Paying evil unto evil in comic books.
- American Vampire: Pearl's revenge on the Hollywood Coven. Not to mention what Hattie ends up doing to the vamps keeping her prisoner...
- Archie vs. Predator II: After Cheryl and Jason Blossom set off a gas leak in order to blow up the school, they refuse to help Reggie try to rescue anyone else from the Predators. In response, Reggie barricades the boiler room door to keep them from escaping.
- The Authority: The Authority has no problem going after villains using similar tactics or even worse, as among other things, the Midnighter smashed a ship into Kaizen Gamorra's tower (after plowing it through a street first) just to take him out, they invaded another universe's Earth and destroyed that world's Italy and London to cripple an invading force after an attempted invasion, and had a scene where Midnighter confronts the man who is implied to have raped Apollo and it's similarly implied Midnighter was going to use a jackhammer to return the favor.
- Batman:
- Played with Batman. His MO involves terrorizing criminals and pummeling them within an inch of their lives, but he (generally) refuses to kill, and he does indeed have a very strong belief in justice, and believes that you can't fix the system if you yourself are hindering it. Of course, this all depends on the writer. Sometimes he's a borderline outlaw who doesn't give a damn about the law, and will even beat the hell out of petty criminals. But other times he will having varying levels of tolerance towards certain criminals.
- Final Crisis marks the only time in recent history where Batman Grabs a Gun with intent to kill, while facing Darkseid at the height of his power. According to Word of God it wasn't about practicality; Batman was attempting to defeat the embodiment of evil — one who was dying and trying to take the Multiverse with him. Batman believed the only way to do so was to use what he considered the embodiment of evil, turning it back on itself to destroy it and invoking this trope in the most literal manner possible.
- Two contrasting examples would be Batman: No Man's Land and Noel. Particularly notable is the example of Joe Chill: On one occasion, Batman scared him to almost lunacy, and after revealing his secret identity to him, he brought his gun to him so he would blow his own brains out before the other criminals would kill him in retaliation.
- Red Hood Jason Todd tended toward this attitude during his career as Robin. Since he came back from the dead, he's denied Batman's Thou Shalt Not Kill rule and considers himself Batman as he should be.
- This is shown even more in Batman: Under the Red Hood. It starts with Joker beating Jason senselessly with a crowbar, and then killing him with a bomb. It ends with Jason beating Joker back with a crowbar, and then attempting to kill him with a bomb!Jason: I'm not talking about killing Penguin, or Scarecrow, or Dent... I'm talking about him. Just him! And doing it because... he took me away from you.
- Shortly prior to the end of his career as Robin, Jason encounters a rapist who had driven one of his victims to commit suicide. The rapist then fell to his death; it is heavily implied that Jason pushed him.
- The Storyline Red Hood: The Lost Days has numerous examples of this trope. At various points in the book Jason poisons a trafficker, leaves a bomb maker tied to a large time bomb, douses the Joker in gasoline, and brutally murders each criminal he hires to train him.
- Beasts of Burden: A pack of ghost puppies kills their killer.
- Checkmate: The post-Infinite Crisis version of Checkmate began on this note, with the supposedly heroic organization, which included a Darker and Edgier version of the JLA eye candy character Fire, committing cold-blooded killings against the terrorist organization KOBRA. This is in fact a major plot element of the first story arc, as traditionalist characters such as the original Green Lantern tended to call Checkmate up on this. Afterwards, however, this aspect of the organization faded into the background and later issues tended not to focus on the "wet work" aspect of Checkmate.
- Daredevil: Daredevil does this to Bullseye when he attacks Hell's Kitchen again. His solution? Break his arms and impale him with a sai. Also functions as a Karmic Death after what happened with Elektra, who wields sai as her weapons.
- Deadpool: Deadpool does this to a psychiatrist who manipulated one of his clients, a very confused teenage girl, into having sex with him. The girl ended up killing herself. The psychiatrist thought he'd covered his tracks and was in the clear...until Deadpool found out it about it. Deadpool took his time with the guy.
