Moral Event Horizon/Comic Books



"Demagol: "Where are the children? You said they were out here." Jarael:"You didn't pay attention. I said they were IN the courtyard""
 * While The Joker was (save for a stretch during The Fifties and The Sixties) always portrayed as a total psychopath, it is generally considered that he crossed the Moral Event Horizon in 1988 when, within a few months, he crippled Batgirl for life and beat the second, still-teenaged Robin (Jason Todd) to death with a crowbar, changing his portrayal permanently into a Complete Monster.
 * The title character of the Lucifer comics punted dogs as a hobby (naturally), establishing him quite firmly as an epic Deadpan Snarker and Sociopathic Hero that was as amusing and Badass as those tropes suggest. This continued all the way until the Basanos arc, where in a rather impressive twist the Basanos actually mortally injured him... only for Lucifer to reveal that he had manipulated Token Mini-Moe Elaine from the start and trick her into dying in his place. He might have redeemed himself later on (bringing Elaine Back From the Dead helped) but the writer mentioned that he considered Lucifer's destruction of The Mansions of The Silence Lucifer's point of no return, destroying billions of souls because he was impatient.
 * An argument somewhat undermined by the facts that 1) said writer made The Mansions of The Silence look pretty hellish, making the destruction of all those souls almost a Mercy Kill; and 2) Lucifer's "impatience" allowed him to arrive just in time to rescue his...friends?...from a murderous undead god.
 * And 3) It's mentioned you cannot destroy souls. All of the Mansions of the Silence's prisoners will eventually reform. This hardly makes it pleasant, though.
 * While the man who would eventually become the Saint of Killers from Preacher (Comic Book) had already a staggering kill record to his name (among other heinous actions), he was nonetheless a decent human being (at least compared to most of his murderous peers), and for a time lived a life devoid of killing people. However, he finally crossed over when, in the course of brutally avenging the peaceful life that he lost, he cold-bloodedly killed an innocent for the first time in his life, damning himself to Hell in the process. What came afterwards (including the Ratwater genocide) was merely a formality, as it's arguable that he was too far gone by then. Of course, even this is arguable since the series Big Bad, God, is still considered worse. In fact, the Saint of Killers gets a happy ending by killing God and taking his throne, finally able to rest.
 * Also, partially subverted for Cassidy, who slowly approaches the horizon through many of the later books, then seems to cross over forever when he . Seemingly subverted when , the seemingly played straight when  , then subverted one more time when we learn that.
 * The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen's Griffen was implausibly popular with fans in the first volume, never mind he was introduced raping teenage girls and shown casually murdering an innocent policeman. To make sure we realize he's a very bad man in Vol 2, he sells Earth to the Martians in Vol 2 -- and assaults Mina. It's the latter rather than anything else that results in his Karmic Death -- by which point a reader can't feel any sympathy for him at all.
 * Likely because this is a common sexual fantasy, of a pedestal-residing woman being available to someone who sees their social standing as lower than dirt. Some scenes in Hollow Man also play off of this, though they end in killing instead as the serum has driven to recipients batshit crazy by then. Essentially the male equivalent of a bodice-ripper, as far as the reasonings behind this go. (for execution purposes, see guys who got off to the movie Disclosure)
 * In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, Raana Tey from the Knights of the Old Republic Series murders her own student, frames the loveable protagonist Zayne Carrick, hires mercenaries to spy on his family, and manipulates his ex-girlfriend into trying to kill him. That was pretty much the point when I wanted Zayne to kill Raana.
 * From the same series, Haazen crosses the horizon when we learn exactly why he warped the Covenant into knights templar, orchestrated the deaths of hundreds of people, and ruined Zayne's life- purely out of jealousy for Barrison Draay, who he already killed years ago. That Start of Darkness made Haazen a pathetic, strangely tragic figure - but it also prevented anyone from sympathizing with the present Haazen again.
