Redemptions Equaling Death in Comic Books.
- Daredevil: In the Born Again story arc, the corrupt cop, after a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, still tries to confess to framing Matt Murdock/Daredevil, and is murdered by one of the Kingpin's minions.
- A Death in the Family: Sheila tries to make up for her betraying her son by getting the heavily wounded Jason out of the warehouse rigged to explode — although she could escape faster by herself and leave him behind. Unfortunately, the door turns out to be locked anyway, so they are both killed when the bomb goes off. In her dying words, she says that Jason is a good boy and she did not deserve him.
- The Incredible Hulk:
- In the Hulk's very first appearance, he was captured by Yuri Topolov, the Gargoyle, a Soviet scientist who had been mutated into a big-headed dwarf. However, when the Gargoyle found that the Hulk had reverted to Bruce Banner, he lamented the loss of his own normalcy. Banner decided to use his own genius to cure Topolov, who responded by ensuring Banner's safe return to America while destroying his own base, taking himself and his Soviet handlers out in the process. Unfortunately, his son Kondrati took the wrong lesson from Yuri's sacrifice, deciding to blame the Hulk and the State for his father's death.
- Fall of the Hulks, Samson sacrifices himself to help drain the gamma energy from the hulked-out heroes before it kills them.
- Invincible: Anissa was initially a cruel social Darwinist who raped Mark out of a desire to produce a pureblooded Viltrumite child. Later on she has a Heel–Face Turn after falling in love with a human man and starting a real family, and expresses regret for her past actions before dying helping to protect the Earth. When Mark speaks to their young son about her, he diplomatically puts it as the two of them having a very complicated relationship.
- Kanan: Commander Grey realizes that he and the other clones had been brainwashed into turning on their commanders, but only after he'd already killed Depa. In response he sacrifices himself to allow Depa's apprentice to escape from his brothers who are mercilessly hunting him down.
- Kick-Ass: In the third volume, Chris Genovese dies saving Hit-Girl from corrupt cops, but not before he asks her to apologize to his mother on his behalf for causing her pain.
- In Kingdom Come, After breaking free of the mind control, Captain Marvel is offered the choice between stopping Superman and letting the nuke to kill all the metahumans, or leaving him and letting the metahuman war continue. Captain Marvel takes the third option, destroying the nuke and sacrificing himself in place of Superman.
- The Magnificent Ms. Marvel: King Maliq Zeer realizes the error of his petty tyranny when the Beast Legions, inhumanly evil monsters from ancient legend, arrive, and dies shortly afterwards to hold the line against them and give Ms. Marvel and his son time to save Saffa.
- Robin (1993): The ambiguity of some of these changes of heart is exemplified when Dodge turns on the group of villains he gathered to get revenge on Robin. He specifically attacks the member that usurped Dodge's leadership position from him and threatened his family, and his immediate death means his it's never revealed if he ever moved past his I Just Want to Be Special and Never My Fault motivations even though Robin chooses to have him remembered as a hero.
- During Marvel's Siege story arc, Loki realizes that he's partly responsible for the return of the Void, as well as the destruction of Asgard. He attempts to help the heroes defeat the Void and is killed in the process. Subverted when he returns.
- Spider-Man'': Kaine, a flawed clone of Peter Parker (a.k.a. Spider-Man), is a serial killer/assassin. However, during Grim Hunt, he disguises himself as Peter Parker, steals Spider-Man's costume, and walks into a trap set by the Kraven family for Spider-Man in order to screw up Kraven the Hunter's resurrection. It doesn't work quite as planned, as Kraven is resurrected normally (though it later turns out that he can't die), but his death does infuriate Peter to the extent that he stops holding back against them. Subverted in that two comics later, Kaine is resurrected as a spider-monster on the last page, and has to deal with the difficult process of redemption as Scarlet Spider.
- Played for laughs in Suicide Squad where, on a mission to Apokolips, Dr. Light declares that from now on he's going to be a hero only to be shot down by Parademons the moment he tries to contribute.
