Elephants in the Living Room in Comic Books.
- An old example is the way white people are overrepresented in The Golden Age of Comic Books. We the readers know that this is because that's how you made superheroes comics back then, but it's very strange how nobody in-story ever notices the lack of super-powered non-whites.
- The issue of staying in super-crime-ridden cities is actually addressed in Astro City: people continue to live in the eponymous city in spite of the constant super-crime because of the sense of community fostered by having to work together to rebuild after battles. And because having a lot of superheroes around is cool.
- Batman's home town of Gotham City never suffers from any long-term economic damage or loss of population, even though a number of psychopathic supervillains routinely use the city as a stage for their grisly "performances" (The Joker), a giant petri dish for their scientific experiments (The Scarecrow), or a base for their environmental crusades (Poison Ivy). Ignoring them, the city has long been a Wretched Hive of endemic police and civic corruption and mob activity, making it curious that anyone would willingly choose to live there. Although the population did take a permanent nosedive after Batman: No Man's Land and sections of the city were rendered uninhabitable, it was still a rather busy city.
- In Shadowpact, it is implied that the ancient entity (who later takes the name "Dr. Gotham", after the city that's been built over him) sleeping beneath Gotham City for untold ages has been influencing the dark trend of everything in the city.
- In Stormwatch, city-speaker Jack Hawksmoor has a tête-a-tete with the personification of Gotham, who is shown as a demented goblin/gargoyle.
- Averted in The Question on the same topic. Hub City was so crime-filled that the honest citizens eventually evacuated the place and abandoned it to the gangs.
- In Fables, the protagonists rarely talk about much of their pasts, even if it was full of abominable deeds. Which, considering they're all old-school Grimm storybook fables, can be extensive indeed. The in-story explanation is they were all given amnesty when they entered the mundane world. This doesn't keep them from being wary of each other, nor from falling back on old habits.
- Despite the fact that Marvel Comics's version of New York City has been the site of multiple alien invasions, a demonic infestation, has suffered through every kind of cockamamie plot imaginable, and is routinely targeted by supervillains of every stripe, there has never been any sort of mass exodus or serious damage to the economy in spite of all the upheavals. (Probably because Damage Control repairs everything so efficiently.) When 9/11 rolled around, it portrayed The Kingpin, Magneto, and Doctor Doom as sincerely moved. Problem is, the Marvel Universe has had much worse. Magneto was actually killed in such an attack, on Genosha, which killed 16 million people. 9/11, by MU standards, was actually a low-impact event. Furthermore, while the Kingpin might be moved by love for his city, there is no real reason why Dr. Doom would care either way. All comics publishers were in a bind there, because with New York as the home of the Fantastic Four and The Avengers, or the X-Men in the same state, or Superman on Earth, it's hard to believe it could still happen, but would have been seen as disrespectful to ignore it. It gets worse. Juggernaut was seen there crying. Juggernaut, in the past, has actually knocked down one of the two buildings himself and laughed out loud about it.
- Mini Marvels parodies this trope with Elephant Steve. He really hates this expression, by the way.
- Judd Winick's Pedro and Me has a sequence where he compares living with cameras filming your every move to living with elephants. You just feel the need to point them out.
- The "Homeschooling" arc of Runaways involves several elephants from the previous two arcs (Karolina's depression after losing Xavin, Nico's growing Machiavellian tendencies, Chase's bitterness over losing Gert, Victor's resentment at Nico for dumping him, and Klara's unresolved trauma issues) all suddenly colliding with each other when an ill-conceived party results in a terrible accident that leads to serious divisions in the team.
- In Transformers: More than Meets the Eye, Krok obsessively carries a small device that he insists is sending a signal to his old squad, whom he got separated from years ago. Except it's soon obvious that it's not doing so and the "missing squad" is actually dead, with Krok being delusional from the trauma. All of the Scavengers can see it plain as day, but they're terrified of broaching the subject and just try to pretend they don't notice, to increasingly poor effect. Misfire grows steadily more fed up with dancing around the issue, eventually forcing the others to confront it by ripping the device out of Krok's hand by force.
- In Ultimate Spider-Man, Spider-Man's secret identity becomes an elephant in the room among Peter Parker's group of friends. Eventually lampshaded by Kenny "Kong" McFarlane:What, you want us to have some kind of secret code? "Oh, if only Spider-Man were here and could go after our friend!"
- The premise of X-Men is that there is a group of people born with random super powers who are the next step of human evolution. Society fears those mutants and their powers, and all mutants have to endure the Fantastic Racism. So what about the other superheroes of the Marvel Universe? How can mutant heroes be feared because of their powers while non-mutant heroes, such as the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, be loved as celebrities? Why do the people fear Sunfire, a guy who can fly and light himself on fire, and love the Human Torch, another guy who can fly and light himself on fire? As a result, most adaptions of the X-Men to other media simply skip the Marvel Universe as a whole, and focus just on the parts of it related to the X-Men.
