As this is an Ending Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.
Times where the protagonist doesn't get together with whomever they've been pursuing in Comic Books.
- Astro City: Part of the reason for El Hombre's Start of Darkness was when the love of his life married a local political activist, forcing him to admit that his heroism was a futile attempt to win her heart.
- Crimson: Alex Elder. First, his girlfriend is murdered by the vampire gang that turned him and her death continues to haunt him for many issues. Then, he meets two other girls that fall in love with him separately, and, to some extent, he returns their feelings. When it appears he's finally made up his mind, the girl he chooses performs a heroic sacrifice to save him, and the other one joins a convent, leaving him alone at the end (although it's implied he plans on reuniting with the other girl in the epilogue).
- In Drama (Raina Telgemeier), Callie is attracted to twin brothers Justin and Jesse but ends up with neither of them because Justin turns out to be gay and Jesse also turns out to be gay. There's a third boy who expresses interest in Callie, but she turns him down and is still single at book's end.
- The Eagles of Rome: Marcus survives the Battle of Teutoburg Forest and his romantic rival Lepidus is taken out, but Priscilla is raped and decapitated while his son Titus is enslaved by the Germans.
- Empire State: Jimmy screws up the courage to confess his feelings for Sara, only to discover that she's found a boyfriend since she moved away. She does let Jimmy kiss her, which is implied to be more out of pity than romantic attraction ("Listen, kiddo, that's just to get you through the next year or two."); if you tilt your head and squint, you could interpret it as a Maybe Ever After ending.
- Family: Kurt begins a relationship with Talia, but he refuses to save her criminal father Gio when he suffers a heart attack. It's implied they break up over this.
- The Flash: In "The Dark Flash Saga", after Wally West disappears into the Speed Force defeating Cobalt Blue, he's replaced by a mysterious new Flash who's later revealed to be an alternate version of himself who goes by Walter West. Walter initially had feelings for Linda Park, as the point of divergence for Wally and Walter is that Walter was unable to save Linda like Wally did, but after they disappear he ends up becoming involved with Angela Margolin. They were engaged, but when Wally and Linda returned, it was discovered that Wally and Walter couldn't exist in the same universe. Walter is forced to leave.
- Dave Lizewski in Kick-Ass has an encounter with this trope. After months of pretending to be her gay best friend, Dave finally bares his soul to Katie Deuxma. Expecting her to reciprocate his feelings, Katie instead gets her boyfriend Carl to beat the crap out of him and later sends him a pornographic picture of herself with said boyfriend, which Dave later uses.
- King City: Joe and Anna broke up a couple years before the comic starts, and Anna has a new boyfriend. Joe, back in the city after being gone for those couple years, spends a fair amount of time moping over her, leading the reader to believe he'll try to win her back. But in the end, after helping Anna rescue Max, Joe accepts that she's not his girl anymore. It looks like they'll remain friends.
- Played with in a very gruesome way in Les Légendaires during the Anathos Cycle. As the protagonists prepare to fight the God of Evil Anathos, Danael, feeling tired with everything that happened so far, eventually fully confess his feeling to Jadina once and for all, and proposes to her after the fight. She agrees and they share a kiss... then after the fight, Anathos ends up taking over Danael's body. When the heroes finally defeat Anathos at the end of the Cycle, Jadina is forced to stab Danael in order to succeed. Though he's then resurrected, he has left the group and is convinced to leave the past behind him, while Jadina replaces him as The Hero.
- Raptors: Benito Spiaggi is really in love with his partner Vicky Lenore to the point he is willing to do really crazy things like striking a deal with the villains to spare her life, and he is ready to die if it means she will be safe. Both of them survive by the end of the comic, but they don't get together since Vicky wanders the night hunting vampires as a new Raptor. Aznar is also hit with this trope, since not only he kills his girlfriend by accident during sex when his vampire side awakens and he drains her dry, but he has a brief fling with Vicky yet doesn't end the story with her too since they part ways.
- The Smurfs: In The Olympic Smurfs, for all the troubles Weakling Smurf went through, he winds up not getting Smurfette (or at least, not getting a kiss from Smurfette) by the story's end.
- As a young man, Superman never married his college love Lori Lemaris, who turned down his proposal and finally married someone else. Of course, Supes eventually fell in love with Lois Lane and even managed to stay friends with Lori, so it all worked out okay.
- In the Uncle Scrooge comics, one of the most attractive things for shippers about Scrooge and Goldie is that they only spent that one month together and then, driven apart by their pride, went their separate ways, never to see each other again for fifty-some years. Don Rosa was strongly tempted to write more meetings between them when he took over the Scrooge McDuck Universe but resisted the temptation to ruin the tragic romanticism of this trope.
- Yorick in Y: The Last Man, in two different ways. First, he discovers that his girlfriend Beth, who he has been right around the world to find again, was planning to break up with him (and even the death of all other men doesn't help). But he realized that he'd fallen in love with his bodyguard, Agent 355, and the feeling is mutual...until she's shot by a sniper. Regardless, Beth ends up with Yorrick's sister, Hero. So, you might say that Hero gets the girl, even if "the hero" doesn't.
- Yorick himself winds up marrying a minor love interest (who became pregnant with his child early on), and in the Distant Finale, the daughter explains that they had a troubled relationship because Yorick never stopped carrying a torch for Agent 355. In this time period, however, the popular belief is that Yorick and Beth found each other, and true love conquered all. Yorick's daughter mocks the embellishment.
