Unbuilt Trope / Comic Books

• The Golden Age of Comic Books, at times, was significantly darker than The Silver Age of Comic Books and more mature than The Dark Age of Comic Books:
  • Most of this is because comics were only just escaping the influence of pulp fiction. The Golden Age also straddled the same time period as the second World War. When your countrymen are killing and dying on foreign shores to protect life and liberty, it makes sense that your comic book heroes would kill and die too. This can be overstated, though, particularly with regard to the most famous superhero characters. For instance, as professional Batmanologist Chris Sims has noted, "Sure, Batman might’ve fought vampires and carried a gun for like three issues, but by the end of that first year, it was all cat-wrestling and trips to Storybook Land."
  • If you read the very first Batman/Joker story, it almost looks like someone decided to actually combine the violence and murder of Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns with the campiness of the Adam West version. (This was also before writer Bill Finger decided NOT to have the Joker be one of the villains that spew terrible puns.) It has simplistic art and bad dialogue, but people actually die laughing with huge unnatural smiles on their faces. It also has the Joker painting his face with flesh-colored makeup, which many have thought was created for the 1989 Tim Burton film (and in the comic, the makeup is not a Paper-Thin Disguise, but actually works).
  • The Human Bomb stories going back to 1941 always had a fair amount of Wangst in them. Everything he touched exploded, and the stories, like something from Marvel from the seventies, often explored how that would affect his psyche. Some of the time. Other times they played it as a joke.
  • If you tell someone there's a comic book where the Human Torch is burning someone's arm to the bone on the cover, they'll probably think "what have comics come to these days?" or "man, they'd do anything to be edgy in the 90s." What they probably wouldn't think is "it's amazing what they put on comic book covers before there were rules about what you could put on comic book covers." Unless they've seen the issue in question◊.
  • Golden Age Superman stories surprisingly have more in common with modern Superman than their Silver Age counterparts, in that Superman was portrayed more as a defender of the common man than the super powered lawman he later evolved into, and stories often had political and social themes to them. In general, many characters treated Supes as a thorn in the side of the establishment, just as one might expect they would in Real Life.
• Watchmen:
  • Watchmen is famous for being one of the first serious attempts at portraying superheroes realistically, and one of the first comic books ever to examine how the world might actually look if superheroes were real. But unlike virtually all of its imitators, it does this in the name of demonstrating how horribly incompatible the superhero genre really is with the real world: "costumed adventurers" are shown to be horribly impractical at everything except foiling petty crime, most of them are (at best) slightly quixotic weirdos or (at worst) outright sociopaths who use crime-fighting as an outlet for their violent urges, it only takes around three decades before the US government denounces them as a threat to public safety and declares them illegal (which occurs before the story proper even begins), and the story ultimately ends in tragedy after one of them commits a horrific act of mass murder in the name of "saving the world". If you go into the story expecting a "grim and gritty" elevation of superhero stories, you might be surprised to find that it's more of a very darkly comedic satire of them (Alan Moore supposedly once described it as Harvey Kurtzman's Superduperman Played for Drama). Several critics have interpreted the series as (among other things) a thinly-veiled message to comic book creators about the inherent folly of trying to make the superhero genre "realistic"; very few creators heeded this message in the years to come.
  • To a modern reader, Rorschach feels like a deconstruction of the '90s Anti-Hero, when he was largely the inspiration for many Darker and Edgier heroes whose creators missed the point—namely that Rorschach is a deranged sociopath with a child's grasp of right and wrong, and that he's kind of pathetic: he's a scruffy loner who lives alone in a squalid tenement building, he doesn't have any friends, and he spends his days beating up petty criminals because he's incapable of maintaining healthy relationships with other people. Even as a crimefighter, he's portrayed as kind of incompetent, with a mostly losing track record: he loses in a fight against the police, gets caught and unmasked, and fails to solve the mystery because of his Entertainingly Wrong conclusions; it's the more Boring, but Practical-minded Nite Owl who actually manages to unmask Eddie Blake's murderer. Alan Moore is bemused that so many readers consider Rorschach's most unattractive qualities (his paranoia, his propensity for violence and self-righteousness) heroic rather than tragic.
  • Doctor Manhattan is one of the most famous aversions of Reed Richards Is Useless, and a progenitor of Cape Punk as a result - and yet, a major running theme of the story is that he's nowhere near as wide-rangingly powerful as the propaganda claims him to be. In fact, his presence is ultimately negative, as it causes the Cold War to escalate, and once he's gone, the United States has lost a linchpin. Also of note is despite his powers, society isn't a whole lot different besides some better technology. In fact, the character who had the biggest impact is the Comedian by keeping the Watergate scandal under wraps and Richard Nixon in power.
