Roaring Rampage Of Revenge / Comic Books

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• Near the end of the comic book series 52, Black Adam's wife and brother-in-law are killed. As it was the death of his first wife that caused his original fall from grace, it is unsurprising that the death of the second led to him going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, wiping out the country that harbored the murderers, and anybody else that stood in his way. It doesn't end well, though, as the nerdy Mad Scientists behind her death soundly kick his ass with SCIENCE.
  • And when he escapes from that, he just declares bloody vengeance on the entire world, leading to the week long World War III.
• 2000 AD:
  • Johnny in Strontium Dog goes on a massive one across several planets after Max Bubba kills Wulf.
  • A Love Like Blood: After his lover Bethany and their unborn child are killed on Karkossa's orders, Jacques goes on a rampage to destroy his father and anyone who stands in his way.
  • Button Man: Adele systematically hunts down the men who killed her father, which includes a man she knows only as "Harry X", but who is most likely already dead. She eventually agrees to a one-one-one match against Harry Exton after he turns up alive, but he reveals that he opted out when he was called in to take out her father, so they team up against the Voices instead.
• Astro City:
  • "The Dark Age" follows the lives of Charles and Royal Williams as they evolve into Sociopathic Heroes to get revenge on the man who killed their parents.
  • In one story, the Zirr Empire sends troops to attack the First Family, but they can only settle for abducting the non-powered wife of one of them. About five minutes later, the entire Family storms the Empire to get her back.
• The Banshee: An Irishman pursues the supervillain who killed his father-in-law.
• Screw with Batman and you'll either wind up in a hospital for the rest of your life, crying yourself to sleep each night or want to die immediately due to recurring nightmares involving a half-man, half-bat demon or go far, far into the world and pray to God that he doesn't ever find you again. More than likely, you'll be going through at least two of these after your encounter with him. There's a reason career crime in Gotham breeds mental illness.
  • The Murderer/Fugitive arc has Bruce framed for the murder of his old love Vesper Fairchild and is wrongly imprisoned (score another one for the GCPD). Bruce escapes from prison to fight crime as Batman (since his Bruce Wayne persona was slowly slipping away) and cuts off all communication with the rest of the Bat-family. Long story short, as soon as Batman slowly starts picking up the clues of the people who framed him. HE. MAKES. THEM. PAY. DEARLY. After his fight with the commandos nearly everyone who he fought will need to see a psychiatrist. Or a priest.
  • The Scarecrow has had a few of these, notably the incidents with his prom and grandmother.
  • Nightwing, after seeing his apartment building (with his neighbors inside) blown up and his circus destroyed by Blockbuster, hunted down and brutally beat down every one of his costumed mooks.
    • Nightwing is prone to this. During KnightsEnd, he tore into Jean-Paul Valley after thinking Bruce was killed by a booby-trapped Batmobile and during Joker's Last Laugh, he actually killed the titular villain when he thought that Tim Drake had died.
• The Blue Streak: An acrobat goes after the gangsters who killed his brother.
• Buckskin: America's Defender of Liberty: The villain of Super-Mystery Comics V3 #4 is Mr. Death, a disfigured man out to kill the men who are responsible for his plight.
• The Crow: When his fiancée is raped and murdered by drugged-up hoodlums, Eric doesn't let the fact that they killed him too get in the way of his Roaring Rampage. Said Rampage is arguably more visceral, violent and over the top than it was in the subsequent movie adaptation, and the actual nature of Eric's literal physical resurrection not explained as clearly.
• The DC Anti-Hero Deadshot goes on one in the second half of his 1988 miniseries. It's a double example, actually; he concludes another one in the first issue, when he finally finds and kills the last remaining guy who abused him in prison.
  "Put your hands on the table..."
