Crossed / Tropes E to M

Crossed Trope Examples
A - D | E - M | N - S | T - Z

---

E

• Easter Egg: In the first issue of Shrink Jack receives the message from his brother Clancy on Facebook. Upon looking closer, one can find "avatarpresscomics" typed in the search bar subdirectory.
• Eats Babies:
  • The sad fate of Kayleen Pratt's unborn child after she's turned into one of the Crossed.
  • The Crossed having no qualms with doing this is a key reason their population declines so dramatically by the time of Crossed +100.
• Elaborate Underground Base:
  • Cody made a living making these for wealthy wannabe preppers. His biggest one, somewhere in Texas, had a garden, multiple bedrooms, hot tubs, a library (with books focused on ways to rebuild society), a helipad, a garage full of Cool Cars and a wine cellar. He claims that only a small fraction of the number of people it was designed to house made it there before the roads were overrun by wrecked cars and Crossed and from what we see there are at least 15 or 20 people who did make it.
  • Professor Nelson also had one, which, while far less luxurious (albeit rigged with an elaborate security hatch and security cameras, did stretch out pretty far once Washington and his group made it down.
  • The bunker that Gordon Brown and his staff take shelter in during the early hours of the outbreak is a pretty basic version. It's underground, has a communications center and its mentioned that it also has a fully seal-able room for the prime minister if the need arises. It is also completely defensible, with SAS operatives and SO1 officers brought on site to fortify the place with machine gun turrets. It should be mentioned however that the bunker is located within the same research facility that's holding the Patient Zero for the Crossed UK outbreak and is also located with the outbreak's epicenter in rural Yorkshire. Brown was never supposed to be brought there in the first place; his bodyguards argued that he be flown to London or Chequers but his aide manipulated things to have him brought there. When the outbreak is in full swing, its become too dangerous to move him from his ad hoc command center to somewhere more secure, so Brown and his staff have to make due.
• Elites Are More Glamorous:
  • Harry and his teammates from The Fatal Englishman and The Thin Red Line. They're all soldiers from an unspecified special forces unit of the British Army. While not outright stated, it's implied that they were in the SAS.
  • In Wish You Were Here it’s played straight with Jackson, an ex-SBS trooper, but otherwise averted (Action Girl Elisa isn’t a veteran despite Shaky's initial suspicions, former paratrooper John is kind of a Dumb Muscle and not a major character, and the Black Watch soldiers at Fort George suffer from Dropped a Bridge on Him).
  • In Quisling Oliver clearly hopes this for Cheyenne Mountain but they don’t live up to his expectations. Nor does the National Guard team he approaches earlier in the arc.
  • Averted with Captain Juneaux's ODA team. While they accomplish their mission, the way they had to do it leaves them shaken and its implied that even before the Crossed, they had done things as bad or worse before.
• Elite Zombie: The "Super Crossed" are rare examples of Crossed who have retained just enough of their humanity to act as Horde Masters. They're still violent sadists, but they can delay gratification for a greater payoff later. Their tendencies can vary somewhat: Smokey is as sadistic as the rest of them, but has some sense of compassion and speaks in terse, choppy English, Aoileann is notably less sadistic, similarly terse and likewise has some compassion and Beauregard Salt is an amoral sociopath, but is as lucid as he was before being infected (he didn't even notice he was infected until he looked in a mirror and saw the scars) and seeks to instill a sense of Pragmatic Villainy in his followers.
• Enemy Civil War: One of the Salt Clan leaders Sneezy (intelligent like the other "children" but decidedly lacking in patience) ultimately becomes uncaring for anything of Beuragard's plans for the Crossed, only desiring to infect everyone and everything. A dying Jokemercy warns Future of this and Bashful's unsuccessful attempts to contain her, with Sneezy succeding in infecting Bailey's group at large at the end of series and humanity might eventually be wiped out, but it's predicted that this will ultimately lead to the destruction of the Crossed too with so many new "dumb" infected and the complete lack of care of any long term plan to persist and survive.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • We get several in the first scene of Wish You Were Here Shaky gets to show his wit and some humanity while also inadvertently causing harm by being too distracted by the sight of a Crossed raping a dolphin to ring the warning bell, giving that Crossed time to spot him and start paddling over towards Cava. Elisa races to the tower and takes Shaky’s rifle after he misses a shot, and finishes the Crossed off as he's just inches away from Vincent. On the beach Rab quickly organizes a fire team that includes John and Skip, watching in relief at Vincent's survival, and preparing to send a boat to pick him up when more Crossed appear and go after him. Rab briefly holds out some hope for Vincent's survival even as Don callously -but correctly- dismisses this notion and says to break out the heavy weaponry.
  • The Gamekeeper meeting Shaky and only letting him accompany the group after he manages to kill a Crossed, mocking Shaky's past as a writer afterwards and then in his next flashback demonstrating his own impressive survival skills, as well as his lack of investment in the fate of his fellow survivors, who he asserts will only live if they do exactly what he says, especially when he tells them whether to move or not move when Crossed are nearby.
  • Harry sitting on a hill, waxing philosophically, before taking a machine gun and mowing away a bunch of Crossed.
  • Frank puttering along on his motorcycle and trying to make small talk when Errol pulls alongside him, only to be interrupted when Errol slams his visor shut and lifts a hammer to smash the head of a Crossed that they’re passing.
  • Rob and Alec arguing about fishing with grenades, while Ian watches them with a snarky and cynical monologue.
  • Amanda saving Harold's life, showing her to be a good person who makes costly mistakes.
  • Sutter saving Jane and Esperanza from the Crossed chasing them while having a creepy inner monologue that reveals he sees them as expendable.
• Eternal Recurrence: A cover for Badlands shows an archaeology team discovering an ancient burial site containing Crossed corpses and a mural depicting a female Crossed being worshipped, implying that all of this has happened before.
• Ethical Slut:
  • Natalie in Gore Angels enjoys graveyard sex and admits to watching porno videos, but is fairly pleasant and is disgusted and furious to find out that Ryan raped Emiko, delivering a Groin Attack to him with her fist.
  • Most of the characters in the original +100 run, where casual sex is less of a taboo and people in general are a lot more community-minded and friendly (outside of places like Camp Casper).
• Et Tu, Brute?: All of the non-infected characters (except for the sailor), who made a deal with Smokey (however all of them ended up getting killed by him.
  • In the case of the last one, he stayed loyal to Smokey and even lived long enough to still be around when his children were growing. But unlike the others before him, he ended up getting killed by Smokey (though based on the look on his face, Smokey may have actually regretted it and even felt remorseful). He may have even considered it a mercy kill, considering he seemed to be aware his more torture-fond wives were waiting in the woods.
• Eunuchs Are Evil: Various minor Crossed play this straight (whenever they sink to that level of self-mutilation they are generally pretty Ax-Crazy). However, Fleshcook (who either castrated himself or had it done to him by the other members of the Salt Clan so he’d have an excuse not to join the rest of the Camp Casper soldiers in their rape culture, which would have led to him infecting any victims and exposing his secret) averts this to an extreme level.
• Evil Matriarch: Joyce Pratt becomes the main villain of "Family Values" after falling to the Crossed.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • Boss Yamada may be an asshole....but his last moments with his Crossed!daughter (as well as the fact that he would sacrifice his own thugs just to save her, even after she disowns him as her father, and that he sees himself as her last line of defense) ultimately indicates he has this trope badly. In essence, he is practically the personification of this trope. He only shoots himself because he feels that he failed her as a father and also because he was horrified when The Virus caused her to release a lot of repressed hatred towards him. Also counts as Even Evil Has Standards, as one of Boss Yamada's only morals is that family is very important.
  • Hazuki herself after becoming Crossed also qualifies, refusing to attack her friends and only working to persuade them that continued resistance is futile.
  • Todd from the 2013 Special allows random women onto his Big Badass Rig, but only if they agree to become his concubines and serfs. The protagonists assume that he sees them as nothing more than sex slaves, and are thus surprised when he actually breaks down crying when of his "wives" is killed in a gun battle.
• Everyone Has Standards: Don is one of the closest characters to an outright villain at Cava but he refuses to cut Jasper’s tendons when they’re marooning him.
• Exact Eavesdropping: Played with when nearly all of Cava hears the truth about the lies that made them attack the Drift Fleet and how the Nun is there because she's after Shaky, but is also holding back the rest of the Crossed from just wiping everyone out. However, given what had just taken place, it was pretty inevitable people would be eavesdropping (although it's pretty funny when we see just how many of them there are, and how Jackson is Genre Savvy about their presence).
• Exact Words: In The Fatal Englishman, Harry’s plan to set off the biological weapons at Porton Down initially sounds fairly reasonable and necessary when he describes it to Father Dennis, saying that while it will certainly kill some of the approximately 50,000 or so survivors still eking out an existence in Britain, he knows of multiple groups with nuclear blast containment gear and he'll radio the others to go for offshore islands or the high ground before flipping the switch. At the end of the arc, though, as he talks things through with his men during their "Chinese parliament," we find out his saying that more than one group had NBC gear meant that only two did, that only four groups he's aware of have working radios to receive his warning, and that the chances of surviving off-shore or on the high ground are worse than he implied. All of this contributes to his ultimate decision not to go through with the plan.
• Excrement Statement: Just one of the many ways the Crossed have their fun.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!:
  • Watching Smokey and his group through his bunker's periscope, Cody is describing how Smokey seems different from the other Crossed as he looks like he's actually thinking, right before Smokey turns around and stares right at his periscope.
  • A while later, Cody tells Smokey that for his Baby Factory, he really only needs to keep one male prisoner, or "stud," alive to impregnate the women, only to falter when a smirking Smokey points a single finger at him.
• Expy: Crossed bears a mild resemblance to the Hentai anime series Kansen: a fast-acting infectious pathogen alters human behavior so that their only priorities is to spread the infection and commit acts they would not normally commit. While such acts for Crossed include murder, torture, rape (regardless of gender, age or species), cannibalism, etc, Kansen focuses entirely on having sex regardless of their partner, location or consent.
  • Also, the Five Bloody Fingers are basically a Darker and Edgier version of the Big Hero 6 team in terms of personality, minus Baymax. Satoshi is basically a fat Hiro, Hazuki and Miku are basically Honey Lemon and Go-Go Tomago respectively except their position as civilian and Yakuza affiliate are interestingly inverted, Koki is basically Wasabi No-Ginger if he were a Yakuza bodyguard, and Taro is basically Fred if he were a bit of a pervert and a gamer instead of a comic book geek.
• Extreme Doormat:
  • Gerry Stilwell to Captain Barnes. This is what ultimately gets him killed.
  • Initially Richie to Jasper, until he finally mans up just before his death moments later.
  • Also Mrs. Pratt to her husband Joseph, knowing full well the abuse he has heaped on their daughters yet constantly choosing to look the other way and pretend that everything is all right out of fear of him... right until she infects herself to save Addy from him.
  • Zig-zagged with Edmund's father from Yellow Belly. He is mentioned to having never stood up to anyone (including his wife), but the second the Crossed show up, he is quick to charge at them while leaving his children in safety. Too bad he gets infected rather quickly and then attacks one of his own sons anyway.
• Extreme Omnisexual: Most Crossed are not picky and will fuck anything, from animals to inanimate objects.