    • If you are used to modern portrayals of Doctor Manhattan as a near-omnipotent figure able to rewrite reality, you might be surprised to see that the original was powerful, but definitely limited, and a main point of the setting was that he was the only super-powered being. It's even explicitly pointed out that, even with all his powers, Doctor Manhattan would not be able to stop all the missiles if the Cold War ever heated up, and the ones he misses would be enough to cause a nuclear holocaust. Manhattan himself is aware of this and his powers of precognition have made him believe that no one, not even he, has free will and dismisses the prospect of humanity being wiped out as being utterly trivial to the wider universe.
  • Many deconstructive takes on superhero stories written after Watchmen (including a few outright inspired by it) often attempt to deconstruct the genre by depicting superheroes as dimwitted, delusional and/or incompetent, often with the implication that costumed crimefighters would look absolutely ridiculous if they really existed. While such characters do exist in Watchmen (most notably Captain Metropolis and Dollar Bill), they play a surprisingly minor role in the narrative: Captain Metropolis is a supporting character who only plays a key role in the book's backstory, while Dollar Bill is a Posthumous Character who was killed decades before the start of the story. On the whole, most of the non-superpowered characters in Watchmen (e.g. Rorschach, Nite Owl, Silk Spectre, the Comedian, etc.) are shown to be reasonably successful at fighting crime with gadgets and martial arts, with the story operating under the default assumption that becoming a costumed crimefighter is at least a plausible pursuit within its fictional setting. As a deconstruction of superhero stories, the book is far more concerned with the morality and philosophy of the genre than its practicality. Its overriding thesis isn't so much that superheroes wouldn't work in the real world—it's more that the superhero genre is based on a horribly simplistic view of morality with disturbing reactionary undertones, and it inevitably breaks down when confronted with the moral complexities of the real world. Even compared to its many imitators, its critique of the genre can cut surprisingly deep by today's standards. This forms the basis of the aforementioned Captain Metropolis' character as he is an effective crimefighter and leader but has an extremely naive view of heroism, believing that heroes can lead radical social change and refuses to change with the times. That's not even getting into his questionable views and desire to push back against progressivism.
• The Dark Knight Returns... it's remembered today as the bedrock of modern Darker and Edgier Batman, featuring not only a Wretched Hive setting where villains actually kill people (already, as mentioned, present in the Golden Age) but Batman himself as a humorless, sadistic brute who views even his closest allies with thinly-veiled contempt. For all that, it plays a lot of Silver Age silliness surprisingly straight, most notably in the Joker's Gadgeteer Genius arsenal (Sentient exploding Kewpie dolls? Mind Control lipstick?!), Batman's Latex Perfection disguise abilities and Superman healing himself by draining solar energy from a sunflower field.
• Marshal Law:
  • While deconstructing traditional superheroes, the comic managed to deconstruct the '90s anti-hero in the '80s. At one point Marshal Law accuses the Public Spirit, a Superman analog, of inspiring an entire generation of heroes to go to war in the Zone, in what can only be described as "Super-Nam". The Public Spirit turns this around by telling Law that Law's own vigilante actions have also inspired people, except in a more horrific manner. The Spirit then reveals that Law inspired the main villain to take up his actions in the first place, thus completing the cycle. The comic then concludes that the differences between traditional superheroes and grim anti-heroes are superficial; Marshal Law is just as bad as, if not worse than, the Public Spirit.
    • This is continued even further in the first sequel, Marshal Law Takes Manhattan. While the traditional Marvel heroes get some pretty brutal parodying, including things like a Spider-Man analog who's all about shooting a different sticky fluid in public, they're treated as stupid and banal, but mostly harmless. Meanwhile, the Punisher analog gets by far the most direct satire, with him being portrayed as a fascist, racist, paranoid sadist with a persecution complex a mile deep, the ugliest part of the Right-Wing Militia Fanatic power fantasy taken to its endpoint. And even he's no different from Law, being his old mentor, implying that Law's archetype is rotten at the root.
  • O'Neill's art was conceived as a satire of Jack Kirby-influenced superhero art with huge, misshapen, excessively muscular heroes carrying gigantic weapons and ludicrously curvy, permapouting heroines in pornographically skimpy costumes. The style of Rob Liefeld and his imitators would subsequently do very similar things without any humorous intent.