- Psychiatrist: No! You don't understand! She wanted to be with me, she begged me to do it!Deadpool: (Holding up a sharp knife) Really? Kind of like the way you're begging me right now?
- Disney Ducks Comic Universe:
- This is the modus operandi of Paperinik (Donald's superhero/antihero alter ego). Even if he stops well short of killing or crippling, Duckburg's entire criminal underworld is absolutely terrified of him because of the savage and humiliating beatings he inflicts whatever criminal is stupid enough to resist... And at the same time rely on him as a protector from anyone, hero or otherwise, that goes overboard, as Paperinik will then turn his attention on them.
- Paperinik New Adventures has Xadhoom. The Evronians pulled a We Come in Peace — Shoot to Kill on her homeworld and made her The Last of Her Kind while she was away performing the experiment that made her a Physical Goddess. Since then she roamed the galaxy searching and killing any Evronian she could find in the most painful and humiliating way she could think of, not stopping even before Evronian spores (basically their fetuses). Her rampage ended only when she had already exterminated untold billions of Evronians, destroyed both their homeworld and the worldship that had brought to safety the Emperor and the Senate, and only because she had discovered and saved the last remnants of her race (as some of her people had survived, she considered bringing the Evronians to the brink of extinction as settling their score). Then, just before her Heroic Sacrifice, she settled events in motion to make the surviving Evronians believe she was still around and would finish the job if they looked funny at the surviving Xerbians.
- The Flash: When Bart Allen ended his tenure as the Flash by dying, Wally West reappeared and took down Bart's nemesis Inertia. The punishment? Wally froze Inertia in time, but left his mind running. Then he stuck him on display in the Flash Museum, forcing Inertia to forever stare at statues of Bart. Wally later had an internal What the Hell, Hero? moment, when he thought about what he'd done.
- Ghost Rider: One of the Ghost Rider's powers is the penance stare; he can cause a villain exactly as much pain as the villain has inflicted upon innocents. Usually, this ends up leaving the villain catatonic.
- Green Lantern: Deconstructed. Amon Sur fled from the Sinestro Corps War and went to the recently deceased Green Lantern Ke'Haan's home world, killing his family. The Green Lantern Laira, who was in love with Ke'Haan, killed Amon when he smugly surrendered. She is promptly arrested, because, bastard or no, she murdered a surrendering enemy in cold blood, and the Lanterns realized now that with the rings authorized for lethal force, they could easily abuse their power like she did.
- Infinite Crisis: The bad guys use the radiation-powered supervillain Chemo to reduce the entire city of Bludhaven to a bombed-out wasteland. Bludhaven just so happens to be one of the most corrupt cities in the US (even worse than Gotham), and its destruction is immediately preceded by scenes of how horrible virtually everyone in it is, including a panel of the mayor taking bribes from supervillains.
- Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: Johnny likes to use this to justify his many, many murders—and the way he tortures his victims beforehand. Sometimes, it really is justified, in the cases of a paedophile and a rapist. Sometimes, it's because he got called a mean name or hates someone's tie. Sometimes, he accidentally grabs a legitimately good person and kills him anyway. He's not exactly sane, though readers somehow end up rooting for him anyway (or just laughing at the carnage).
- Miracleman: Johnny Bates performs his final transformation into Kid Miracleman while being raped by a bully, then spends about three seconds paying evil unto evil before paying evil unto just about everyone else.
- Morbius: In the '90s Anti-Hero version, Morbius the Living Vampire uses this as a solution to slake his bloodthirst, figuring that if he needs to kill, he'll kill serious criminals.
- The Punisher:
- This is the justification of The Punisher, who brutally kills criminals as seen on trope's main page image. How this is received depends on where in the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism the comic he's appearing in is. But one thing's for sure. If he has you on his list, he will kick you when you are down. And shoot you. And throw a grenade on you. And push you in front of a moving subway train. And pull out all your teeth while you're tied to a dentist's chair. And run you over with his car, then back up and run you over again. And tie you to a chair and set you on fire. And hook your balls up to a car battery, turn the ignition key until you've shit all over yourself, and then turn the key some more. If you're on his list, you deserve everything he does to you. So don't get on Frank's list.
