Important Haircuts in comic books.
- This trope, like nearly every other predominant comic book trope of the era, gets played with during Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man. After the murder of his wife and children, he heads off to get vengeance, but not before switching over to a leather costume and cutting his own hair with a trimmer. When Mirror Master sees him, though, he says it looks like he ran his head under a lawnmower.
- After being deposed (again) and banished to the surface in his 2003 solo series, Aquaman cut off the mane of hair and Viking beard he’d sported since The '90s, reverting to his classic Golden Age look. He also moved into a lighthouse and started using the name Arthur Currynote again as part of a "back to basics" repackaging.
- Arak: Son of Thunder: After learning more about his Native American origins, Arak cuts off his Barbarian Longhair and starts wearing his hair in a Mohawk to honour his ancestry.
- In Ball and Chain, Mallory cuts her long hair short in a vain attempt to convince herself that she's over her impending divorce. And we do mean vain. The first thing she says when she's finished is "I hope he... I hope I like it. I do. I like it."
- Sometime between quitting his stint as Batman and the events of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Bruce grew a mustache. However one night after he can no longer stomach Gotham's senseless violence and subconsciously decides to become Batman again he wakes up in the batcave with his mustache shaved.
- Catwoman has a history of giving herself important haircuts. Most recently, she hacked off her hair in a public bathroom after giving up her daughter for adoption, trading longer mommy hair for her usual short action-ready style.
- Not a haircut, but in Death of Wolverine: Logan's Legacy #1 X-23 dyes the forelocks of her hair blue and gold after Wolverine's death (blue and gold being the iconic colors of Wolverine's costume).
- In the ElfQuest comics, when her lifemate is killed, the usually mild-mannered Clearbrook slices off her waist-length braid and drapes it over his dead body... "I will always be with you!"... then turns into a revenge-mad Mama Bear for a while. Centuries later, when she's back to her normal serene self, we see her hair has grown back. Word of God explicitly labels her hair as a symbol of her sexuality, which she was unable to experience fully while mourning her lifemate.
- Inverted in The Fire Never Goes Out. Before the comics start, Noelle has already cut her hair "as short as it will go", and keeps it short styles for most of the years. As she begins to turn from drastic behaviors to settling down day by day, her hair begins to grow out long. In 2019, she remarks that "each inch is a reminder that I made it this far."
- Lisa from Funky Winkerbean lost her hair twice in the strip's run. First, a building fell on her and her head had to be shaved for brain surgery. Then there was the cancer.
- Another Morrison example — in The Invisibles, Jack Frost cuts his previously long hair into a shorter style upon finally accepting The Call. This is foreshadowed earlier in the series, when Boy tells him he should cut his hair as at its current length it would get into his eyes when he was fighting — the obvious symbolism of the haircut being that he is now ready to begin said fighting.
- In Meridian, minor character Feabie cuts off her braid with a dagger to prove to her unrequited love Jad that she can be as serious and useful as his missing girlfriend Sephie (the protagonist). Metafictionally, this was meant to make them more distinct from each other, as both Sephie and Feabie had long blond hair.
- Nightwing grew a ponytail during New Titans, and lost it by accident in an early issue of his solo series, giving him a distinctive look he maintained for some time.
- Likewise, he lost the haircut he'd been sporting more or less constantly since 1940 in New Titans under the advice of Starfire, who turned out to be a sinister doppelganger.
- In the original Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD, early in Jim Steranko's classic period, the formerly scraggly Army Commando gets a thorough professional shave and hair to finally change his look into the clean shaven and sleek spy hero.
- When the Civil War finally begins, Nikolai Dante cuts his hair short (off-panel) to represent his acceptance of the Romanov name. During the Amerika storyline, he finds a poster of himself from his swashbuckling days, and the toll the years have taken on him become painfully apparent.
- The Outsiders:
- In Batman and the Outsiders, Halo gets one after learning her true origin (she was evil and is dead, fused with an alien energy being) so she less resembles the evil dead girl.
- In Outsiders (2003), Thunder loses her distinctive blonde wig and grows out her hair during the One Year Later jump in The DCU. It's later revealed that the team has gone underground and that she's in a same-sex relationship with teammate Grace. Make what significance of that you will.
- The final few pages of Red Sonja: The Forgiving of Monsters show Sonja cutting her long hair short, symbolizing harnessing her rage to a higher objective.
- In the "Season of Mists" Story Arc of The Sandman, Lucifer — depicted as looking like an ordinary if rather good-looking human apart from the great big wings growing from his back — resigns from being Ruler of Hell and goes off to live among the mortals; in a gesture combining practicality with the symbolism of the Important Haircut, his last act as Ruler of Hell is to ask the Sandman — his enemy on the best of days — to cut his wings off. He doesn't bother with anaesthetic.
