Its Personal / Comic Books

---

• Albion: Heavily implied between Eagle-Eye, the warden of the asylum, and Feendish, who had been his arch nemesis in the days of Eagle Eye, Junior Spy. The trauma Feendish caused him as a child hero is implied to be the reason why Eagle Eye helped imprison all other costumed people.
• Age of Reptiles:
  • "Tribal Warfare": The Deinonychus pack has a grudge against the T. rex family for stealing a kill. The grudge also extends the other way when the Deinonychus pack steals all the Tyrannosaurus eggs and kills the baby ''T. rex.
  • "The Hunt": The Allosaurus (named Santo in the prologue) has a grudge against the Ceratosaurus pack for killing his mother. When the Allosaurus kills the Ceratosaurus pack leader, it's revealed the Ceratosaurus had a mate and offspring, who just witnessed the Allosaurus kill their mate/father.
  • "Ancient Egyptian": The female Spinosaurus struggles to forgive the male when he kills her babies from a previous Spinosaurus. While they already have a hatred of predators, the alpha male Paralititan has a grudge against the male Spinosaurus for injuring his foot and the Carcharodontosaurus for killing one of his babies.
• This is the core motivation of the Astro City story arc, "The Dark Ages," with Charles and Royal Williams spending years on a vendetta against the man who killed their parents twenty years ago.
• The Avengers: In The Avengers (Jason Aaron), the Came Back Wrong Phil Coulson says he doesn't take Deadpool killing him personally. Destroying Lola, on the other hand...
• Avengers Inc.:
  • While it initially seemed Whirlwind had been killed for blabbing about something he shouldn't back in Wasp (2023), it turns out his murder was entirely unrelated to that. The killer admits it was personal, and laments having done it.
  • Vision takes the very existence of "Victor Shade" personally, since that's his name (or at least a name he chose for himself).
• Played for laughs in Issue #4 of The Awesome Slapstick. When the Neutron Bum is rampaging through Manhattan, Steve Harmon flatly refuses to get involved (he was waiting in line for a concert). He leaps into action only after the Bum attacks the Tower Records building.
• Batman:
  • In "The Origin of Batman", Batman learns that the villain of the week is none other than Joe Chill, the two-bit hood who killed his parents outside the theater. Upon this realization, Batman becomes determined to collar Chill, asking Robin not to get involved, and even going as far as unmasking himself on the gamble that doing so will scare Chill into making a mistake. And it does.
  • Death of the Family: Barbara Gordon had been left paralyzed by The Joker in The Killing Joke and Jason Todd had been murdered by him in A Death in the Family. Now that Joker is after both of them, Barbara and Jason have some scores to settle with him. Made worse with the poisoning of Jason's girlfriend, Joker's poisoning of Commissioner Gordon, and his kidnap and mutilation of Barbara's mother. This goes both ways, as in Red Hood and the Outlaws, The Joker is really, really irritated that Jason went off-script and basically ruined one of the best jokes he pulled on Batman by coming back to life. So he prepares a little surprise for Jason as an aside from Death of the Family and booby-traps one of Jason's helmets, causing him to receive a face-full of acid.^note Red Hood and the Outlaws #18 (2013)
  • Batman: Gordon of Gotham. When "Checkers" Hoagland tells Gordon that a bloody heist was committed by rogue cops, he orders Batman to leave the case alone and sets out to bring the culprits in himself.
  • In Batman: Year One, Falcone wants Batman hunted down and killed for tying him up in his underwear inside his own home.
  • In Nightwing (Infinite Frontier), it's made clear that the K.G.Beast is on the Titans' shit-list for shooting Nightwing in the head, setting off the whole "Ric Grayson" debacle back during the Batman (Tom King) run. Wally West in particular makes sure to let him know that he'll never get another chance to try that stunt again.
• The conflict at the heart of Civil War II is due to the death of War Machine as when a new character with precognive powers emerges, Captain Marvel, who was Rhodey's lover and present when he died, wants to use the character to make Precrime Arrests and Iron Man, who was Rhodey's best friend, still believes that punishment should come after the crime.
• In the Eleventh Doctor Doctor Who (Titan) comics, Alice has this level of personal hatred of the Talent Scout after he impersonates her dead mother in an attempt to manipulate her.
• Firefly: The Sting: Saffron locks Inara in the convent because of Inara trapping her in a trash crate in "Trash".
• The one thing that all Iron Man villains have in common is that they really, really, really hate Tony Stark. Or are psychotically obsessed with him.
• At one point in Preacher, Allfather D'aronique explains to Jesse Custer why he changed his plans from exploiting the word to killing him:
  Allfather D'aronique: You killed her, Custer. You killed my Aunt Marie!
  Jesse: Grandma.
• The Punisher: Almost any recurring villain has this in one form or another, and sometimes the feeling is mutual. Oddly, a great many criminals try to invoke it by truthfully claiming they had nothing to do with the deaths of Frank's family, not understanding Frank's war is on crime rather than revenge.