F

• Face Death with Dignity:
  • At the end of the last issue of The Fatal Englishman, Harry calmly walks out of the main building of Porton Down to stand in front of an incoming Crossed horde, armed only with a pistol.
  Harry's last words: Tally ho. Steady the buffs. Up, guards, and at 'em. Stand to.
  • Selene in Wish You Were Here, when she uses the last claymore on Aoileann's Crossed horde.
  • Wentz attempts this in Badlands #70. He doesn't succeed, though.
• Fake Crossover: The Mercury Heat arc "Another Bloody Crossover" is a crossover with Crossed that is canon for Mercury Heat but not Crossed. In the arc, Crossed is depicted as a fictional work within the Mercury Heat universe, and the comic's villain is a mad scientist who is a fan of Crossed and intentionally creates a memetic virus that mimics the Crossed virus.
• Fallout Shelter Fail:
  • "Quisling" shows the Cheyenne Mountain complex set up to house NORAD. Oliver leads Smokey there hoping that the bunker's status as a continuity-of-government facility is still intact enough that they can destroy Smokey's horde with superior firepower and tactics, only to discover that the bunker evidently was already hit by the Crossed and, while there are still survivors within, it is operating on a skeleton crew that has barely managed to fend off prior attacks and is quickly overwhelmed when Smokey's horde overwhelms the surface defenders.
  • Homo Tortor has Professor Nelson and a group of seven others travel to a bunker after the C-Day. After Washington and Warren find the bunker ransacked, the former studies the diary and learns that things quickly went south after one of their own turned on the surface, killed a fellow group member and then fell into a water tank, right before he was bisected with a shotgun blast and left to die. Since the legs were in the water by the time they were fished out, several weeks later the whole shelter had become a deathtrap with everyone either dead or infected.
  • The final Badlands arc shows that just because you can book a place in the apocalypse bunker does not mean that you might make it alive to said bunker when shit does hit the fan. Many of Cody's clients were in city centers when the C-Day hit and thus were all slaughtered by the Crossed, with only those who had convenient means of transportation making it out alive, like Bobby Lee in his helicopter. Cody himself made it a point to purchase a house close to the apocalypse bunker he had designed (without telling his clients to do so as well), meaning that when C-Day hit he was the first to arrive at the bunker on his motorcycle. The stuff in the bunker itself averts Cozy Catastrophe, even before Smoky finds them and quickly renders it uninhabitable by clogging all the outside vents.
• Fan Disservice: A lot of Crossed covers depict sexy and scantily clad women...soaked in blood, in the midst of a disgusting or gory act, or being brutally attacked and/or raped.
• Fate Worse than Death: Becoming Crossed is generally thought to be this, which is why characters who have been splashed by Crossed bodily fluids tend to commit suicide or are killed by their non-infected friends and relatives. Being caught alive by the Crossed is also something that people will go to all lengths to avoid. Likewise, willingly submitting to the infection is either seen as an act of extreme desperation (as what happened with Addy's mother in Family Values, when she saw no other way to save her daughter) or an act of unforgivable depravity (like with Steve in Homo Superior and Clooney in The Golden Road, though in the latter case it's more The Dog Bites Back).
  Harry (in The Fatal Englishman, as he is walking behind his friends to one final confrontation with the Crossed): "Paddy, Jock and Taff. I've asked so much of them. They've never let me down. And I know with terrible finality that I cannot see them torn apart. Defiled. Or born again as demons." He shoots them all dead. "I cannot."
• Fear Is the Appropriate Response: One of the general themes of the series. Due to the nature of the Crossed, standing your ground and fighting them is the surest way to die a painful and messy death, if not turn into one of the Crossed yourself. Hiding and fleeing is the only sensible course of action, with remote, inaccessible and sparsely populated locations (like Cava in Wish You Were Here) being the only safe places in which to settle. Even that might not be enough.
  • Shaky (Wish You Were Here) and Edmund (the "Yellow Belly" arc of Badlands) openly regard themselves as cowards, with Edmund in particular loathing himself because of it. However, it's worth noting that they are still alive and uninfected (so far), while all their friends and relatives are dead or crossed. So their cowardice has very likely made the difference between life and death.
    • ... and as soon as Edmund decides to be brave, he gets killed by the girl he saved. Had he just abandoned her when the Crossed attacked, or had he decided not to come clean to the bikers about what really happened to Nicole, he would most likely still be alive. Moral: Courage will get you killed or turned in the world of the Crossed.
• Female Misogynist: Archivist Julie notes that the few female soldiers in Camp Casper were, if anything, even crueler and more vicious toward the female "support" personnel than their male counterparts. She theorizes it's because they didn't want to think that they were similar to the non-soldier women, i.e., "weak."
• Flanderization:
  • Elisa and Don are engaging, nuanced characters for the first half of Wish You Were Here despite having their flaws, but those flaws are amped up to eleven by the third volume and get both of them killed in short order.
  • In the final Badlands volume, Cody’s transition into an Oliver Expy, while not a huge curveball, still felt a little contrived and irritating.
• Foil:
  • The three fathers on Cava form a three-way version of this for each other. Des is an assertive Blood Knight (possibly a Death Seeker) of African descent guilty of Parental Neglect who is the only one whose spouse didn’t survive with him and was a criminal before C-Day. Skip, a somewhat submissive Caucasian Australian who maintains a mostly sunny disposition, was a “beachfront hippie” giving parasailing tours before C-Day and is the only one of the three to both not be the biological father of his child and to survive. And Mr. Masoud, a reserved Pakistani family man and eventual Death Seeker who seems to be the only religious one of the three, avoids the group politics, is the only one with two children and is also the only one to lose a child, in the form of a Mercy Kill at his own hands.
  • Elisa could be one to Aoileann and perhaps Shaky sees that in her. Both were blondes who apparently had wild teenaged years, and were caregivers afterwards (Elisa to her mother, Aoileann at a nursing home). The key difference between them is that Aoileann is an Actual Pacifist (even after being infected, to some degree) while Elisa feels like a Blood Knight at worst, and a hardened Action Girl at best.
• Foregone Conclusion:
  • Those who read the "Thin Red Line" prequel arc of Badlands already know that any attempt to fight or contain the pandemic is doomed to fail, that both Britain and the world will be overrun in the days ahead, that Harry and his team will survive the events of the outbreak and die five years later in Porton Down, and that the infected Russian pilots will fail to deliver their payload to the US mainland. The drama instead comes from the first events of the pandemic as they happened, and the true nature and origin of the virus.
  • The first volume mentions the fall of the San Diego Naval Base early in the epidemic, so we know they're living on borrowed time when they show up in the Gavin Land arc, although to be fair the soldiers themselves know this and are instead focusing on evacuating anyone they can.
  • The final issue of the original +100 issue, set several years after the Salt Clan show themselves mentions that Happy's branch of the Salt Clan has been experiencing success in Wyoming. which robs a lot of the suspense out of the conflict between Fleshcook and Commander-Chief Nathan in MIMIC.
• Friendly Zombie: Severly downplayed, but there are a few Crossed that don't display the same sort of sadistic tendencies as the rest.
  • Hazuki in Five Bloody Fingers. After becoming Crossed she refuses to attack her friends, who she considers to be her true family. She doesn't even say that much disturbing stuff, at least relative to other Crossed.
  • Aoileann in Wish You Were Here zig-zags this trope. On one hand, she refuses to kill anyone personally. On the other hand, she is leading a horde of Crossed and has no qualms with them killing people.
    • She also manages to overcome her desires at the end by agreeing to sacrifice Shaky and allow the surviving Cavaites to go after hearing his pleas to, although this causes her followers to mutiny.
  • Horrifyingly averted with the group of religious Crossed in Breakdown. You'd think they might qualify due to the fact they are extremely opposed to rape (and in fact are celibate), but they still are eager to torture "sinners" which happens to include anyone who engages in sex, human or Crossed.
  • Patient Zero in The Thin Red Line actively resists the infection and the urges it gives him. He ends up giving in to the virus' influence after Alistair has him tortured.
  • Matthias in Conquers All is focused solely on finding Serena and getting revenge on the people that kept him from her. He shows no interest in engaging in the sort of depravity the rest of the Crossed enjoy until he takes a bunch of ketamine after learning Serena has been dead for days.
  • The elderly Crossed woman who is a central focus in The Folly is an example of Playing With this trope. For most of the comic, it's unclear if she is less sadistic than the rest of the Crossed, but she is pitiable due to the other Crossed brutalizing her when bored. Towards the end, she brings Isaac his inhaler, does not attack him and even ends up saving him from the horde of Crossed that used to bully him. Then she promptly turns around to get him, though we never find out if this was the case.
  • The Crossed baby Now Future and Mustaqba raise in Crossed +100. As far as can be discerned, she is pretty much a typical young child with little to no of the usual aggression the Crossed display. She is still kept hidden, both to keep her from accidentally infecting anyone and to ensure she isn't killed by Bailey.
  • Fleshcook in +100: Mimic is perhaps the straightest example of this trope for the Crossed yet. He is eloquent, philosophical and displays strong capacity for compassion towards Archivist Julie. His tendencies in this direction are so strong that the "support personnel" of Casper Compound actually help him take over the base because the military forces there are so abusive and exploitative they think they would be better off under Fleshcook and as it turns out, they aren't wrong.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Before she was infected, Aoileann was a kindly nun who risked her life to save the patients of a nursing home that she worked in even though half the patients there were infected. After her turn, she leads an entire army of Crossed.
• Full-Frontal Assault: The Crossed are fond of this.
• Future Slang: The survivors in +100 speak heavily in this manner. While some characters simply speak in an exaggerated Joisey dialect, most of the cast communicates in a more Midwestern dialect, with several hallmarks:
  • Widely accepted enshrinement of a number of phonetic misunderstandings and mispronunciations. Ex: "Peace be upon you" as "peace beyond you", "same old" as "say mould", "horrible" as "horrorball" or "horrorballs", various American city names twisted into rough approximations (Chatanooga becomes Chooga), and so forth (despite this, no specific indication is given that literacy in English has declined overall).
  • Sharply curtailed vocabulary. Characters use fairly small numbers of very clipped, short, simple words with more possible meanings and connotations. In addition to a bone, the word "skull," for instance, also sees use as a noun or verb for almost anything related to thought or imagination, "buddy" for almost any social relationships or alliances, "movie" as the adjective for almost anything positive, etc.
  • Verb conjugation rules seem to be largely out the window. Present tense is used extensively, and many verbs are used interchangeably as adjectives.
  • A few miscellaneous tics. "But" is always preceded by "and" for no discernible reason. "Fuck" is used as a tic or intensifier (see Cluster F-Bomb above). "Brown" seems to have supplanted "shit" as an obscenity, but its grammatical context is completely unchanged from the previous term.
  • One of the side stories in Crossed +100 MIMIC is set in 2060, 52 years after C-Day. It features a young woman named Remy Crowell who is writing the last words into her diary before her fortified settlement is overrun by a large band of Crossed (perhaps one of the last such bands left outside the Salt Clan). It provides an interesting glimpse into the evolution of the English language in the years and decades since the fall of civilization. Remy's writing already shows traces of what the language will be like in Future's time, as she uses words like "skull", "opsy" and "fuck" the same way that Future and her contemporaries use decades later. However, her language is otherwise very recognizable to an English-speaking person of the early 21st century. Meanwhile, James, the oldest man in the settlement and the only one who was alive during C-Day, speaks ordinary early 21st century English on account of his age and background.

