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Karma Houdini Warranty / Comic Books

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Times where Karma Houdini Warranties ran out in Comic Books.


  • An Archie comic from the early '70s starts with Reggie yanking away a pennant from Jughead and saying "Take your hands off!" Jughead replies "I can't, they're attached to my arms!" and proceeds to drive Reggie crazy with his incessant recital of "Dem Bones." Later Jughead realizes he may have gone too far and seeks to apologize. He finds Reggie half way around the bend and tells him "I didn't want to upset you." This drives Reggie even crazier as he didn't accept it as a valid apology.
    • Archie himself turns into a Karmic Trickster in a story about a fake rubber hand he borrowed from the art class. He uses it to play practical jokes on Reggie and Big Moose, getting them in trouble with Mr. Weatherbee. Jughead, who disapproves of Archie's behavior, thinks a hand clinging to the outside of a window sill is Archie's fake hand and nudges it off, only to find it was the janitor. Jughead, Reggie, and Big Moose wind up serving detention, with Archie delivering a final needle ("I sure wish I could give you a hand!") As Archie laughs outside, three arms from the detention room reach out towards him.
    • One story has Jughead take part in a Photo Club contest and messing up the others' pictures (running over Archie and breaking his camera, accidentally mixing his Ice Cream with Dilton's film) and winds up winning the contest, due to being the only one who entered. As he celebrates his winnings, Archie and Reggie invite him over, ending with Moose behind a corner ready with a club.
  • The Avengers #200 infamously ended with the Avengers bidding Carol Danvers a fond farewell with Marcus Kang, a man who basically raped Carol. Avengers annual #10 later brought Carol back, revealing that Marcus died a short while after she left with him and having her scream at her useless ex-teammates for none of them doing anything about the fact she'd been raped and brainwashed. And most distressingly of all, that all of them took everything Marcus said at face value. Carol doesn't return to the Avengers, choosing to stick with the X-Men, as the Avengers shamefully leave realizing they betrayed one of their friends.
  • The Doctor Who Magazine comic strip:
    • An alien Corrupt Corporate Executive named Josiah Dogbolter acted as a recurring villain in a lengthy arc in the early-to-mid eighties, but then disappeared from the strip unpunished for his many crimes due to a change of writer aborting the arc. "The Stockbridge Showdown", a Milestone Celebration strip in the magazine's 500th issue, centred around the Doctor finally defeating him.
    • Similarly, Count Jodafra was a major villain during the Eighth Doctor's era, and an Arch-Enemy to his niece, the Doctor's companion Destrii. The intended arc got aborted in this case due to the revival of the TV show and the BBC decision that the Ninth Doctor's strips should feature Rose and be unambiguously set in gaps in the TV continuity. Jodafra ended up making a brief return in the Twelfth Doctor's final arc, and getting killed off to help establish the threat of the main villain.
  • The original run of Doom Patrol ended with the members of the eponymous superhero team being murdered by their enemies Madame Rouge and Captain Zahl in 1968. Rouge and Zahl escaped justice for 14 years until their own deaths in The New Teen Titans in 1982 - and unlike the Doom Patrol, they stayed dead.
  • Dynamo5: Chrysalis was never caught by Captain Dynamo because of their affair before the series, though he did try to stop her crimes. In the series, after her plan with her daughter to take advantage of Captain Dynamo's death to impersonate him to increase their power base failed, she and her daughter were captured. She was finally sent to jail and separated from her daughter, who had the memory of her mother wiped from her mind.
  • Earth 2: Terry Sloan tends to get away with his nefarious schemes no matter how devastating they are, but ultimately gets his comeuppance when he is killed during the events of Earth 2: Society.
  • The finale of the first arc of The Flash (Infinite Frontier) has Savitar finally pay for his actions in Heroes in Crisis, which resulted in the destruction of Sanctuary, the deaths of several heroes, and Wally West being set up to take the fall. Namely, through Wally himself effortlessly catching up to and beating him - after giving him a 3-second head start.
  • Fables: Gepetto ended the original run of the series completely unharmed, aside from the lost of his empire, and when he was last seen he was plotting ways to rebuild it. And then the series continued on DC Black Label, and within two issues of its start an unimpressed Peter Pan has Tinkerbell turn him into a coin. Nobody else knows this happened, so Gepetto gets to spend the next few millennia (or longer) as a lifeless coin, with everything yanked permanently from his hands.
