make use of it. Few, apparently, did. The issue, taking place after a global invasion, had several pictures of buildings in ruins... Near the picture of the LexCorp building was one of the ACTUAL twin towers, with blast holes at roughly the SAME place as where the planes had hit in real life. Additionally, Superman himself took to wearing a darker costume with a red and black version of the "S"-shield to mourn and honor the dead, and many people wore black after 9-11 in remembrance of the attacks.
  • The Death of Lightning Lad: Antennae Boy, an applicant for member of the Legion of Super-Heroes, can pick up radio broadcasts from anywhere and anywhen on Earth. As showing off his power, he picks up a news bulletin stating John F. Kennedy had been re-elected president of U.S. In real life, Kennedy would not even serve one full term because he was murdered only eleven months after that issue came out.
  • In Action Comics #270, Superman dreams he travels to the future where he's a forgotten has-been and his cousin Kara is now Superwoman, the world's greatest heroine. Fast-forward twenty-five years and Supergirl is killed by the Anti-Monitor, never becoming Superwoman or taking over her cousin. On the other hand, Superwoman is one of her worst enemies in the Post-Crisis universe.
  • In "Supergirl's Big Brother", a conman convinces Supergirl's adoptive parents Fred and Edna Danvers that he is their not-dead-after-all son Jan. Shortly after "Jan" dies saving Supergirl, and the mourning Danvers -who never discovered that he was a fraud- comfort themselves with the thought they still have their lovely adoptive daughter. Several years later they will also have to mourn their daughter when Supergirl gets killed saving the universe in the Crisis on Infinite Earths.
  • In Superman (1939) #165: "The Sweetheart Superman Forgot" (1963), Superman is exposed to red kryptonite that causes him to lose his powers and his memory. He eventually enters a rodeo, where he's thrown from a horse and injured so that he's paralyzed from the waist down. That story became rather more significant when Christopher Reeve, known for playing Superman, was paralyzed from the neck down by being thrown from a horse.
  • Action Comics #309 features Superman revealing his identity to President Kennedy, which is sad for two reasons: the issue was released the week after Kennedy was assassinated; and Superman tells Kennedy "If I can't trust the President of the United States, who can I trust?" Flash forward to Watergate...
  • The Living Legends of Superman aims to show how Superman's history would evolve into half-remembered and hilariously-inaccurate but inspiring myth through the millennia. Nonetheless, Crisis on Infinite Earths and Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? would invalidate this story only two years later by showing Superman losing his powers and faking his death only a few years before his universe's annihilation.
  • "Brainiac Rebirth": As the Justice League and the Titans gather up, Wonder Woman congratulates Wonder Girl on her upcoming wedding, and the latter gushes over her beloved fiancé being "really the right man for [her]." In the intervening years, Terry Long will begin resent Donna for petty reasons and end divorcing her, filing for a retraining order and gaining custody over their son because "she is too dangerous an influence".
  • From Eternia— With Death! (1982) features the first meeting between Superman and Masters of the Universe hero He-Man, and concludes with Superman promising to help He-Man out if the barbarian hero ever needs him again. However, future DC/MotU crossovers DC Universe Vs Masters Of The Universe (2013-2014) and Injustice vs. Masters of the Universe (2018-19) would put Superman in the role of brainwashed or maddened antagonist.
  • Superman: Savage Dawn sees Superman's He's Back! moment immediately become this as the very next arc The Final Days of Superman sees him dying — with it being explicit that one of the factors for his dying being how he got his powers back in Savage Dawn, turning it into a case of Harmful Healing.
• Batman:
  • Batman: The Dark Knight Returns: Published in 1986, the story involves Two-Face plotting to blow up "The Twin Towers" in Gotham. Luckily, he's stopped by Batman. Shortly thereafter, an electromagnetic pulse caused by the detonation of a powerful nuclear warhead in the western hemisphere knocks out all power to seemingly the entirety of America. A 747 then falls out of the sky and crashes into the Twin Towers, blowing them up and setting all of Gotham on fire.