G

• Gang of Hats:
  • In "Psychopath" we see two tribes of Crossed who've developed different habits. The Skinfaces who cut off their victims faces and wear them on various parts of their body, and the Bloodskins who soak in their victims bloods until they absorb enough of it to give their skin a red tint.
  • Amanda, the survivor of Psychopath, notes in a later story that groups of Crossed can develop a "theme" due to boredom, because they were like-minded people prior to infection (an example being the rescue/medical team from "The Lesser of 2 Evils") or because their leader(s) found something that they liked (such as a specific form of self-mutilation) and had their followers adopt it. One of the clearest examples is in Yellow Belly, where the majority of the Crossed are dressed as clowns because the outbreak initially starts at a circus, but it's later shown that even people that were newly Crossed the next day are put into clown makeup to fit the theme.
  • The Professor's tribe in Homo Tortor style themselves after the titular (fictional) race of humans. The final arc of Badlands has a group of Homo Tortor lookalike Crossed show up as opponents of Smokey who are forcibly incorporated into his band, which may or may not be the same band.
• Gender-Blender Name:
  • Steve in "Homo Superior". If it's short for anything, we don't find out.
  • Roshan is also more typically a boys name in Pakistan.
• Genre Savvy: In "The Lesser of 2 Evils," Morgan and Olivia have managed to survive in the middle of C-Day through their makeup skills and by following the lessons contained in their copy of Surviving D-Day, a guide to living through the Zombie Apocalypse. This fails to save them.
• Genre Shift:
  • The "Thin Red Line" arc of Badlands is this, in part due to it's nature as an Origins Episode for the franchise, where it takes on aspects of a geopolitical thriller as Gordon Brown and his advisers attempt to deal both with the emerging pandemic and the possibility of nuclear armageddon while a medical team attempts to find the cause of the infection as the world begins to tear itself apart. Most noticeable is the minimal use of the series' trademark Gorn, which is instead used sparingly and effectively.
  • Also the actual Crossed (i.e. those with the facial rash, the unspeakably violent/sadistic behavior, and the retention of their human intelligence) only begin to appear halfway through the arc, though several different strains of Proto-Crossed ranging from the mindlessly homicidal and sadistic (such as Harry's friend's security team and the villagers who attacked the nearby airbase) to the suicidal (the villagers who hurled themselves into the gorge) to the simply crazy.
  • The Anti-Crossed arc set at the comic-book store is set post-C-Day but relegates the Crossed to the background, aside from a few Crossed shown outside the store in the present and flashbacks to C-Day, the majority of the Crossed appearing in the arc appear in the in-universe comic book as enemies of the titular hero. The main focus is on the store owners' abuse of Leigha and her escape from their captivity with the help of a gay couple who stumbles on the store and thematically centers on the topic of misogyny.
• Gladiator Games: In one of his more impressive/less despicable moments, Cody suggests to Smokey that due to there being so few humans, he entertain the troops by having the stupid or disobedient ones kill each other once a week (comparing it to Friday night prize fights). Smokey is skeptical until Cody suggests having them try to think of creative and gruesome new ways to kill each other every time, at which point Smokey gives a Slasher Smile.
  • In Homo Tortor, the prehistoric "Blood Men" also hold these, kidnapping modern humans and forcing them to fight each other, Crossed-infected Blood Men, and various prehistoric animals. The main characters are forced into such a game, and end up getting killed when the Eldritch Abomination that the Blood Men worship emerges from a volcano. Maybe.
• Good Shepherd: Unusually for a Garth Ennis work, Father Dennis in The Fatal Englishman is one of the most genuinely decent characters in the series, with his only flaw being his relative naivete and optimism (for instance, trying a Pretend We're Dead gambit that doesn't work). His defining moment is choosing to escort a large number of children when his parishioners voted to cast them out, and he does so to the best of his abilities. Though the soldiers he meets up with are largely disdainful towards his Roman Catholic faith, he respects their beliefs (though he does talk to them about it, it comes off as mainly curiosity), and he's able to raise a solid counterargument by pointing out the flaws of the British Empire which they speak of so reverently. Even Harry, after spending most of their time together wheedling him, sums him up as a good man—he argues that Dennis's goodness stems from his essentially good character rather than his faith, but he still believes his good to be entirely genuine.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: A possible explanation for the origin of the Crossed virus. As revealed in The Thin Red Line the British man identified as the outbreak's patient zero (or one of them at least) has nightmarish visions of many various atrocities throughout human history. Worse yet, many of these visions are of events that he could not possibly have known about (he says as much himself), adding further credence to idea that the virus is a supernatural phenomenon. It's possible (but by no means confirmed) that everyone infected with the virus goes through this and become Crossed because said visions irrevocably shatter their sanity.
• Gorn: Those murders and rapes mentioned above? All drawn in loving detail.
  • Remember the Reavers from Firefly? Who'll rape you to death, eat your flesh, and sew your skins into their clothing? (If you're very VERY lucky, ...In That Order). Well, in that show, you didn't see any of it. Here, however...
  • The series even has "torture" variant covers for people who think the standard editions don't have enough Gorn.
• Graceful Ladies Like Purple: Occasionally. Kelly is a good example, although given her blindness she wouldn't have picked most of her own clothes.
• Gratuitous Rape: The Crossed really like their rape. Dubbed "buggerkill" in "Wish You Were Here."
• Grew a Spine: Lloyd spends most of his page-time too terrified of the Gamekeeper either killing or abandoning him and Agnes to stop him from repeatedly raping her, but he eventually declares that enough is enough after he and Ashoke find some shotguns in a store they were salvaging, taking one and going to confront the Gamekeeper. It ended poorly.
• Grievous Bottley Harm: In Psychopath, Harold kills Darwin by jamming a broken bottle into his neck and letting him bleed out.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: In Dead or Alive, a scene also occurs in which one of the Crossed picks up a baby and starts beating people with it. This trope at its most uncomfortable.
• Groin Attack: There's some... pretty graphic ones in the series.
  • Less graphic is Nathalie's response to learning her boyfriend Ryan raped Emiko. Though Emiko later threatens Ryan with castration, she doesn't follow through on the threat.
• Gun Nut:
  • Lewis in Homo Tortor had so many guns he was paranoid the government would seize them.
  • Joe (the cop from Richie's group in DOA) is also noted as spending most of his time cleaning and maintaining his gun.