  • The 109th issue of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (Marvel) had a S.A.W. Viper gun down Doc, Crankcase, Heavy Metal, Thunder, and Breaker in spite of Cobra Commander's specific orders being that none of the Joes be killed. He has the gall to boast to Hawk that the Joes can't do anything about his actions and convinces Cobra Commander not to punish him solely by addressing that he's killed more Joes at once than any other Cobra member has in their past years fighting G.I. Joe, but eventually gets what's coming to him when Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow kill him in the 112th issue.
  • Gotham Central ends with its Big Bad Jim Corrigan getting off the hook with his many crimes (including murdering Crispus Allen) because of a variety of circumstances and prior mistakes by the MCU, and while he gets beaten severely, humiliated, and nearly killed by Renee, it's still made clear that there's nothing legally that can be done to bring him to justice and Renee ultimately can't bring herself to kill him. Later comics, however, show that Corrigan's actions and the things he did suffer end up having realistic consequences; when he see him again, he's a broken, miserable man drinking himself into an early grave after the beating he got from Renee left him both mentally and physically traumatized and the fact his crimes are an Open Secret ruined his life. And then his sins really catch up to him, as Crispus' son, Malcolm Allen, gets ahold of his father's old service pistol and corners Corrigan in an alleyway, vengefully shooting him dead.
  • Gotham High: Selina is in love with both Bruce Wayne and Jack Napier (the story's incarnation of the Joker) and wants them to play off against each other for her love, for no other reason than her being a Manipulative Bitch. Not to mention she goes further by instigating a kidnapping plot and continues to manipulate them for profit and twists the knife by calling Jack's love for her "the biggest joke". Thanks to her, Bruce and Jack's friendship is destroyed while she fakes her death and escapes to Paris for Spring Break, and thus seems to get off scot-free after all the trouble she caused. But since Spring Break is just a week-long, she will eventually have to return to Gotham and deal with the consequences of her actions.
  • The Christine Spar arc of Grendel has the serial child murderer vampire Tujiro XIV, who started all the trouble, escape at the end. He unexpectedly turns up again as the main villain of the Eppy Thatcher arc, and this time dies.
  • Loki's Karma Houdini Warranty over what they did at the end of Journey into Mystery (Gillen) (killed their own child incarnation and took over his body) expired in the 10th issue of Loki: Agent of Asgard, the kicker is: They're type one. Their own guilt over this crime almost unmade reality in Young Avengers, they're trying to make amends ever since, and what actually triggers the karmic punishment is a confession to Thor.
  • Legion of 3 Worlds gives belated karma to the human couple who killed an alien child in the prologue to Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes when they wind up slaughtered by Superboy-Prime.
  • In the Marvel Universe, there's Henry Peter Gyrich, an Obstructive Bureaucrat who has attempted numerous times to destroy the superhuman populace or at least control them. After years of this man's meddling and always getting away with it, he finally meets his end in S.W.O.R.D. (2020) when Abigail Brand, fed up with his incompetence within ORCHIS, has him shot out of an airlock. Despite this breaking one of Krakoa's three main laws, no one's really willing to actually want to try and convict her.
  • The Multiversity had the Thunderworld Adventures one-shot take place in a universe based on classic Shazam! (to the point of Billy Batson's alter ego still being called Captain Marvel with nary a care for possible litigious retaliation from Marvel Comics also having a Captain Marvel) where the villains are Dr. Sivana and several counterparts of himself from other worlds. One of the Sivanas is a Serial Killer who succeeded in defeating his world's counterpart to Earth's Mightiest Mortal by using time travel to slaughter Billy Batson before he gained his powers and gets away in the end to continue killing other people in the multiverse when the other Sivanas are beaten. He eventually gets his comeuppance during the series' conclusion when he wanders into the Justice Riders universe and gets shot in the head.
  • Scooby-Doo! Team-Up: The story "Perils Before Swine" is a crossover with The Perils of Penelope Pitstop. In that series, Sylvester Sneekly a.k.a. the Hooded Claw kept trying to kill Penelope Pitstop so he could inherit her vast fortune and, no matter how many times he failed, he was never unmasked and was always free to torment her in the next episode. This time, thanks to the very same people he tried to manipulate so he could be rid of her protectors, he's finally exposed and arrested.