 * Issues 45 and 46 are this for Chantique. Before it was obvious that she wasn't exactly the most stable individual, but these issues showed just how depraved she really is. She mindrapes Zayne by showing him 1000 years of pain and suffering, forces him to fight the slave he befriended, mocks him when the slave commits suicide, and she keeps him alive just so that he can drive Jarael away. And it works, with Zayne failing to realize that he was deceived until it was too late. And she does it all to get revenge on Jarael. Those two issues singlehandendly propelled her from Dark Action Girl to Complete Monster.
 * Also, the little surprise she prepared for her father Demagol. Just these words:

"John Dee: Because I can."
 * In Star Wars Legacy, Darth Krayt, in a fit of temper after losing an important shipyard, orders ten percent of the Mon Calamari species executed on the spot and the rest imprisoned in camps to be worked to death. Even the other Sith thought it was a bit much. As for the reader...
 * In Infinite Crisis, Superboy-Prime was presented as a confused teenager with powers he couldn't control lashing out at people who didn't understand him... until he lost it and killed some C-List Fodder, whereupon he turned into a near-demonic Card-Carrying Villain, excusing his actions by claiming to be "better than those losers".
 * For '90s Kid, it was the moment in Countdown when he killed the pregnant Lana Lang on an alternate Earth. The end of Legion of Three Worlds and especially Prime's Adventure Comics crossover with Blackest Night gave him Character Development (regret for many of his actions and realizing that he was just a tool for DC writers to use).
 * In one of the Infinite Crisis lead-ups, Villains United, Alexander Luthor (under the guise of the regular Lex) orders part of his Secret Society of Villains to retrieve a number of people for unknown reasons, chief amongst them the heroes Lady Quark and Pariah (who fought along side him during the original Crisis). Alex mocks and kills Pariah and later uses Lady Quark to power his dimensional tuning fork. Again, they were all heroes who tried to save the Multiverse together. And in the actual Infinite Crisis, he just kept on going with his despicable manipulations of everyone, including Golden Age Superman.
 * Speaking of Villains United, Deathstroke gets his moment when he guns down a pregnant Cheshire for selling the Secret Six out to The Society. Keep in mind that the Society was Deathstroke's own team; he was simply rewarding her as a traitor deserves. To be fair to Deathstroke, he didn't know she was pregnant at the time.
 * Everyone's favorite Magnificent Bastard, Dr. Doom, has plenty of possible Moral Event Horizon moments, but he is just so Affably Evil that his writers are continually forced to quietly retcon each of them thanks to the outrage of the Marvel readers.
 * In the prologue to the "Unthinkable" story arc in Fantastic Four, He approaches his Unlucky Childhood Friend, Valeria, and promises to abandon Mad Science and be with her forever if she'll love him. Eventually, she accepts -- and Doom immediately casts a spell that skins her alive and makes the skin into a new suit of leather armor. This was all a Xanatos Gambit by Doom, who made a Deal with the Devil for unstoppable magical power in exchange for abandoning science -- and winning the love of a pure soul and damning said soul to Hell. Please note: Doom didn't even have to break his code of honor by lying; everything he told Valeria was technically true. Writer Mark Waid stated that the purpose of the story and the rest of the arc was to deconstruct Dr. Doom's "nobility".
 * Later in the same arc, Doom possessed Reed and Sue Richards' daughter Valerie and kidnapped their son Franklin, imprisoning him in a Hell dimension. Again, in a deconstruction of Doom's supposed 'nobility' and 'honor', Doom, holding Val and showing Franklin in Hell, promised to 'set your child free' if the Four surrendered to him. They did so - and Doom put down only Val, leaving Franklin in Hell.
 * They also tried to do everything with making Doom's former master, Marquiz of Death crossing it one time after another, by doing things like However, there's actually no point in it with this character - fans hate him anyway.