H

• Happily Married: Emiko's parents. The Masouds, the Thackerys and Skip and Jackie in Wish You Were Here. Eventually Future and Mustuqba.
• Has a Type:
  • We never meet the fiance he lost on C-Day but Shaky's other love interests Aoileann and Tabitha both have long blonde hair and a lot of determination, as does Elisa who he’s also attracted to but never makes a move on.
  • The girls Edmund feels attracted to are all trim brunettes.
  • Both of Cody’s love interests, Anna and Violet, have long dark hair, and at least a little defiance, and wear purple.
• Hate Plague: The Crossed have absolutely no inhibitions and a cruel intelligence. When there aren't uninfected to hunt, they turn on each other.
• Head-in-the-Sand Management:
  • The Im’am spends a long time disbelieving Future about the Salt Clan and once she finally finds out they're right, dithers and has no good strategy about what to do next when they're surrounded by Crossed and have a week to decide whether they want to accept their deal or die at their hands. This leads to a coup by Knight Templar Bailey.
  • By the end of Grave New World, Barnes is focusing too much on internal issues to be vigilant against the Crossed.
  • In the first Badlands arc, Ian was part of a group that had three de facto leaders, squabbling constantly (one who was convinced there was surviving society in England and wanted to go back there, one was a constable who was convinced the army would come for them if they stuck where they were, and the third guy just kept insulting the other two). When they couldn’t even agree to argue softly enough to ensure that no nearby Crossed would hear them, Ian decided that Screw This, I'm Outta Here.
• Happy Ending Override: The Livers ends with Amanda finally joining the Livers and serving them a fresh meal (a man whom she rescued in the beginning of the arc). Breakdown, however, opens with Amanda alone and her companions (Dr. Kong and Dr. Candy) captured, with the former killed and the latter being infected and then castrated.
• Heel Realization:
  • Harold has somewhat lucid moments throughout Psychopath where he realizes what a monster he really is. They don't last long, unfortunately.
  • Edmund realizes exactly how catastrophic being a Dirty Coward has been for people around him pretty early on in Yellow Belly. Despite this, he continues to act cowardly right up until the end where he finally acts bravely only to get murdered for his earlier cowardice by the woman he saved.
• Hero of Another Story: Due to the nature of the franchise, there are quite a few protagonists.
  • Captain Juneaux and his team get a small backstory of their own which has them evacuating and then killing the nuclear power staff to prevent the Crossed from causing more damage than one that has already been done, though it is all described in a diary Stan reads, with Juneaux himself dead and the rest of his crew's status being unknown.
• He Who Fights Monsters: A recurring theme. In order to survive the plague, the uninfected are often pushed to extremes themselves.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: Sutter is seemingly benevolent, saving dozens of people from the Crossed. In truth, he did not care about their survival, he only hates the Crossed. The people he brought to Haven were only saved by him to serve as bait and he rigged the base of Haven to explode when he detonated it with the goal of killing as many Crossed as possible.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Todd the Australian trucker is a fat slob who wants to "repopulate" with his (dubiously voluntary) harem. He also enjoys listening to Australian nature documentaries while driving.
  • Alec, from the first Badlands arc, seems kind of stupid and is introduced, wanting to go fishing with grenades when the noise might draw Crossed and they can't spare a grenade. However he also has the awesome moment of that arc, when he's the one who tricks a small group of Crossed into turning on each other just by throwing some rocks into their midst from cover, while the rest of his group is panicking.
  • Clooney's girlfriend Tabitha, while participating in the creepy hedonism of Welles and the other guests and humiliating Clooney, does care enough about him to go and let him out of his cell when the Crossed are breaking into the place. Unfortunately for her, she finds him infected, waiting for her and not in a forgiving mood.
  • Cold Sniper Elisa balks at Don's idea of "experimenting" on an infected toddler from their group to look for weaknesses in the Crossed.
  • The mute, illiterate Cavaite Boy apparently had enough skills or spunk to have been on the sortie which first encountered Shaky and brought him to Cava.
  • Two of Wentz's henchmen, Donnie and Soaks.
    • Despite the Super-Persistent Predator nature of the Crossed, Fat Idiot Donnie managed to spend the first week after C-Day playing a cat and mouse game with an infected Omar without leaving Wentz's mansion, before Land showed up looking for both of them.
    • Soaks remained by Wentz following his Heel–Faith Turn, when he left the (apparently) safe Catalina to go and try rescue people on the mainland, although whether this was due to a Heel–Face Turn of his own or simple Undying Loyalty to Wentz is never elaborated on.
  • Of the bunker survivors during the final Badlands arc, we have Anna, who initially appears to just be either a trophy girlfriend or High-Class Call Girl, but proves to be a Badass Driver during the escape attempt, and Lloyd, who despite being considered useless by Cody was apparently the only person in the bunker who also managed to save his family and get them there.
  • Frank in American Quitters. He may be a New-Age Retro Hippie who is trying to OD on the ultimate high to go out on his own terms, but, as the comic itself says, "hippie can shoot."
• Hope Spot: Despite how bad things are in the series, it sometimes gives a tiny, tiny ray of hope for the survivors just to mke it worse.
  • Possibly the worst in the first series is when a small pack of Crossed is chasing Patrick. The survivors, fed up with running and hiding all the time, heroically charge in and get a little payback, annihilating the Crossed, only to find that Patrick has turned anyway.
  • Well into Wish You Were Here a character is introduced who is described as being some kind of super scientist who may even be immune to the Crossed virus. He takes a knife to the throat barely an issue after he's introduced.
  • A tribe of Australian Aborigines retreat into the outback to safety in the Crossed 2013 Special, protected from invasion by the Crossed's notorious lack of self-preservation. The implication is that even if the rest of Australia is dead to a man, they'll be fine.
  • Gordon Brown experiences this in Thin Red Line when one of his aides tells him that they may have stopped the spread of the infection in Britain at the last minute, with said aide explaining that the cordons south of Nottingham appear to be holding and that any large-scale refugee movement (which is spreading the virus) can be contained. Of course, those who have read the first arc of Badlands as well as Wish You Were Here and The Fatal Englishman (which features Gordon Brown's bodyguards five years later) know better...
  • In Quisling, a few of the National Guardsmen Oliver betrays almost get away in their chopper, before Smokey throws an infected child into the rotor blades, splattering blood everywhere and infecting a soldier who'd grabbed the landing gear and was just climbing in.
  • Another helicopter-related one involving Smokey has Cody and most of his group having almost made it clear, when Smokey appears above them in the chopper he hijacked.
• Hormone-Addled Teenager: Edmund from "Yellow Belly" is easily distracted by pretty girls, not that he can help it.
• Horrifying the Horror: In Volume One, Geoff confesses to being a Serial Killer before The Crossed showed up. He describes his first encounter as picking up a "drunk" young man and taking him home to butcher him as he'd done many others, only for him to turn out to be Crossed and proceeded to vulgarly goad him into doing his thing. Geoff was so freaked out that he abandoned The Crossed man in the basement and never looked back.
• Hospital Hottie:
  • Karen becomes one of these reluctantly, as while she's Not That Kind of Doctor, she's also the Closest Thing We Got in Cody's bunker, and thus does have to operate on a man who needs an appendectomy. He doesn't survive the operation.
• Hot for Teacher:
  • During a flashback in the Wish You Were Here webcomic arc, a female Crossed at a cafe starts ranting about how she wants to be given detention by (read: have violent sex with) her geography instructor.
  • A straighter example plays out in Tabitha's backstory in the same arc. Tabitha was an art teacher in a sexual relationship with a student. After the student turned Crossed, his apparent remaining attachment to her caused his peers to beat him to death.
• Hufflepuff House: In the + 100 era, fourteen rebuilt human towns in post-apocalyptic America are identified by name. Some (most notably Big'N'Low) are far less prominent than others.
  • Chooga (formerly Chattanooga), Camp Casper, and Murfreesboro are major settings.
  • Future visits Fayetteville and Kingstenn (both of which temporarily Kneel Before Zod).
  • Scores of unnamed soldiers from New Castle (formerly Newcastle) and Rap City (formerly Rapid City) come into conflict with the Crossed who conquer Camp Casper (with the Crossed moving on to attack New Castle at the end of Mimic).
  • The Gapple Isles (formerly New York or "The Big Apple") appear in a Mimic side story that focuses on attempts to clean out the subway tunnels of Crossed, and traders and soldiers from the region play a big role in the original +100 run.
  • B'More (formerly known as Baltimore) appears in another Mimic side story as the inhabitants purge their city of Crossed.
  • Refugees from Muska-G (formerly Muskogee, Oklahoma) describe their fight against the Crossed, complete with flashbacks.
  • Sugar Tree and Lubbock are only represented through a handful of minor, unnamed characters, although bits of their society and culture are teased for Worldbuilding.
  • Bethlehem, Pennsylvania is resettled by Christians who consider its name significant, but they're wiped out by the Crossed six years (In-Universe) before the town is even mentioned by name.
  • The fourteenth settlement, Big'N'Low, Arkansas (formerly known as Bigelow) is only represented through two spear carriers at a refugee meeting who only have a single line of dialogue between them, and vaguely say that they were "disastered out" when the Crossed attacked.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: All humans have the potential to be monsters, with Stan pointing out that however horrible the Crossed are, they never do anything that ordinary humans cannot also do.
  • "The Thin Red Line" reveals that one of the patient zeroes of the initial outbreak (and possibly all of them) were overcome by visions of atrocities committed throughout history (the Holocaust, the Balkans genocide, the Cambodian Killing Fields are all mentioned) and then all of human history (9/11, the suppression of the Indian Mutiny, biblical child sacrifice) which they then decided to imitate. It is yet unclear as to whether this was due to the "prototype" virus infecting them (which had many different effects as it evolved to the full Crossed infection), whether this mass hallucination actually created the virus, or (as speculated by the doctor researching the plague during the initial crisis) whether this infection was always within humanity and was only now emerging.
  • The main character of "Shrink" is revealed to have been molesting his younger brother all throughout childhood, which is implied to be the reason for why the brother became such an asshole.
  • One of the covers for "Badlands" (a variant for #18) has an uninfected woman tied to the end of a race track while several Crossed with their legs cut off crawl toward her and a large crowd of spectators place bets and cheer. All of the spectators are uninfected.
  • Another cover (#33) has two masked terrorists lifting a preserved Crossed head out of cryostorage as a wounded scientist watches helplessly while two SWAT officers take position outside. The implication being that this scene took place after humanity beat the Crossed... And now some assholes want to start the whole thing all over again.
  • The society of Casper Compound in Crossed +100 Mimic is a stratified class society, where the soldiers can basically do whatever they want to the "support" personnel, i.e., civilians who serve the soldiers. It was so bad that the civilians are actually better off under Fleshcook's rule than they ever were under the non-infected soldiers.
  • Father Dennis' own parishioners threw him and the children under his care out in The Fatal Englishman to face certain death and worse at the hands of the Crossed.
• Hypocrite: Harry spends most of The Fatal Englishman being a Troll to Father Dennis about the corrupt church aspects of Catholicism, but when Dennis brings up the darker side of the British Empire (whose legacy Harry is nostalgic about), he doesn't really take it to heart (admitting Dennis has a point, but insisting the comparison isn't as strong as he thinks).