- The MAX arc "The Slavers" is one of the more infamous examples of this trope. In it, Castle's fighting a group of war criminals turned human traffickers who do horrible, horrible things to their captives. When Castle finds one of the three ringleaders of the operation, he douses the guy with fuel and burns him alive. Let's just say Castle spends the rest of the arc using other inventive methods to mete out payback.
- The other two ringleaders (one of which is the fuel-doused one's son) were also disposed of in very graphic ways. The woman responsible for the more practical aspects (such as having the girls raped for twenty-four hours so they don't even think of rebelling) was thrown against a shatterproof window face-first multiple times till the window frame broke, making her do a swan dive many stories high. The son ended up getting drugged, dragged out into the wilderness, his stomach slit open, and hung from his own entrails on a tree branch. Then Frank WOKE HIM UP before letting him bleed out.
"It had been a long, long time since I hated anyone the way I hated them." - Lampshaded in The Punisher: Welcome Back, Frank, where a victim that he left helpless in a gasoline-doused house is screaming that he's no different from her. The Punisher turns back to the mansion with a grenade, calmly replies "Tell me something I don't know," and pulls the pin.
- Nicky Cavella digs up the Punisher's family and pisses on their bones, believing this will enrage Frank and make him easier to kill. Well, it definitely did the first part. Frank hits every Mafia operation even harder until Cavella is abandoned by his own troops, realizing how useless he is, and Frank leaves him to die over several days of a gutshot wound. During Frank's rampage, the city is torn between letting Frank do his thing and actually upholding the law, and settle for reburying Frank's family (Cavella gets taken out quickly after).
- Sin City: Marv inflicts on various criminals horrible torture which would maybe even make Jack Bauer sick. He's kind of like Dexter in being a pretty messed up person himself. But when the Sociopathic Hero brutally tortures and dismembers the bad guys, few readers will shed a tear. Lampshaded in the film, when Marv remarks "I love hitmen. No matter what you do to them, you don't feel bad."
- The Spectre: Depending on the writer, it's usually somewhere between "implied" and "outright stated, there on page 2" that the Spectre is the embodiment of the wrath of God, and he's usually more than willing to outright torture people that "deserve it." In the darker arcs, it's made clear that as far as the Spectre is concerned, everybody "deserves it" (in the "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" sense) and it's fortunate for humanity that he's actually holding/being held back most of the time.
- Superman:
- Back in the 1970s comics, Clark Kent had a co-worker named Steve Lombard, who was a little bit of a bully, generally in the form of "practical jokes" such as using a fountain pen to spray ink all over someone's face. For reasons one hopes are obvious, they tended to backfire when he attempted to pull them on Clark (or anyone else when Clark was around). Not very high on the evil scale, of course, but without Steve's initial malicious intent Superman would have quickly come to look like a first-class jerk.
- In the "Superman and Spider-Man" crossover, Peter Parker is not amused when he realizes Steve Lombard played a "Kick Me" prank on him, so he coats Steve's couch in webbing, ensuring that the Daily Planet's bully will be unable to stand up for one hour.
- Superman: Birthright: Superman intervenes in a school shooting and tracks down the dealer who illegally sold guns to the perpetrators:Superman: One minute ago, I saw a little girl screaming because she was staring down the barrel of a gun. She was nine, and she will remember it for the rest of her life.
He fires a gun at the dealer, catching the bullet just in time.
Superman: Now you will, too. - The Krypton Chronicles, which tells the history of Krypton and the House of El, provides another example. During Val-El's ship journey, his brother Tro-El attempted to take over the ships to become a pirate. His mutiny failed, and it was agreed to give Tro and his followers the same punishment they had in store for Val and his loyal sailors: marooning them in the island of Bokos, which would become an island of thieves.
- In Action Comics #338, Supergirl gets stalked by an alien named Raspor, who -falsely- claims he destroyed Krypton with a planetary bomb at the behest of the warlords of planet Gryyk. Incensed, Supergirl tricks Raspor into travelling to a deserted world where she leaves him stranded after revealing there's another Gryykian planetary bomb buried deep underground (she previously defused the bomb but Raspor doesn't know that).Supergirl: "When I learned how you wiped out Krypton, I remembered Superman telling me about this planet and its hidden N-Bomb, as well as that mento-machine data! So I decided to fake my love for you in order to lure you here and give you a taste of what you did to the billions of Kryptonians you killed!"