  • A Lonely Place of Dying has a scene where Two-Face almost decides to blow up the twin towers just to piss the Dark Knight off. This is made worse by Bruce Wayne simultaneously considering holding a massive charity event there to provoke him into attacking.
  • Batman's origin story will now qualify as such. In most mediums, his parents were shot by Joe Chill outside of a movie theater. Let's just say there are roughly 7 times as many Martha and Thomas Waynes dead now after the showing of The Dark Knight Rises, when the premiere at Aurora Colorado had a madman shooting and killing as many as 14 people as they were leaving the premiere.
  • A short story in the DC Universe Holiday Special '09 features the character Deadman trying to talk Karen Keeny, the mother of Batman supervillain The Scarecrow, out of committing suicide. He succeeds...but nearly two years later the New 52 reboot would happen and Scarecrow's retconned backstory includes his mother dying when he was very young. Meaning sadly, Deadman's efforts were for nothing since even when given a timeline where Karen did get to raise her child with Gerald, tragedy still strikes and Jonathan still becomes a supervillain.
  • A major subplot of Batman: Dark Victory was Carmine Falcone's son, Mario, trying to reform the family and legitimize it. Several comics before New 52 followed up on his fate after the miniseries and revealed that after his breakdown at the end, he became the new head of the Falcone family, becoming every bit the criminal his father and sister were — and like them, he also met his end at the hands of Two-Face.
  • Batman & Captain America has an famous moment where the The Joker terminates his alliance with the Red Skull upon learning the Skull wasn't faking being a Nazi (the trope image of Even Evil Has Standards). Naturally, after the Skull caused a Cosmic Retcon to turn Steve into everything he's sworn to fought against in Captain America: Steve Rogers and Secret Empire, fans took to pointing out that, until the latter's end saw the return of the true Steve Rogers, Marvel's paragon had less morals that the man who crippled Barbara Gordon, tortured Commissioner Gordon, and killed Jason Todd and Sarah Essen.
  • In the Elseworld Batman Vampire, the second book sees were-cat Selina Kyle sacrifice herself to save the now-vampire Batman from a wooden crossbow bolt fired by the Joker. Not only does her loss deprive Batman of the only person who could help him control his ever-growing thirst for blood, but the third novel in the trilogy reveals that staking on its own doesn't kill vampires for good; if Selina had let the Joker shoot Batman, she could have taken out the Joker, removed the arrow from Batman's heart, and everything would have been fine.
  • All-Star Batman #6 has Batman stopping Mr. Freeze from unleashing a deadly bacterium from an ice core and disrupting society. He does this by carrying a virus in his heated suit, and the third-person narration talks about how bats are such good disease carriers because of the heat they generate. A few years later, a bat may have been responsible for a deadly virus escaping and disrupting society.
  • There was a story from Paul Dini's run in which the Joker impersonated a stage magician with a vast teen following. The press revealed that the real magician was dead. The Joker uses a viral marketing campaign to tell his audience that they'll have one last show where they can see that he's not dead. Guess which actor passed away after this comic was printed and what his last two films are...
  • In one comic, Scarecrow sprays Batman with fear-removing gas and kidnaps Robin. At the end of the comic, Batman reveals that he managed to combat his fearlessness-induced recklessness by thinking of a new fear to motivate him - and it's further revealed to the audience that his fear was that the Scarecrow would kill Robin. The Robin at the time? Jason Todd.
  • In Jason's first Post-Crisis outing as Robin (rather, the first after Dick officially passed the torch to him), he ends up separated from Batman and brutally beaten by, of all people, Crazy Quilt. When Batman hurries back to try and save him, he finds Jason unsconscious and assumes he's dead. The next issue has Batman holding Jason in his arms in a manner distinctly reminiscent of the iconic scene from A Death in the Family, where Jason did die.
