Phlebotinium powered by deeply unethical means in Comic Books.
- Captain America: In Captain America 1954 #174, the Secret Empire capture mutants to drain their greater-than-normal psychic energy to power weapons and vehicles to take over the U.S.
- The events are later revisited in the short prose story "Firm Commitments", told from the point of view of a scientist who discovers the immense thermodynamics-breaking potential of Mutant neurons, gets involved with events far greater than himself, and has his life ruined as a result.
- Checkmate: In a story arc involving the Suicide Squad, the team is shown invading a power plant in a Southeast Asian dictatorship. A boy emitting solar power is hooked up to a machine siphoning the energy. They break him out, but leave him in the Mirror Dimension, on orders to make sure he is no longer a threat to American interests.
- Dark Empire: Emperor Palpatine did this to maintain his immortality. To be exact, he dreamt of conquering the entire universe and drawing on the Force from every individual for the sole purpose of keeping himself, and possibly Darth!Luke alive for all eternity. And yes, all Sith are obsessed with immortality.
- Doom Patrol: In the 2016 series, the first arc involves the team being brought together to save Danny the Street. Having long since evolved into the pocket dimension Danny the World, and acquiring the ability to create life, Danny was hunted and captured by an unscrupulous interdimensional corporation that plans to torture them into being an endless supply of "ethically sourced" ground meat.
- ElfQuest: Blue Mountain, home of the Gliders, featured doors and ornaments that were maintained and controlled by rock shaper elves. Once free-willed elves, these rock shapers were so deeply sunken into meditation or mental numbness that they were oblivious to all but other Gliders' commands to open or close.
- Elseworld's Finest: Supergirl & Batgirl: There is no Superman or Batman; the most powerful superheroes are their Distaff Counterparts, Supergirl and Batgirl. Batgirl is trying to take down Lex Luthor and elicits a reluctant Supergirl's help. They both travel deep underground Metropolis, trying to find the 'clean fuel source' that Lex Luthor discovered for the city years ago. It turns out that it's her cousin Kal-El...who never got to grow up, but died as an infant in a jar. But considering that this is Lex Luthor, are we truly surprised he'd stoop so low?
- Empire: Golgoth has Endymion (essentially this Universe's Superman) hooked up to a machine that drains his blood and turns it into a hyper-addictive drug
- Fables: Frau Totenkinder sacrificed her own child in exchange for her considerable magical powers. In order to keep said powers, she also has to sacrifice one newborn every year. In modern times she has supposedly stopped killing infants and uses donated blood from newborn Fables instead. It's heavily implied that she also maintains her magic by owning an abortion clinic.note And as her encounters with Hansel and Gretel (shown in flashbacks) indicate, in a pinch a child of any age will do. Kay's comments also indicate that Totenkinder sacrifices hundreds, possibly thousands, of children, upon which the old witch says she 'invests her money in perfectly legal ways among the Mundy'.
- Fantastic Four: Doctor Doom sealed his position as truly evil rather than arrogant Well-Intentioned Extremist when he tracked down his first love, convinced her he had abandoned his technology and evil ways, then sacrificed her to demons in order to boost his magic powers as a complement to his genius tech. The demons then gave him a cloak made from her flesh, which he wore. However, every writer after these events has pretended that they never happened.
- The Flash: Iron Heights, the horrendous supervillain prison for the enemies of the Flash, is powered by Fallout, a man who was irradiated and accidentally killed his family. He is so irradiated that he needs to be quarantined so that his energy can be safely released. When the Flash first sees him, the process for powering the prison is extremely painful. He later makes the warden change the system so that Fallout is more comfortable.
- This is oddly similar to The Dark Knight Strikes Again, where Flash himself is used to power an entire city by essentially running on a giant hamster wheel all day, every day.
- Give Me Liberty: The comic has secret experiments performed with schizophrenic kids. One of them turns out to be a telepath.
- Graveyard Shakes: To keep his son Modie alive, Nikola removes the life force of a 13-year-old child and transfers it into Modie. Modie doesn't like his dad doing this, though.
- Green Lantern:
- The power rings of the death-worshipping Black Lantern Corps of Blackest Night don't rely on emotions like the others. Instead they are powered by killing a lot of people. Killing a person and stealing their heart restores 0.01% power to every ring in the Corps. So it takes about 10,000 hearts to recharge all the rings to maximum power, minus the power used to steal those hearts of course. And when all the rings are charged to 100%, Nekron appears.
- Speaking of which, it's common knowledge that the rings of Green Lanterns and other similar corps run on emotions, but the Lights Out arc revealed the dirty little secret that they're finite power sources. Once those emotions dry up, the universe ends — and this isn't the first time it's happened.
- Guardians of the Galaxy: In Guardians of the Galaxy (2008), the alien Universal Church of Truth powers its technology with "Belief Engines", generators that draw on the faith of its legion of worshippers. At least one of their starships is shown carrying storage banks full of the faithful, kept in stasis and wired directly into the ship's power systems.
