Pietà Plagiarism/Comic Books

File:Crisis7.jpg

The Trope Codifier.

The examples of Pietà Plagiarism in Comic Books listed here are just a brief overview. As citing the numerous examples would take up way too much of this page, here's a nice big list.

• The cover of Crisis on Infinite Earths #7, showing Superman carrying Supergirl's dead body, is one of the best known examples in comic books, and is frequently referenced and/or parodied, effectively making the origin of the trope Older Than They Think.
  • The final page of Final Crisis #6 has Supes doing it again, this time with Batman's corpse. This has got to be a throwback.
    • And a drawing by Arthur Suydam of DC zombies has it too, with everyone but Supergirl a zombie, and her with an apple in her mouth.
  • Tom Strong #22.
  • A cover done for a Guardians of the Galaxy storyline that never actually came to be.
• The cover of Uncanny X-Men #136 (Cyclops holding Dark Phoenix) is equally well known; ironically, it wasn't until the next issue that Phoenix died.
  • This cover came about five years earlier than the Crisis cover mentioned above, so it's at least passably likely that the Crisis cover was an homage to THIS one.
  • Two more X-Men examples, both all-female: The cover of Uncanny X-Men #255 shows Mystique kneeling, holding the body of Destiny in a pietà pose, and that of X-Men Annual" #1 (2006) shows Mystique sitting on the ground holding her injured daughter Rogue.
  • Subverted slightly in X-Treme X-Men #2, where the villain arranges a dead (at the time) Psylocke and bloody-and-broken Beast in a reversal of the Pietà. Might be calling back to the Dark Phoenix cover, as a good portion of the fandom indulges in Shipping where these two are concerned.
• Likewise, the cover of The Death of Captain Marvel is very explicitly based on the Michelangelo work.
• One of the most notorious examples is from the cover of one of the Teen Titans 'Drug Awareness issues', with Speedy holding an unnamed child.
• Another very famous one comes from A Death in the Family, with Batman holding Jason Todd as Robin's body. This picture.
• Captain Atom probably deserves mention for doing it twice, first on the cover of #8, with Plastique cradling a badly wounded Cap, with bonus points for Cap having a very visible wound in his side, and then inverting that image on the cover of issue #44, with Cap now cradling an unconscious Plastique.
• It's a fictional comic book, but the cover of issue 1 of Rage: Gay Crusader from the US version of Queer as Folk.
• The last issue of the fictional Bluntman and Chronic, from Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy, references the Batman example with "the inevitable death of Chronic!".
• Dark Reign had one of these in a promo poster.
• Witchblade #128's cover.
• Issue 217 of Hellblazer literally copied the statue.
• Two-Face holds a drugged and bleeding Batman like this in Batman: Jekyll and Hyde.
• One of the earliest Star Trek: The Next Generation comics had Data cradling Geordi's dead body this way. Then Q resurrects him.
  • This cover was a double whammy: Data's not only holding Geordi's dead body, he's also in tears.
• The Avengers: Red Zone Part 5 cover features this with Iron Man holding a very dead Captain America. Note that Tony's angst is so great that even the armor is emoting.
• The "Death of Captain America" plotline has Steve Rogers taking a bullet and collapsing outside the court, only for him to be cradled by Sharon Carter and a federal agent (spoilers) ^[dead link].
• Marjane in Persepolis recounts how she got into the Iranian art school; in the entrance exam, she drew a copy of Pietà, with Mary replaced by a veiled Iranian woman, and Jesus replaced by a martyr.
• Spider-Man holds Gwen Stacy in this way, in the last panel of The Night Gwen Stacy Died.
• For the Marvel reprints of Elf Quest, a new series of covers was made. Issue 24 also used this pose for Clearbrook and One-Eye.
• A cover of Batman and Son has Batman do this to the Joker
• In All Fall Down, the Ghoul holds Portia this way after rescuing her.

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