I

• I Just Shot Marvin in the Face:
  • Occurs in Yellow Belly, when Edmund shoots Nicole in the head after being startled by her jumping up and screaming after being tackled by an infected Joe Rigg. It occurs to Edmund too late that she was not a Crossed, and this almost drives him to suicide... right before Harold Lorre interrupts him and talks him out of it.
  • In Wish You Were Here when Shaky discovers an infected Tabitha and tries to bond with her, Mark (a guy who was picked up during the sortie) bursts in and shoots her in the head. Out of sheer reflexes, Shaky turns around and blows his brains out with a rifle, before realizing that he was not infected. Unlike Edmund however, he gets through it fairly quickly.
• I'm a Humanitarian: The Livers from The Livers eat "nogwumps," which are people from outside their group who are deemed unfit. Amanda is more than happy to join in by the end, bringing the corpse of a man she had earlier saved from a pit trap she found hanging from a snare to the bunker for dinner.
• The Immune:
  • In Crossed +100, we're introduced to Beauregard Salt, a serial killer of such profound insanity that he did not notice being infected, and viewed the atrocities of C-Day as beautiful. He's effectively immune to the Crossed virus because it didn't show him anything he didn't already know, and is even overjoyed to find out human society finally sees the world as he does.
  • A straight example is suggested with one of the survivors in Johnson's group during the "Wish You Were Here" webcomic arc. It's impossible to know if he was actually immune or if Johnson was lying, because he dies very quickly after his introduction.
• Improbable Weapon User: In the first arc, a Crossed uses the severed reproductive organ of an equine specimen as a billy club. Or, in layman's terms HORSECOCK!
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Completely subverted.
  • The Shingon monks in Gore Angels are ascetic vegans who wouldn't hurt a fly. Even that didn't stop them from turning into rapist-murderer-cannibals after being infected.
  • Kelly and Thomas are the characters from the first volume who manage to hang onto their ideals and innocence the most even after Thomas is infected, although he implies that he only has seconds left before succumbing to the Crossed impulse before running for the nearest cliff.
  • Zigzagged with Rab, who actually does lose his Honor Before Reason characteristics that Shaky took for granted in the first arc and becomes more of a Pragmatic Hero, but he doesn't lose his protectiveness of the rest of the group and respect for human life, and ultimately, through a little hard pragmatism, succeeds in a Batman Gambit that Shaky doubts he would have thought of.
  • Hazuki in Five Bloody Fingers proves to be the straightest example of this trope as far as Crossed infectees go. Admittedly, upon getting Crossed, she proceeds to give her father a "Reason You Suck" Speech that drives him to suicide, orders Usama the lion to eat his remains and contemplates having intercourse with Usama, but beyond that allows herself to be tied up by her uninfected friends and refuses to harm them despite being capable of ordering her lion to attack them if nothing else.
• Indispensable Scoundrel: Deconstructed horrifically with the Gamekeeper from Crossed. While he is no doubt a skillful and adapted man, the Gamekeeper constantly torments the luxury couple for whom he used to work before the Crossed pandemic (even raping the female repeatedly) and treats every other member of his group of survivors as expendable, showing no sympathy to people dying around him. Even without the Crossed nearby, the Gamekeeper is still a horrible person, but the scariest thing is that he is necessary for the other members of his group to survive and he knows it, freely abusing his power and brutalizing them all the time. The survivors don't dare to stop him because none of them have his survivorship skills against the Crossed.
• Insane Troll Logic: Harold believes that the Crossed virus absorbs and locks away the good part, the soul, of a person, leaving only evil impulses behind. By this logic he believes that if he feeds the infected flesh of his dead stalker crush to Amanda (whom he believes is a pure and untainted innocent) the virus will have no evil to absorb and will release Lori's soul into Amanda's body, allowing Lori to be reborn. Luckily he never gets to test the theory.
• Instant Expert: Sometimes played straight for narrative purposes, but often averted.
  • In Badlands Issue 93, when Lloyd suggests breaking out their guns to try and fight Smokey, Cody replies that while Ben knows how to shoot from his time in the army, Cody and Lloyd have only ever hunted animals before, and no one else has even done that, and therefore he doesn't like their chances in a firefight.
  • In the same arc, the dermatologist in Cody's bunker is tasked with performing an appendectomy. She fails and the man she operated on dies as a result of her unfamiliarity with that field (or perhaps of inadequate equipment and other resources).
  • Also, a cover of one of the +100 issues shows a group of survivors in a besieged airport, with the Crossed attacking at the fences while being held back by some soldiers, while the other members of the group looking at the manual for the airplane they're loading up and trying to figure out how it works.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: Immediately after the Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap! moment where Smoky is paying attention to the bunker, Karen expresses skepticism at Cody's claims that Smokey saw them, asking what the odds are that he'd understand the meaning of the periscope even if he did see it. The next panel has Smokey calling down to them "little pig, little pig, let me in." Cue a Mass "Oh, Crap!" moment.
• Intercontinuity Crossover: With fellow Avatar Press title Mercury Heat, sort of. It's so far been implied that the "Crossed" that appear there are in fact merely facsimiles that were somehow created by a pair of deranged fans of the franchise.
• Informed Attribute: Shows up a lot in Wish You Were Here, along with Informed Flaw. Shaky repeatedly speculates that Elisa is a sociopath despite her visibly displaying empathy on several occasions. He theorizes that Rab might he happier surviving without the others early on but this isn't supported by the series. He claims that Camp Gay Jamie has a persecution complex, and a crush on Rab, but neither of these are really displayed. And he calls Jackie a "gossipy she-cat" even though she probably has the least dialogue out of all of the adult Cavaites. A lot of this can be put down to Unreliable Narrator, or The Law of Conservation of Detail.
• Ironic Echo: Early in Wish You Were Here, Rab and Don argue about whether or not to send out a sortie, with Don asserting they can't just expect food to appear out of nowhere, and Rab being reluctant to go looking for trouble. The meeting is interrupted by news that a boat with a cow inside it has drifted up to Cava, and Rab and Don instantly throw each others arguments against each other while arguing about whether or not to get the cow and the boat. The boat turns out to have been rigged with a grenade.
• Iwo Jima Pose: On the cover of issues 7 of "Family Values". The difference between it and other homages is that they're planting the flag into some guy's mouth.
• It Can Think:
  • While some bands of Crossed display basic planning and bits of intelligence, the Salt Clan in +100 have developed a sort of (for Crossed) society that can practice restraint, basic agriculture and domestication and, most frighteningly enough, mimic uninfected humans. Regular Crossed aren't actually less intelligent, they just lose the capacity to utilize it properly in favor of mindless sadism and hedonism.
  • Long before that, Smokey, the first infected to show genuine intelligence, was shown to not only posses intelligence, but also the ability to plan, speak, and most importantly, delay his sadistic gratification, unlike his near-mindless brethren.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Already in the beginning of the outbreak, the survivors were referring to Crossed as things rather than people, as shown when Stan, Cindy and their group refer to the cop's Crossed prisoner in his squad car as a "thing" and "it." Subverted on Stan's part at the end, when he's come to the realization that the Crossed are really no different from non-infected humans in terms of their evil.