 * In the Planet X storyline, Grant Morrison tried to do this with Magneto, whom he considered a "mad old terrorist twat." Not surprisingly, it didn't take, and was quickly retconned away. Morrison at least had the decency, however, to explain Magneto's Out of Character behavior:.
 * Lex Luthor giving a few thousand people superpowers in 52, then taking them away again. While they were in mid-flight. Because he was pissed the power-giving treatment wouldn't work for him. Luthor's a sociopath, sure, but he's not usually that petty (okay, there was that one time he stole forty cakes...).
 * The real reason is actually far worse. He thought Supernova was Superman in disguise and so created the situation just to test him, reasoning that Superman would use his powers to save the people. So in other words he killed thousands to test a HUNCH. And no, it didn't work -- while Supernova saved as many people as he could, it didn't help Lex or anyone else closer to figuring out Supernova's ID.
 * In the DC miniseries Identity Crisis the previously bumbling and mediocre villain Dr. Light is revealed to have raped the Elongated Man's wife, Sue Dibny on the JLA Satellite years earlier. What he was doing there in the first place isn't revealed, nor was it the first time he'd done it. Unfortunately, that wasn't the worst thing that happened to Sue in the book.
 * The Purple Man started out as a low-grade Daredevil villain. Then came Alias (not to be confused with the TV show), in which he humiliated, abused, and tortured Jessica Jones in pretty much every non-rape way available. But he does rape people as well. Just in case there was any doubt he's a total scum bag. He kidnapped women and raped them in front of her as a way to mock her for being an ineffective superhero. Just in case there's any doubt that he's a Complete Monster''.
 * Spider-Man villain Green Goblin very famously crossed it when he killed Spidey's girlfriend Gwen Stacy.
 * Doctor Destiny's Diner of Death. JLA Villain John Dee may have kicked the dog when he shot a woman who had been nice to him, but the real proof that he had turned irrevocably evil came next issue. Sure, he would routinely plot to drive the whole world insane back in the silver age, but what he does to those six people over a 24-hour period will keep you awake for days. And the fact that he let the rest of the world tumble into madness at the same time shows that he went for both the macroscopic and microscopic level of sadism. Arguably the cruelest thing he did to those six people was to briefly give them back their minds in the middle of his sick game. When one of his victims demanded to know why he was torturing them, this was his response:

"'Cheshire: I decided to make a point. America? No, that'd incur too much wrath. And I like shopping there. Russia? They're suffering enough as is. England? Maybe we're all sick of hearing of DI and Fergie, but maybe not...I COULD blow up a little out of the way island, but that wouldn't get the point across...Then I realize...the terrorist capital of the world. That little eyesore, Qurac. Oh, sure, you'll all rage and complain, but inside? You'll be THANKING me."
 * This is useful in showing Dream's moral compass: he doesn't care that much, just wanting his stuff back and returning Dee to Arkham. It's also evidence of how the Sandman is not your typical comic. Dream doesn't have a heroic spaz attack, he doesn't beat up Dee, he doesn't even punish him. When it's all over, he gives Dee back the power to sleep. Dee once again becomes an old, addled man in an asylum. He may not have been redeemed, but he's not a Complete Monster either, even though even your most depraved Complete Monsters seldom hold a candle to what he did.
 * In Irredeemable pretty much the very first thing we see former Cape the Plutonian do is incinerate a little girl's mother, baby brother and father in front of her eyes before, it's implied, murdering her off panel. And that's not even the first atrocity he's committed; we learn that he's just destroyed an entire city and murdered a large portion of the population with in it. And horribly murdered more than a few of his old friends (of whom the father was one). He shows no signs of slowing down in later issues, apparently having decided to become the biggest Complete Monster there is.
 * Well, not quite Complete annihilation. He did leave 10 alive.
 * For that matter, the reason he did it makes it even worse. He wanted to become absolute ruler of the world, and Singapore's ambassador wasn't completely honest as to why they agreed with him.
 * So, wait, since The Plutonian crossed the Moral Event Horizon, that means he's beyond redemption.
