Surprisingly Realistic Outcome / Comic Books

• In the first issue of All-New Ghost Rider, Robbie Reyes tries to stop three gang members from stealing his brother's wheelchair. One of them pulls out a gun. You would expect Robbie to show what a Badass Normal he is, dismantle the thug with the gun, and beat them all up. Instead, he stands still and the thugs beat him up and steal both the wheelchair and his shoes. This shows that, despite growing up in a bad neighborhood, Robbie isn't some sort of impossibly tough delinquent, but just a regular guy.
• Black Panther:
  • In Priest's run, the new Black Panther, Kasper Cole, falls from a 62nd-floor window after trying to leap onto a helicopter. He attempts to break his fall by clinging to a flagpole, noting that Spider-Man and Daredevil do it all the time, only for the flagpole to snap in half as soon as he grabs it.
  • In the same run, a reporter named Kevin Trueblood tries to help out T'Challa by punching a bad guy in the head. Kevin ends up breaking his hand for his troubles and remarks that punching people always looked so easy on the TV shows he used to watch as a kid.
    Black Panther: You should not hit a man in the side of the head with your fist. The man's head is harder. Remember that!
• Conan the Barbarian: In Dark Horse's Conan the Avenger, the main protagonist's allies attempt to pull off a Slave Liberation by assaulting a slave-trading hub, killing all slavers, and freeing the prisoners. Their glory is short-lived as a massive military force is assembled from warring city-states that join forces to destroy them, as this attack is a massive disruption to their economy. Trying to go around freeing slaves by kicking ass and taking names like Daenerys Targaryen will only get a massive army breathing down your neck.
• Crossed: At one point in "Wish You Were Here", the main character decides to analyze a recently destroyed military base where one of his cohorts, Selene, went missing. After a Sherlock Scan, he comes up with a Crime Reconstruction that the reader sees: the soldiers turned out to be Sociopathic Soldiers who wanted to turn Selene into a Sex Slave a la 28 Days Later, and she managed to escape but sacrificed herself by detonating a grenade that destroyed the fortified entrance and let the Crossed inside. Sometime later, it is revealed that his theory is totally, totally wrong: the soldiers were actually quite welcoming to Selene, and the destruction of the base was completely unrelated to Selene's presence. He admits to himself when he sees Selene alive and well that thinking he could flawlessly piece together the events of a prior disaster from limited evidence when he's a writer by trade was probably kind of stupid.
• Hawkeye:
  • In the final issue of the original 1983 Hawkeye limited series, Crossfire attempts to kill Clint with his own bow and Trick Arrow, only for this to (literally) backfire when Cross finds himself unable to properly pull back the bowstring. It actually takes strength and consistent practice to properly use a bow with any sort of effectiveness.
  • The very first issue of the Fraction/Aja run opens with this. Clint falls from a great height and manages to catch himself with a grappling arrow... but still suffers some pretty severe injuries and ends up in the hospital for six weeks.
  • In another issue, Kate tapes up and gags Madame Masque and steals her costume. It's shown that she needs to use padding and a wig to complete the disguise, since her body type doesn't really resemble Masque's.
  • Another issue has Kate having to swim across a flooded street. She dives underwater with her eyes open expecting to be able to see semi-normally like people do in movies. Unfortunately for Kate, movies do that for the audience's benefit and she quickly realizes her mistake when all she sees is vague blurs and gets bad eye strain. Upon exiting the water she lampshades this trope.
• An issue from the Chip Zdarsky run of The Invaders (Marvel Comics) ends with Bucky getting shot point blank in the back of the head. It's later revealed that even though the gun was only loaded with blanks, it was still close enough to knock him unconscious and give him a concussion. There's a reason why you're never supposed to point a gun at someone in real life, even with blanks. Even if they're less lethal than standard bullets, blanks have resulted in real deaths due to unsafe handling, such as the infamous death of actor Jon-Erik Hexum back in The '80s.
• Marshal Law: In "Marshal Law Takes Manhattan", a Corrupted Character Copy of Daredevil is falling to his death from a skyscraper and manages to grab hold of a flagpole protruding from the building... whereupon the inertia rips his arms off.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW): An issue has the Mane Six get a warning about a giant monster. Eventually, they encounter... the remains of said monster. It turns out, monster or not, if you don't feed a creature for a long time, it tends to die.