  Narration: This is certain - even if Jason's injuries are neither serious nor permanent, they will prey on the Batman's conscience forever...
• Wonder Woman:
  • Wonder Woman (1942): In issue 3, Diana goes to track down and rescue Paula's daughter Gerta she discovers an entire barracks full of hungry children in torn clothes being held by the Nazis and declares that she'll rescue all the children from "the horrors of Nazi cruelty," but she never went back and freed anyone else from Nazi imprisonment after getting this group of kids out. The extent of this cruelty in the real world would only really become known the year after the story was published when the first major concentration camp came into the hands of the allies and the full horror of The Holocaust was revealed to the world at large.
  • One Vol 2 issue had a fake newspaper on its cover with headlines proclaiming Wonder Woman's death and referred to her as Princess Diana. Guess who died a week later.
• An in-universe one DC one: Teen Titans Issues #20-#21 of the New Teen Titans comic (May-June 1986). The Titans were (temporarily) mostly broken up after incidents involving or happening roughly around the time of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Wonder Girl, who is left in charge with an empty nest, calls in Aqualad, a newly-minted Flash, a Hawk without Dove, Jason-Robin, and Speedy. At the request of King Faraday, they help to protect a peace conference which is being threatened by Cheshire. This was where it was discovered Speedy and Cheshire had a child together. Issue #21 closes on some supposed to be heart-warming reconciliations between Terry Long and Wonder Girl and also Speedy and Cheshire, including him getting to hold his daughter for the first time. Also, Wally getting to explain his new role as The Flash to his hero-avoidant then-girlfriend Francis Kane. Now, look at these events through the lens of:
  • Speedy and Wally West still apparently have strong feelings for Wonder Girl, well after their teen romance fizzled according to later comics. Oh and Lian is killed when Prometheus destroys Star City and chops off Speedy's arm too.
  • King Faraday being the (possibly mind-controlled) villain, Gamemaster.
  • Wally-Flash being erased from existence by Barry Allen as a result of Flashpoint, made worse by the fact that when fighting a deranged Reverse Flash (who had a breakdown and literally thought of himself as Barry Allen) cursing Wally and leaving him to die out of anger over how everyone loved Wally more as Flash and was furious at how fast he was forgotten
  • Jason Todd being the voice of reason among his older, more experienced peers and then not receiving a statue in the memorial hall upon his death for this and the work to free Raven as if they were embarrassed.
  • Having Speedy, Wonder Girl, and Flash return to Cheshire, Terry Long, and Francis Kane with the idea that this is a relief to them. All three of these couples later go nuclear. Cheshire dumps Lian on Speedy and then nukes Qurac, literally nuking their relationship. Wonder Girl and Terry split apart even after she gave up her powers to ensure their son Robert wouldn't grow up to become Lord Chaos, followed by the father and son dying in a car crash. Francis develops magnetism powers and a split personality, becoming the supervillain Magenta and making things really hard for Wally.
  • Having Hank Hall (Hawk) be a nearly-murderous bastard as a hero, when later he becomes the JSA villain Extant, who slaughtered half of the team.
• Titans (1999): Editor Eddie Berganza had a comment in the back of one issue stating he couldn't wait to see Lian lead the Titans when she was older. About ten years later Berganza and Dan Didio were responsible for the editorial decree of killing Lian off in Justice League: Cry for Justice. This would later come to bite them in the back.
• Green Lantern: Hal Jordan has two examples: His fight with (what seemed to be) a crazed Barry Allen because of events from the storyline "The Return of Barry Allen", where he attempts to reason with his Evil Former Friend going through Sanity Slippage and having become an evil psychopath. Hal's story would go through much the same path. Then, in 2004, a younger Hal got to see his future and how he would go mad and reset the timeline to remake it to make everyone happy, in JLA/Avengers. In response to other heroes suffering because of the awful, awful things that would happen to them (or that they would perpetrate on others), Hal managed to find it in himself to insist they have a duty to that reality, because it's the one they got, and that playing god with it would be wrong, throwing shade at his future self. At this point, fans only wish the heads of DC would have listened to Hal. Not helped by how the point of Zero Hour was that a man with such a myopic viewpoint (highlighted by Hal's adopting the moniker "Parallax") who only cared about the past could not create a universe that benefited everyone.