J

• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk:
  • Don initially seems like an example of a particularly cold Pragmatic Hero, despite his flaws, until the third volume, when it becomes more It's All About Me.
  • Commander Chief Nathan’s efforts to liberate Camp Casper initially buy him a tiny, tiny bit of credit from the readers of MIMIC even after he is established as a dictator and rapist, but the confirmation that he just wants to put things back to the way they were before the Crossed drove him out and him planning to kill Julie (so that the other "support" personnel don't get any ideas about improving their station) cement him as an Asshole Victim.
• Just Before the End:
  • In one untitled Badlands arc set in the early days of the Hate Plague Crossed apocalypse, the Crossed infection has already killed billions but has yet to completely destroy every trace of civilization. There are some organized evacuation efforts by both the military and private citizens. The water is still running in some places (as shown by how a man hiding in the sewers of Catalina is using a hose for drinking water). There are still a few big military bases coordinating with each other. The military is even managing to keep large sections of San Diego safe as everywhere else burns. However, it is made extremely clear that the Crossed are days away from overrunning the defenders of San Diego and all they can do is pack people onto evacuation ships (which are in short supply) while still trying to work out if there's anywhere they can find safe refuge.
  • While Shrink is set several weeks After the End, it takes place in an isolated town in Idaho where the few residents who haven't fled to the hills are stable enough to carry on normally and try to accomplish something as they wait for a horde of monsters to inevitably follow the roads to the town and rape or torture everyone to death.
  • Thin Red Line is the most prominent example, taking place right at the very start of the Crossed outbreak. Instead of a typical postapocalyptic horror, the plot has the UK government officials try to prevent the situation from getting worse and turning into nuclear overkill.

K

• Karma Houdini:
  • Smokey, the Twins, and possibly Harold Lorre are major examples of villains who avoid proper punishment, but all pale in comparison to Beauregard Salt who set monstrous stuff into motion but apparently died contently of old age and at the end of +100 many of his descendants are still kicking strong.
  • Also, the only real-life person specifically mentioned to have survived at least the early stages of the epidemic is Vladimir Putin, in The Thin Red Line. Though given the situation, it's far from guaranteed he made it much longer than any other world leaders. And his role in the arc is attempting to avert a nuclear war from breaking out during the outbreak, leading to him outright begging Gordon Brown to shoot down the rogue bombers.
• King Incognito: not a king of course, but Dora, the captain of the Drift Fleet spins a while posing as a lower-ranking member of the group while having one of her men dress up as the captain.
• Lady of War: Captain Dora of the Drift Fleet turns out to be this in Volume 3, Chapter 19 of WYWH. She shows Shaky just how much more at a higher level she is than smug snake Don.
  Shaky (narrates): "In Dora's eyes the calculation happened. I could see it. The cost weighed against the benefit. You could see her reading back the little note I wrote her. You could see her comparing this with that. Watching it...? Watching it made me feel stupid I didn't guess she was the real captain earlier. Dora made Don look like a fumbling middle-manager.

L

• La Résistance: There are rebels in the Les Collaborateurs settlements: Archivist Reed in Kingstenn and someone in Fayettville who painted the signs “gone to church” and "stay away" on the road to warn away travelers who might have stopped there.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • Shaky gets this when, upon the expedition returning to Cava, he finds out that Rab has told everyone about the incident with the Crossed child and that he forced Rab to put him on the team to the mainland. This results in everyone on the island mistrusting and ostracizing him.
  • And now the chickens have really come home to roost for Shaky as the surviving Cavaites prepare to leave the island, without him. Rab ensures this by smashing Shaky's ankles while Skip and Jamie hold him down. Though all of them have very morose and apologetic expressions during this, signifying that they take no pleasure in crippling Shaky.
  • Oliver and Cody both betray people to Smokey in order to save their lives, only to be put through such horrors that they're soon willing to give up their lives for the opportunity to stop him.
• Laughing Mad:
  • The Crossed tend to do this frequently. In the "Wish You Were Here" webcomic arc, Skip plays this straighter, laughing hysterically as he escapes Blackpool by boat.
  • In The Thin Red Line, this is implied to be what has become of George W. Bush by the time Britain is able to place a call to the White House.
• Lemony Narrator: The narration in American Quitters. Highlights include warning Errol and Frank not to eat the drugged food twice, "foreshadowing alert: hippie can shoot" and this bit following the priest being left as bait for the Crossed as he'd intended to do with Frank and Errol.
  Priest: Forgive them father, for they know not what they do.
  Narrator: They totally knew.
• Lesbian Jock: Upon hearing that Miranda is a rugby player, Shaky comments that based on every pub anecdote he's heard, that means she's a guaranteed lesbian. Shaky's First-Person Smartass narration may not have meant that seriously, although Miranda does seem to get along with Camp Gay man Jamie.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: When Matthew Pratt is bitten on the leg by his infected mother, Addy manages to cut it off before he's turned.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: Fleshcook is presented as being this both to the average Crossed, other Salt Clan Crossed, and the local humans under Commander-Chief Nathan.
• Lighter and Softer:
  • +100 feels like this at times, with humanity having survived despite a century of absolute hell, managing to give the Crossed what for on multiple occasions and the violence being (slightly) toned down once Si Spurrier took over the writing.
  • The ending of the webcomic arc "Dead or Alive" can come across this way, although it's very relative given the nature of the series. The protagonist of the arc is an apparent sociopath who was badly broken even before the Crossed showed up. He projects this attitude out to everyone else to justify it, assuming that his group mates are either useless or as bad as he is and therefore not to be trusted. They aren't. In a rare point where this series actually has a moral played straight, they stay alive by caring for each other and retaining their humanity. The protagonist dies horribly because of an attempt to kill them and "escape" the people who have been keeping him alive.
  • Shrink has little violence, which is mostly limited to being off-panel (until the Crossed find Jack's town, that is, not to mention his dark secret), and is more centered on a psychologist's attempt to learn more about the virus from his own infected brother who persuaded him to carry out such experiment.
  • While not exactly light, Anti-Crossed is lighter than most Crossed arcs as it relegates the Crossed to the background for the most part, with very little actual Crossed-caused violence being shown on-panel. While the plot does revolve around the comic shop owners holding a female comic book artist hostage as a sex slave and source of entertainment, Earn Your Happy Ending is in full effect with the conclusion, which is probably the least depressing ending in the entire franchise.
• Little Miss Badass: Ten-year-old Merrily Pratt is a crack rifle shot.
• Loincloth: In issue #4, we see a Crossed wearing one. It's made out of some guy's face.
• Loves the Sound of Screaming: Volume 4 of "Wish You Were Here" gives this as the reason the Crossed don't usually attack each other. No matter what they do, their victim will just laugh through it all. And that takes all of the fun out of it.