 * Marvel rogue Mr. Hyde was always a violent, brutal thug of a villain, but his true MEH crossing would have to be when he beat the Avengers' butler Jarvis half to death while Jarvis was tied up and helpless. Hyde did this just to hurt Captain America (comics), who could only watch as the horrible scene played out.
 * Another Captain America (comics) baddie who fits this trope is the Scarecrow (not to be confused with the Batman villain). While he was always a criminal who enjoyed scaring and robbing people, when he's captured by Captain America he goes completely over the edge and becomes a sadistic murderer, impaling innocent people with his pitchfork as a means of trying to draw Cap out to stop him. He gets the attention of Ghost Rider instead, and ends up impaled on his own pitchfork in the ensuing battle. It Got Worse when the Scarecrow was revived as an undead zombie with the ability to cause fear in his enemies.
 * Spider-Man's foe Mysterio was an egotistical, second tier villain with Large Ham tendencies. Then came Kevin Smith's Daredevil arc "Guardian Devil", where Mysterio And let's not forget that in order to implicate   And his motive for all of this? He was
 * An exquisitely cruel one in the Old Man Logan non-canon miniseries: he tricks Wolvie into You could argue the real MEH crossing is the illusion being lifted
 * Miek of the Warbound crossed it during World War Hulk when he stabbed Rick Jones. Also,
 * If the X-Men villain Vulcan didn't cross the Horizon when he, then he definitely crossed it when he.
 * Either Sentry, crossed MEH when he  -- suddenly all discussions over the Internet about if he should be a member of Avengers after the end of Dark Reign were replaced with discussions about how he should be killed or why having him anywhere near Avengers is a bad joke.
 * Recent developments in Blackest Night: The Flash have fans of Captain Boomerang the Younger wailing and gnashing their teeth. Owen's moral compass is shaky at best. Upon learning of his heritage, he joined the Rogues with minimal prompting and showed very little remorse or hesitation when it came to killing people in certain situations. Those situations being fights. After leaving the Rogues, his character was more developed as a screw up who's looking for a family, and whoever's giving him affection and approval (or at least a group to hang with) gets his loyalty. He's had ice cream nights with Supergirl for pity's sake, and has always been more or less shown to be a pretty okay guy, for an occasional assassin. So in the latest installment of the series, we learn that baby-Boomer was . Okay, a little creepy, but it's not so ba--  Thus making a formerly endearing, kinda sweet character...so full of squick.
 * Nekron of Blackest Night is an Eldritch Abomination who is said to be beyond good and evil. And at first he seemed like that. Raising the dead as foot soldiers and sending them to terrorize their loved ones? That's pretty ruthless, but not exactly personal. But once it's revealed that
 * Ultimate Red Skull was shown to be a typical evil bad guy, and then he threw a baby out the window. Immediately afterward it's heavily implied he had his henchmen rape the mother.
 * Don't forget immediately before this he had told the mother that he'd let the baby live if she would be so kind as to kill her own husband with a pair of dull scissors.
 * And he shot JFK.
 * For the Red Skull in the main universe it's hard to pin down when he crossed it. It actually seems like he was born in the Moral Event Horizon. He is consistently portrayed as the one supervillain that all other supervillains loathe.
 * In JL: A Cry for Justice, Prometheus (the latter part was released the same week as Ultimate Red Skull throwing a baby out of a window).
 * In Kick-Ass,
 * In Negation, Komptin captures Kaine on Komptin's homeworld. He goes to his mother's place and stashes Kaine there until Komptin's superiors arrive.  Prior to this point in the story, Komptin, while clearly a bad guy, was portrayed with a small degree of sympathy: a hard-working but misfortunate underdog who wants nothing more than to be a successful leader within the Negation. With this act, that characterization changed, and Komptin was afterwards depicted as colder and crueler, living only for his job - and for revenge on Kaine especially.
