Hannibal Lectures in Comic Books.
- In the last issue of his miniseries, Baron Zemo talks his would-be murderer into attempting suicide, then stops him and convinces him to join Zemo instead.
- This was used to lethal effect in a back issue of Excalibur, as a telepath and sadist had trapped Pete Wisdom in a room flooded with an exotic bioweapon which damaged the body of an agitated person. Said telepathic sadist was probing around for things to get Pete's goat and let his own memories carve him up like a side of beef. It didn't work, as Pete had made peace with his demons some time before. Instead, the poor maniac eventually hit Pete's deliberately assembled bloc-o'-atrocity, filled with unpleasantness from his horrific earlier career so bad it started damaging the telepath. When that got going, Pete hit him with a bit of the ol' Hannibal Lecture to the effect of there being a big difference between reading minds and dealing with what you find in them.
- The Fantastic Four comic book had the "hero won't fall for it but the villain is right" version. Reed captures Doom, who points out that Reed has sacrificed far more than it's worth to take him in.
- Ghostbusters (IDW Comics): Lots of the more powerful ghosts enjoy trying this on the gang. It usually has barely any effect.
- A ghost called the 'Hungry Manitou' tried to do a Break Them by Talking on Garrett Miller, trying to make him feel like The Load to the rest of his team because of being paraplegic. Garret promptly gave it a Shut Up, Hannibal! and defeated it.
- Harley Quinn's origin is a classic example: She was Joker's psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum. The frame of her origin is, in most interpretations, almost exactly identical to Silence of The Lambs.
- Famously used in The Long Halloween: which reinvented Julian Day, AKA Calendar Man, not only making him a Hannibal expy, but also using this exact speech, not against Batman himself, but rather towards the true Holiday Killer, who it's heavily implied he knows the identity of, but avoids even using gender pronouns as to not give any clues to Batman.
- The Punisher MAX is kind of in love with this trope.
- Frank doesn't do this often, being The Stoic, but he completely destroys the last shreds of dignity Nicky Cavella has with one.Cavella: Either I walk outta here or I blow the little fuck all over you. It's your call.Frank: You won't shoot him. You're a coward. ...Psycho rep only takes you so far. After that, you've nothing. Hurt the boy and you die bad. You know that. But there's a part of you that still thinks that if you let him go, you've got a chance. And that part of you just won't shut up.
- Frank's S.A.S. pal Yorkie is the master of these. In a Double Subversion, Barracuda laughs off one of these after killing Yorkie, but true to form his dying speech echoes in his head at a most inopportune moment and gets under his skin — allowing the Brit to punk him from the grave. (It's possible that Yorkie did it in the hopes that this would actually happen.)Yorkie: He's going to kill you. Not over me. You're going up against him, so he'll kill you. Because you're a joke, in spite of it all... and he's the most dangerous man who ever walked this Earth.
- Frank doesn't do this often, being The Stoic, but he completely destroys the last shreds of dignity Nicky Cavella has with one.
- In a 1990 story in Suicide Squad, the Israeli superteam Hayoth captures arch-villain Kobra. They assign their team AI, Dybbuk, to interrogate him... which was his goal all along. He gets the AI to wonder whether it has free will, and almost convinces it that the only way it could prove to itself that it has free will would be to do something its creators would never have wanted... like, say, launch a missile attack on the Dome of the Rock.
- Ultimate Comics: Avengers features a cloned Spider-Man kept under heavy security by SHIELD as part of a Black Ops group. According to the team leader, he can "drive a man to suicide in three or four exchanges."
- The graphic novel Watchmen (which pre-dates The Silence of the Lambs by two years — but is predated by Red Dragon, the first Hannibal book) has a classic "psycho prisoner out-psychs the psychiatrist" scene. The prisoner in question evades the standard psychiatric evaluation questions, giving false responses to such things as a Rorschach test. The psychiatrist is hopeful for his progress, until a few days later, when he asks the prisoner to give true statements this time... at which point, the prisoner relates the entire story of how he mentally snapped and became Rorschach, a story so horrifying that the psychiatrist is left sitting stunned in his chair long after the prisoner is led out.
