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Karmic Death / Comic Books

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  • Aquila: Locusta violates the sanctity of Vesta's temple to revive the dead as unholy abominations. She ends up entombed alive, with the demonic babies she'd revived closing in on her.
  • In the final issue of Atomic Robo And the Dogs of War, the second half takes a time skip to the 70's when Robo finally finds Otto Skorzeny after looking for him since WWII. He goads Robo, claiming that he had personally killed Nikola Tesla, Robo's creator, and stolen his ideas. Robo takes a gun, aims it at him, and... points it away, and tells Skorzeny that he already knows he's dying of cancer, and instead of giving him a quick soldier's death, he'll leave Skorzeny to die alone and painfully from his cancer.
  • Dark Empire: Palpatine finally dies after Han shoots him for trying to possess Anakin, and a Jedi who survived the purge drags him into the afterlife.
  • Long-running newspaper comic Dick Tracy makes karmic deaths of villains one of its defining features.
    • BB Eyes is a tire bootlegger who tries to escape by leaping off a bridge into a garbage scow. The ship unleashes its cargo and BB Eyes drowns inside a tire casing.
    • The Brow, a Nazi spy, falls out a window and is impaled on a pole bearing the American flag.
    • A pair of twins murder people with high-pitched sound, wearing special earplugs to protect themselves. They're escaping Tracy by running across a road, smirking back at him...and because of the earplugs, don't hear the horn of the truck bearing down on them.
    • A dwarf-sized woman is the leader of a baby kidnapping ring. Trying to escape, she's crushed inside her car and unable to get out before the gas tank explodes. Tracy sums up the irony of how "the one time it mattered, she was too big for a space."
    • A millionaire turns out to be a long-hunted cop killer who escaped the gallows 40 years earlier. Trying to escape by climbing outside a building, he loses his footing and ends up strangled by a vine.
    • In Dich Locher's... somewhat disliked run, the strip had become a surreal series of storylines that are basically long, Rube Goldberg-like marches to see what gruesome end awaits the villain of the story, to the point where Dick and crew will abandon police procedure and common sense (and occasionally, the laws of physics) to facilitate said karmic fate. For example, the storyline where the Big Bad gets torn apart by his own attack dogs after losing his protective whistle; all the while, it never occurs to Dick or his crew to shoot the damn dogs until LONG after the villain is a literal dog's dinner.
  • Dynamo5: For years Captain Dynamo/William Warner was a habitual womanizer who cheated on his wife, Maddie Warner, even when it compromised his crime-fighting duties. He also was not above using his shape shifting power to impersonate married women's husbands in order to sleep with them. So his death in bed by being poisoned by the woman he was sleeping with can be seen as his cheating and sleeping around finally catching up to him.
  • MonsterVerse comics:
  • Scooby Apocalypse: Velma's brother Rufus is one of the Four — the people responsible for the nanite plague that turns most of the world's population into monsters. He's totally unrepentant about this, and has even convinced himself that the monsters are worshiping him. As such, he lets them into his tower in order to kill Mystery Inc... only for the monsters to completely ignore the gang and grab Rufus, dragging him out of the tower to be burned alive in a giant effigy of himself.
  • In Sin City the cannibal Serial Killer Kevin is eaten alive by the pet wolf to which he'd fed the scraps of his victims.
  • Spawn has Malebolgia, the main villain of the original 100 issues, finally killed when Spawn slices off Malebolgia's head with a holy weapon taken from an angel that Malebolgia killed barely five seconds prior. After Malebolgia spends the entire arc manipulating, tormenting and trying to enslave Spawn through the crooked deal that started the series, it comes off as completely karmic.
  • In one Star Wars comic, Mako Spince, an old smuggling friend of Han Solo's, sells him and his wife Leia out to bounty hunters hired by Hutts for the death of Jabba. They manage to escape, and later on in the series the same man sells them out to Imperial forces. Han retaliates by flying right next to Spince's flight control tower, causing it to become caught in the Star Destroyer's tractor beam. The Imperials, rather than cut the power, increase it, and the traffic control tower, with Spince cursing Han, is torn up and impales the SD, killing all of them.
  • The Governor from The Walking Dead suffers one of these at the conclusion of the "Made to Suffer" arc. After the remainder of his troops have finally broken into the good guys' sanctuary, scattering them to the wind and killing over half of them, one of his soldiers, at his urging, shoots a fleeing survivor... the main character's wife and infant daughter. Upon discovering the Governor made her kill a baby, she empties her shotgun into the back of his head. The entire squad of soldiers get Karmic Deaths as well, as they're implied to be overwhelmed by zombies a moment later.
  • In Warlord of Mars, Salensus Oll takes fancy to the female entourage of Matai Shang and arbitrarily declares they shall becomes his concubines and personally executed Shang for protesting. When Helium's fleet arrives, he has the women chained as his playthings, and after an explosion in the control room, they take the opportunity to gang up on him and shiv him to death with knives taken from his very belt. For extra karma, one of the women, Phaidor was Shang's daughter, and promptly avenged her father's death and her own humiliation by killing her captor.


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