  • Secret Wars (2015): Arcade managed to kidnap several teenagers, forced them to fight to the death, and survived to brag about it — and yet the supervillain community still treats him as a joke. Then in Secret Wars he finally meets his demise via getting his eyes torn out and being run over by every single Spirit of Vengeance.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
    • Geoffrey St. John got away with a number of treasonous actions, including letting Dr. Robotnik usurp the kingdom because he was pardoned by his then recently crowned master, Ixis Naugus. When Naugus' plan to use Mind Control on the Council of Acorn fails and Geoffrey finally sees Naugus for what he is, he tries to appeal to Naugus to change his ways and gets possessed by Naugus. Now that the book has gone through a Continuity Reboot, Geoffrey's ultimate fate is unclear, but he's no longer relevant to the book. Though it's very possible that he's been wiped from existence due to the lawsuit that resulted in said reboot.
    • Thrash the Devil threw the entire echidna race into an unknown dimension out of revenge for him and his race being experimented on, never mind that many of the echidnas were completely innocent. Knuckles, Sonic, and Amy tried to force him into revealing their location, but he escaped. It can be assumed that, because of the lawsuit, Thrash ended up facing the very same fate he inflicted on the echidnas, gone and never coming back.
  • Superman/Batman: The "Public Enemies" arc provides some belated comeuppance for Lex Luthor's term as President. After spending his term flouting the law and abusing his position to cause harm to his enemies (such as getting his ex-wife killed or framing Bruce Wayne for the murder of Vesper Fairchild), Luthor's hatred of Superman proves to be his undoing when his attempt to destroy the Man of Steel using Apokoliptian battle armor results in everyone seeing his true colors as an unstable madman and they summarily have him impeached.
  • Supreme Power: Emil Burbank is shown to be a much worse person than his Earth-712 counterpart, to the extent that he heavily implies to have done sexual things to his older sister when he was a child and is frequently hinted to prey on underage girls. After multiple series of weaseling out of punishment by coasting on his advanced intelligence being needed to vanquish greater threats, Burbank finally gets his just deserts at the conclusion of Howard Chaykin's run, where all the people empowered by the energy from Hyperion's ship lose their special abilities. Since Burbank was one of those people, he winds up permanently losing his high intellect and is last seen raging over his inflated ego being shattered by the revelation that he's been forever robbed of the gift he's long used to get his way and flout consequences for his actions.
  • In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (IDW), Krang is put on trial for crimes against both the normal universe and Dimension X, including a failed Hostile Terraforming attempt that would have wiped out humanity. While it's clear to everyone that Krang is a monster, he manages to avoid the death penalty by emotionally manipulating the judge (the king of the Neutrinos) while on the witness stand, guilt-tripping him over the fact that countless Triceratons have died protecting the Neutrino homeworld. When the King orders Krang to be exiled to a small island on Earth, Leatherhead (who was tortured for years by Krang) goes berserk and kills Krang himself by eating him.
  • In The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye, a flashback arc set in the Pre-War era has the corrupt Senator Proteus get away with all the terrible things he's done... but only because the comic's chronology states that Proteus gets brutally murdered for his crimes a couple months afterwards.
  • During the War of the Realms, Dario Agger is able to get himself and Roxxon away scot-free from being punished for effectively betraying humanity to Malekith's army by claiming that Wakanda manipulated footage of him and his company. The warranty finally ran out for both Dario and Roxxon as they found themselves in the crosshairs of the Immortal Hulk as Dario's attempt to use Xemnu the Living Hulk on the Not-So-Jolly Green Giant ended with all of them being reduced to blobs, Dario himself being snagged by the Leader, who taunts him for his failure.
  • Watchmen ended with Ozymandias killing three million people as part of a Genghis Gambit for world peace and getting away with it, only to discover his efforts merely delayed World War III. In the sequel Doomsday Clock, he's shot by the Comedian only for Rorschach to stop the bleeding so he can be judged for his crimes, and Ozymandias spends the rest of his life in prison instead of becoming a martyr like he wanted.

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