• In issue 24 of Justice League International, the amusing storyline was about getting Martian Manhunter to quit his addiction on Oreos. To do this, he separated the embodiment of those desires from his body which then jumped from member to member of the team to reveal their darkest desires in an amusing way. Then the craving embodiment lands on Maxwell Lord, who then proclaims that he wants everyone to do what he says all the time.... yeah. It kind of explains why he went off the deep end prior to Infinite Crisis years before the storyline was even made.
• Justice Society of America: A very early story involved the members of the Society traveling to the future to retrieve technology necessary to build a bomb-proof force field. They succeed and the scientists they were working for manage to successfully replicated the technology, meaning that now America is fully safe from bombing threats by the Axis... this story was written before Pearl Harbor. This also created a Continuity Snarl since later on, the Justice Society (or rather, the Justice Battalion) did very much join the war, which could not have happened if this story was true. Roy Thomas later introduced a Retcon that, right after the end of that issue, Per Degaton sabotaged the machine and thus called its reliability into question, meaning that by the time the scientists could figure out what went wrong, it was too late.
• Identity Crisis:
  • All those stories from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s in which the heroes use super-hypnosis and magic rings and so on to alter the villains' minds or remove knowledge of their secret identities from others read very differently given the revelations of this series. So does Doctor Light's time as an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain.
  • Justice League of America volume 1, #122 gets hit especially hard: it's a story that explains how the Leaguers decided to reveal their identities to one another, after Doctor Light uses "Amnesium" to scramble their knowledge of their alter egos, learn their secrets, and nearly kill them all. In the end, Light is mindwiped with the Amnesium to remove his ill-gotten knowledge. The story's title? "The Great Identity Crisis."
  • An earlier event, the more nostalgic Silver Age series of "skip week" specials, also has a group of villains learning the Justice Leaguers' secrets... and in the end, Hawkman uses some Thanagarian technology to remove this knowledge from their minds, with the sanction of Superman and Batman. The whole thing is played as a Reset Button style happy ending. The Silver Age: Justice League chapter also contains a scene in which Doctor Light rejects Catwoman's advances, stating that he "has always been more interested in test tubes and Bunsen burners than the fairer sex."
  • The whole reveal that Dr. Light raped Sue, given that Jeremy Piven, who voiced the Elongated Man in Justice League Unlimited, has been accused of sexual assault.
• Justice League of America:
  • JLA (1997)
    • Towards the end, Batman kicks Huntress off the JLA when he stops her from killing Prometheus. Given what happens in Justice League: Cry for Justice, perhaps Bruce should've let Helena do the then-still dead Oliver Queen, Roy and Lian Harper, and Stay City a favor by offing Prometheus.
    • The first arc ended with the White Martians getting mindwiped into thinking they're normal humans with no pushback by the League or readers—nearly seven years before Identity Crisis raised the ethical questions of this and shown many in the League to be strongly against this.
  • Justice League Elite
    • In JLA #90, Manitou Raven and his wife Dawn have a tender moment, Raven asking his wife if she regrets coming to the future with him; Dawn assures him that she loves the future and has no regrets coming with him. Wonder Woman and Faith comment on the scene, with Faith saying that she must really love him for following him to the future. Then in Justice League Elite their marriage starts to fall apart, because of Raven's attention to work and the trials of the "Stony Path" keeping him from spending time with Dawn. Dawn becomes close with Green Arrow and eventually starts an affair with him. Raven was angered, of course, but was too consumed by his work to confront her, while Dawn eventually regretted the affair and betraying Raven. But before the couple could truly reconcile, Raven died while taking the brunt of a bomb blast, leaving Dawn devastated.