  • It also works as a Deconstruction of the Cape Busters comics that came after it. The cape busters in The Boys and Stormwatch: Team Achilles are generally heroic and have actual superpowers, which can lead to Broken Aesops since their comics revolve around the dangerous nature of superheroes, yet said cape busters are superheroes in all but name. On the other hand, Marshal Law acknowledges that he is a Hunter of His Own Kind. Not only that but Law is portrayed rather negatively and is sometimes called a fascist by the other characters, given his pseudo-Nazi costume and admitted obsession for brutalizing other superheroes; furthermore, Commissioner McGland, Law's superior, views Marshal Law as another tool to ensure the dystopian status quo of San Futuro. In short, despite Law's occupation as a cape buster, Marshal Law is part of the superhero problem rather than the solution to it.
• Judge Dredd seems like an obvious candidate as a proto-'90s Anti-Hero, debuting in 1977 and clearly inspired by Cowboy Cops such as Dirty Harry. Judge Dredd is a gritty Judge, Jury, and Executioner who enforces the laws of a dystopian future police state, has acquired a massive bodycount over the years, and tends to fight enemies even worse than he is. However, Judge Dredd is far less one-dimensional than popular culture portrays him as: even in the early comics, he was clearly a By-the-Book Cop who takes "protect the innocent and uphold the law" very seriously, and abhorred corruption and wanton violence. After the "Democracy" arc, he actually resigned when he lost faith in the Justice system.
• The original Clone Saga by Gerry Conway (not to be confused by the more famous and proverbial clone saga that came in the 90s) of Spider-Man actually is a pointed satire about Death Is Cheap, attempting to reverse the past, and fixating on The Lost Lenore beyond the point of healthiness:
  • In that story, Prof. Miles Warren who became the Jackal (and who was intended as a one-time villain who died at the end of the story) is a stand-in for fans of Gwen Stacy who hounded Conway and others for killing off the character, and who likewise blamed Peter Parker and not the Green Goblin for her death. While the Gwen who came back is revealed later to be a clone, initially Peter and everyone assumed she was real, and Peter's still conflicted about Gwen's return because he's not the same person who loved her anymore - he has moved on and his feelings for MJ are stronger than his grief for Gwen, because unlike Miles Warren, who had a lecherous and creepy obsessive fixation for Gwen (putting her on a pedestal and fixating on her looks), Peter's at heart a normal and optimistic guy and indeed he overcomes his Clone Angst when he realizes that since he's now in love with Mary Jane, he's the real deal since the clones are all fixated on his past with Gwen.
  • In other words, Conway's story reads like a parody of comic tropes that came afterwards (i.e. Death Is Cheap, Status Quo Is God, Doppelgänger Replacement Love Interest as it came to be seen in the wake of The Dark Phoenix Saga), and question why Gwen should even return since the feelings Peter once had for her would not be enough to renew a relationship, which contrasts heavily with Cyclops dumping Madelyne Pryor for the revived Jean Grey even when he had married and had a child with her. It also completely contrasts the spirit and intent of the second and more notorious Clone Saga, which was a stunt intended to return Peter "back to basics" and reverse his Character Development, when in Conway's the story the character who has that attitude, Dr. Miles Warren, is an old creepy stalker/professor who fixates on Gwen, his former student, and clearly the villain who is insane for having that attitude.
• Marvel's Secret Wars (1984) (preceding Crisis itself) was the start of the Crisis Crossover... and for the most part it never crossed over into the characters' books. You'd just get a few panels of the character disappearing for the crossover and reappearing.
• The Night Gwen Stacy Died is often cited as one of the earliest and most famous instances of Stuffed into the Fridge, predating the Trope Namer by 21 years. It embodies many of the misogynistic hallmarks of the trope: Gwen has no agency of her own, barely has any lines before she dies, her plotline gets completely unresolved, she's not even the most important female character of the titular story (that's Mary Jane), it was done by Green Goblin to spite Spider-Man, and Spidey even (rather uncomfortably for modern audiences) refers to her as "my woman" even after she dies. However, unlike the many, many derided examples it inspired, this one in particular stands out positively and is seen as a good story even now for two primary reasons. The first is that Gwen's death has meaningful consequences for Spider-Man, both the mythos and the character, becoming a Shocking Defeat Legacy that inspired Spidey to be a better hero. Gwen herself is treated as The Lost Lenore and not a Disposable Love Interest, as it took years for Spidey to fully accept her death, and even after Mary Jane became his Second Love, he will always mourn Gwen with the utmost respect, compared to the usual example of a fridged character being mostly forgotten and replaced. There's a very, very good reason why the story named I Let Gwen Stacy Die, instead of the incident being known as "Dropped From a Bridge".