- Ramona Flowers has one in Volume 5 of the Scott Pilgrim series.
- Haircuts are very important in general in Scott Pilgrim. Ramona changes her hair color and style constantly, and her not getting a haircut is a plot point. Scott is afraid to cut his hair because his last girlfriend broke up with him immediately after he got a haircut (for unrelated reasons), but finally Ramona cuts his hair for him, a major step toward him getting over Envy and moving on.
- At the end of Seconds, Hazel cutting her hair short symbolically represents her growth into a more social person.Katie: I literally cried.
- Shade, the Changing Man — Kathy's Important Haircut came after getting over the loss of Shade and becoming romantically attached to Lenny. The editor confessed in the letters page that she had also gone through several hairstyles of her own while getting over emotional pains. Kathy returned to long, natural hair while pregnant with Shade's child and since she was murdered not long after, that's how she's always remembered.
- And then there's Shade himself, who gets a new haircut every time he dies.
- The very opening scene of the OEL Manga ShutterBox depicts the romantic lead cutting the blue dyed streak from his hair before going off to drown himself.
- In The Silencer, Honor Guest grows her hair to shoulder length once she retires from being an assassin and develops a quiet suburban life. Once she's thrown back into her old lifestyle, she buzzes her hair again, mostly for practical purposes.
- In the Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) comic series, Princess Sally grows her hair after a year-long Time Skip. This is symbolic of the changes she'd gone through the year apart from Sonic, and coincided with a redesign for a lot of the other characters and her own apparent mental breakdown. Later on, while under a new writer, Sally decides to cut her hair again, going back to her old hair-do, to signify that she's got her head on straight again.
- Spider-Man: When Ben Reilly took over the role of Spider-Man in The Clone Saga, he was forced to cut his hair short and dye it blonde because too many people were mistaking him as Peter Parker.
- Star Wars: Kanan: Caleb cuts his padawan braid off, signifying cutting ties with his former life and the Jedi Order.
- In the beginning of Supergirl story arc Bizarrogirl, the Girl of Steel cuts her hair short after the New Krypton's debacle to try to change herself and forget her former life.
- Superman:
- The Death of Superman: When Superman came Back from the Dead, he had shoulder-length hair (worn in a ponytail as Clark). During the preparations for his wedding, he had it cut to its previous length.
- In the beginning of Kingdom Come, the isolated, retired Clark Kent has long hair, which he cuts when he decides to become Superman again. Rather a shame, since he looked surprisingly good with long hair.
- In Transmetropolitan, Spider Jerusalem loses all of his hair to a malfunctioning shower unit within hours of returning to The City, having come down from the mountains looking decidedly woolly.
- Wonder Woman:
- Volume 3: Queen Hippolyta cuts her own hair in the Circle arc before going to beat up invading Nazis, as a sign that she's going to be more hands on from there on out rather than letting the guard take point.
- Volume 5: Steve Trevor shaves the beard he's grown since meeting Diana and cuts his hair to have the same hairstyle as when they first met when they move in together. He's worried at first that Diana doesn't care for the gesture, but she finds it endearingly romantic.
- After an extended period offworld and near-transformation into a predatory alien, Storm of the X-Men steadily veered away from her serene nature-loving Technical Pacifist Team Mom persona to the point of stabbing a woman in the heart during a duel for rulership of the Morlocks. This culminated with her showing up to Wolverine's wedding in leather pants, a matching tube-top with vest, and a mohawk (her clothes and much of her hair were burned earlier that week, but less jarring salvage options were available even in Tokyo).
- The mohawk was meant as a joke by Paul Smith, the regular artist of the book at time. He did include some feminine hairstyles among the potential new looks.
- Referenced in Ultimate X-Men. After Hank McCoy aka Beast was killed in a Sentinel attack (don't worry, he got better) Storm, who had been his girlfriend at the time, smashed up her room, started dressing in black leather clothes, and gave herself a punk-rocker haircut.
- Recently, she went back to the mohawk. After her marriage with the Black Panther went belly up due to Avengers vs. X-Men, she decides a change is in order and asks Wolverine to lop up her hair with his claws. It's something of a mixture of the mohawk and her usual long hair.
- The X-Wing Rogue Squadron comics show that Wedge Antilles and Soontir Fel, the two Corellians who are second only to Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, respectively, in piloting skills, both had very long tied-back hair when they were young. Wedge apparently had his cut after his parents were killed, since his next-set appearance of only a few years later has him with short hair. Soontir's hair is entirely shaved off when he's signed into the Imperial pilot academy. Major changes for both of them.
- Y: The Last Man. Agent 355 cuts Yorick's hair after the traumatic events in "Cycles".
