Never Recycle Your Schemes in Comic Books.
- Done by Diabolik and Ginko:
- If Diabolik recycles a scheme, Ginko will be ready for it and slap him into jail (possibly long enough for that death sentence on his head to be executed), and if Ginko recycles a successful defensive ploy the next time, Diabolik will bypass it with ease. Best shown by Diabolik's perfect masks: as soon as Ginko confirms their existence, every single defensive ploy of his involves pinching people's faces (including his own) to check for a mask, but once in a while Diabolik walks right through the checks thanks to theatrical make-up, wigs, and, in one occasion, shaving his own head (admittedly, the latter was improvisation and he wasn't dealing with Ginko... But it worked).
- That said, Ginko is liable to recycle a defence once in a while... But only if Diabolik has no idea of what Ginko did to foil him. As that happened only with a single gold bricks escort scheme (namely leave the armoured truck empty and hide the gold in the escort motorbikes), that doesn't happen often.
- In one occasion, a Diabolik copycat had his hired accomplices recycle some of Diabolik's schemes... And Ginko promptly identified him as a copycat and prepared to shut him down by using knowledge of what schemes were usable in a given situation and applying the obvious counters to arrest the accomplices until nobody was willing to accept a job for him. The only reason he didn't was that Diabolik tracked the copycat down first...
- Disney Ducks Comic Universe:
- "The Trouble With Dimes" by Carl Barks had Donald Duck try a scheme of buying rare coins from Uncle Scrooge for their face value and then selling them for a huge profit to collectors. Scrooge got wind of the scheme and tricked Donald into flooding the market so the coins were worthless. Don Rosa's "The Money Pit" had Donald remember this flaw and try the plan again but this time vowing only to sell a few, very rare coins. After searching through Scrooge's coins for the rarest, most valuable ones gets him buried alive in the money bin, Scrooge expressly forbids the scheme from being recycled in any way again on the grounds of it being too dangerous: "I won't risk you being buried in my bin again. Why, my insurance rates would skyrocket!"
- The Black Knight: Defied. In his first raid on Scrooge's Money Bin in the Black Knight armor, Lusène just walks right up to the main entrance until Scrooge disposes of him by pulling on a red carpet, causing Lusène to fall through the floor in his dissolving armor until a vault filled with diamonds breaks his fall. He recycles the scheme in his second appearance, but takes preparations to stop Scrooge's trick from working a second time by installing a hook on the back of the suit that will stop his fall.
- Averted in a few Italian stories about the Beagle Boys, where they use variations of the same scheme on several occasions. Lampshaded at the opening of a story, where Scrooge easily defeats an "ingenious" attack because he is already overly familiar from it from their previous attempts to use it. He chastises them to stop repeating themselves and start being creative, because he is getting bored with them and how predictable they have become. Unfortunately for him, the Beagle Boys take the advise to heart and start using new and more effective methods.
- In Paperinik New Adventures, Two lampshades this trope, predicting that his brother One could escape Duckburg's destruction by recycling Two's escape plan (quickly transfer himself to various hardwares across the country) and made sure he couldn't do it.
- Fantastic Four:
- Played straight by Doctor Doom. When he reviewed a brain tape replay, he realized that one of his very old plans could be made to work with just a little bit of modification. He stopped the replay before it got to the actual plan.
- Another time, his adopted son Kristoff (standing in for Doctor Doom), dusts off one of Doom's old plans and corrects the fatal flaw which allowed the Fantastic Four to escape destruction the first time it was used. Needless to say, the Four come up with a different way to thwart the plan the second time around. (This may be why villains don't bother recycling their plans.) This was used to prove to Kristoff that he wasn't the real Doom (as memory implants had caused him to believe), because the real Doom would never repeat a scheme.
- More than that, it was clear it was run from a recording because it didn't account for Sue's force-fields (which tells you how old the plan was, she got them by issue #30 or so).
- Inverted in the Polish comic series Kajko i Kokosz. The villain Hegemon likes to reuse a simple plan of capturing the heroes' village: build a siege tower and use it to get his soldiers over the village wall. He also has the habit of setting fire to the tower after everyone else has climbed to the top so none of his men dare retreat. This means that he has to rebuild the tower every time he recycles the plan. The trope is played straight with the heroes who will use a different method every time they have to foil his plan.
- In Masters of the Universe comic series He-Man and the Masters of the Multiverse, the Skeletor of one universe managed to avert this and conquer Eternia by combining all the mystical artifacts that failed in the past, such as the Diamond Ray of Disappearance and the Ram Stone, with his Havoc Staff until he became unbeatable.
- Averted in Queen Chrysalis' issue of My Little Pony: FIENDship Is Magic. Her original plan to invade Trot by impersonating Emperor Incitatus' fiancé and draining his love, which failed because he was too self-absorbed, is identical to what she used to much greater success in "A Canterlot Wedding" hundreds of years later.
- Averted by Robotnik in Sonic the Comic. The original Metallix Project results in rogue killbots that nearly take over the world; the second results in Robotnik's strongest, most reliable Badniks which can take Sonic in a one-on-one fight. The first Cybernik is an ultra-powerful Phlebotinum Rebel that is a persistent threat to Robotnik; the second Cybernik is loyal and a useful foil to the first. The first time Robotnik tried to absorb the power of the Chaos Emeralds Knuckles stopped him with the Control Emerald (the Grey Chaos Emerald), the second time Robotnik succeed in absorbing the powers of the Chaos Emeralds, and after spending some time as a crystal statue while his body adjusted to the power he became a Omnipotence Omniscience Reality Warper with Eye Beams.
- Eggman in Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW) makes a point to never reuse his schemes. When Dr. Starline notes how close Metal Sonic’s plan was to succeeding, he suggests using what they’ve learned to pull it off bigger and better. Eggman promptly dismisses it as old news and promptly moves onto his next plan for a change of place. Turns out Eggman may have a point in doing this: Starline tries recycling various schemes that both Eggman and Sonic have used throughout the rest of his tenure as a villain, and every single one blows up in his face because of his inability to accept that anyone else is capable of learning from their past failures, while his innovations on the original plans are always insufficient to prevent his opponents from simply exploiting the original weaknesses.
- Superman:
- Unless it involves exploiting one of Superman's various various weaknesses, whatever scheme is used against Superman by Lex Luthor is guaranteed not to be reused, especially since eidetic memory is one of his talents.
- Subverted with Lesla-Lar. In The Unknown Supergirl, she kidnaps, brainwashes and swaps places with Supergirl as part of a scheme to get Superman and Lex Luthor killed and then take over the world. In The Girl with the X-Ray Mind, Lesla kidnaps, brainwashes and swaps places with Supergirl's friend Lena Thorul, albeit the second part of her evil plan is markedly different.
- Invoked in Adventures of Superman #520: on Christmas Eve, 100 criminals plot to commit acts of theft at midnight; rounding up the criminals strains the resources of the police, even with Superman's help. Supes and the Metropolis P.D. have to round up every single criminal in order to hammer home the message that this type of scheme doesn't work because if word got out of its success, criminals in other cities without a big name superhero could overwhelm the local police by copycatting the original 100.
- Notably lampshaded and subverted in Mirror Universe Transformers: Shattered Glass. In the original comic, Optimus is building a shuttle platform that will allow him to send his forces to space, and Cliffjumper uses his metal-destroying glass gas to wreck it. In Do Over, Optimus then promptly rebuilds the platform, but posts doubled guards and adds stone to the construction to make it immune. Cliffjumper is shocked at this, as he's used to villains who throw out their whole plan after one mistake.