• Wolverine was the Trope Namer for Wolverine Claws, but unlike a lot of other examples of the trope, stories with him have actually addressed that having claws come out of his hands HURTS; in fact some stories with him depict blood coming out of his hands whenever he uses his claws and a period where he didn't have his Healing Factor addressed that without it he had to constantly bandage his hands whenever he used his claws. While also considered one of the Trope Codifiers for the Healing Factor power, having it had drawbacks like meaning anesthesia can't be used on him.
  • Also, while Wolverine is the Trope Codifier for Healing Factor in comics, a power that would be frequently used later on, it was significantly more downplayed than the From a Single Cell example so often used (including the X-Men movie and later Wolverine stories). While he was difficult to kill, he could still be heavily wounded or laid out or even die. In fact, his power essentially consisted of "healing slightly faster than normal".
• Jack Kirby's O.M.A.C. seemed to utterly defy classification when it hit the stands in 1974, and didn't make it to nine issues. The series has since established a cult following, who have placed it firmly into the Cyberpunk genre: ten years before Neuromancer, you had a hero who gained his powers from an AI satellite, put in place to hold off nuclear exchanges and nullify attempts at corporate espionage. Long before Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell popularized the concept, OMAC was showing sympathy to Ridiculously Human Robots and discussing ideas like memory and identity in a world where a person's memories can be removed or rewritten. The cover of the first issue, showing a weird anti-erotic robot woman in a box with her face where her crotch should be, could be seen as a condemnation of the excesses of Internet porn, decades before there was porn on the Internet. One blogger even pointed out that it actually analyzed cyberpunk themes more than the 2011 reboot.
• Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth is one of the first and most succesful deconstructions of the Batman mythos, analysing every character through a Jungian lense and in general is one of the darker and more macabre stories of the Dark Knight. However, you'd be surprised to see that it isn't really as the other future deconstructions.
  • Most attempts to deconstruct Batman usually do so in a more realistic and grounded setting, like Batman: The Imposter or The Dark Knight. This comic, however, does the exact opposite! Arkham is suddenly an Eldritch Location that's a focal point of madness that expands in all directions in time, while Batman may be the latest incarnation of an Animalistic Abomination sent to torment the Arkhams, and it features a Stable Time Loop involving dreams, magic and the 1st of April. The cast of villains is also much more colorful and diverse: Featuring more lighthearted villains reinvented to be more scary, like the Mad Hatter or Tweedledum and Tweedledee or even downright supernatural, such as Dr. Destiny, a full-on Reality Warper.
  • Unlike most deconstructions, this one actually deconstructs Batman in a positive way, making it more of a Decon-Recon Switch without actually reconstructing anything: Yes, Batman is portrayed as much weaker and human, and is mentally fucked up, but others trying to deconstruct the idea of Batman as just a pathetic mentally ill man is what makes him change for the best, and by the end of the story he is ready to become the hyper-competent One-Man Army version of himself in JLA (1997).
  • On a similar note as the above mentioned example of The Dark Knight Returns, the story also features some elements that wouldn't be out of place in a Silver Age story. The Mad Hatter has a giant psychaedelic room with giant chess pieces and is sitting on a mushroom, and Batman defeats Dr. Destiny, an Evil Cripple that can warp time and space by throwing him down some stairs, like if he was Mr. Sinister.
• Azrael from Batman was one of the first examples, and probably the most famous, of the Anti-Hero Substitute, taking over from Bruce Wayne when Wayne was temporarily paralyzed. He's depicted as a violent, mentally unstable sociopath and egotist who's doing more harm than good with his brutal and militaristic methods of crime fighting. By the end of the arc he's become the Big Bad whom the original Batman must put down before his extremism destroys Gotham. Word of God confirms that the entire arc was preplanned to demonstrate to over-excited Dark Age fanboys that a totally ruthless and brutal Batman was a bad idea. The fact that we have a full trope page for Anti-Hero Substitute should tell you about how well the message went over.
• Grant Morrison's Animal Man run is one of the most poignant in the history of comics, but it's also managed to feature some interesting points of view for tropes that we'd later see:
  • For starters, it criticizes the Darker and Edgier tendencies of at the time recent comics, and includes the protagonist getting an Adaptational Angst Upgrade out of nowhere (His family is killed) that turns Buddy into a '90s Anti-Hero... And all of this in the 80s, just a year or so after Watchmen and TDKR had hit the shelves.
