Works with their own pages
0-R
- 100 Bullets:
- Milo is a Hard Boiled Detective with a Bandaged Face who has some Belligerent Sexual Tension with Megan, got along well with Lono in the past, and refuses to dance to Graves' tune once he figures out the man's game. Many fans resent the authors for killing him off in his first arc.
- Most of the Trust leaders get the short end of the stick when it comes to plot relevance and character development, despite wide interest in how they operate and what kinds of dynamics they have with each other. About half of them never even get names or dialogue until the arc they die or their appearance directly preceding that one, and even the more prominent ones tend to get killed with little fanfare. Fulvio, Sigmar, the Nagel twins, and Joan (who does get some prominence, but only in the last thirteen issues) are the ones with the most wasted potential.
- This was particularly bad in Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) during the Penders/Bollers era as many characters were introduced, especially by writers other than the two, then dumped as the two did their own things.
- This came to a head when Ken Penders decided to sue Sega itself. He basically attempted to claim ownership over the entire race of Echidnas within the Sonic universe, as a stepping stone for his own spin-off. The spin-off ended up in Development Hell, but the damage was done. Every single character not created by SEGA or under effective ownership by Archie was Exiled from Continuity.
- This is pretty much the premise of Avengers Arena, killing off teenaged heroes with cult followings in a Hunger Games style fight to the death. Because the characters originated in series that had been cancelled though, they fall into C-List Fodder box described above. Detractors' reactions have pretty much unanimously been "You could have brought the characters back another way and considered reviving their series instead of killing them in cold blood, damn it!"
- The premise of AXIS is an event that causes heroes to become bad and villains to become good, known as "Inversion." A number of fans and reviewers have pointed out that most of the inverted heroes are acting in rather generically evil ways, though the characterizations of the inverted villains have been met with praise for the way the baddies are portrayed as retaining their negative traits even when trying to do good.
- Aztek had a lot of this, with Joy Page being a love interest until she became a victim of the Lizard King, the Lizard King himself being underused as a possibly archenemy of Aztek, Tezcatlipoca ultimately not being a reinvention to the Wonder Woman villain of the same name, and Quetzalcoatl from War of the Gods also not being used in the role.
- Birds of Prey:
- In the original Birds of Prey continuity, Tabby Brennan was introduced as an Eviler Counterpart to the Huntress, and was set up to be able to return as a recurring villain. When the series did bring her back, it was to kill her off stupidly in one issue.
- Later in the New 52 Birds revamp, new character Ev Crawford, a.k.a. Starling was introduced. Starling is a rarity: a breakout character from DC's reboot, a quick shot with a gun, a devil-may-care attitude, and cool tattoos. Plus, she is a bisexual character, and the reboot was supposed to be more diverse in its character roster. Starling became a fan favorite... so naturally, she was revealed to be a traitor in 2013, tossed into comic book limbo, and has been forgotten ever since.
- Dark Avengers: Ares was portrayed as a Papa Wolf, once villain of The Avengers who was recruited onto the Mighty Avengers team. However, the team itself was short-lived as after only two short arcs the team was disbanded and he became a Dark Avenger instead. This led to him being tossed around by every other villain the team faced and the book focused on other characters instead. He scored a few crowning moments of awesome while being neglected but it seems increasingly likely that he won't feature too prominently anymore seeing as The Void tore him in half in an embarrassingly short Curb-Stomp Battle during Siege.
- Dawn of the Jedi:
- The focus on the younger Je'daii and their main mentors can come at the expense of interesting older masters and rangers who get fewer appearances than fans would have liked, such as Kora Ryo (with her Dating Catwoman past with Ox), wise and humble Retired Badass Lha-Mi, Lady of War Rori Fenn, blacksmith Tem Madog (one of the few Masters to get along with Xesh), Miarta Sek (a light-aligned member of the Sith species who is the grandmother of a main character and worries about his balance with the Light), Scarily Competent Tracker Bel Zana, and Hermit Guru Rajivari.