- Heavy Metal: One story depicted a disparate group of beings infiltrating and fighting their way through a high-tech structure, eventually reaching a computer resembling a huge, sleeping human face. They blasted open a dome on the forehead and remove... a baby. The only text is at the end, over panels of the group walking in a garden-like setting, in the style of an intelligence report on the destruction of the City of Om, caused by the failure of the central computer system known as The Dreamer, due to the removal of the "human component" known as "The Soul of The Dreamer", who is now "enjoying the ecstasy of life."
- House of Mystery: The classic story, "The Piper at the Gates of Hell!" has a village called Anyville have perfect consistent tranquility as long as they surrender an innocent to a demonic skeletal piper figure to be tormented forever every twenty years. When the brother of such an innocent is taken, he cannot let this custom continue and rescues him. However, the town pays the price as it is explodes into fiery chaos with the pact's abrogation. Only the brothers and their father are safe as they leave, praying that they will have the strength to resist the temptation of such a Deal with the Devil.
- Iron Man: The miniseries Iron Man Hypervelocity reveals that the AI used for Life Model Decoys and elsewhere in the Marvel Universe — such as the Virtual Ghost backup of Tony Stark who's the series' protagonist — was based on horrific human experimentation. The bad guys in the series are the Virtual Ghosts of some of the test subjects.
- Irredeemable: In Incorruptible. The Superman analogue goes quite insane after a living entity spreads itself by turning kids into skeleton zombies. 'Supes' caused this by negligence. Oops.
- Legion of Super-Heroes: In the last post-Zero Hour volume, there was a new galaxy-level faster-than-light spaceship drive introduced by the government of the United Planets. The Legion discovered that the drive power sources were living and sentient beings who had been created by the government via the abduction, torture, and genetic splicing of citizens of two of the United Planets' member worlds - and that being used to power the drives put them through agonizing pain and slowly killed them.
- Micronauts: Baron Karza's body banks are pure Body Horror. They've granted Karza and his followers effective immortality... by literally cutting up society's undesirables for spare parts, to replace their own organs when they wear out. When Mari was a naive young princess, she suffered an accident but was very pleased with the lovely new legs she was given... until she learned they'd been stolen from her best friend, the court dancer, who was left crippled and would never dance again. The elite's dependence on the body banks is the foundation of Karza's dictatorship.
- Reign In Hell: The miniseries reveals one of the more feared punishments of hell was becoming building materials.
- Runaways: During the "Home Schooling" arc, when an injured Klara Prast accidentally raises a massive forest around their house, Nico and Karolina struggle to convince Victor and Chase to leave it alone, because they're afraid that the forest might be connected to Klara's own lifeforce, and therefore attacking it might cause her even further injury.
- Silver Surfer: In Silver Surfer 2014, the Silver Surfer is conscripted to defend a massive, scientifically-impossible planet from the Queen of Nevers, the living embodiment of all possibility. It turns out that the city is powered by the Queen's heart, which was stolen from her by the planet's architects, and she needs the heart back or else the realm of possibilities will collapse.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
- In an obvious shoutout to The Matrix, the series features a new creation by Dr. Eggman/Robotnik after the Roboticizer is rendered obsolete: the Egg Grape Chambers. Eggman captures Mobians in them and uses their life force for power. This slowly drains their memory as well. Left too long, they can be killed, or at the very least left with amnesia of varying degrees.
- The use of someone's life force for energy is also the principle behind the energy weapons and rockets built into Bunnie's robotic limbs. One enemy (the Iron Queen), who usurped control of her robotics, tried to use this to kill her via overexertion.
- Star Wars: Knight Errant: Lord Odion abducted every child in his domain, so that he could instill despair in their hearts that, when harnessed by an ancient Sith artifact, would drive every living thing in the galaxy, and possibly the entire universe, into a murderous frenzy, leaving him the only person in existence.
- Teen Titans: One plot point had Deathstroke's team breaking up a drug manufacturing ring that created Bliss, a drug literally made from children. It's later revealed that the reason for Roy Harper's behavior while supposedly on heroin (supposedly in that there was no way a man on heroin would be able to fight like he was) was that Deathstroke was secretly spiking his heroin with samples of Bliss.
- Wonder Woman Vol. 1: The old Nazi Karl Schlagel created a machine that works by strapping children into it.
- X-Men:
- During the Messiah War storyline, an alternate future version of Kiden Nixon is used by Stryfe to empower a machine that prevents time-travelling.
- The storyline that introduced the Brood established that the Brood's Space Whale ships are made of the Acanti, huge alien life forms that float around space. The Brood capture them, lobotomize them and turn them into living vessels powered by pain.
- In the Mystique solo comic, there's a mutant who can control all machines and gets plugged into a giant device that requires her power to run. She's a little girl, of course.