    • A more bitter one, when Green Arrow and Dawn slowly grow closer before their affair. Dawn defends her relationship with Raven, saying that one day he'll save Green Arrow's life. Manitou Raven does save Green Arrow's life, by sacrificing his own, with him knowing about Green Arrow and Dawn's affair. Dawn was devastated by Raven's death and learning that he knew about the affair.
  • Justice League International
    • In their very first scene, the natives of the Kooey Kooey Kooey island are complaining that offering it for a new JL embassy was a massively bad idea. Fast forward to the grand finale of Giffen's run, where Dreamslayer kills them all.
    • From the same story: Booster jokingly tells the Beetle that he cannot wait to get back to New York so Max Lord can put a bullet between his eyes. Cue to Countdown to Infinite Crisis, where Max Lord shoots the Blue Beetle in the head.
  • JLA: Tower of Babel was lucky enough to have the Justice League members rescued on time, because Dark Nights: Metal provides a scenario where an alternate universe Batman killed all members of the Justice League after being Jokerized by a purified version of the Joker toxin, essentially giving birth to the Batman Who Laughs.
  • Justice Lords Beyond: In "A Better World", the episode starts with Lord Superman, Lord Batman, and Lady Wonder Woman in the opening scene where they take down President Luthor. Wonder Woman kills Batman, and she in turn is killed by her League counterpart. Superman is banished to the Phantom Zone.
• Zero Hour: Crisis in Time!:
  • In a case of Older Than They Think, the alternate Batgirl seen throughout came from a world where the Joker killed Commissioner Gordon rather than cripple her—and where she and Bruce were lovers. Not only would Batman Beyond and the animated version of The Killing Joke would make this a part of their main versions of Bruce and Barbara—but the Bruce of the Mainstream DC Universe's reaction to this news mirrored the fans' own shock and disgust.
  • A second Batman-themed alternate reality would see Bruce killed, not Thomas and Martha—which would happen again with Flashpoint, only with Thomas and Martha respectively becoming that universe's version of Batman and the Joker.
• Georgia Sivana's desire to be a beautiful teenage girl and her superpowered form consisting of a pair of ridiculously large breasts in a skimpy parody of Mary Marvel's costume becomes extremely uncomfortable to think about after Thunderworld #1's artist Cameron Stewart was outed as a sexual predator who targeted and groomed younger women.
• The Button ultimately didn't do much to develop the ongoing Myth Arc of the DC Rebirth era, with Jay Garrick and the Justice Society remaining exiled from reality and ultimately no serious resolution unfolds. This wouldn't be too much of an issue since the story was just meant to be a "stepping stone" of sorts, but Schedule Slip and Executive Meddling would subsequently prevent the myth arc from developing substantially, until finally resolution came from Doomsday Clock, which came out long after the Rebirth era was considered over, and far too long after The Button. At the time, what looked like hype for an upcoming grand return ended up instead being a tease for something that, three years later, still hasn't played out in full. The result of the long delay ended up making it appear Batman and Barry Allen discovered Jay Garrick's existence and his trapped state within the Speed Force, but instead of helping him like they indicated they would, they'd proceeded to focus on any other possibly distraction and leave him to his fate.
• Transmetropolitan
  • The comic ends with Spider Jerusalem degenerating under an incurable disease and about to end his life by putting a gun up under his chin. It was actually a cigarette lighter. As it turned out, he was fine. A few years after the end of the comics, Spider's real-life inspiration Hunter S. Thompson ended up doing pretty much the same thing... except the gun was real.
  • In his acknowledgements, Warren Ellis thanks Patrick Stewart and jokes that Stewart's wife Wendy Neuss is "smarter than both of us." Neuss and Stewart divorced a year after the book was published.