- Haidya's generals are introduced as a colorful but probably not irredeemable group of Retired Monsters whom Daegen seeks to recruit for an Enemy Mine alliance against the Rakata. Despite this promising introduction, they are never seen or mentioned after their debut issue (about halfway through the series).
- Fantastic Four:
- During the story arc in which Franklin Richards was sent to the distant future then came back with a Plot-Relevant Age-Up, Marvel seemed to bend over backwards to make sure the adult Franklin never encountered Rachel Summers, the time traveler who was his girlfriend in her own alternate future. Then when the arc was concluded they promptly erased the adult version of Franklin from existence and brought back the child whose lack of control over his powers means his only way to participate in stories is as a either a kidnapping target or a source of Deus ex Machina. At least the aged-up version was an actual character.
- Reed's father Nathaniel became a warlord in another dimension and fathered the warrior woman Huntara. Years later, he got summarily retconned as just an alternate universe version of Reed's real dad, and then killed off-panel. A completely different character was then introduced as Reed's "real" dad.
- Wildstreak was a paraplegic young African American woman whose father designed a powered exoskeleton granting her not just freedom of movement but superhuman speed and agility. She had a fun and eager but very earnest personality, and had a lot of potential. Unfortunately, like Tracer listed above, she had the misfortune to debut in an otherwise mediocre Fantastic Four story about Ben and Psi-Lord fighting a Venom knock-off called "Dreadface." She's spent most of the last twenty years in comic book limbo.
- Shamrock
, Marvel's Captain Irish heroine. Debuting in Contest of Champions (1982), she's possessed by the spirits of dead Irish soldiers who have unfinished business. When they possess her they give her the speed, strength and martial skill of a thousand dead warriors... oh sorry, they actually made her really, really lucky. But wait, it gets better; she retired from superhero-ing to become... a hairdresser. And no one cared! - Towards the end of DnA's run on Nova, the Nova Corps started to be built up again. All of the new recruits were interesting characters and had a lot of potential, but perhaps none more so than Zan Philo. A Skrull member of the Nova Corps who had been trapped in the Fault for over thirty years, he seemed to know several things about the Nova Force which even Richard didn't, and served as a drill instructor for several issues. Between the fact that he was a heroic Skrull, was a very competent character, and had a lot of unanswered questions in his backstory (why does he have two artificial arms and one regular one?), Zan Philo was just full of potential.
- The otherwise pretty forgettable Quasar spinoff Star Blasters introduced an alien robot villain named Skeletron. He claimed to be the sole survivor of an ancient race of robots called the Turgentine Technenium, who had dominated a huge swath of the Marvel Universe eons ago, only to finally be destroyed in a tremendous war with the organic races of that era. He got killed, and the Turgentine Techenium hasn't been mentioned since.
S-Z
- Scott Pilgrim has a couple:
- Stacey Pilgrim was an interesting "normal" character (for a certain value of normal, anyway), but she almost completely disappears from the series after the second volume. When she reappears in the final volume, she's suddenly acting like a jerkass.
- Julie Powers was a hot but snarky woman who wasn't afraid to tell Scott his faults at first, before she was flanderized into your generic jerkass character in volume three.
- Knives Chau was a fun, if slightly stereotypical, cute Asian teen character in the first two volumes, only to be Demoted to Extra as the less interesting Kim Pine began taking her place. In the last volume, she only appears in a whopping total of two, plot-unimportant scenes.
- Hollie was a cute-looking girl with a good character design and a dynamic of being best friends with Kim, but the scenes she was in can be counted on one hand - almost none of them with Kim.
- Matthew Patel was easily the most likable out of all the evil exes, yet he was only in a single scene with absolutely no build-up, and Ramona never talks about him even once after that.