• Examples from Diabolik:
  • The title character is rather infamous in-universe for killing everyone stupid enough to put themselves against him, to the point it's faster to list the exceptions:
    • If you have what he considers a legitimate reason, he'll let you be. To him, legitimate reasons are: being the target of his current heist (so if you foil him he'll just try again, with more respect if you actually outsmarted him); being a guard surveilling his current target or a cop (that is, you're paid to stop him); having been a victim of one of Diabolik's Kick the Dog moments, such as Gustavo Garian (Diabolik killed his father and aunt and drove his mother to madness in order to steal a collection of incredibly valuable knives from him. Gustavo has sometimes gone out of his way to kill Diabolik, but he never retaliated) or Elisabeth Gay (for her crime of accidentally getting him arrested, thus exposing his true face and nearly getting him executed, Diabolik drove her to madness knowing that to her it was A Fate Worse Than Death. She has since recovered enough to retaliate, but he didn't kill her).
    • On occasion he let his enemy live knowing he could come and kill them at his pleasure, and would do so when bored enough. Usually it's because the criminal has done something that really pissed Diabolik off, but in one occasion he spared a group of former victims of his (even skipping the visit to let them know he could kill whenever he wanted) who had stolen his treasure (that is, his favorite loots) for three reasons: they had a legitimate grievance, as Diabolik had accidentally ruined part of their lives; their theft had actually done him a favour, as they had eliminated one of his weaknesses; differently from their ringleader (who did get killed), they didn't try and kill him.
    • Worthy Opponents get away with whatever they did. So far there have been only the unnamed custom guard from "Crime Knows No Border" (a Dirty Cop in the pocket of Diabolik's personal fence in the east. As the fence had just died he had lost his main source of income, so he told Diabolik he could either give up the crapload of money he had with him or be arrested for money smuggling while pointing out he had no way to escape, and Diabolik had to accept the defeat) and the man who, in "The Sin of Gustavo Garian", alias Gustavo Garian himself in his earliest attempt at getting revenge on Diabolik, kidnapped Eva for ransom and had the sense of getting Diabolik to promise he'd not try and have revenge or even find out his identity (as Diabolik always keeps his word).
    • In one occasion, Ross, the owner of a luna park put on a show that had Diabolik getting the drop on Ginko and wounding him to death with a thrown knife and Ginko living long enough to shoot him. The allegation that someone could sneak up on Ginko or survive Diabolik's thrown knife pissed him off... But he limite himself to steal his wife's jewels and leave a mask with Ross' face as a Calling Card. Note that Ginko actually expected him to murder him...
  • Eva Kant, Diabolik's lover, is less revenge-prone... but much more sadistic about it. Diabolik will kill you, but Eva will make you suffer while you die.
  • The nice and inoffensive Gustavo Garian never missed a chance to try and get Diabolik arrested or killed for what he did to his family, even kidnapping Eva to lure Diabolik in an explosive trap faking a ransom ("The Sin of Gustavo Garian". Attempt abandoned in favor of having Diabolik saving Ginko), hiring the best killers in the world to try and murder him ("The Return of Gustavo Garian"), and siccing the most powerful mob boss of a Banana Republic on him ("The Rediscovered Enemy").
  • Outside of flashbacks, Elisabeth Gay's two appearances after "Atrocious Revenge" involve this, having her capture Diabolik with the purpose of torturing him to death or her husband trying to kill him.
  • Altea, Ginko's fiancée, has engaged in this once: when a mob boss tried to have Ginko killed twice she reacted by hiring a hitman to kill him, and upon realizing Diabolik had replaced the hitman to try and rob the boss she had him promise he'd kill him (Diabolik complied).
  • Ginko, being an honest cop, usually subverts this, as even when It's Personal, he will try to get a criminal arrested for the crimes that they commited. Then the Grey Ravens nearly killed Altea, and it ended with a large number of them dead, either by his gun or by Diabolik's knife (as they had joined forces).
  • Speaking of the Grey Ravens... They're a perpetual victim of this: aside for the time Ginko killed every single Grey Raven he could find, Diabolik has not forgotten the time they captured him and tried to torture the location of something he stole out of him, and Altea and her uncle fight them not only because the country they're trying to take over is theirs, but because It's Personal, as their leader was Altea's first husband, who married her and then faked his death to hide the fact and then returned to try and separate her from Ginko. Even with their original leader (personally responsible for Diabolik's torture) dead at Diabolik's hands, he, Altea and her uncle are more than willing to go out of their way to cause them harm whenever they have a chance.