• In Justice League International, Booster Gold and Blue Beetle joke to each other about how Max Lord, their team's sponsor/boss, is going to "put a bullet in my head" for their latest Zany Scheme. Years later, the prologue to the Crisis Crossover Infinite Crisis has Max, with a fresh new Face–Heel Turn, graphically executing Blue Beetle after (almost) preventing him from revealing his plans, complete with a huge bullet hole going right through his skull. The panel from the earlier JLI issue could be found on nearly every comic-book site within days.
  • There was a warmly received reunion mini-series of former JLI members featuring among others, Blue Beetle, Maxwell Lord, Elongated Man, and his wife Sue Dibny. The mini-series was so successful, the writers immediately wrote a sequel. But the artist couldn't keep up with the punishing schedule DC was trying to place on him, so the release of the sequel was delayed for a year so that DC could give us Identity Crisis instead, where Sue Dibny is murdered, burned, and autopsied, and it's also revealed that years earlier, she was raped by Dr. Light. All of which is depicted quite graphically, leaving little to the imagination. Oh, and it also turns out she was pregnant at the time of her murder. When that reunion sequel was finally released, it featured a Running Gag where everybody thinks Sue is pregnant and she angrily denies it. This gag is in Every. Single. Issue.
  • Given everything that's happened to them, Giffen's entire run of JLI could be seen as Harsher in Hindsight. Nearly all of the members of one of the more light-hearted takes on the Justice League have suffered tragic fates.
• Preacher: Friendly Neighborhood Vampire Cassidy makes an It Tastes Like Feet remark about how gravy made from bacon grease tastes like semen (or so he'd assume). Then we find out that in the past, he'd resorted to prostituting himself and giving blowjobs to satisfy his addiction to heroin. Seems slightly less funny, except for those of us with sadistic senses of humor.
• There was a 1997 Wonder Woman comic whose cover showed a newspaper with prominent headlines saying that Wonder Woman (aka Princess Diana) had died. A couple days later, the real Princess Diana died.
• In Wonder Woman (vol. 3) #14, a character echoes most of the fandom's sentiments by saying "The last thing we want is Amazons Attack!: The Sequel". Solicitations for DC's Flashpoint crossover seemed to indicate that it would be Amazons Attack: The Sequel. Luckily Flashpoint was better received and better written and gave an actual reason for their actions that made sense.
• Wonder Girl-focused story Who Was Donna Troy?:
  Lian: Dead? Donna's not really dead, daddy. She'll come back like Uncle Ollie did. You'll see.
  Roy: Sometimes we're lucky that way, Lian.
  • Jade's conversation with Kyle Rayner on the following page is almost as bad, given what happened to her in Infinite Crisis...
    Kyle: I just want you to be extra careful. That's all I'm saying. Alex was murdered and so was Donna and I think you—
    Jade: Kyle— Kyle. I'll be fine. I promise.
• There's a small example in a late-80s issue of The Flash in which Captain Cold has finished his term in the Suicide Squad and the Rogues are attending a party in his honor. Cold brings along a cheery letter from Dr. Light which he reads aloud to laughter and comments like "Arthur's always a card!" Wally and his girlfriend "crash" the party later, and they end up getting along pretty well despite the initial resentment of him for replacing Barry Allen. Some fifteen years later it turns out that these Friendly Enemies were "chums" with a rapist.
  • Similarly, in one memorable episode of the original Suicide Squad run, after Arthur Light was being trolled by a demon to resurrect and die in different situations, at one point he resurrects inside Kimiyo Yoshi, the female Dr. Light of Japan, while her mind is transferred to her American male counterpart. After a couple of Man, I Feel Like a Woman type jokes, they all go back to their original bodies, much to Arthur's dismay, since he lost Kimiyo's boobs, and it's all played for humour. Not so humorous when Light is revealed to be a rapist in Identity Crisis, and he later comes back as a Black Lantern and tries to rape and eat Kimiyo.