- Spider-Man:
- Toxin was introduced in the Venom vs. Carnage series as being basically a good counterpart of Spider-Man's villains Venom and Carnage. The character became an Ensemble Dark Horse amongst some fans, and could have been quite interesting, having his own conflict and a unique relationship with his symbiot. But all he got was a short-lived limited series where he fought mostly villains that weren't really able to match him (his main antagonist, Razor-Fist, was just a guy with blades instead of hands. Against a guy with Venom's and Carnage's abilities combined), and was never actually seen again after that. When the symbiote finally showed up again, it was stripped from its original heroic host, Brainwashed and Crazy and forced to bond with Eddie Brock to go kill the Flash version of Venom.
- During the poorly received "The Other" storyline, a subplot involved Spidey fighting a new villain named Tracer. Tracer at first seems completely forgettable, literally just a punk with a gun, but he is later revealed to be a robotic entity that claims to have arisen from the internet as a sort of god to the world's computers. He gets destroyed, but declares that he'll be back. He hasn't been back.
- Carl King, aka the Thousand, was a one-shot villain introduced as Peter Parker's high school bully who was aware that Parker was Spider-Man. Jealous of Peter's powers and wanting some of his own, King eats the now-dead spider that bit Peter, which causes his body to transform into a Hive Mind swarm of spiders. He gains the ability to "possess" people by entering their bodies and eating their insides, wearing their skin like a suit and mimicking their voices. His ultimate goal is to steal Peter's life. While he could have been a decent recurring villain as well as a good Evil Counterpart to Peter, he's killed off in his debut when all of his spiders die.
- David Lowell, aka Sundown, was a retconned early member of Spidey's rogues gallery who distinguished himself twice over, first for becoming one of the most powerful villains the wall-crawler ever tangled with (at his peak he was strong enough to fend off Spidey, the Avengers, the Fantasic Four and the X-Men all at once) and, more intriguingly, by being one of the few members of said rogues gallery to seriously reform (he was only 'defeated' in the first place after he surrendered in remorse, and later served his time and rebuffed a gangster's attempt to recruit him once he got out). His final appearance implied that he might return again, using his powers for good, but he never did and has seemingly vanished off the face of the planet.
- Mysterio: A lot of Spider-Man fans feel that Mysterio has a lot of untapped potential as a villain but writers in general don't tap into the full extent of his skills, theme, and idea. Notable is that there are multiple villain who use the Mysterio identity, among them a teleporting mutant and a stunt double who was also the Jack O'Lantern, yet the only Mysterio anybody ever seems to care about is Beck.
- Alyosha Kraven ultimately ended up as just one more Daddy's Little Villain, but there was a time when the character could have been something more. A mutant with animal empathy unlike his father who just snorted a lot of jungle cocaine, "Al" experienced a Heel–Face Turn early on and set up shop in Hollywood, leading to a hilarious one-off where he paid to have Spidey and JJJ take a camping trip together for charity, and a short-lived miniseries called "Get Kraven" that slyly lampooned a lot of Hollywood culture. This ended up being what doomed the character, as Hollywood types don't take kindly to being lampooned and the character took a sharp veer back into villainy, ultimately degenerating into a forgettable face in the Kraven family pile and being ignobly killed offscreen.
- Superman:
- Superman villains and Abusive Parents Zod and Ursa had their young child end up on Earth, where Superman and Lois Lane adopted him under the name Christopher Kent. The Character Development and story potential opened up by Clark and Lois finally becoming parents was then wasted when Christopher got sucked into a Year Inside, Hour Outside dimension for a Plot-Relevant Age-Up and wound up becoming just another minor character by the "New Krypton" arc. (He did get some further development during New Krypton, though). Especially sad as the New 52 reboot came not too long after all this, so Christopher's change to the status quo would not have been permanent in any case. Chris eventually showed up at the end of Dan Jurgens' Rebirth run - as Overlord Jr., with no one remembering the time when he lived with Clark and Lois anymore thanks to the events of Superman Reborn.
- Unfortunately, Superman himself fell into this in the New 52. He was introduced as a younger and angrier figure that considered himself “Superman first, Clark Kent later”, just like the Silver Age. His characterization varied across books, as each writer was more interested in depicting their own interpretation of Superman instead of delivering a single, more cohesive narrative. By the time Superman: Truth hit the shelves, fans were tired of the dark and brooding Superman and preferred the more optimistic Superman: Lois and Clark.