M

• Madonna-Whore Complex: This is Harold Lorre's main problem.
• Mafia Princess: Hazuki in the Five Bloody Fingers arc. Her father is a Yakuza oyabun.
• Mama Bear: Everything Cindy does in the first series is to protect her son Patrick, including shooting a cop without any hesitation whatsoever.
• Man Bites Man: How Thomas kills Horsecock in the final issue of Volume One.
• Martyr Without a Cause: In Yellow Belly, Hank rallies the remaining survivors in the gun shop and dies fighting with the rest of the survivors when the Crossed break into the store and overrun it. Edmund, fearing for his life, immediately runs away and encounters Sweeny (his childhood bully). Sweeny angrily tells him to go back and "die like a man" but Edmund shoots him instead to get past him. While the narrative does portray Edmund's actions as cowardly, Edmund does survive and escape the shop. After all, it is understandable that he wants to survive and it's basic common sense to only fight if you have a chance of survival.
• Meaningful Name: Loads of them, although some may have been unintentional.
  • In the first volume, Arwen is named after a character from The Lord of the Rings, implying that her parents were fantasy lovers and the kind to seek a Magic Bullet solution. That same volume has Sheena (as a bit of foreshadowing), given that she has blonde hair and is last seen falling, in an area surrounded by trees like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and Randall, whose name comes from the German name Randolph which means shield plus wolf and when he is infected, he’s like a wolf in sheep clothing.
  • Wish You Were Here has a lot of these.
    • Given how Skip's job involves staying on the boat whenever he brings people ashore, Shaky feels he gets to skip out on the real danger on sorties.
    • Shaky (or sometimes Shakespeare) is just a nickname, and we never find out his real name, but he does keep writing while working to build the story that he's living rather than just participate it and rely on others. In the first issue he also says it’s not because he shakes a little bit when shooting, but he does in fact shake, and this is a hint of his cowardice dominating him in critical situations.
    • The surname Masoud means fortunate, prosperous happy and lucky- which describe Roshan fairly well (at least initially) and also (except maybe the happy part for Mr. Masoud) the family as a whole until they lose their son, given how few families had all their members survive that long.
    • Mark the cheesemaker's name might be a reference towards the Royal Mark cheddar brand.
    • In various slangs, Jasper can mean outsider, heckle and abuse, or be an insult to your intelligence, all of which describe the character to a T.
    • Lloyd Thackery’s name sounds a lot like Lord, which he is, indicating privilege, some nobility of character but also being used to relying on others (all of which also apply to another Lloyd, who appears in Badlands).
    • The Gamekeeper is a synonym to the word "huntsman", with hunting being one of his useful perks.
  • Hunt McAvoy, upon being infected, does go on to hunt after his former group and was a rigid police detective before C-Day.
  • Joseph Pratt and his brother Eli are named for biblical figures and he named his sons in that way (Joseph Jr., Matthew, Eli, John and Paul) yet save for Hannah, none of his daughters have biblical names hinting that he holds women lower and/or doesn’t want a biblical reminder due to his incestuous feelings towards them.
  • Edmund's could be a reference to another Edmund who was also a dark-haired coward who made some bad judgment calls.
  • Danger Montana; twofold; he faces dangers and is the first of the Livers to die. As Amanda lampshades it's clearly not his real name, finting at his fantasist nature. He’s the least physically dangerous to Amanda but does draw her into the Livers mentality.
  • Leland Barnes was also the name of a manipulative, unrepentant killer on Law & Order who brought misery to everyone around him and was manipulative and unrepentant.
  • +100 takes the cake in this regard, with lots of characters having names that signify the hopes of the generation that was finally turning the tide against the Crossed.
    • We have Future Taylor, Morning Addison, Mustaqba the Chooga archivist (his name also means "future" in Arabic, with an 'l' at the end), Hope Keller, Coal Captain Carpe Dee (short for Carpe Diem), Enthusiasm and Opportunity Smith, and Forward Dietrich.
    • The most meaningful of them all is Cautious Optimism Kryswickzi, whose name in retrospect is telling the readers to feel cautious about being optimistic about this seemingly brighter future.
    • Opportunity Smith and Carpe Dee also prove to have meaningful names in another way when they presumably join most of their town in trying to capture Future and Genheim to hand over to the Crossed to save some of their own people.
    • Possibly Archivist Reed (if that’s her first name) as in "read" books.
    • Insa's (short for the Ray Bradbury line "Insanity is Relative") name symbolizes how her culture is more well-read, but also that she is a Crossed collaborator, working with insanity that she finds relative.
    • The Crossed child Now’s name might symbolize by how it is a time of intelligent Crossed.
    • Im’am Fair subverts this in that she’s not a good leader, or a fair person, at least not initially.
    • Genheim Mc Blarney does indeed sell a lot of blarney as a hobby, and after his death, Bailey sells a version of what happened to him that is also blarney to avoid alienating his people.
    • Genheim's son Oneway averts this, as by leaving Bailey’s army when they’re heading into a trap, he avoids going on a oneway mission.
  • Camp Casper on the other hand only has normal names (except for a few militaristic ones like D-Day Kendall), symbolizing the compound's refusal to look forward to the future and attempts to keep its people and culture repressed.
  • While most Crossed nicknames are ones they get later in life for specific, often physical reasons (like No-Nose, Stump, Face, and Fleshcook), others play this straighter.
    • Robbie Greer/Jokemercy had that name from infancy, and it suits him perfectly as he often delivers horrific terms of surrender that he considers "merciful" with a Slasher Smile, as if it's all a big joke to him.
    • Also played straight with the seven “children” of Beau Salt (although most of them are long dead and only mentioned in Salt's diary). Bashful isn’t a frontline general for the most part and prefers to have his Mouth of Sauron conduct business for him. Sneezy is bent on “total infection” and wants to spread the Crossed disease to everyone in the world. Happy seems to have been one of the comparatively less sadistic and more stable members of the Salt clan based on his disciple Fleshcook’s claims and behavior. Doc took part in behavior conditioning for Deep Cover Agent Jokemercy and others like him to overcome their psychology and infiltrate human settlements. Sleepy’s branch of the Salt clan are also described as zealots who haven't awakened from Salt’s posthumous sway and are viewed fairly negatively even by the others (while remaining below the radar like sleeper agents). Grumpy was Salt's original enforcer. Dopey was apparently the least intelligent of the seven, dying prematurely of AIDS after violating Salt’s rule about not having sex outside of their group.
    • Outside of the Salt clan, another Crossed example is Smokey. While his nickname came from fireman status (or at least looking like he had such status), it gradually turns into this a bit given how his plans keep going up in smoke.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The Crossed virus itself. It's ambiguous whether it is supernatural or merely a disease that science does not understand. In "Thin Red Line" it's shown that the people infected with it experience flashbacks to events in history they have no knowledge of, and also demonstrate knowledge about other people they should have no way of knowing, at least at the beginning of the epidemic. But even then, it's still unclear if the virus is genuinely supernatural, extraterrestrial, or man-made.
  • In the 3D one-shot, there is a character who claims he can kill the Crossed by "cursing" them. It's left deliberately unclear if his "curses" actually work, or if they're just lucky coincidences.
  • The ending of "Homo Tortor" essentially runs on this. Was there really an Eldritch Abomination-worshipping species of red-skinned hominids in prehistoric Indonesia who were the first Crossed, or did the professor who came up with the theory make up the story after becoming Crossed himself?
• Men of Sherwood: It is very rare to play this straight from start to finish, which makes the few times it occurs more notable.
  • In The Thin Red Line, the soldiers and cops at the Prime Minister's bunker do an effective job of containing any outbreak inside the bunker (minus stuff outside of their control) and killing anyone who attacks from outside.
  • In the third issue of the untitled Gavin Land arc, Wentz has an army of volunteers helping evacuate women and children to an offshore island by boat. They save lots of people that way and are all last seen alive (save for the one guy who Land has a personal grudge against and won't let walk away).
  • Later in the Gavin Land arc, the San Diego Naval Base Marines do a good job conducting a Citywide Evacuation for several issues, but none of them are named. Very few of them are allowed on the ships evacuating people, but they take this stoically. As the Crossed attack the docks, they depart the story in a Bolivian Army Ending fashion, but that's still better than most characters get.