• Abslom Daak from the Doctor Who Magazine comics. Because they killed his lover (whose corpse, now cryogenically frozen, makes her into a literal woman in a refrigerator) he's gonna kill every last stinking Dalek in the galaxy. Implicitly, a bit of a lunkhead, which got made explicit when he got to meet the Doctor, who took the mickey out of him.
  • But ultimately (and posthumously) he was honored for a Heroic Sacrifice with a new moniker: "Abslom Daak, Life-Giver".
• The Eye Sees: A magical living eye takes it upon himself to avenge the theft of a company.
• Subverted in Fables. Flycatcher wants to go on one of these after remembering what the Empire's soldiers did to his family, but Boy Blue refuses to teach him the secrets of the Witching Cloak that would let him do this, because he doesn't want to corrupt the only truly innocent Fable left. Ironically, this leads to him taking out the Empire's most powerful magic source and causing far more damage to the Empire's armies than he ever could have on a RROR without ever killing a single soul.
• After the apparent death of Batman in Final Crisis, Superman returns to Bludhaven with a Roaring Rampage of Heat Vision, taking down as many of Darkseid's troops as he can see.
• Green Lantern: Most of the Red Lantern Corps are on one in one form or another, given that their superpowers are fueled by rage driven by loss, and as such that rage tends to fixate on the ones responsible for that loss. It's also such an overpowering rage that they tend to take down anyone and anything that gets in their way as well. Special mention must go to the Red Lantern of Earth, Dex-Starr. He's a housecat and is trying to avenge the kindly old lady who owned him.
• Hexed: In issue #8 of the 2014 series, once Madam Cymbaline kills Val, Lucifer burns down her building, kills all her men, and then summons a devil gods had fought and died to keep out of their world, before killing the Harlot and taking her place as The Thief.
• The Incredible Hulk goes on one of these in the World War Hulk Crisis Crossover. Why? The six most influential people in the Marvel Universe sent him into exile on an uninhabited, peaceful planet — except that he landed on a savage planet that put him through immense hardships before he earned his happy ending. Then the ship he arrived in exploded, nuked the planet, and killed the Hulk's alien wife. Cue rampage.
  • Shortly before that story, Marvel had retconned several of its main heroes into such utter douchebags that even though the Hulk was technically the villain of the story, most readers were rooting for him to smash the Illuminati. And even though it was revealed that the main crime — the explosion of the ship — was not their fault, Doctor Strange openly admitted that they had been wrong to exile the Hulk and that they probably deserved what they had coming.
  • The What If?: Planet Hulk special included a What If? of that story where the Hulk died in the explosion instead of his wife, and she came to Earth on a roaring rampage of revenge instead. The end result was much, much worse.
• Iron Man: In both the movie and the original comics, Tony Stark goes on a short but absolutely kickass one of these after the terrorists who have been holding him and another man (Yinsen) hostage end up killing Yinsen. In response, Tony takes the badass suit of armor he designed and built in a cave, with a box of scraps and a goddamned improvised forge, and then breaks the fuck out and proceeds to use the suit's built-in flamethrowers to kill everyone stupid enough not to run away screaming, and then he explodes the entire terrorist hideout, thus quite effectively taking out anyone who managed to avoid being roasted to death.
• This is the plot of the first story arc of Jennifer Blood: the eponymous anti-heroine is out to wipe out the organized crime family that murdered her father and drove her mother to suicide. Of course, her father had been the head of that family, and the men who killed him were all her uncles. The subsequent story arc seems to be shaping up to be that the relatives of three assassins who had been hired by her uncles and whom Jennifer had killed along the way are now determined to track down the person who killed their loved ones and kill her and all her loved ones...
• In Jon Sable, Freelance, Sable went on one of these after his family was murdered.
• The first three miniseries of Magic: the Gathering (IDW) follow Dack Fayden's hunt for Sifa Grent, the planeswalker who destroyed his hometown.
• Used as an Invoked Trope in the The Mighty Thor and Journey into Mystery (Gillen) comics. The only reason no one has killed the reincarnated-as-a-kid Loki yet for his past deeds is because Thor has sworn to do exactly this trope if anyone hurts Loki and he finds out about it. Or if Loki just suddenly dies, even if there's no proof, because Thor's not an idiot.