 * Doctor Octopus and the rest of the Sinister Six, Spider-Man's recurring Villain Team-Up, have all murdered a few times over the decades, but it usually happened to AssholeVictims, so most readers could shrug it off and continue to at least partially root for them. Then came the early 90's storyline, Revenge Of The Sinister Six (not to be confused with the novel of the same name). As part of their plan to take over the world, they invade another dimension and steal the highly-advanced weaponry they find there. And to test it out, they kill over 143,000 of that dimension's natives. Spidey himself is stunned, noting that the Six rarely if ever kill. Their bloody campaign continues when they return to Earth, killing at the bare minimum four dozen people (an explicitly given body count), and Octopus threatens to blow-up the world with orbiting weapon satellites if the assembled heroes don't stop fighting him. By the time it's over, a clearly soul-weary Spidey notes that way too many people are heading to the hospital or morgue.
 * In No Hero, two members of the "superhero" team Front Line . Front Line has apparently been pulling stunts like this for decades   No wonder
 * Cheshire, a Psycho for Hire in The DCU, crossed the line when she nuked Qurac as part of her plan to extort the nations of the world. Gail Simone outright called Cheshire a Complete Monster due to this act and rarely writes her as anything else.


 * Mongul II, the son of the original Mongul, kickstarted his career as his father's successor by punching his own sister's head off to eliminate any in-family competition. He's only gotten worse from there
 * Drago Wolf from Sonic the Hedgehog is hated by nearly every fan of the comic, and with good reason; turning traitor and joining Robotnik? Not nearly as bad as browbeating your abused girlfriend into killing the leader of the resistance and framing the titular character for it.
 * To make her an even more sympathetic character, she had no idea what she was doing when she nearly killed Sally. Drago gave her a Sonic mask (to make Sonic look like the hero) that had circuitry in the eyes that turned everyone in view into a duplicate of Snivelly, Robotnik's right hand. So, to recap: he bullied her into committing murder (even of a villain), gave her a mask that made her confuse her leader with her supposed target, and causes Sonic to be framed on the side. Yeah, Drago's a bastard.
 * Also from Sonic the Hedgehog is Robotnik himselef--or rather "Eggman." He'd been spending most of his time since his return trying to reestablish himself as a credible archvillain. Then along comes his Egg Grapes--a set of devices that drain the life force of Mobians to power his machinery. The process is fatal. Eggman re-killed off the echidna race with 'em. Charmy Bee was in one for less than a minute and his brain is still a bit scrambled. When the Grapes were introduced, his sidekick/robotic daughter asked why he would do this when there were many methods of power production that were much more effective. His response was basically that none of the other methods were "as fun."
 * The same goes for the original Robotnik, the man who once called himself Julian Kintobor. The man attempts to take over an Overlander city and ends up being rescued by Mobians. His response? Initiate a coup, robotizice countless Mobians and hold the planet in a death grip for ten years. Before his death at the hands of Sonic himself, he crosses it one last time by setting Sonic up for the death of Sally and proceeds to wipe Knothole off the face of the map (both get better)
 * Let's hat trick the Archie Sonicverse: Geoffery St. John. Grief-stricken by the death of his father, he learns of the trapped Ixis Naugus and starts conspiring in order to get revenge on those who lead to his father's death. When the rescued King Acorn asked St. John to recruit people for his Secret Service, he purposely recruited people with less-than-friendly reputations for the sole purpose of pinning the blame on them should his Batman Gambit fall apart and he be revealed. In short order, he double-crosses Sonic, gives Naugus one of the Chaos Emeralds, and helps initiate a coup that would indirectly lead to the destruction of the Freedom Fighters.
 * Eric in A God Somewhere crosses the Moral Event Horizon for most when he rapes his sister-in-law and cripples his brother. But the narrator, his former best friend Sam, notes that throughout the series of ensuing mass murders, he was still ambivalent about Eric. He finally crosses the Moral Event Horizon in Sam's eyes when the military unit with whom Sam had been embedded as a reporter sneak up on the cave where the two of them are talking, and Eric slaughters them right in front of him.