  • Ma Gnucci provides the page image up top. The fact that a battle with the Punisher renders her a quadruple amputee doesn't improve her disposition. It gets to the point that once she's killed, her will states that her last remaining family member won't inherit until the Punisher is dead. Punisher's feelings towards her get a lot uglier after she has one of his friends tortured while trying to find him.
  • Most versions of Jigsaw have his status as Frank's Arch-Enemy trace back to how one of his first encounters with the Punisher left his face horribly disfigured.
  • Rosalie Carbone has it in for Punisher bad for 1) Killing her father, and 2) seducing her while undercover then telling her it didn't mean anything. His occasional attempts to kill her don't help.
• The Punisher MAX:
  • When Nicky Cavella (the Big Bad from the first storyarc and one of the very few MAX villains to survive an encounter with Frank Castle) returned to New York, he was trying to lure Frank out of hiding — and he started by unearthing the bodies of Frank's deceased wife and children and urinating on their bones. Frank wasn't very happy about this, though unlike what Cavella had been hoping for, Frank reacted with Tranquil Fury rather than becoming sloppy and reckless, going after the entire New York underworld with military precision. The arc ended with Frank dragging Cavella out into the woods and shooting him in the stomach, then leaving him to die a long, inevitable death.
  • Before this he kills fifty-eight mobsters in one night and vows to continue until the police bury his family, tortures the assassin said mobster hired, and is saved from a suicide strike on the mobster by a hot Punisher fan lady. On the plus side? Crime rate went down.
    • Which gets a "Fuck you Jonathan" as the mayor's reply, after another aide suggests they hope he just stops.
  • Another Punisher fan lady shows up, going to far as to take his clothes and seek out revenge on those who wronged her, before beating one of them to death, naked, in front of Castle. She then has sex with Frank and commits suicide halfway through. Compared to Jenny, O'Brien is perfectly sane.
    • Said people who’d wronged that woman were going after Punisher for killing their husbands. Even more so for the leader, an older woman, who was not only widowed when Frank massacred the mobsters attending Don Cesare's birthday party in the first MAX story, he also killed her grandfather, her brothers and two sons.
  • During the "Kitchen Irish" Arc, one of the SAS soldiers Frank works with is the son of a soldier murdered by one of the IRA members they're chasing. After getting his revenge, he comments that he feels no different, Yorkie tells him to take a look at Frank and wonder how he feels.
  • When Barracuda kills one of Frank's few friends and kidnaps Frank's illegitimate daughter (itself an It's Personal as Frank was the only man who'd ever beaten him, leaving him down one eye, four fingers and several teeth), Franks response rivals what he did to the man who dug up his families bodies, and involves hooking Barracuda's testicles to a car battery for over an hour.
  • Two one-shots show Frank killing the murderers of his family ('The Cell"), and the mafia group who terrorized his childhood neighborhood and allowed the rape of his best friend ("Tyger").
• In Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics), Mammoth Mogul told Sonic that he now understands he can never defeat Sonic. He is content to outlive Sonic and make sure that Sonic never knows peace until the day he dies.
• Spider-Man: There are so many villains that fit this mold, Spider-Man can sometimes seem as though he isn't actually doing any superhero work but is rather trying to survive the next villain who wants to get even:
  • The original Green Goblin, Norman Osborn, started off trying to take control of the New York underworld, but by his second appearance he was dedicated completely to killing Spider-Man. See quote for this trope. It's only been during the recent Dark Reign crossover that he has begun to do other villainous things besides messing with Peter Parker.
  • The same goes for the second Green Goblin, Norman's son Harry. He went into villainy just to kill Spider-Man as revenge for his father's "death". It doesn't help that he was always going through a Heel–Face Revolving Door so he never really wanted to do anything evil when he wasn't after Spidey's blood.
  • The first Venom was Eddie Brock, who was also only after Spider-Man and not only had no aspirations for further villainy, but he was something of a Sociopathic Hero. Once he agreed to a truce with Spider-Man, he became an Anti-Hero.
  • The Jackal was also mostly interested in Spider-Man and was the villain responsible for kick starting The Clone Saga... apparently For the Evulz.
  • Kraven the Hunter was hired to captured Spidey one time and failed, resulting in him becoming obsessed with Peter Parker to the point where he was Driven to Suicide.
    • Over the years, his wife and three children all took turns trying to kill Spidey in revenge.
  • The Mad Scientist Spencer Smythe was likewise hired to build spider-slayer robots. He was driven to insanity and financial ruin due to building wave after wave of robots designed to kill Spider-Man, only for them to be busted into pieces. Eventually, he died of old age.
    • His son then took up his mantle during a single story arc where he built an entire robot army of spider-slayers which, as expected, were destroyed by Spidey. He even turned himself into a cyborg in order to beat Spidey one-on-one. He lost.
  • During Spider-Verse, Spider-Girl, Miles Morales and Spider-Gwen all say one variation of this to the Inheritors after they end up doing something that really pissed them off: Killing Mayday's family, destroying Rio Morales' gravestone and forcing a Peter Parker Gwen was trying to save to sacrifice himself. For the last two, the Inheritor who brought this about just has no idea why.