• In Ms. Tree, Michael practically makes a career of this. Any time there is an attack on her, her family or her friends, this is almost guaranteed to be a huge stack of enemy corpses at the end of it. It got to the stage where The Mafia didn't want to mess with her because it was too costly for them.
• Paperinik New Adventures:
  • This is what drives the character of Xadhoom. Having seen her entire planet destroyed and her people reduced to mindless slaves, she swore revenge on the alien race that caused it, the Evronians. Unfortunately for the Evronians, Xadhoom had recently become one of the most destructive forces in the Universe, having the destructive power of a super nova. Xadhoom now hunts the Evronians all over the Universe, killing as many of them as she can. (And that's a lot.)
  • The PK reboot has Paperinik himself doing one of these after Lyo's death. He comes this close to ignore his Thou Shall Not Kill policy and outright kill the culprit.
    Vendor: B-but you a-are a hero... You can't do this kind of things...
    Paperinik: I have bad news for you. I've just resigned.
• Pretty Deadly is about Deathface Ginny, who is after a man named Fox. He was married to her mother but imprisoned her in a tower where she died (but not before having an affair with Death and giving birth to Ginny).
• The Punisher:
  • In all adaptations, the entire plot revolves around this, to the point where it's less a Roaring Rampage of Revenge and more of a Roaring Marathon of Revenge. In the comic, Frank Castle's family was killed when they stumbled upon a mob execution while having a picnic in a park. In revenge, Frank kills the people responsible and then goes on to kill all the other criminals he can find. In the movie, Frank was once in the FBI, and his family was specifically targeted.
  • In an arc of The Punisher MAX entitled "Up is Down, Black is White" a gangster with a grudge against Castle digs up his wife and children, urinates on the remains, and releases the footage to the news media. Frank did not take this too well. Let's just say the bad guy got what he deserved, and the crime rate went down significantly.
  • For another example of what happens when you really piss off Frank Castle, look at "The Slavers," where he finds a sex slavery ring that tried to intimidate a woman into silence by killing her baby. Frank's path of destruction is something to behold: He tracks down one procurer, knocks him out, and wakes him so that he can see he's been disemboweled, with his intestines tied to tree branches. Once he spills, Frank leaves him there and moves on to the accountant. He tries to throw her out of her skyscraper office, only to find out the place has safety glass — so he hurls her against the window until it pops out of frame and she hits the ground. Once he finds the local ringleader, he ties him to a chair and burns him alive, all as a videotaped message to the rest out of the outfit — "Don't come back here."
  • The ultimate example comes in the form of The Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Whether this represents a parody or a crowning homage to the character is open to debate.
• Red Sonja's backstory has her family slain by brigands, after which she hunts them down and murders them. On a smaller scale she's often seen adopting the causes of wronged parties unable to fight to avenge them.
• In The Sandman (1989), Hippolyta Hall sends the Kindly Ones (a.k.a. the Furies) to attack the Dreaming because she thinks that Morpheus killed her son.
• The plot of Sherwood, Texas involves Rob Hood's plan to get revenge on the Nobles motorcycle gang after they killed his father, and then ambushed him and left him for dead.
• Sin City:
  • Marv goes on one of these in The Hard Goodbye when his lady of the night Goldie is murdered and he is framed for the crime.
  • And in Family Values, Dwight and Miho cut a swath through the Sin City Mafia to avenge the shooting of a prostitute.
  • Wallace of Hell and Back also goes on one of these when Esther, the woman he saves from suicide, is kidnapped.
• Spider-Man:
  • Spider-Man has one in The Death of Jean DeWolff. The Sin-Eater is murdering people left and right, and one of his victims is Captain Jean DeWolfe. As she was one of Spider-Man's friends and supporters, he took her death very hard and this adventure very personally. Ultimately, Spider-Man finds the Sin-Eater (who has no superpowers, by the way) and brutally beats him to a pulp. If not for Daredevil, Spider-Man seemed quite likely to kill him.
  • In Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #76, Black Cat is beaten to the brink of death by Doctor Octopus and near-fatally shot by the Owl's henchmen whom she and Spider-Man were trying to apprehend. Spider-Man goes ballistic and nearly beats Otto to death in retribution, leaving him with arachnophobia for some time afterward.
