You Cant Go Home Again / Comic Books

• Silver Surfer: After sacrificing himself to become Galactus' herald, the hero's memory is taken from him AND his homeworld gets displaced. After he (very quickly into the story) regains his memories, the rest of the plot is largely about finding his home planet again.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
  • Occurs to mutant alligator Leatherhead in the Mirage comic after he is inadvertently left behind on Earth by the escaping Utroms; several stories involve him unsuccessfully trying to reach the Utrom homeworld.
  • In the IDW comic, a mutagen bomb mutates thousands of people in New York and several city blocks are quarantined, leaving people separated from their friends and family both inside and outside the zone. One of them is Mona Lisa, a college student from Maryland turned into a mutant salamander and unable to go home; when she gets the chance to call her parents, they are horrified by her appearance and hang up on her.
• This is the premise of the Legion of Super-Heroes story Legion Lost. A group of Legionnaires find themselves galaxies away from Earth in a trashed starbase.
• Alan Moore wrote a Time Twister for 2000 AD centered around a character, Sideways Scuttleton, who can travel to alternate universes by "wiggling his back in a certain way." Unfortunately, he didn't count on his back going out in his later years, making it difficult to him to return to his own universe. The story is also possibly a subversion because when he asks someone for bus fare in a dimension that he's pretty certain is his own, the man produces the British £1 coin which upsets Scuttleton because in his dimension people use paper notes instead of coins; however, the story was written shortly after such coins were first introduced in 1983, and Scuttleton very well may have stumbled into his home dimension without fully realizing it.
• The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck combines this with Stranger in a Familiar Land. Having spent most of his teen and adult life abroad, Scrooge has a great deal of trouble fitting in with the traditional Scottish people. He decides to begin a new life in America, this time bringing his sisters along for the ride.
• Used as the in-story reason for Static joining the Teen Titans. He was worried that his family believed him to be dead due to the months he spent in captivity, so he stayed with the Titans for a while until he could work up the nerve to return home and confront his parents.
• The Origin of Lilith: After being revealed as a goddess, Lilith can not return to Earth, she must stay in Olympus with her family.
• In Crisis on Infinite Earths, after the five surviving Earth universes are merged together, the heroes of Earths-2, S, and X find out that they can't return to their home universes since they no longer exist, with Earth-2 Superman taking it the hardest because that means that his world's Lois Lane no longer exists — or so he thought, since Alexander Luthor Jr. saved her by transporting her into another dimension prior to the universes merging.
• Superman:
  • Superboy-Prime had no home universe to return to after Crisis On Infinite Earths had ended and so decided to join Earth-2 Superman, his wife Lois Lane, and Alexander Luthor Junior from Earth-3 into a paradise dimension where they could be at peace. Unfortunately, time was not kind to Superboy-Prime in this dimension, as he watched the Post-Crisis Earth's Superboy have the life that he himself wished to have, not to mention he was missing being home in his own universe, so he joined with Alexander to manipulate things in the Post-Crisis universe so that they could resurrect the Multiverse in Infinite Crisis. However, even with the resurrection of multiple Earths, Superboy-Prime was upset that his Earth wasn't resurrected and thus couldn't go home, so his next plan was to destroy Oa and cause another Big Bang that would replace the current universe with a new one, where Superboy-Prime would be its prime hero. It would be many years later in Dark Nights: Death Metal that Superboy-Prime sacrifices himself to damage the Batman Who Laughs so badly that his Dark Multiverse is destroyed. As thanks, he is resurrected back on his Earth-Prime as if it hadn't been lost to the Crisis.
  • When Power Girl finally had her back story settled during Infinite Crisis it was decided that she still came from the alternate universe of Earth-2 which had been destroyed in Crisis on Infinite Earths. Under Geoff Johns run Karen struggled with being the sole survivor of an entire universe, until she was seemingly sent back to Earth-2 by the being called Gog. The residents of Earth-2 believed theirs was the only Earth that survived the first Crisis, until it was discovered that this Earth-2 was a brand new version with a copy of Power Girl already living in it. Karen was then hunted down like a criminal because her copy believed she was an impostor who had something to do with the disappearance of Superman.
  • In The Supergirl Saga, Pocket Universe Matrix contacts Superman and brings him over to her world, which turns out to be completely devastasted with Smallville being the only city still functioning due to the Pocket Universe Lex Luthor's scientific discoveries. At the end of the story, with Matrix being the only living thing left in the Pocket Universe, Superman takes her back home to his universe.
  • In series Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade, Supergirl gets stuck in Earth because neither she nor Superman knows how to travel across a dimensional barrier.