  • Tying with the themes of above, the run's use of Meta Fiction means Morrison also carefully spends an entire issue dissecting exactly why both the author and the reader, would want to see dark stories and heroes instead of lighthearted ones, and offers some pretty nuanced comentary about it. This in stark contrast of just mindlessly defending the old comics like some Reconstructions run the risk to do so.
  • Buddy switches to a leather jacket and a more Civvie Spandex look, which was common among anti-heroes who "weren't like the superheroes from comic books". This, however, is both presented for laughs (And for cuteness) and given an actually pretty reasonable explanation for the costume switch: Buddy needed pockets to carry his keys or notes from his wife. Besides, the jacket is not even real leather, since Animal Man is a vegetarian.
    • Also, he averts Movie Superheroes Wear Black before there was any superhero movies! The jacket is light blue and yellow and serves to add more detail to his also colorful spandex (Which he still wears). The intention of the costume change isn't to make Buddy look "serious" or to distance him from his superhero roots, but rather to make him more distinctive and make him pop from the page (Which is specially useful on the final issues, where he is the only character rendered in colour in the real world).
• The Transformers (Marvel) preceded all other Transformers fiction, but also went a hefty way to deconstruct the premise and clichés that the cartoon would use. Characters could be Killed Off for Real at any time if their toys weren't in stock, sometimes the Decepticons won battles, the Autobots often won at heavy costs, there were shown to be evil Autobots and good Decepticons, the ineffectual Megatron gets taken out by issue 25 and replaced by the legitimately dangerous Shockwave, the Matrix of Leadership is depicted as an unknowable force that can be both good and evil, and the human sidekicks often meet tragic fates including being killed off.
• Kingdom Come is seen as one of the comics that brought back idealistic heroes and rejected edgy violent vigilantes, yet the comic portrays Superman's side as also flawed. For starters, the world has changed and Supes legitimately doesn't understand it due to his years of isolation. The 90s heroes also raise some valid points, mainly how villains used to escape constantly from jail and how some of them, like the Joker, truly deserved to die, and Magog is correct to point out how Superman and older heroes would rather turn their back on the world than face any flaws in their ideology and the story ended with almost all metahumans dead and the remaining superheroes joining society. This makes the plot less Black-and-White Morality and more Black-and-Grey Morality, since it makes sure to state that the old heroes were also flawed, but weren't as much as the new generation.
  • The story also features Lois Lane and the entire staff of the Daily Planet getting killed by the Joker, one of the first stories to do that. In modern comics this would send Superman on a killing spree and would be the beginning of his Face–Heel Turn. Instead, he is clearly full of grief but makes sure to track the Joker and bring him to the proper authorities, and he wouldn't have retired if it weren't for Magog killing the clown. His reitrement is more the culmination of his friends and wife dying, the public's already growing distrust of heroes, his frustration for letting Magog kill the Joker and multiple other factors, whereas these days it seems Supes is just one Lois away from becoming an Omnicidal Maniac.
• Fantastic Four: Despite Mr. Fantastic being the trope namer for Reed Richards Is Useless, canon states that he actually does patent a lot of his gadgets; he just doesn't sell the insanely dangerous ones like interdimensional transporters. It's also been shown that a chunk of his money comes from other companies paying him to not release stuff expressly because the devices would drive them into bankruptcy through competition they couldn't hope to match.
• Vampirella, featuring a hot, near-naked, mostly heroic vampire babe, sometimes gets the credit of being the first "Bad Girl Comic", decades before the genre properly began. Although Vampirella was often a Damsel in Distress, something no Bad Girl would put up with... she didn't really start to fit the mold until after her character was resurrected by Harris Comics during The Dark Age of Comic Books.