  • In Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #107, the Sin-Eater kills Spider-Man's longtime Friend on the Force Jean DeWolff, causing Peter to go on a warpath to avenge her. Upon discovering the Sin-Eater is Jean's partner Stan Carter, Spider-Man is only stopped from killing him by Daredevil's intervention, leaving Peter shaken into the events of The Spectacular Spider-Man (Vol. 1).
  • In the Grim Hunt storyline, the Kravinov family had been messing with Spidey for weeks and eventually killed several of his superpowered friends. Spider-Man goes berserk, taking out the whole clan and even used his wall-crawling grip to tear off a chunk of Sasha Kravinov's face.
  • And of course, there was right after the events of Civil War when Aunt May is shot by an assassin sent by the Kingpin after Peter exposes his identity to the world. Donning his black costume to let everyone know that he means business, he tears across New York until finally locating and delivering a huge beatdown on the Kingpin, threatening to finish the job if he can't find a way to save Aunt May (we all know how that turned out). In an issue of What If?, the assassin shoots (and kills) Mary Jane instead, causing Peter to snap and actually kill the Kingpin.
• The Steel Fist: A factory worker battles the Nazi spies who ruined his hand.
• Supergirl:
  • In the storyline Red Daughter of Krypton, secondary character Sheko goes on one of these after she judged and found her planet's jerkass Crown Prince guilty and the king got her shot. She gets so absolutely furious that she becomes a Red Lantern and decides to burn everyone who were responsible for her death.
  • Subverted in Elseworld's Finest: Supergirl & Batgirl. Kara wants to kill Lex Luthor after discovering that he murdered her baby cousin, but Batgirl talks her out of it.
• Swamp Thing returns to earth after a forced exile. Step one is to kill the people responsible for his unexpected interstellar journey.
• The entire plot of the Luna brothers' The Sword is Dara Brighton's vengeance quest against the three demigod siblings who murdered her family.
• While there are many of these in the series an obvious example takes place within IDW's Transformers run, during Cliffjumper's Spotlight comic. Crashing on a world he manages to create a strong bond between himself and one of the locals, a kind and gentle girl called Kita. A few days after his arrival Decepticons arrive and manage to injure Cliffjumper and shoot Kira in the back when she attempts to run. The Decepticons call for backup in hunting him down leading to this brief exchange upon figuring out just who it is they've managed to piss off. It doesn't end well.
  Decepticon 1: Did you say "little red runt"?
  Decepticon 2: Yeah, little red—
  Decepticon 1: Small?
  Decepticon 2: Yeah.
  Decepticon 1: About so high?
  Decepticon 2: Yeah.
  Decepticon 1: Horns?
  Decepticon 2: Yeah, but—
  Decepticon 1: Arm yourselves!
• Ultimate Marvel:
  • The Ultimates: Hawkeye goes on an especially inspiring one after his wife and kids are murdered and he is taken captive by a black ops team sent by Black Widow. As part of his escape he kills his guards with the fingernails he's torn off his own fingertips via his effectively superhuman ability to use anything as a lethal projectile. After killing an additional squad sent to subdue him, he takes their guns, grins into the security camera, and tells the rest of the base, "Run."
  • An incident somewhat similar to The Death of Jean DeWolff, above, occurs in Ultimate Spider-Man. A punk dressed up as Spider-Man had been robbing banks and destroying the little amount of good reputation that Peter had built up when taking down Doc Ock for the first time. While robbing an armored truck, the imposter is confronted by Police Captain Stacey, father of Peter's friend Gwen, and a bullet ignites the plastic explosives in the criminal's backpack. He quickly shrugs it off and throws it away, and it arcs right towards a nearby child. Stacey, in keeping with the death of the character in the original universe, throws the child out of harm's way and is killed when the explosives detonate. Later on, Peter hears a report that the imposter is attempting to rob another place and finally confronts his double face to face. After a brutal beat-down, Peter locks his hands around the man's throat and very nearly strangles him to death while screaming his fury into his face.