- Supergirl story "Supergirl's Big Brother": A conman called Biff Rigger pretends to be Fred and Edna Danvers' long lost son Jan to steal his inheritance. As cajoling the Danvers, Biff discovers their adoptive daughter is Supergirl. Biff tricks Kara into giving him a power-granting pill, and starts using his newfound powers to commit robberies right away. Kara is trying to stop him from plundering a sunken ship, when she comes upon a cache of Kryptonite rocks and starts weakening. Biff feels tempted to let her die but his conscience will not leave him alone, so he gets her out of the ocean, dying as saving her life (since his powers wore off as he was swimming towards the surface). Given the circumstances, Supergirl forgives Biff for being a deceiving crook and decides against telling her parents that he was a fake.
- Ulic Qel-Droma in Tales of the Jedi had an arc solely dedicated to his redemption. In the end, he was able to make peace with himself and the people he hurt before getting shot. This was still enough to reestablish his connection to the Force and let him become one with it when he died.
- Lampshaded in Transformers: More than Meets the Eye, where Rodimus thinks that sacrificing oneself is a cheap way to gain redemption, particularly since he was the one who put Ax-Crazy Overlord onto their ship in the first place. He believes that redemption has to be earned by making amends past mistakes.
- Ultimate Marvel:
- Henry Pym was one of the founding members of The Ultimates, and became universally hated when he commited Domestic Abuse of his wife. However, in Ultimatum he died by attracting the attack of several Multiple Men, saving the Triskelion. When Captain America woke up from a coma and mentioned him in disdain (ignoring what he just did), he was told to shut up.
- Ultimate X Men: Juggernaut has a change of heart and decides to help Rogue defend the X-Mansion from Stryker's anti-mutant army... and is killed shortly after.
- In Violine, Muller attempts to do this after his Heel–Face Turn to save Violine. However, he is saved just before he can be killed.
- Marvel's Wonder Man is one of the luckiest examples on record; he was originally a one-shot villain who decided he couldn't go through with taking out The Avengers, and whose own powers killed him as he came to their rescue. Twelve years later, he was resurrected, and since then he's been a prominent member of various Avengers teams.
- In Wonder Man (2006), supervillain Ladykiller changes her path and becomes a superhero, but then realises she's being used as a pawn in another villain's plan to murder the Avengers. She breaks his Mind Control long enough to save them, then kills herself before he can reassert control.
- Wonder Woman Vol 1: After betraying Hippolyta the power hungry Antiope redeems herself by sacrificing her own life in battle to save Hippolyta's.
- X-Men: The Trial of Magneto pulls an unusual example of this with the Scarlet Witch, after many attempts to make up for M-Day, almost all of which ended badly. Extremely badly. As in, one gave Doctor Doom godlike power and got Cassie Lang killed, another played right into the hands of the Apocalypse Twins and temporarily got her killed and Earth destroyed, and the most recent one turned the entire deceased population of Genosha into zombies. The only exception was Avengers vs. X-Men, and that was a mixed success. Taking Strange's advice after the last one, she stops being used by her guilt and trying to undo what she's done. So she dies. Specifically, while she knows she'll always come back, she orchestrates her own murder on Krakoa with the reluctant aid of Magneto, and possibly also Toad, who's implied to willingly take the fall, so she can die and be put through the Mutant Resurrection Protocols. That allows her to, with the help of Polaris, Proteus, and Legion, to create the Waiting Room a.k.a. the Eldritch Orchard, the Elysian Fields of mutantkind - anyone who wants to get their powers back can just step through and be added to the Resurrection queue without having to go through Crucible. It also allowed Cerebro to sweep through time and space and pick up every mutant who was killed before Cerebro made back-ups, or before their X-Gene activated. Finally, it functions as the ultimate back-up for Cerebro, one that's effectively untouchable. Almost no one actually knows about her connivance with Magneto, though, as she points out that they'd turn it down otherwise. In other words, dying is part of her redemption, one that wins over even the likes of Exodus.
- In Zombies Christmas Carol, Scrooge's change of heart and resulting kindness reverts the zombies back and saves the world, but having become a Spirit of Christmas himself, he dies that same night.