 * In Uncanny X-Force, Archangel, corrupted by the "Death Seed" Apocalypse placed in him way back in the original run of X-Factor, crosses when he . This somehow ends up having more gravitas than when he depopulated an entire town two issues earlier.
 * In Gotham City Sirens #20, crosses the line. During  she murders an innocent guard via explosive in the face. Even worse,  acknowledges that the guard is an innocent man, but
 * Zsasz has always been a Complete Monster, but what really made him do this was using kidnapped runaways and orphans for gladiator matches and dumping their bodies in the river. You know it's serious when the current Robin is vomiting over what happened.
 * To Clarify: The "Current Robin" is Damien Wayne. A character who, in his first appearance, decapitated two of Batman's rogues, assaulted Alfred, and tried to kill Tim Drake at least three or four times. And while he had mellowed out by that point, he was still pretty unflappable.
 * Some time during the X-Men Messiah Complex crossover for Bishop. The major incidents are recounted here allowing you, the reader, to draw your own conclusions. It could be that the whole crossover event is one giant Moral Event Horizon for Bishop.
 * He waited until the other adult X-Men were away from the mansion pursuing the new mutant baby, the Marauders, and the Purifiers. He then stole some of Cassandra Nova's nano-sentinels and had them take over the O.N.E. Sentinels and set them against the mansion. The kids had to defend themselves against an attempted genocide. Bishop blamed that on Cable.
 * Then he, in secret, made it to Dallas, attacked Forge, stole time travel tech, attacked Cable, and blamed Cable for the attack. The attack on Cable is directly responsible for the Marauders getting baby Hope. The panels imply that had the Marauders not attacked, he would have killed baby Hope right then and there.
 * Bishop also lied to the X-Men and blamed Cable for his actions, and tried to murder Cable and the baby again and again on Muir Island. His last attack (just after Cable and Hope time-slid away) nearly killed Professor Xavier. And in the subsequent Cable and X-Force titles, He Got Worse.
 * Vandal Savage, being an immortal villain in DC Comics continuity, has had several millennia and hundreds, if not possibly thousands, of opportunities to establish himself as a Complete Monster, with just a few of the examples we know about listed on his character page. Of those listed, however, perhaps his most disturbing MEH-crossing candidate is.
 * The Governor from The Walking Dead pretty much explicitly steps across a new one of these (or is revealed/implied to have done so) in pretty much any scene where he appears for more than a page. By the time he, his MEH crossings look like the line of doors from the opening sequence of Get Smart.
 * The Guardians cross the line in the early issues of the DC Nu reboot of Green Lantern when they wipe out Ganthet's emotions to turn him into a cold emotionless Guardian like them. Kyle is understandably outraged by Ganthet's emotional lobotomy and vows to fight the Guardians.
 * Curious example from Watchmen, in that many readers think Big Bad 's crossing of the Horizon and the greatest crime he commits are two distinct things. Sure he, but he had a damn good reason for doing that . But when he , it becomes a whole lot harder to sympathize with him.
 * Prowl just stomped through the Moral Event Horizon while singing in a recent issue of IDW's Transformers comics. Before he had been portrayed as a dodgy guy who was willing to do some bad things for the greater good. But in this issue we find that he's basically using known psychopath and murderer Arcee as his personal assassin of sorts to get rid of enemies. Not too amoral considering that we're talking about Decepticons here. A few pages later Prowl stops a plot by Bombshell involving his cerebro shells. After Prowl gets Bombshell in his custody he takes him to jail or something right? No, he blows Bombshell's brains out while the guy is totally defenseless and wounded then brutally murders all of the Constructions after they refuse to surrender (the reason why should be pretty obvious). Oh and he also tries to murder Dirge (who's tried to mind his own business and stay out of these conflicts) too. For being a witness.