  • Ultimate Marvel re-introduced the Ghost Rider, distilling his origin as he and his lover Roxanne were innocents killed as human sacrifices, so the perpetrators could bargain for power from Mephisto. As it turns out, Ultimate Johnny Blaze sold his soul to Mephisto, too. All so Roxanne could be spared the suffering, and Johnny could hunt and kill the monsters that did this to them. Just one problem: One of the sacrificers is now the U.S. vice-president.
  • All-New Ultimates: Bombshell got one after getting rid of Diamondback's control, as she killed her boyfriend.
• The titular V has the titular vendetta in V for Vendetta, coldly eliminating everyone who worked at the camp where he was imprisoned, then moving on to overthrowing the government and killing everyone who was responsible for the very existence of said camp in the first place. Just before his work is done, he dies, and leaves the very last step and the cleaning up afterwards to Evey.
• Vigilante:
  • After the Controller orders J.J. murdered Adrian slaughters his way through the Controller's men before fatally injuring the man.
  • Fever is furious when Linnaker murders Louise and kidnaps his daughter and makes it clear that she's going to hunt him down and kill him regardless of Vigilante's actions. Vigilante, looking at the cleaver planted in the cereal the girl had been eating, agrees.
• Besides The Punisher, Marvel's other resident avenger Wolverine has been featured in some high-spotlight revenge arcs. Kinda hard to avoid when you're a killing machine with a Hair-Trigger Temper.
  • The Marvel event Civil War kicked off because a lone villain named Nitro, who is essentially a living bomb that can blow up and reform as many times as he likes, blew up a small town in Connecticut. While all the heroes were slap-fighting each other over federal legislation, guess who it was that hunted down and tried to destroy Nitro for his mass murder?
  • His biggest, however, has been in the Alternate Universe story Old Man Logan, where after returning home to his family with the money needed to pay off their debtors, he finds them murdered by those he owes because "they were bored". He forsakes his fifty years of pacifism in order to exact some very bloody satisfaction of his own. Given the reason he gave up snikting bubs in the first place, this is a pretty huge character shift.
  • And don't forget about Matsu'o, who commissioned the murder of Logan's lover Mariko. Every year on the anniversary of Mariko's death Logan cuts off a little bit more of Matsu'o; he's currently missing his right arm, right ear, nose, and gall bladder. If it weren't for Comic-Book Time, he'd probably be a head in a jar before his death. Wolverine said his punishment wasn't over, but finally relented and let Psylocke finish him off.
  • Then there's Mark Millar's "Enemy of the State" and "Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D." arcs where HYDRA, the Hand, A.I.M., and the upstart group Dawn Of The White Light, lure Logan in by kidnapping and killing an innocent child. Then they brainwash him and send him after the super-hero community like the weapon he once was. When he gets his mind back, he reprograms a Sentinel to kill the hundreds of members of the Dawn of the White Light mutant group, then kills thousands of Hand members, then kills 40,000+ Hydra agents, then slices up the dozens of thugs who were tangentially related to just the kidnapping aspect.
  • And then there's his horror-movie-style hunting-down of a bunch of guys who broke the spirit of a nun to the point where she begged Wolverine to make them suffer, which he did on the five year anniversary of her death (they didn't kill or even harm the nun, just broke her spirit with fake execution after fake execution, and Logan was avenging the loss of her innocence). And his slaughter of the pirates/slavers who hijacked a plane carrying one of Mariko's personal secretary was in part to avenge those that they'd murdered or worse over the years. And the slapstick one he did on the Madripoor underworld using Mr. Fixit as a proxy.
  • Suffice to say, Roaring Rampage of Revenge is Wolverine's primary mode of communication.
• Wonder Woman: The Hiketeia: With the Erinyes' encouragement Danny slaughters her way through the five men most directly responsible for her sister's death. She's first introduced in the story at the tail-end of it actually, killing off the last one.
• The Wraith: A cop goes after the gangsters who left him to be stung to death by his own bees.
• X-Factor (2006) shows that even an enemy's simulator knows that if you hurt/kill Rictor, Shatterstar's Roaring Rampage of Revenge would come next, quickly followed by your demise.
• X-Men: This is done by Mystique after the death of her partner, Destiny, at the hands of Legion.
• Yellowjacket: A writer who can control bees goes after the gangsters who left him to be stung to death by his own bees.

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