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Other Comics
- The Arawn graphic novel series tells the story of the eponymous Evil Overlord that rules the underworld and details how he came to be this way. It's hard to get invested already as it is, due to the Foregone Conclusion stating that he lost everyone he loved and was betrayed by those he trusted in the prologue, but as the story unfolds, virtually none of the supporting cast come out in a sympathetic light since they commit some truly heinous atrocities or make the situation worse than it already is. Not even Deidre, who is most likely to garner sympathy from readers is above crossing the line when she kills her innocent son to spite his father in revenge for killing her child with Arawn.
- The Borgia series by Alejandro Jodorowsky has as its protagonists the notorious Borgia family, who kill, rape, and torture their way into power. You may better remember their patriarch, Rodrigo, as the final boss from Assassin's Creed II. They operate in a world full of other raping, murdering, torturing assholes. You know something is off when Church Militant killjoy Savonrola is likable compared to our heroes.
- As brutal as The Boys can be on TV, the original comic is much darker, adding to its divisive reception. Both sides consist largely of amoral killers, only sometimes the people on one side kill people who are slightly worse than they are. Readers can't agree whether this results in a compelling story where a lot of bad stuff happens, or just a parade of over-the-top shock value.
- Brat Pack is meant to be a Deconstruction of the very idea of the Kid Sidekick in the spirit of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. However, unlike those two, Brat Pack is devoid of any type of joy, comfort, or hope, with the main cast molded into emotional wrecks by their "hero" mentors who are worse than most villains of the The Dark Age of Comic Books. Also, not helping the comic's message is that superhero-related media since the Turn of the Millennium has dealt with the lives of young pre-adult heroes in a much more reasonable and compelling manner.
- This is a frequent criticism of the works written by Brian K. Vaughan. Vaughan is known for his affinity for common Darker & Edgier and True Art Is Angsty tropes in his various comics; including (but not limited to): Anyone Can Die, Downer Ending, World of Jerkass, Grey-&-Gray Morality, Extreme Cynicism, and Characters Swearing to the point that even sailors would find it excessive. It is not uncommon in many of his comics, such as Y: The Last Man and Saga, to have it appear that things will improve for the main characters... but then an issue or two later to have that taken away, have a major character killed rather spontaneously (typically one of the nicer & more likable characters), and now things are worse off than ever for everyone. Unsurprisingly, all of this has caused many readers to lose interest in his works since they know, based on the track record, things will never turn out for the better.
- The premise of the Crossed comic franchise is "you think the Zombie Apocalypse would be awesome? Wrong!" coupled with "let's see how we can make each atrocity more Gorn-filled and horrific than the last one" and sprinkled with a dash of "almost everyone's gonna die horribly". The original comic (retroactively tilted Volume One when the later comics rolled around) by Garth Ennis was already different to Ennis' other works; whereas the others tend to balance the dark and often nihilistic subject matter with moments of levity (albeit usually dark in nature), Volume One often tended to be quite grim and serious and comedy, while not entirely absent, is often a lot rarer. It was refreshing for Ennis back when it began, as the tragic events and eventual Bittersweet Ending were well integrated into the plot, and plenty of the gruesome moments were visually hidden via Gory Discretion Shot so as to not overuse the shock value. Unfortunately, the later comics with different writersnote , however, throw any plot-shock relations out the window in favor of showing the gruesomeness in all its detail whenever the writers could, combined with repetitive storylines and flat or unlikable characters. This means that a comic or arc's plot can often risk turning into a chain of escalating unpleasant and gruesome events happening to doomed people in an atmosphere of unrelenting misery, making it easy for burnout to set in.
- Adam Warren's Empowered is a highly potential case. The jerkass-to-genuine-good-guy ratio in the cast leans pretty hard in the jerkass direction and Cerebus Retcon is also on a high ratio (at least Volumes 7 and 8). The entire cast (except the pure evil villains) is a Dysfunction Junction mine field. The titular heroine being a brutal case of Failure Hero with a Burj Khalifa-sized dose of Dude, Where's My Respect? (and other Dysfunction Junction issues such as a big case of Hollywood Pudgy, Family-Unfriendly Death of her dad, said Jerkasses on the cast fanatically keeping her down and so on) balancing out her Determinator attitude can also trigger this. And the villains who are running around, at best held back for another day, and at worst completely unstoppable.
- Craig Thompson's Habibi gets this complaint. The story is set in a rather unflattering imagining of the Arab world in which men are almost universally savage brutes who rape and oppress women with impunity and seem to have no qualms about pedophilia. To make matters worse, the heroine has very little agency of her own and spends most of her time getting pulled from one melodrama to the next.