• A Spider-Woman comic series revolves around Spider-Woman (Jessica Drew) coping with her new life after having been rescued from the Skrulls after two years in captivity while the Skrull Queen impersonated her, giving her an even worse reputation than she had before. Needless to say, she came to hate Skrulls, and when she found a Skrull posing as Spider-Man and trying to trick her again, she was displeased.
• Strontium Dog: Johnny Alpha has a couple of these, notably against Nelson Kreelman in "Portrait of a Mutant"/"Wanted", and Max Bubba in "Rage".
• Superman:
  • In Superman: Red Son, Lex Luthor was originally hired to kill Superman (here a champion of the Soviet Union) by the US Government and just saw it as another problem to solve with his genius intellect. But he decides to devote his entire life to the task shortly after Superman defeats a Bizarro duplicate he created. But he later reveals that wasn't the problem — the thing that drove him over the edge was that Bizarro managed to beat him at chess, implying that he, and by extension the original Superman, was more intelligent than Lex was.
  • The Supergirl from Krypton (2004): Superman goes after Darkseid when he kidnaps his beloved cousin. Barda joins the rescue team because she hates Darkseid and because her ex-teammates -the Female Furies- killed Harbinger and abducted Supergirl.
    Barda: From what you've told me, I'm willing to bet that it was the Female Furies who killed Harbinger... and made off with your cousin. That makes it personal for me too.
  • Elseworld's Finest: Supergirl & Batgirl:
    • Batgirl wants to take Lex Luthor down because he murdered her parents.
    • When Supergirl discovers that Lex slaughtered her baby cousin she wants to kill him.
  • In a classic story, Supergirl and her cousin fight Kryptonite Man, a villain who blames their race for Krypton's destruction and his own species' extinction. Superman tries to explain the truth to him, but K-Man refuses to listen.
  • In the New Krypton storyline, Post-Crisis Supergirl has a feud with Reactron after he kills her father. It doesn't end well, and he eventually blows up her mother and almost every surviving member of her race. She also takes her enmity with Doomsday this way, knowing that he once killed her cousin.
  • In the Red Daughter of Krypton arc, Supergirl explains that she hates the Worldkillers (sentient, genetically-engineered biological weapons) and the Diasporan alien race because they kill planets, and she's an orphan of a dead world. She's very committed to stop them all.
    Supergirl: How could anyone make it their mission in life to murder whole worlds? Can you imagine what an abomination that is to an orphan from a dead planet? [...] This world-killing stuff... it hits a nerve. It makes me furious, and the ring just fans the flame!
  • Bizarrogirl: Supergirl dreams that she's slugging Superwoman while shouting: "You destroyed our planet!"
  • Superman: Brainiac: The titular villain killed hundreds of Kryptonians, stole the City of Kandor and kept its denizes imprisoned for decades. Taking the Coluan down is intensely personal for both Kryptonian cousins. And at the end, Brainiac blows the Kent Farm up and kills Superman's father in revenge for Superman defeating him.
  • Who is Superwoman?: The titular villain killed and hurt innocent people and also helped Supergirl's father's murderer escape justice. Supergirl doesn't hold back at all when she gets to fight Superwoman.
  • Superman: Doomed: Brainiac targeted Smallville and Metropolis as a way to get back at Superman for foiling his first invasion five years ago.
  • Crucible: Tsavo burns with the desire to knock his little brother Roho down because his youngest sibling murdered their parents after staging a coup which destroyed their homeworld.
  • Strangers at the Heart's Core: Supergirl regards the Visitors as enigmatic but run-of-the-mill crooks until they shoot her adoptive father, whereupon she declares she will chase them to the ends of the universe if they have killed him.
  • Let My People Grow!: When Brainiac gets shrunk into oblivion, Superman looks upset... but Supergirl is grinning wickedly. Having been raised in Kryptonian society, she took Kandor's abduction way more personally than her cousin, who was raised as an Earthman, ever did.
• Super Metroid: Samus discovers that the dead hatchling and swears to avenge it, and opens up with everything she has on Mother Brain.
• Marvel supervillain Jackie Dio, aka Underworld, asserts that while the mutilation of one of his friends by Hammerhead may have been "just business," it was personal to him, and shoots Hammerhead for it.
• Ultimate Galactus Trilogy: Captain America will not shy away from saving the world, but taking down a cult of aliens that pervert the idea of God... that's something else.
• The Warlord: Th Vashek assassins despise the Warlord for defeating their New Atlanteans, and Y'smalla has an even more personal stake because the Warlord killed the man she loved during his war against the Atlanteans.
• X-23: Laura is ordered by her mother to kill Rice and destroy the Facility to prevent them from making more clones of her. When Laura puts up her claws to beat Rice to death over the course of ten minutes while having Flashback Cuts to the severe physical abuse he subjected her to throughout her life it's pretty clear she's made it personal.

---