- Supreme Power: Whilst on a mission in the Middle East, the Squadron comes across a young girl, traumatized by how her father and male relatives stoned her mother and sisters to death after invading soldiers raped them. This trigger's Inertia's Berserk Button, reminding her of her own Dark and Troubled Past, and the super-strong woman promptly finds the girl's male relatives, buries them up to their necks in the soil, and presents the girl with a length of steel fencepole so that she can do with them as she wills. As Inertia walks off, sound-effects make it clear that the girl is literally bashing the brains out of every last one of the men.
- Teen Titans: This mindset was darkly invoked by Titans villainess Cheshire years earlier when she dropped a nuclear bomb on the country of Qurac to show she was willing to do it. She then gloated about Qurac being openly acknowledged as the "terrorist capital of the world," laughing at the idea that those who would shame her for her actions would also be secretly glad she did it.
- The Transformers (IDW):
- Deconstructed in The Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers: The Wreckers fight Squadron X, a team of dangerous and deadly Decepticons, and defeat them. When Prowl tells them that they have to let them go because the battle was on a protected planet, Impactor walks into their cell, and shoots them all in the head when they're restrained. He's arrested and sent to a maximum security prison. His protege Springer testifies against him, and later when he tries to defend himself, Springer tells him "They deserved to die, but you didn't deserve to kill them." Roadbuster reveals that the team approved of his actions, but they were afraid of prison time, so they pretended to agree with Springer.
- Further deconstructed in The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye by the same author. First Aid suffers an emotional breakdown after invoking this trope on Pharma, showing that the average person is ill-suited to such violence. Whirl engages in this from time to time, but it's always used to show how dangerously unhinged he is, such as when he brutally murders an unarmed gangster out of nowhere in retaliation for crimes the guy's bosses committed.
- After the war ended, Sandstorm began feeling a mixture of guilt and anger over war crimes committed on both sides, and ended up setting a lot of people on fire over it. He justifies it as punishment for those who escaped justice. At one point he even tries to assassinate Optimus Prime under the rationale that Prime could not have been ignorant of the actions committed within his army, and as its commander in chief he is responsible for the actions of said subordinates. Sandstorm's attempt fails for a multitude of reasons, and Prime eventually has to punch Sandstorm in the face and have him imprisoned.
- Ultimate Marvel:
- The Ultimates: "NAKED GUY THINK HULK STUPID? NAKED GUY THINK HULK NOT FIND OUT ABOUT AFFAIR? HULK SHOWS NAKED GUY WHAT HAPPENS WHEN HE TOUCHES BANNER'S GIRLFRIEND. HULK TOUCH NAKED GUY LIKE NAKED GUY WAS TOUCHING BETTY!"
- Ultimate X Men: The whole reason Weapon X was created in the first place. Wraith thinks that, after being rescued, the president may be losing sight of the original circumstances that led to it.
- V for Vendetta: V personally murders every single staff member of the concentration camp where he was imprisoned, as well as a few other people, and commits terrorist attacks against the fascist regime that has taken over Britain. The moral ambiguity does not go unmentioned, but the people who he kills are honestly very bad people.
- Watchmen: Rorschach has this as his MO, although he ranks sex along with murder on the scale of morality, and proceeds to break a guy's fingers just for calling attention to the fact that he is, uh, hygienically challenged.
- To provide some context, he'd gone into an apparently-random dive bar to try and get information out of the patrons, and the crack about his hygiene was why he picked on that particular guy. (This worked about as well as you might expect.)
- And in his monologues he implies that this is his standard method for gathering information: walk into some underworld dive, and break bones of random people until someone confesses something.
- Rorscharch's shifting inkblot mask also symbolically adds to this, with his mask being a direct representation of how he sees the world: through an extreme filter of Black and White. In his words, "there is no bullshit grey", a crime is a crime no matter how small and must be rightfully punished.