• The original Sandman comics that would be eventually revived by Sandman Mystery Theatre to great success didn't actually have to change much from the original to fit it into modern standards. The original Wesley Dodds was a founding member of the Justice Society of America and one of the first costumed superheroes ever...and also contrasts to a massive degree with pretty much every character that followed him. Rather than a beefy Aryan superman in a flashy costume, Wesley Dodds was a rather ordinary man in a Gas Mask, Longcoat outfit who averted Plot Armor and took gunshot wounds on multiple occasions. Nor did he fight crime with an array of gadgets like fellow Badass Normal icon Batman, who debuted around the same time, except for his trusty gas gun that he primarily uses to subdue criminals without a fight. In addition, his girlfriend Dian Belmont was not the stereotypical damsel in distress, but an equal partner in his crime fighting efforts who was fully aware of his dual identity — anticipating characters like the original Janet van Dyne and Mary Jane Watson, and Post-Crisis Lois Lane, and which (as the later histories of those ladies will tell you) still feels rare and refreshing.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check is a widely mocked aspect of comic book Mad Scientist villains, who could have made more money by using their inventions legitimately. However, Whiz Comics #15 plays with this. It's revealed Doctor Sivana, the Arch-Enemy of Captain Marvel, started out as an idealistic scientist intending to use his inventions to revolutionize society. However, he was instead mocked and ill-treated for his plans, which were called impractical and fake, including by people who preferred society the way it was. As a result of this, he was driven mad and angry against society, turning him into a villain. Sivana was one of the earliest Mad Scientist villains of Comic Books.
  • Speaking of, the man this trope is named after doesn't truly fit this mold either. After all, Lex Luthor is the CEO of LexCorp, which means he already uses his genius to make mountains of money. It's just he puts some of that money and the best of his inventions into trying to be the better of Superman, which is treated as a pathological and philosophical need for him to succeed at.
• Thunderbolt Ross is the Trope Codifier for the unhinged anti-superhero General Ripper character. However, in early strips Ross was depicted as more of a Hero Antagonist who was wrong about Bruce Banner, but sincerely wrong; and as The Incredible Hulk was more of an out-of-control beast than an Anti-Hero in those days, his position was somewhat understandable as a person who didn't have all the facts. This was due to The Comics Code, which prevented authority figures like generals being depicted negatively.
  • When the CCA lost its teeth in The '70s and Ross did just become a paranoid lunatic with a murderous grudge against his daughter's boyfriend, he actually faced realistic consequences for his behaviour, unlike characters he inspired or even his own later depictions; who get an endless supply of resources and political cover no matter what crazy thing they do. It became increasingly obvious that Ross was genuinely, seriously mentally ill, suffering multiple nervous breakdowns; he was dishonourably discharged from the military after teaming up with supervillains to kill the Hulk, who was a member of The Avengers at the time; almost committed suicide and ended up as a broken, pathetic, borderline-insane homeless drifter. He eventually showed up to Bruce and Betty's wedding with a gun and shot an innocent bystander, then had another breakdown when Betty angrily disowned him and was committed to an asylum.
• Marvel Comics' Namor the Sub-Mariner is often assumed to be a Darker and Edgier deconstruction of Aquaman, his more well-known counterpart at DC Comics. They're both aquatic-themed superheroes who protect the oceans from evil, but Aquaman is cheerful, friendly and handsome, while Namor is brooding, angry, contemptuous of "surface-dwellers", and eerily alien in appearance—embodying everything mysterious and scary about the ocean. It's actually the other way around: Namor made his debut a full two years before Aquaman. In fact, it's quite possible that Aquaman was conceived as a Lighter and Softer reaction to Namor, embodying the beauty and majesty of the ocean rather than its savagery.
• Much like the relationship between Namor and Aquaman above, only with their respective companies reversed, the original Doom Patrol is often mistaken for a deconstruction of a series that it actually preceded by several months. In contrast to the original X-Men, who were, with only a few exceptions, Rubber Forehead Mutants with maybe some strange hair but were otherwise perfectly attractive people, the "World's Strangest Heroes" were genuinely deformed and unlucky dudes who hated their own powers and suffered severely because of what had happened to them. In addition, the Patrol were not immune to prejudiced views themselves, and their kindly, wise, wheelchair-bound mentor was actually a Manipulative Bastard who had directly engineered the accidents that gave them powers. At the end of the run, they were all killed off not by an all-powerful archvillain to save the entire world, but by a crippled old Nazi, in the process of saving one tiny fishing town. Not only that, but the Doom Patrol actually at one point operated a school for young mutants. It's to the point that many modern readers think the Patrol ripped off X-Men, despite the fact they were released too close together for either to really influence the other.
  • And the intelligent, wheelchair-bound leader of the team being less benevolent than he appears and having a darker, manipulative side is something the series had done long before Marvel started doing it with Charles Xavier. However, while Xavier is a bit of a Manipulative Bastard and has employed some Ambiguously Evil actions, the Chief was a full-on megalomaniac who ruined the lives of Cliff, Rita and Larry for his own gain, was financed by the aformentioned Nazi and almost caused the end of the world when his technology brought the Candlemaker to our plane of existence.