• Punisher: War Zone mini-series, when the antagonist Tim attempts to snipe the Punisher from a tree, he misses and promptly gets two of his fingers shot off, forcing him to make a hasty retreat. Tim later says that people like Bruce Willis make shrugging off non-fatal gunshot wounds look easy, when in reality, getting shot often causes debilitating pain that makes it difficult to do much of anything, much less continue fighting.
  • Tim was trying to shoot the Punisher with a tranquilizer dart, which instead hits the Punisher's informant, Schitti, in the ear. Schitti is, quite reasonably, completely messed up from having knockout drugs injected directly into his brain, and the end of the story shows that, rather than snapping out of it in time, he is left with permanent brain damage. Which is still a happier ending than you'd expect for a mobster who was forced to work for the Punisher.
• Runaways: At one point, the Runaways have to fight a supervillain barely a week after they last caught him because they stupidly left him tied to a lamppost with a note for the police after the first battle. The guy easily got away the second the Runaways left. This is why most heroes like Spider-Man directly hand over villains to police or at least make sure they're securely trapped before leaving.
• In one of the Secret Invasion (2008) tie-in issues, Shanna the She-Devil tries to mug a female S.H.I.E.L.D. agent for her uniform. Unfortunately, the karate chop Shanna uses to knock the woman out (often portrayed as non-lethal in most uses of this trope) ends up accidentally breaking her neck and killing her instantly. However, it turns out the agent was actually a Skrull.
• She-Hulk:
  • The Sensational She-Hulk: In issue #19, Purple Hayes, a Batman Expy, tries to help an old woman being harassed by two thugs. Despite her martial arts training, the men are able to fight her off due to being larger and stronger than her.
  • She-Hulk (2004): A story in the Peter David issues has Jen dealing with an alien who murders a woman and takes her husband hostage. Jazinda, She-Hulk's Skrull companion, kills the alien. However, with no evidence that his wife was killed by aliens, the husband is still arrested for her murder as he is the only suspect the police can find.
• In the early issues of Spider-Man, the managers of the wrestling league Peter worked for told him they could no longer pay him in cash. He had them make a check out to Spider-Man but the bank refused to cash it since Peter had no identification in that name. He suggested that the bank accept that his costume is proof of his identity but the teller simply pointed out that anyone can wear a costume.
• In the Star Trek (DC Comics) storyline "Who Killed Captain Kirk?", William Bearclaw is exposed as a Fantastic Racist and, being the last straw, is told by Kirk that he's going to get him transferred to another ship where he won't be trouble for him or others. He attempts to prove his worth by conning a member of a possible suicide mission into swapping with him. He makes it out alive and saves a member of the team in the process... and is chewed out for disobeying a direct order (which was "No, you can't go").
• Stray Bullets:
  • During Dark Days, Beth accidentally shoots a cop while trying to find Virginia. Even though the cop survives and even expresses sympathy for her plight, Killers later reveals that Beth still went to prison.
  • After getting hit on the head with a pot, Annie is knocked unconscious and the other characters are unable to revive her. Even though she eventually wakes up, the untreated brain damage remains and later causes her to suffer a stroke.
  • Played for Laughs (the Black Comedy kind) when Orson accidentally kills the abusive ex-boyfriend of a burlesque dancer he'd befriended by knocking the man off a balcony:
    Orson: Wow. Who freakin' dies falling one story?
• The Ultimates: One issue has Batman Parody Nighthawk break his ankle trying to pull off a Dynamic Entry by jumping off a building to attack some mooks.
• During Warren Ellis' Ultimate Fantastic Four run, the team travels to Denmark to capture Doctor Doom and turn him over to the U.S. military. The story ends with the Danish military not only protecting Doom, but then forcibly ejecting both the Fantastic Four and the American soldiers from their country. Governments don't respond well to foreign groups barging onto their property to take an affluent citizen.
• In The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Nancy instantly sees through Chipmunk Hunk and Koi Boi's Paper Thin Disguises and recognizes them as her classmates, Tomas and Ken. When Squirrel Girl expresses shock, Nancy asks how she could possibly have fallen for the ruse when all the boys used to hide their identities are Domino Masks. Plus, when your roomie is obsessed with squirrels and then you meet a female superhero who calls herself "Squirrel Girl?" It's easy to make the connection.

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