- Elliot S! Maggin invented a character named Superwoman who had a lot of potential. Kristin Wells was a time traveler from the distant future who used then-commonplace technologies to be a superhero in the present day (she actually first appeared in non-superhero form in Maggin's Superman novel Miracle Monday.) Superwoman only received a handful of appearances before Crisis on Infinite Earths erased her from history. She's probably best known these days for having a non-speaking cameo in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? Half her shtick, meanwhile, got appropriated by the Post-Crisis character Booster Gold (a time traveler who uses his era's tech to be a superhero).
- World's Finest #246-247 by "Zany" Bob Haney is an extremely Silver Age, entertainingly insane story about Superman being framed for abusing his long-lost hunchbacked identical twin brother. Right. Not surprisingly, later stories did not reference it. However, the plot is introduced by a little alien criminal guy named Ram Drood. We've never seen him before, but the JLA has apparently encountered him repeatedly and call him "the greatest space bum in all the galaxies!" We never learn what exactly he's done to earn himself that reputation, and he clearly lives his life on the shady side, and yet he also clearly isn't so villainous that JLA would feel obliged to haul him off to the Space Police or whatever, and they hear him out peacefully. In fact, he comes across as a fairly adorable and intriguing Jerk with a Heart of Gold who it would have been fun to see return once in a while, but unfortunately he's stuck in a story so ridiculous that no one wanted to revisit any elements of it.
- The Untold Story of Argo City: The citizens of Argo City. They are ordinary people (families, rescue workers, etc.) who temporarily develop super powers and struggle to survive a radiation storm in vain after already losing their home planet. Plenty of fans wanted to see more of them survive along with Zor-El and Alura. This sentiment apparently extends to writers, as several different continuities have more survivors of the city.
- Teen Titans:
- Cute Mute and Body Surfer Jericho. After being stuck on a floppy as a Brainwashed and Crazy ghost for a couple years he was finally revived and restored to his old self and with a new body... only to be shoved into limbo about ten issues later where he would turn up a in couple years evil again due to multiple evil personalities from his power of possession (and also possibly from being 'dead') and ultimately suffer Eye Scream. What makes this even more of a waste was that during Jericho's short time as a newly revived hero, he had hardly any interaction with any of his old friends (especially best friend/almost love interest Raven who resurrected him but instead their relationship seemed forgotten) or a decent reunion with his father Deathstroke the Terminator, or really anything about the character was explored besides "mute son of Deathstroke". Now, the mute part has been taken away, thus DC Comics having one less hero with a physical disability. Besides some sweet bonding moments with his half-sister Ravager, Jericho was mostly stuck in the background and underused until he was thrown in to the mediocre and forgettable stories DCU: Decisions and the Titans/Teen Titans/Vigilante crossover Deathtrap. However, as of Blackest Night Jericho seemed to have recovered from both insanity and Eye Scream... for now.
- Several fans of the Kon-El Superboy, disappointed at his editorially mandated shock death in Infinite Crisis, were perked up by the reveal that his evil yet sophisticated clone Match would finally be made part of a teen villain team alongside fellow evil clone Inertia. Since Match had previously infiltrated Superboy's close circle of friends and had successfully manipulated them and even gained a villainous crush on Wondergirl thanks to his high degree of intelligence, it was hoped he'd be an epic villain and we'd get to here some great monologues. Then the team finally appeared. Match was a carbon copy of Bizarro. No real characterization. Weaker power level. And redundant; a Superboy Bizarro had already been done. He was eventually murdered by Superboy-Prime offscreen just prior to the reboot.