• In a flashback issue of Martian Manhunter, Maxwell Lord is one of the members of Justice League International briefly possessed by the manifestation of J'onn's Choco addiction:
  I want... I want everyone to just do as I say... all the time! I want Superman to do my errands and Batman to respect me and Wonder Woman to... I want Wonder Woman to... oh, how I want Wonder Woman to!
• Underworld Unleashed: C-List Fodder Airstryke is one of the few villains to refuse Neron's Deal with the Devil (feeling there is no point in selling his soul to the devil when the devil probably already has control over it) and is allowed to depart the gathering with a simple Get Out! insult. In Outsiders (2003), Airstryke speaks against following a second demonic figure (Brother Blood) at another supervillain gathering and is immediately Thrown from the Zeppelin.
• Wonder Girl (Infinite Frontier): After making a splash in DC Future State, Yara Flor became the first Wonder Girl to get her very own on-going title which received a substantial amount of promotion from editorial. To the point where Yara was even hyped-up In-Universe as The Chosen One. But partly due to a Troubled Production that resulted in multiple consecutive delays, the comic was abruptly canceled by DC with its seventh issue being forced to hurriedly wrap up as many lingering plot threads as possible. Making all of the previous fanfare Yara received throughout DC Infinite Frontier much harder to read a second time around. The fact that this also happened just shortly after The CW backed out on the Wonder Girl pilot, which was supposed to serve as Yara's live action debut, just adds salt to the wound.
• National Comics #18 depicted Freedom Fighters Uncle Sam defending Pearl Harbor from an air assault. It was released a month before the real attack on Pearl Harbor.
• Grant Morrison ended their run on Animal Man by having their Author Avatar resurrect Buddy Baker's murdered family as a final favor and acknowledging that the next writer to take over is likely to discard what they had established at the first opportunity. In Jeff Lemire's Animal Man series written for New 52, Buddy's son Cliff would get killed again, but this time his death stuck and remained in effect even in the post-Rebirth canon in spite of the Rebirth initiative's primary purpose being to restore the DCU to how it was prior to the New 52 era.
• Doom Patrol:
  • Rachel Pollack's run established that a major reason for Dorothy Spinner's dysphoria was because of a traumatic incident where her first period resulted in the other children making fun of her for menstrually bleeding in front of them and her mother showing an appalling lack of concern for her daughter's feelings by telling her to her face that she should've been aborted. John Arcudi's run would later reveal that the Spinners were Dorothy's adoptive parents, making Mrs. Spinner's already grossly callous statement even crueler in retrospect.
  • Dorothy Spinner and Kate Godwin were shown to be among the living again in DC Pride 2022, which was met with considerable acclaim after they had been killed off in John Arcudi's run and remained deceased in spite of other members of the Doom Patrol coming back from the dead and the history of the DCU being rewritten at least three times since (with the Cosmic Retcons caused by Infinite Crisis and Rebirth even resulting in the respective resurrections of Elasti-Girl and Celsius). In spite of this, Unstoppable Doom Patrol ignored this development and established Dorothy and Kate to still be deceased, with the conclusion of the miniseries even having the Brotherhood of Evil unearth Dorothy's corpse as part of a ritual to summon the Candlemaker, a villain she originally defeated at the end of Grant Morrison's run. Tasteless as that already was, the miniseries' writer Dennis Culver confirmed that he was keeping Dorothy and Kate deceased mere days before Kate's creator Rachel Pollack passed away, making the dedication to her memory in the miniseries' third issue come off as insincere.
• Seven Soldiers of Victory (2005): The subplot about the Newsboy Army shows how the original team fell apart after Captain 7 raped Chop Suzi and she died in childbirth, which led to the rest of the group murdering Cap in revenge. Recently, Cameron Stewart, the artist who worked on Manhattan Guardian was outed as a sexual predator who liked to groom young women. Knowing Stewart's a predator who worked on a story about a young woman dying after giving birth to her rapist's babies makes the story even more uncomfortable to read.

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