- Granted the guy is Ax-Crazy, so we're not supposed to think it's okay.
- The clearest example is the incident that drives Rorschach Ax-Crazy. He tracks a child abductor to his home, only to find out that the abductor has murdered the little girl he kidnapped, chopped her corpse into pieces, and fed the remains to his dogs. Rorschach responds by killing the dogs, waiting for the kidnapper to return home, throwing his dead dogs at him, beating him half to death, then handcuffing him in place and killing him as he screams for mercy and begs to simply be arrested (the method differs here; in the comic, he burns the house down, cooking the man alive, while in the movie, he simply splits the guy's head open repeatedly with the same meat cleaver as he growls, "Men get arrested, dogs get put down!")
- X-23:
- This was an incidental reason for X-23's creation in the first place: While many of the Facility's clients for her services were certainly bad men (among the bidders shown in one conference are Mr. Sinister, Doctor Doom, and the freakin' Red Skull), many of her targets ended up being rather bad men (dictators, drug czars, etc.) as well. Sarah also uses her to track down and murder the serial killer who abducted her niece, while Rice sends her to kill Sutter, who may not have abused her himself, but he sure as hell enabled everything.
- Though X-23 was bred to be an emotionless killing machine and racked up a body count in the hundreds by the time she was a teenager, she was also horrifically tortured and abused by the Facility, the organization which created her. Her mother, the geneticist who created her, finally had enough, and turned Laura loose against them. Dialog in Target X suggests that she slaughtered everyone in the installation housing her. This would mean not just the surgical head, (who Laura beat to death bare-handed over ten fucking minutes) guards and scientists, but the receptionists, janitorial staff. Everyone. Of course, this was an organization that performed human experimentation, sold Laura's services to people like the Kingpin, and were preparing to breed an army of clones to sell to anyone with the cash.
- After her escape, Laura's cold detachment towards killing and torturing her enemies means she does this a lot when her friends and teammates are unwilling to do so themselves, which except when she's serving on X-Force (a whole team of X-Men like Wolverine who are willing to pay evil unto evil) is pretty much all the time. Not that she doesn't get called out on her methods.
- X-Men:
- Every time Magneto clashes with anti-mutant hate groups. Magneto is Jewish and survived the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. The Red Skull is a Nazi. While working together during Acts of Vengeance, Magneto decided to get some revenge on the Red Skull, beating the living crap out of him and leaving him in a Sealed Room in the Middle of Nowhere with some jugs of water and his own thoughts.
- What is considered Cyclops' Moral Event Horizon by many is when he formed X-Force to do this. To provide context, following Decimation, the Purifiers had started a war against what was left of the world's mutants, almost all of whom had taken refuge in the X-Mansion. They started by attacking the children, brutally murdering many and causing a lot of pain to many more, driving Dust to question her faith. When Hope was born and people realized that she was the mutant Messiah, The Purifiers decided to kill her, so Cyclops formed X-Force and sent them out to stop them, any means necessary. The team basically goes around killing madmen who pose great risk to the rest of the mutant population or humanity in general. Once Mutant births start happening again and people start developing mutant powers following the death of Purifier leader Bastion, Cyclops disbands them so they can go back to the way things were. Many still consider this a dick move of his, but in retrospect, had he not done this, many more would have died and the Purifiers may have in fact killed them all. In-Universe, however, many still dislike him doing this, but that dislike mostly boils down to him not telling anyone about it and recruiting relative innocents (along with someone being actively rehabilitated) for the wetwork.
- Prior to the 2000s, the island nation of Genosha in was a brutal place that enslaved its mutant population and treated them horribly. This ultimately led to its downfall in the 1993 Bloodties event, when the malevolent Fabian Cortez was able to play on lingering resentment amongst the mutant populace - newly freed after X-Tinction Agenda - to provoke them to a bloody rebellion. When Magneto was given dominion over the still war-wracked island in 1999's Magneto Rex, he sat back and encouraged the mutants to exterminate and expel all of Genosha's native human population, who had profited so much from the misery of its mutants.