  • In the Bizarrogirl storyline, Supergirl's Bizarro counterpart was sent to Earth by her cousin to save her from Bizarro World's destruction. Supergirl takes her back to her world only to find her planet's half-eaten, and most locals hate her.
  • In Last Daughter of Krypton, Kara discovers that her hometown Argo City survived Krypton's explosion and has been drifting across space since then, but it has become a ghost town. Shortly after, Argo City is consumed by a blue star while Kara is forced to watch helplessly. At this point, she acknowledges her home is gone for good.
  • The Killers of Krypton: During her quest, Kara makes a stop by the ruins of Krypton. As overwhelmed by old memories, she can see all that remains of her former home is a radioactive asteroid belt orbiting the Rao star.
• The Green Lantern/Star Trek (2009) crossover "The Spectrum War" ends with some of the surviving Lanterns (John Stewart, Hal Jordan and Saint Walker) serving on the Enterprise, some (Kilowog, Guy Gardner and Star Sapphire) remaining on Earth, the remaining (Sinestro, Atrocious and Larfleeze) MIA but all of them unable to return to their universe.
• The Runaways are all displaced kids; the original team became orphans after their efforts to stop their supervillain parents from destroying the world resulted in said parents all dying, Victor became an orphan after his mother was murdered, Xavin lost their homeworld to a war, and Klara fled from an abuser.
• Crimson: Alex Elder is forced to abandon his home after being turned into a vampire, not helped by the fact he almost succumbs to his bloodlust and almost feeds on his little sister. After fulfilling his job at the end of the series, he goes on a quest to cure himself so he can reunite with his loved ones.
• Albedo: Birthright: After expelling the Tosiu invaders from Shartoa, Alfon and his men are attacked by anti-royalist forces hellbent to kill him and his family just to prevent the return of the previous status quo before the Tosiu invaded the country and they only managed to barely escape from the planet alive after the crew of the Winkles rescue them.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Wonder Woman (1942): When Mala gets knocked out and comes to in the ocean she ends up swimming to New York city. She is terrified that in doing so she has lost her birthright and her claim and home as an Amazon since only the champion is allowed to enter the outside world. Since she only stepped on land outside of the Paradise Isles due to the actions of another she is allowed to return, though some other Amazons are not so lucky.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): Themyscira was shifted to another dimension by Circe at one point, leaving Diana with no idea how to find it and with Diana and the world presuming it was lost forever. She doesn't learn what really happened until the events of "The Contest", in which she does finally get to go home again after thinking it was lost forever.
  • Wonder Woman (Rebirth): Part of the condition of leaving Themyscira was that Diana couldn't ever return. That Diana has gone home on many an occasion raises a few questions in-universe. Turns out, she never went home and the times she returned to Themyscira were illusions.
  • The Legend of Wonder Woman (2016): Diana and Alcippe cannot return home again as Themyscira is hidden and their rebuttal and refusal of gods seals their inability to return as the gods go out of their way to bar them from it afterwards. In the meantime the god's fighting over how to prevent their power loss from killing them outright has left Themyscira in ruins and killed all but one of the Amazons remaining there.
• The fate of the Phantom Stranger in two of his possible origins in Secret Origins. In both cases he is fated to be the Wandering Jew, walking the earth and helping others until the end of time, but never able to return home to the life he once knew.
• Ultimate X Men: Derek Morgan's brother is a cop, who harbors Fantastic Racism and is Lawful Stupid at the same time. When he learns Derek is a Mutant he draws a gun on him and tries to hand him over to the government. Jean wipes his memory so he thinks Derek just left to live with a friend in Cincinnati.
• Invoked by Master Mogul in Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics). Master Mogul realizes that his apprentice Silver’s frequent trips to the past to Set Right What Once Went Wrong have slowing been causing changes to their present. Realizing that Silver’s next trip could butterfly him out of existence and leave his apprentice without his primary means of support, Mogul tasks Silver with staying in the past until he is absolutely certain their Bad Future has been averted.
• Star Trek (IDW): In "After Darkness", Spock succumbs to the Pon Farr and becomes feral because Vulcan is gone and his organic link to the planet is not present. This forces the Enterprise crew to fool the ship's sensors (and Kirk) into thinking Vulcan has been restored in order to fix his condition.
• Star Trek (IDW): In "After Darkness", Spock succumbs to the Pon Farr and becomes feral because Vulcan is gone and his organic link to the planet is not present. This forces the Enterprise crew to fool the ship's sensors (and Kirk) into thinking Vulcan has been restored in order to fix his condition.

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