• Lois Lane's modern portrayal as an intrepid, competent Damsel out of Distress is often thought to be the result of cultural changes in the 60s and 70s. In reality, however, it's a return to her Golden Age characterization. She actually started as a tough, intelligent Intrepid Reporter before the advent of The Comics Code caused her to suffer chickification during The Silver Age of Comic Books. That's right: probably the original superhero female Love Interest was a kickass go-getter all the way back in the 1930s.
• Superman having a penchant for encountering people with double-L Alliterative Names is one of the most famous examples of alliteration in comics. It can be surprising, then, to realize that when this first started to happen, Superman not only lampshaded it every time, but actually seemed to be unsettled the more and more it happened. It was even occasionally used as a plot point, with Superman getting a cryptic clue about "L.L" but not knowing who it referred to.
• There's a comic series about a superhero who is truly unsettling. His powers and motives are so alien he comes off as a Humanoid Abomination who happens to be on our side, very little about him is given even the most cursory of explanations, the fates he inflicts on his enemies are truly cruel and horrifying, and it's made very clear that the world would be completely unable to stand against him should he ever go rogue. This may sound like a modern deconstruction of superheroes, but it's actually a description of Stardust the Super Wizard, which made its debut in 1939.
• Rob Liefeld comics often (always) involve Nineties Anti Heroes dropping down to an enemy base and getting into violent arguments with each other during the mission. Funny, then, that the first issue of Youngblood (Image Comics) featured a "hero" doing just that - and accidentally killing his ally with a superpowered punch, before quickly turning heel to give the main characters someone to hunt down. If that had happened in a later issue, or in a parody, it'd have been a subversion.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Mirage) was, famously, a parody of Frank Miller's run on Daredevil. As such, it might surprise readers more accustomed to the campy cartoon turtles to see that the "ninja" part of their names is accurate enough to flat-out murder the Shredder.
• While the Lee-Dikto Spider-Man run codified the idea of a teenage superhero in high school, very little of the run actually deals with high school. One reason is that Peter's intelligent enough to get good grades despite his role as Spider-Man. Another is that Peter is far too much of a loner, and his classmates too mean and judgmental, for him to hang out with other students. Peter even graduates by issue 28. Most of the stories follow Peter working at the Daily Bugle and trying to earn a living, or working as Spider-Man. Later high school superhero stories, as well as later adaptations, would put much more emphasis on the heroes' high school career and social life.
  • Writer David Mann has discussed in this article how Peter Parker took far more time to grow into a noble and responsible hero compared to many of the other Classical Anti-Hero characters he inspired (and by proxy, many later adaptations of the Spider-Man mythos):
    "In the earliest material, Peter Parker was a dick, and that went on long after the mugger got turned in. His immediate response after Ben was killed? Keep on going with the show business until Jameson starts going after him. His first couple saves are at least in part about His Good Name...and even once he starts going after criminals on a consistent basis it's initially only for photography money. He takes stupid chances. He's desperate for cash...He fakes pictures of Sandman and Electro with the flimsiest of moral justifications. He's got a chip on his shoulder the size of Queens and can barely begin to control his temper. He'll lash out at people on suspicion or anger alone, and in some early stories he just plain gave up or ran away until he learned his lesson or circumstances changed...and even if we can't blame him with all he goes through, he's often far afield of anything resembling ''likeable''...But he changes, so completely many seem to forget he was ever anything other than the official co-saint of the Marvel Universe alongside Steve Rogers...He grows, he shifts, he learns lessons and forgets them and falls and picks himself back up, and he never stops pushing forward. He takes on the responsibility of becoming the Man he claims to be, that others need him to be, even if he doesn't consciously realize it at first...that's what makes him an everyman we can all relate to, because no one ever stops growing up. It's what differentiates him, makes him real, compared to Superman or Batman or the FF or Captain America."
• Most modern DC stories featuring Harley Quinn go out of their way to make her independent in her criminal exploits after it became clear that they could no longer have the primary public perception of her be as the girlfriend/punching bag of The Joker, even though a handful of episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, the series that Harley made her debut in, made it clear that Joker and Harley's relationship is an abusive one that she keeps going back to in spite of herself, as well as having some other episodes feature her on crimes sprees alongside Poison Ivy or by herself, with Joker not even being mentioned.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: Uncle Scrooge's famous money bin is one of the most influential and iconic examples of the Pooled Funds trope. However, unlike many if not most imitators, the comics actually acknowledge the impossibility of swimming in treasure. Scrooge being able to do it is one of many improbable skills of his that leaves people baffled and he claims learning how to do so took a lot of practice. It's also shown that most other characters are unable to do the same; Scrooge's nephew Donald is able to do it (albeit not as well as his uncle) thanks to having spent quite a bit of time observing him in action, but pretty much anyone else who tries it generally injures themselves, just like what would happen to a real person who tried diving into a swimming pool full of gold coins.
