Overview

Suicide is often committed out of despair attributed to some underlying mental disorder which includes depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism or drug abuse. Comic book characters are no exception to this. In a parallel to real life murder suicides, it often occurs that overly violent and gun related characters commit suicide once they believe that their campaign of vengeance is over. This has been shown with the Punisher and Vigilante.

The term is used occasionally in relation to the military as relates to a mission which if undertook would result in certain death (a suicide mission.) This is generally not the same employment of the term as it relates to the action of suicide though the two terms have been occasionally combined. This was notably done by John Ostrander in the 1980s in the series Suicide Squad, where many characters have a death wish, but do not want to kill themselves. This series labeled its letter column Suicide Notes, a term which received some criticism including from the United States Postal Service.