"You can do nothing but fall, and if you force my hand, die. But you cannot defeat me. My power is as great as my faith... and I have never believed more strongly in the righteousness of my cause!"
— Exodus, X-Men
The following have their own pages:
Other Comic Books
- Deadlock and the order of the Knights Martial in the ABC Warriors comics are specifically stated to be inspired by the tradition of the Knights Templar.
- In the indie graphic novel Artesia, there are the Templars of Agall. These guys worship a patriarchal New God, calling those still dedicated to the matriarchal Old Goddesses heretics. It's their Islik-given duty to protect His church and slay those that oppose them. They have no respect for powerful women like the main character, and in their eyes, any woman who even seems to be dabbling in magic or herbalism deserves to be burned as a witch. Not very nice guys. And they happen to be pretty badass.
- Astro City has The Pale Horseman, a vengeful spirit who incinerated hardened killers and jaywalkers equally.
- Birthright:
- The Five are a group of magic users devoted to fight against God-King Lore, a demonic tyrant that covered their world Terrenos in darkness. However, they abandoned the world after the fighting dragged out for too long and concluding that the struggle was lost, they moved on to Earth, took up human identities and had set up a barrier between both worlds to prevent Lore from invading Earth and doing the same thing he did to their world. They are absolutely zealous in preserving the barrier and they will use any measure available to stop Lore's agent on Earth such as threatening their innocent loved ones, summoning cleansing spirits with the propensity to cause collateral damage and butchering a group of police officers that were working with them just so that their murders can be pined on Lore's agent and turn them into national-level wanted terrorists.
- Lore himself is revealed to be this since he genuinely believes in his brand of "justice" is for the good of Terrenos, and also wants spread it to Earth and other worlds. Considering that he was actually The Chosen One destined to save Terrenos and he privately reveals that he is tired of all the fighting and warring leads some credence to his beliefs.
- Security Chief Parahexavoctal in Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire will do anything to enforce his version of keeping the peace, including opening entire embassies to the vacuum of space.
- Crimson:
- Appropriately enough, The Knights Templar are an organization devoted to destroying all monsters, regardless if they are good or evil. They capture The Chosen One fated to save the world, and subject him to torture for being a vampire before trying to execute him. Their elite members, the Order of the Dragon, are somehow even worse because they hunt angels along with monsters, harvesting their body parts, turning it into drugs to enhance themselves in combat. Their logic is that the Heaven has sent angels to help them fight darklings, so its their reward to use them as any way they see fit.
- Not that the angels themselves are any better. Specifically, the Angelic Host composed of six Archangels visit mortals during Christmas to dispense judgment on them, punishing an AIDS victim the same way as a mother who allowed her daughter to die in the cold. They nearly execute the main protagonist for being a vampire too if it wasn't for the timely arrival of Satan, who voted to spare him. Its quite telling how much of an assholes the angels are that the freakin' Devil looks nice in comparison.
- In East of West this trope is pleasantly avoided by the Ranger who seizes power, kills off the criminal and the corrupted and promptly relinquishes power and retires.
- Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted: The Big Bad Raymond Martin sees himself as a Hunter of Monsters who's completely in the right for killing off creatures with the potential to hurt humans. In reality, he's a monstrously self-serving psycho who himself endangers hundreds more people than the monsters he attacks would have done, he murders completely non-threatening creatures like the Sker Buffalo, and he hounds and attempts to murder a pair of defenceless cubs before attempting to murder Kong, the most philanthropic living Alpha Titan on the planet. In the end, he proves that humans sometimes really are the true monsters.
- Pictured in the main page, Imperius from The Infinite, who is determined to bring order to the world at any cost.
- Judge Dredd:
- Judge Dredd himself is one of the best examples of this in the world of comics. In any given strip, there's a chance that Dredd may sentence witnesses or even the victim of a crime after they reported it to him. Notably, in the more emotional story "America", Bennett Beeny gives Dredd a witness statement after he was shot through the throat by democratic terrorists, and immediately after their conversation, the Judges are contemplating whether or not they should arrest Benny for a separate offense. In that one particular instance, Dredd decides to let Beeny off the hook.
- Judge Death takes this to its "logical" extreme: since all crimes are committed by the living, then life itself should be considered a crime. As his Catchphrase goes, "The crime is life. The sentence is DEATH." The Dark Judges sometimes have trouble comprehending why all those "sinners" they lovingly murder aren't practically lining up for the slaughter. In their eyes, Judge Dredd himself is a criminal since he's continually stopping them from bringing their own version of the law to Mega City One.
- The Democracy movement eventually resorted to acts of domestic terrorism in an attempt to oust the Judges. During the "Total War" arc, they used stolen nuclear devices to force the Judges to step down, blowing up the city one sector at a time until they cave.
- SJS Judge Pin went around slitting the throats and taking the helmets of judges she felt were unworthy of the badge.
- The eponymous Wanderer from Just a Pilgrim. If you're a raider and you meet up with him, you'd be better off just shooting yourself - there's less talking involved.
- The Jedi Covenant in Knights of the Old Republic. Their purpose is to look into the future in an attempt to prevent the Sith from returning. So when they see an enemy wearing the same envirosuit their apprentices use, naturally the only thing to do is murder them all! Lucien illustrates it best when he tells The Hero Zayne that a Jedi must be willing to kill innocents For the Greater Good.
- Marshal Law is one, and he knows people think of him as one. And he agrees with those people. As he himself says:""A lot of people say I'm a uniformed thug, no better than the scum I hunt down...a fascist cop...a glorified Nazi...a legalized vigilante, handing out his own highly suspect street "justice"... someone with a pathological hatred of superheroes, reveling at the chance to beat the hell out of them. That sounds fair. I can live with that."