- Brian Azzarello's Loveless is a Western comic about the failure of Reconstruction, and is utterly devoid of sympathy and hope even in comparison to Azzarello's already-quite-dark magnum opus 100 Bullets. The Northerners are imperialistic bullies, the Southerners are violent, backwards hillbillies, both are disgustingly racist, and by the end there isn't a single major character that hasn't committed either murder or rape, even the ex-slave who might otherwise be the most sympathetic character. Halfway through, the Decoy Protagonist dies a pathetic and pointless death, and focus shifts to his vengeful wife who swears a Sweeney Todd-esque vendetta to murder the entire town as payback for his death. And unlike Sweeney, she succeeds. The series was quickly canceled and the final three-issue epilogue arc resolved little but the fates of a few minor characters that escaped the slaughter, none of which were pleasant.
- Marshal Law: You could probably replace the narration with "Everyone sucks but me! (And I'm not that great myself.)" Kevin O'Neill noted that one Batman writer felt offended by the series' piss-take of Batman in The Kingdom of the Blind noting that he and Pat Mills had parodied the character without putting anything in its place. O'Neill said that this was an Intended Audience Reaction because to them the concept of The Hero was out of favor and there weren't any more stories to tell in that genre and Mills and O'Neill were frustrated that the genre's Dead Horse Trope keeps being recycled and updated.
- The Metabarons is a long, grim epic about a Big, Screwed-Up Family where the son of each generation is forced to mutilate himself and kill his father in single combat, leading to a whole bunch of anti-heroes who are progressively more screwed up.
- Mark Millar:
- Kick-Ass. Anyone who seems to be in the right is quickly revealed to be naïve or secretly an asshole; the main character is a spineless worm who's deluding himself into thinking he can be a hero, while the primary hero character is an utter tool who has turned his daughter into a violent criminal to live out his own dreams. And yet the people they fight against are even worse. There's a reason a lot of people prefer the movie's significantly more idealistic take on the story.
- The Unfunnies— Funny Animals get raped and abused as their world is transformed by their Karma Houdini serial killer/child molester creator. While some read it in horror and disgust, most who read it in the years after its publication find the comic to be a painfully dull example of the Subverted Kids' Show, with most of its humor derived from pure shock comedy that quickly bores more than surprises due to how constant and unrelenting its dark jokes are. It's telling that Millar himself would go on to disown the comic and refuse to even talk about it when asked.
- Wanted. In a fight between a group of nihilistic, mass-murdering, serial-raping assholes who want to continue ruling the world in secret and a group of nihilistic, mass-murdering, serial-raping assholes who want to rule the world openly, there's no reason to really care who wins. You might as well root for the series' antagonist, Mr. Rictus. At least he's good for some Black Comedy (if you're amused by the slaughter of children). The You Bastard! ending seems to indicate that the author himself hates both the story, and anyone who read it through to the end. One of the possible interpretations is that he's condemning anyone who could accept a universe so devoid of hope. Like Kick-Ass, the movie gets more love for embracing fun instead of nihilism
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- Alan Moore's works often skirt the edge of this trope, or dive right over it:
- Miracleman sees its heroes defeat possibly one of the most horrific monsters in comics history, but in the denouement the world, as a result of Miracleman's Blue-and-Orange Morality, changes so much and so quickly that one can hardly even call it human society anymore.
- V for Vendetta gives the reader the choice of fascist totalitarianism that keeps order and keeps the people fed or the chaos and violence of the post-revolutionary era which the comic makes overtly clear will lead to mass starvation (we're to understand that the eventual "voluntary anarchic order" will make things better in the long run).
- Watchmen gives us the choice of "inevitable" nuclear annihilation or a Roman peace maintained by fear, mass murder, and a lie.
- Rat Queens spent an arc with one member of the team turning full Chaotic Evil and the team making only a token attempt to either reclaim or restrain her before ditching toward home. Then there was a left-field murder of a fan-favored character by his intimate partner with no explanation. The backlash put the series on hiatus for a year.
- Requiem Vampire Knight: The world is so grimdark that there's hardly anyone to root for. Let's see, it's set on a hell world where the wicked are rewarded by being turned into powerful monsters and the good are punished by being turned into less powerful monsters, the whole culture is built around violence, bloodshed, and betraying anyone you can, and the gods are terrible eldritch entities at war with each other. Even the main character is an ex-Nazi who is the reincarnation of possibly the most evil character in the setting.