• Militaries Are Useless: Justified. Due to the random, sporadic nature of the Crossed outbreak, military forces are given very little time to mobilize or make any sort of concentrated effort to curb the outbreak. Worse, with the Crossed emerging everywhere from the backstreets of small towns to the highest offices of government, the chain of command was all but gutted by the death, infection or incapacitation of important civil and military figures, making coordinating any efforts almost impossible even if the forces could be brought together. With no higher command to report to anymore as well as no contact with any other forces, any surviving military units that have managed to stay together and find a safe place to hold up acted independently, with no greater objective other then their own survival.
  • In some cases, efforts were hampered by infected personnel, such as infected fighter pilots or personnel that worked in the Strategic Nuclear Weapons facilities deliberately launching their housed nukes. In both the United States and the UK, infected pilots would expend their munitions on any targets of opportunity before deliberately crashing their aircraft into densely populated areas. In Pakistan, the Crossed managed to launch a nuclear missile aimed at New Delhi.
  • In the United States, important US military command centers such as Fort Bragg and the White House were overrun almost straight away. The destruction of Air Force One presumably took out the last of the Presidential succession. Even bases that managed to survive the initial outbreak such as Fallon Naval Air Station and Cheyenne Mountain Complex were left almost bereft of manpower, making it only a matter of time before they fell as well. In San Diego, US military units managed to rally and restore order back to the city. They used the respite to organize the attempted evacuation of 200,000 survivors, using a US Navy fleet sent from Pearl Harbour. Unfortunately, the fleet was somehow infected and fired on the city, killing and maiming many survivors and any remaining soldiers. The last organized act by the government was to dispatch special operations teams to assist nuclear specialists in shutting down key nuclear facilities across the country and then killing them when they were finished. Years after C-Day, remnants of the US federal military and national guard would scatter all over the country. While some, such as at Camp Casper, would establish a safe haven with a semblance of order and safety, others would inevitably get overrun one by one.
  • In Canada, the government assumed the infection was exclusive to the US and attempted to use the army to close the border. When the infection emerged north of the border as well, the army was stretched too thin to be of much use and was overrun quickly.
  • In the UK, at first the army fared slightly better; despite a brief period of indecision, the military managed to successfully cordon off the outbreak's main epicentre in northern England and even organize the emergency transfer of troops from Afghanistan. However, the efforts would ultimately fail after Gordon Brown's death. After London fell to the Crossed, the British Army then launched an attempt to retake the city by force. Due to many of the soldiers not being issued any kind of protective gear (And Shaky speculates that the soldiers were told they were pacifying a riotous mob, so they shot to wound instead of kill) many of them end up getting infected and the attack fell apart within minutes. Two years after C-Day, only the Black Watch battalion remained a functioning remnant of the British Army.
• Mirroring Factions: The Crossed not being as different from humanity as we'd like to think is a recurring theme.
  • It's repeatedly stated everything the Crossed can do regular humans are also capable of. The series features characters who engage in murder, rape and even cannibalism and some characters have engaged in all of the above.
  • Sociopaths are also highlighted in a wide range of forms, including the protagonist of Dead or Alive who abandoned his fiancee to die in a plane crash and the two girls possessing the survival guide in Lesser of Two Evils who use the guide to justify manipulating the group of survivors they join into almost completely destroying themselves so they can steal their supplies.
  • Overall, in the world of the Crossed, Humans Are Bastards and the Crossed are simply humans unrestrained from impulse control.
• Misplaced Wildlife: The "Homo Tortor" arc features saber-toothed cats, mammoths, woolly rhinos, terror birds, and a Diprotodon in Indonesia, as well as horses thousands of years before they were domesticated. Possibly justified, in that the whole story is implied to be a fake written by a Crossed anthropologist.
  • "Wish You Were Here" shows sea lions living in Scotland, where only earless seals actually live.
• Monster Clown: Since "Yellow Belly" involves a group of Crossed who were circus workers, a couple of these appear. One of Edmund's classmates is later dressed in the clown attire after having been infected not long ago.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • Issue four opens with a discussion about the ramifications of shooting the dog. And then... HORSECOCK!.
  • Badlands issue 91 opens with a humorous scene where a group of comic book geeks and nerds complain about the lack of new material as a result of the Crossed apocalypse... and then they're revealed to be holding a female comic book writer/artist as a sex slave.
  • The Cavaities having a nice moment of bonding after one of their members completes a dangerous mission suddenly turns grim and terrified when they hear gunshots and he comes running back with Crossed in pursuit.
• Monumental Damage: Averted in the 2013 Special, where Uluru/Ayer's Rock is shown to be intact though hosting a camp of refugees from Australia's west coast mixed in with Aborigines. The refugees are later infected by a Crossed David, though the Aborigines manage to escape.
  • Played straight in the 3D one-shot, where a group of Crossed somehow bring down the Chrysler Building.
• Morality Pet: Haley is this for both Gavin Land and Wentz.
• Morton's Fork: Happens quite a bit.
  • Cody's group find themselves in a classic example of this at the beginning of Badlands issue 94. They can either stay in the bunker and wait for their air to run out, or try to break out and hope that they can outrun or outthink Smokey.
  • The patrol boat captain a few issues later is seen telling one of his men (who's protesting the risk of going ashore to forage for food) that the only other option is cannabalism, right before they come under attack by Smokey.
  • The various communities surrounded by the Salt Clan get a doozy of this; either serve as Les Collaborateurs by offering ten people as a sacrifice every year, destroying their archives and suffering various other depravities (not to mention eventually being forced to fight against the humans reclaiming Crossed territory who view them as traitors), or the Crossed will wipe them out on the spot (with all of the communities before Murfreesboro that refused the deal having been on the receiving end of a Curb-Stomp Battle, although at least some of those battles did leave survivors).
  • Mrs. Pratt infecting herself to save her daughter from Joseph in Family Values is a good thing in the short term, but she only proves to be an even bigger threat to her whole family afterwards, wanting to infect them all so they can be together again and killing anyone who gets in her way.
• Murder by Mistake: An interesting version happens with Jethro in Family Values. Mrs. Pratt seems to think he’s her son Matthew while ambushing and infecting him until she gets a good look at his face.
• Mutual Kill: In the final issue of +100 Mustaqba, who had been stabbed in the abdomen with a knife by Jokemercy, manages to rip it out of his body and then jam it into Jokemercy's throat right when the latter shoots him in the head with a pistol.
• Multiple-Choice Past: Welles from "Golden Road" is said to give a different version of his life story whenever he's asked. Given his personality, it's likely he does it for no other reason than to screw with people.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Cody, Oliver, and Shaky, unsurprisingly, by the ends of their stories. Lance has a bit of his after John dies fixing a mistake he made. Wentz laments this after seeing how ruthless he made Land as a result of the depravities he put him and his family through.
• Mysterious Past: Quite often, given most characters' reluctance to talk about their past lives and previous survival. Notable examples include:
  • Smokey, whose origins, and whether or not he was actually a fireman or just took one's coat are never revealed.
  • Gideon Welles from The Golden Road has made up so much stories about his past (and told some of them to his workers) it's hard to guess who he truly used to be.
  • Pretty much half of the cast of Grave New World:
    • Dr. El-Sayeed and Kimo were both mentioned to have been prisoners in the United States Navy Brig in Norfolk on C-Day, before Barnes let them out, but it's never revealed what crimes they had been arrested for.
    • Peter Bingham and the Stillwells are implied to have been pleasure boaters who were at sea during C-Day but it's unclear whether they were together or not, and how Barnes found them.
    • Finally, Barnes keeps four children stowed below decks, for their own safety, but it's never revealed who their parents are or whether Barnes rescued them from the Naval Base or pleasure crafts.
• Mystical Plague: While it is speculated throughout the franchise that the infection is some divine punishment or other supernatural phenomena, this trope is seemingly averted... until "The Thin Red Line" arc. In this story it is revealed that the virus is utterly alien to science on an atomic scale, and it grants one of the "Patient Zeroes" horrifically vivid hallucinations of historical atrocities he had no previous awareness of, as well as knowledge about things he had literally no mundane way of discovering. That said, there's still an element of Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane in that it could also be a highly advanced man-made Synthetic Plague, or perhaps an alien weapon.

---