- Doomed/Reiser, a college freshman who accidentally gained the ability to become a Doomsday-like monster, had most of his intrigue removed when transferred from his short-lived solo comic* to the Teen Titans. Initially, Doomed's induction seemed to provide an opportunity for further exploration into his efforts to prove he has a greater potential for good than Doomsday did, overcome his difficulty communicating as a vocally unintelligible monster, and address the possibility that he might someday become unable to resume human form. At the least, Reiser's acceptance of his dual nature at the end of his book suggested that joining the Titans would allow Doomed to unleash the fullest extent of his abilities. Unfortunately, his tenure basically consisted simply of making some very gratuitous cameos, before heading back to Metropolis. This also resulted in Reiser having even less personality than he did in the solo series.
- X-Men:
- During the 90s Emma Frost was given an extended family, consisting of sisters Adrienne and Cordelia Frost and brother Christian Frost. All three of these characters were introduced with great promise — Adrienne was the eldest sister who had dedicated her life to out-Emmaing Emma, Cordelia was the youngest sibling who, true to her Shakespearen name, had a somewhat impish personality, and Christian was a tragic victim of the Frost trio's Abusive Parents. While Christian never made an appearance beyond flashbacks, both Adrienne and Cordelia were put to great use in Generation X only for both of their stories to be cut short thanks to a switch of creative teams. Adrienne was Killed Off for Real whole Christian and Cordelia were Put on a Bus, and for quite a long time they vanished... until the era of X-Men (2019), when writers finally saw fit to bring back Cordelia and elevate Christian because there's no better time for an LGBT character with a tragic backstory to be featured. With this, Adrienne is now the only one of the Frost siblings who truly qualifies for this trope.
- Exodus, aka Bennet du Paris, was one of many promising characters who saw his potential squandered. Introduced as a Mysterious Watcher and The Dragon of Magneto, Exodus became the Dragon Ascendant after Magneto was incapacitated following the Fatal Attractions event. This was intended to set the stage for a new generation of the Brotherhood in their successors, the Acolytes, with Exodus assuming Magneto's role as the preeminent enemy of the X-Men. But after the lackluster reception of the Blood Ties story which was grooming him for Big Bad status, this plan was shelved and the Acolytes and Exodus were both moved Out of Focus, leading to them being offered up at The Worf Effect altar to build up new villain Holocaust. Later stories would give Exodus more depth, showing him as more conflicted about his master's mission of mutant supremacy than earlier stories indicated, but this too was wasted thanks to the constant changing hands of writers. Consequently, the character has never lived up to his full potential and remains a second-string character doomed to stand in Magneto's shadow.
- David Haller, aka Legion, is a rare case of a character being recognized as one of these. The son of Professor X, David was cursed with a tragic union of Split Personality Take Over and With Great Power Comes Great Insanity. For the first twenty years of his existence, he was used much more as a Plot Device than a character, being the instigator that ushered in the Age of Apocalypse. But as stigma against mental illness lessened in the 2010s and Legion came back into the spotlight following his use as The Heavy for another alternate universe story (Age of X), his potential was finally recognized, leading to his grand promotion as the star of the live-action television series Legion (2017).
- Madelyne Pryor, aka the Goblyn Queen, Red Queen, and a number of other aliases, is one of the most infamous cases of this in the X-Men stable. Like Exodus above, she originally had a full character arc set up in which she was going to marry Cyclops, get him to retire from superheroics, and the two were going to live Happily Ever After, with Cyke coming back sporadically to mentor the next generation. But thanks to the Executive Meddling-mandanted revival of Jean Grey to facilitate the launch of the X-Factor title, Madelyne was forcibly derailed into villainy, having her history rewritten and turning her into a clone to deaden her humanity and make it easy to have her Killed Off for Real. But the sloppy way in which this was done led to a lot of reader sympathy for Pryor, sympathy which was only heightened by how Cyclops seemed to get off completely scot-free. This led to Maddie's return in the pages of X-Man and sporadic use over the years, while Cyclops would see his hero cred progressively diminish until he was flat-out turned into a Villain Protagonist (and later just plain villain). Despite this, Pryor remains a villain herself, if one of the cooler and more sympathetic villains.