- Seems to be a recurring issue in comics made by Pat Mills, in Nemesis the Warlock with the exception of Purity Brown, there are hardly sympathetic characters worth rooting for, including Nemesis, who's a brutal demonic Anti-Hero fighting against Torquemada for all the wrong reasons. The series' heavy handed theme of Humans Are Bastards, with most human characters being shown as sleazy and pathetic individuals when not committing atrocities, and Kevin O'Neill's grotesque artwork don't help much either.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW): The Metal Virus arc is a Zombie Apocalypse in the Sonic universe played completely straight, and arguably the bleakest Sonic tale ever told. While the idea of Sonic and friends being powerless, even helpless for once is an interesting one, what readers actually get in execution is a depressing slog where the heroes constantly lose whatever small victories they can get, Dr. Eggman and Starline continually make huge strides, and beloved characters undergo a Face–Monster Turn almost once an issue (even Cream isn't safe!). So much emphasis is placed on the loss and suffering caused as a result of said robo-zombie apocalypse that a lot of fans just felt burned out by the time the Darkest Hour hit and Team Sonic finally started clawing their way back from the brink... and one can only imagine how the target audience must have felt. While things obviously get better for the heroes eventually, the one-arc-a-year policy results in eight straight issues of nonstop loss and misery, which unsurprisingly makes for a very draining read. Not helping issues is that of the villains involved in this plot, one has Joker Immunity and the other is a Karma Houdini despite gleefully bounding across the Moral Event Horizon—he has to survive to headline the Bad Guys subline. Later arcs rectified this issue by being comparatively lighter in tone with Starline eventually receiving his comeuppance by by issue 50.
- The Tomb of Dracula: As much of a Magnificent Bastard as Dracula is, he generally puts an emphasis on the "bastard" part of the trope and it can sometimes be trying watching him inflict cruel torments on both regular protagonists and guest Innocent Bystanders while invariably thwarting the various brave and awesome attempts to kill him for good.
- The Transformers (IDW) has taken a darker tone on Transformers: Generation 1; the Autobots before the war weren't saints as the ones in the present, who aren't always as nice as we used to know them. Their relations with the humans who fear and hate them aren't good, all thanks to the Decepticons who are as ruthless as ever. Even though the Autobots have saved Cybertron, their victory seems hollow. A band of Cybertronians who fled the war blame both sides for tearing Cybertron apart, Optimus steps down as Prime as part of a deal so that the Autobots can stay and goes into exile. Meanwhile an even greater threat looms, as the Dead Universe seeks to extinguish all life in normal space. More Than Meets The Eye has largely averted this trope by actually having the heroes succeed and keeping them sympathetic while not playing up the darker ideas as much (or at least toning them down significantly), but its sister series Robots In Disguise is steadily slipping into it. Some fans have started abandoning Robots In Disguise because unlike MTMTE it sometimes gets really depressing.
Season 2 seems to be taking steps to reverse this; Dark Cybertron left things in a much better state than at the start of MTMTE and RID, and RID has adopted a more humorous tone, making the mood a little more consistent for the two comics. - Über was stated by its author to be a story not meant to be enjoyed, with the author's intent being to utterly demolish the typical comic book themes of Heroic Spirit, Underdogs Never Lose and Stupid Jetpack Hitler. It's World War II, and Hitler got himself a shiny new weapon in the form of super-powered soldiers, with the rest of the comic being one absurdly-gory slaughterfest after another absurdly gory slaughter-fest performed by these super-soldiers as the Allies rush to find something, anything, that can provide them a fighting chance. Good guys with a strong desire to win get slaughtered mercilessly, bad guys walk away to fight another day even in the worst situations they get into, the Red Shirt Army soldiers on all sides are about as useful as a new coat of paint (and quickly become a new coat of paint)... the story can be described as "let's take the Second World War, crank the bloodshed and horror up, and brutally snuff out any reason we can think of to make the reader feel hopeful that maybe things might get better". The author has become aware of this trope and has made an effort to avert this in later issues, but whether he actually succeeds or not is still debatable.
- One of the reasons why Youngblood (Image Comics) proved to be such a disaster: The nominal heroes weren't allowed a win because every enemy they faced was a potential Spin-Off, so they had to be subjected to The Worf Effect. For the book's entire run, they only had one clear victory: A Qurac dictator whose head was burst by a psychic hero... to set up his Face–Heel Turn.
- The spinoffs themselves were even worse. Brigade Vs. Bloodstrike was an Evil Versus Evil story, since both team leaders were Youngblood villains given their own books. And the miniseries ended with no clear victor (so there could be a rematch) meaning we didn't even get to see one of the bad guys lose.
