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The Elites Jump Ship / Comic Books

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Times where The Elites Jump Ship — or attempt to, anyway — in Comic Books.


  • Batman: No Man's Land:
    • In the Contagion story that leads up to No Man's Land, when a group of Gotham one-percenters learn that a dangerous virus has reached the city, they send away their servants and lock themselves inside a penthouse to engage in debauchery while riding it out. One of them already has the virus, and things go downhill for them from there.
    • Right before an earthquake-ravaged Gotham City is quarantined and all disaster relief is discontinued, most of the city's upper class flee. Much of its lower class is unable to afford to do the same.
    • Many of the people with money who remain in Gotham (a mixture of elites and criminals) end up paying a crime lord named Shank enormous sums of money to smuggle them out of the city several months into the disaster. He takes all of their valuables and then locks them in a cellar to cannibalize each other.
    • Bruce Wayne pretends to have done this when he's actually still in Gotham helping out as Batman.
  • Blacksad: In Red Dawn, Blacksad gets out of trouble with Senator Gallo (a Senator McCarthy expy) by threatening to reveal Gallo's plan to build bunkers to survive the upcoming (according to Gallo) nuclear war with the Soviets. Bunkers that are pointedly too small for all of America's population but just big enough for its politicians.
  • Crossed:
    • Future traitor to humanity Cody made a living building luxury survival bunkers for doomsday peppers before the Zombie Apocalypse, describing them as places for useless people to survive. That being said, the residents of said bunkers themselves are treated with a little sympathy, not having saved their lives at the expense of anyone else's, with the two portrayed as being this trope the best being killed by Cody for this attitude, and being killed by infected right at the door respectively. Ultimately, the bunkers don't provide long-term protection against fully-sapient Technically Living Zombies which can find the air ducts and block them off to force the residents to die from suffocation or take their chances outside.
    • Largely subverted with The British Prime Minister and his staff in The Thin Red Line Arc: They do quickly retreat to a heavily fortified bunker, but continue to try and coordinate with the military to protect civilians, and study the source of the virus out of the hopes of stopping the creatures.
    • The trope is also surprisingly averted by movie producer/crime lord Curtis Wentz, who has an uncharted island to flee to but claims to have experienced a Heel–Faith Turn (whether or not this is true is a major question throughout the arc) and sends women and children of all classes to his island instead of fleeing there himself.
    • A disfigured man claiming to be Prince Harry of the Royal Family says that his family was also evacuated to a bunker, only to find it overrun upon arrival.
  • Earth 2: In issue #21, Superman's clone stops a space ark carrying the world's most wealthy and powerful individuals from leaving the Earth and rips the ship apart, sending the passengers plummeting to their deaths. "The one percent trickles down"
  • The Fantastic Four story "World's Greatest" introduces Nu-Earth, an entire duplicate Earth intended to serve as a refuge in case the original is irreparably damaged or destroyed, which was created by a top-secret group of scientists and financed by the world's wealthiest people. The FF is initially told that Nu-Earth is meant to accommodate the entire human population. However, one of the project's top scientists (an ex-girlfriend of Reed Richards') discovers that only the "world's elite" (totaling half a million people) are going to be allowed to travel there and that the majority of the human race will be left to rot on a dead or dying planet. The "antagonists" of the story turns out to be the last few superheroes from the Bad Future Nu-Earth was meant to save the privileged few from, kidnapping Johnny Storm and Dr. Doom to use as stabilizing power sources for a massive time machine meant to bring the surviving 8 billion human survivors to the present (after 12 billion had already starved, drowned or died from disease). While their original goal was regular Earth, because they had no idea Nu-Earth existed, the FF managed to reroute the time displacement, placing the refugees on the uninhabited world and averting a massive population crisis. The only people not happy about the arrangement were the wealthy providing the funding, and Ted Grant, the overseer of the project, who went to extremes trying to get rid of the "illegal immigrants" afterwards.
    Alyssa: I thought this was all a noble mission, but you've got to see their plans, Sue. Their disdain for people. It's like something out of a movie.
  • An issue of Zenescope's Grimm Tales of Terror anthology series is a Setting Update to The Masque of the Red Death, replacing the castle full of nobles with a hermetically-sealed mansion being used as a bunker by its owner and his rich friends to comfortably sit out the end of the world. Then a man and his newborn daughter, both of them The Immune to The Plague, stumble on the mansion, and the daughter is kidnapped and brought inside by the owner's mentally unstable wife. This brings along the virus, which quickly infects and kills everyone inside.
  • In the Judge Dredd story "Dark Justice", with Mega-City One becoming an increasingly unlivable hellhole (moreso than usual), the city's wealthiest decide to leave the Earth on a Generation Ship to find an off-world colony to populate. They didn't get very far because the Dark Judges hitched a ride.
  • In Judgment Day (Marvel Comics), when the Progenitor judges humanity unworthy and starts the destruction of Earth and the human race, a spaceship holding the wealthy leaves Earth in an attempt to escape and survive. The Progenitor nukes it out of orbit - no one gets out of his judgement.
  • The main plot of Post Americana is driven by the existence of The Bubble, an Underground City built out of the NORAD bunker, to provide a place for government officials and social elites to comfortably ride out nuclear war and then rebuild the country. The only problem is that when the war did come, no one from the government ever arrived, leaving just the rich to live idly while an indentured servant class developed out of the people manually maintaining the place, and America was reduced to a post-apocalyptic wasteland. And then one day a few generations in, a Visionary Villain emerged from the upper class of the Bubble's population, declared himself President, and decided to reclaim America by means of slaughtering all other survivor communities.
  • The Punisher: The End takes place an unspecified amount of time after an unlimited nuclear war with China resulting in the world is on fire. Frank (who'd been imprisoned in Sing Sing) escapes with another convict and heads for a bunker in New York built by another inmate (or rather, was thrown into Sing Sing by the people he'd built it for). Once inside the (formerly rich and powerful) occupants explain that while there were several such bunkers around the world, they've all gone silent (the last one from the Presidential bunker apparently involved rape), and there's a good chance everyone in the bunker is all that's left of humanity. Frank kills them all anyway, then goes outside to wait to be reunited with his family.
  • In the Runaways, the Pride are a cabal of rich supervillain couples who intend to destroy the world on behalf of a trio of fallen angels... while ensuring that their own children get to live in the paradise that the angels promised to build in the ruins. Said kids (most of them anyway) are not happy to find this out.
  • Le Transperceneige (The Snow-Piercer): Like the film and TV series based on it, the comics follow the elite lording over the various trains and preserving their privileges. It's subverted in the ambiguously-canon Jean-Marc Rochette prequel comics though, where the billionaire creator of the train (or at least a train) announces his belief that there will be an ecological disaster to the world and offers everyone the chance to apply to be on his train and be judged by merit. So far, it's unclear if this vision was corrupted or his train is simply a contrast to the other ones.
  • Ultimately subverted in Y: The Last Man: After all men are wiped out by the Gendercide plague, the Right-Wing Militia Fanatic characters suspect that it's a government bioweapon and that the elite leadership of the country is hunkered down in a bunker plotting to take over someday. A surviving (female) General also thinks the disaster was caused by a bio-weapon meant to be used against China and it's eventually revealed that there is a bunker that the American government was supposed to flee to. When the protagonists finally reach that bunker though, they are informed that, whatever the cause of the plague was, none of the elites survived long enough to reach the bunker.


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