  • This also ends up being either lampshaded or a plot point fairly often. One Italian story features Rockerduck building his own money bin, and the ensuing battle is only ended when Scrooge visits Rockerduck's latest attempt and takes a dive in the money, inviting Rockerduck to do the same... and Rockerduck fails miserably and hurts his head by impacting a mass of solid gold. Characters who aren't as familiar with Duckburg or the duck family are also extremely skeptical when they hear about it, considering it a joke or a myth until they see it happen with their own eyes.
• The Killing Joke is the Trope Namer for the Multiple-Choice Past. However, it is clear the fact the Joker uses his potential past as a sob story to justify his atrocities against others. At the end of the story, after the Joker tried and failed to drive Commissioner Gordon to madness, Batman not only tells him that one bad day doesn't drive someone to madness, but even the Joker realizes he has no right to do what he did.
• Wonder Woman was one of the first superheroes (Shazam! predates her by over a year) to be drawn explicitly from ancient mythology, predating the likes of Thor and Hercules by decades. But unlike most later superhero comics that used the idea, early Wonder Woman comics were not a straight-faced tribute to their source material; they were actually a proudly irreverent deconstruction of classical Greek myths that confronted their outdated morals head-on, sometimes in ways that can still seem brazenly subversive by today's standards. To whit: Diana's original backstory is an explicitly revisionist take on the Greek legend of Heracles and Hippolyta where Hippolyta is portrayed as the hero of the story, while Heracles is depicted as a brutish and dimwitted misogynist—and instead of Heracles slaying Hippolyta after taking her precious girdle, Hippolyta takes it back and leads her fellow Amazons to a new island homeland where they can be free from the control of men. William Moulton Marston pretty openly envisioned Wonder Woman as a platform for his feminist beliefs, and conveyed many of those beliefs by framing the series as a more progressive modern alternative to the male-dominated stories of the ancient world.
• Many installments of the Masters of the Universe franchise feature Schizo Tech, featuring futuristic technology alongside medieval style kingdoms, swords and other low-tech weaponry. However, the original minicomics explained that the advanced technology was the result of the "Great Wars" between members of an advanced ancient race, meaning Eternia is a Scavenger World After the End.
• X-Men was one of the first comic books ever to make use of a Mass Empowering Event to justify numerous characters developing superhuman abilities at the same time. In later years, this trope would become a popular method of setting up a superhero series without needing to give every character their own unique Superhero Origin (indeed, Stan Lee admitted that he came up with the premise because he was sick of having to come up with an origin for every new character, and felt that the typical Freak Lab Accident often felt too coincidental to take seriously). But X-Men doesn't just use it as a convenient excuse to give lots of characters cool superpowers: it also examines the social and political ramifications of dozens of people suddenly developing volatile and dangerous abilities, delving deep into the Fantastic Racism and government paranoia that inevitably results—which is now the most well-known thing about the series. If it had been written today, it would probably be seen as a deconstruction of the trope that it helped pioneer.
• The Suicide Squad is one of the most famous cases of Anyone Can Die in comic book history, where the team is composed of C-List Fodder supervillains who can casually die in any mission without slowing down the team, and are employed precisely because of how expendable they are. Must be a shocker when you read Jon Ostrander's classic run and find out that the team actually is composed mostly of superheroes or decent people: The team included the likes of Vixen, the Ditko-era Shade, Black Orchid, Nemesis, Oracle (She actually debuted here) and Nightshade, who are all classical superheroes, and are helped by the likes of Katana or Speedy in some missions. Heck, about half of the villains in the Squad (Bronze Tiger, Deadshot, Punch and Jewelee, the Atom...) are pretty decent people, unlike the current Villain Protagonists. Also, the team's casualties weren't nearly as bad as today's standards: You'd be surprised to find that it's not weird for the team to partake on various missions without a single casualty, and the one time only Rick Flag survived it was his Despair Event Horizon and Amanda Waller was actually horrified (She was actually a Jerk with a Heart of Gold who wasn't afraid to fight the government and felt guilt for each death of the team, odd right?).

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