- Nemesis the Warlock:
- Torquemada fully believes that his genocidal crusades to purge the universe of all alien life and ruling humanity through terror is the 'right' thing to do. Noted by the man himself in a 2000 AD pin-up after winning The Eagle Award for best comic villain of 1984:
Torquemada: "Villain"? This vile slur on my good name shall be avenged!- What makes Torquemada even more despicable is that for all his talk about Terran supremacy, he has no problem with using alien technologies and energies to prolong his own life. At the very end, after Termight has been freed from his rule, he concludes that humanity has failed him and prepares to blow up half the planet before stealing Nemesis' ship to find an alien empire to rule over. Ultimately he just wanted power for its own sake.
- Shakara: The Shakara Federation ruthlessly enforced their own sense of order and justice on the rest of the universe, becoming a mostly benevolent but still oppressive empire.
- Shadow in Archie Comics' Sonic The Hedgehog becomes one in the "X Years Later" storylines. First, once Sonic leaves the timeline, he conquers Mobius and implements a totalitarian regime. He's eventually overthrown and put in stasis by Sonic, but then went From Bad to Worse: five years after being put in stasis, Shadow is freed by his loyalists. Understandably pissed at what happened, he proceeds to release Tikhaos in order to destroy Mobius, so that he can rebuild society afterwards. When Lien-Da protests, he simply kills her, sics Tikhaos on the planet, and teleports away.
- Transformers:
- At one point, the Autobots in the Transformers: Generation 1 comic became like this when Grimlock became leader after one of Optimus Prime's numerous Heroic Sacrifices.
- The Autobots also did this during the Nova Prime administration in the latest series of comics.
- Megatron in the IDW comic adaptations of Generation One started out as this. A former gladiator/miner who got pissed at the corruption of the Autobot High Council, he gathered an army of mechs with familiar thoughts toward them and started a typical working-class revolution. However, as the revolution went, he and his army became more and more bloodthirsty and greedy and resorted to more violent methods in the war, and by the time when they finally invaded Earth, none of the original goals of the Decepticons existed. Except for, perhaps, Megatron himself. In one of the most recent comics, he is quoted as saying a rather inspirational passage — "When the word 'Weapon' is emptied of meaning, when the purpose of a weapon is impossible to grasp, when the rejection of my weapon is of significance to no-one other than myself, only then shall I remove it from my arm" — Kinda awesome.
- The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye has several examples:
- The Decepticon Justice Division are absolutely devoted to the Decepticon cause; they name themselves after the first five conquered cities, and their leader, Tarn, even quotes Megatron's inspirational lines. Their job is to kill Decepticons who are disloyal, cowardly, or disagrees with their goal. This eventually even comes to include Megatron himself, after his renouncing of Decepticonism and defection to the Autobots following the events of The Transformers: Dark Cybertron. Though when Tarn first learns of this, he briefly suffers from a Villainous Breakdown and attempt suicide, but the DJD's newest member, Nickel, restores his faith in the Decepticon cause and causes him to believe that the ideals they stand for are bigger than anyone, even the one who thought them up to begin with.
- Star Saber is a known religious nut who once proposed destroying all non-believers. With Robot Religion getting a big showing here, fundamentalists think he's mental and kicked him out of their group. Now he works for the next example in the series...
- Chief Justice Tyrest. He started as an atheist, and he helped to make a new breed of Transformer through a process called Cold Construction. He served the committees well, and later became a judge known throughout the universe for his unyielding fairness. When sentencing war criminals, he realized that all of them were cold constructs (which Ultra Magnus dismissed as a coincidence), and exiled himself. He began drilling holes in himself to alleviate the guilt... and then he drilled a hole in his brain. Suddenly he could hear the voice of God and all the chosen in his head telling him to remove the sinful breed of Cold Constructs from existence. With this goal in mind he created a device to kill all those he helped to create, and recycled their parts into his army of drones.
- Getaway was gradually revealed as this. A member of the Diplomatic Corps. He would perform odd-jobs for the Autobot's resident manipulator Prowl. Getaway made a lot of friends with his easy charm, but beneath that friendly exterior is a violent fanaticism. The Autobot cause is noble and just, and when Megatron makes a Heel–Face Turn, that's when he takes matters into his own hands. From trying to get the naive Tailgate killed by Megatron to prompt an execution, to ultimately unleashing a months long gambit to have Megatron and anyone willing to give him a second chance, sentenced to death at the hands of the DJD. After all the civilizations he ruined, Megatron is the enemy and anyone who sides with him can die with him.
- The Functionist Council were a group of fanatics who took Measuring the Marigolds to the extreme with their attempts to classify and segregate society based on which alt-modes were the most useful. Though they died early on in the main timeline the characters visit an alt-timeline where the Functionists took over. They've turned the world into a dystopia and constantly kill off entire groups of Transformers who they believe cannot fulfill a purpose. They've got delusional god complexes and anything diverting from their ideal of perfection they have destroyed as they see it as an affront to their god Primus. Their grand plan was to recycle most of the population into mindless kill-bots so they could wage galactic genocide and destroy all that they decreed incongruous with their beliefs.
- Usagi Yojimbo: Jei-San's goal is to eliminate the evil in the world, but there's just so darn much of it...Fortunately he doesn't seem to have a hair-trigger and can walk through town uneventfully, but when it's pressed...There's also the fact that he/it was born from "evil gods" which makes his definition of "evil" highly suspect.
