Comic books are full of daring action and high stakes, but they also get into some pretty
weird stuff.
Here are the messed up parts of these superhero stories that we all just usually ignore.
Everyone these days knows Tony Stark as the wealthy industrialist who fights evil as the
invincible Iron Man.
If you were only reading comics for about five minutes back in 1996, though, you'd know
Tony as a teenager who traveled through time to replace his older self after the elder
Stark was mind-controlled into becoming a murderer.
When that shocking twist was revealed, Old Tony went berserk and shoved his hand through
his younger self's chest.
Then, he finally came to his senses and sacrificed his own life to save Teen Tony.
The result was that we all got a cool new '90s teen version of Iron Man who fought crime
while attending high school, hopefully taking some tips from the older Tony's mistakes..
"Don't do anything I would do, and definitely don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.
There's a little gray area in there and that's where you operate.”
While the move was meant to breathe some new life into the character and entice new readers,
it didn't exactly catch on.
Teen Tony and his exaggerated, anime-inspired armor managed to stick around for only eight
issues before he sacrificed himself yet again.
After that, he was rebooted along with the rest of the Avengers and the Fantastic Four
on a parallel Earth, and then a year later was re-rebooted back in the regular Marvel
Universe.
The weirdest part?
Tony actually remembers all this stuff, including three different childhoods.
And you wonder why he drank.
Still, it's nice to know that if Robert Downey Jr. ever gets tired of playing Iron Man in
the movies, there's actually precedent for replacing him with one of those kids from
Riverdale.
One sad fact of comics is that, like a lot of media, they lagged behind in reflecting
the real world, especially when it came to including characters of different races.
As time went on, creators started diversifying their casts, but in the Superman books, they
hit a bizarre snag with a pretty upsetting solution.
The problem was the planet Krypton.
While readers had seen plenty of stories set on Superman's home planet before it exploded,
the lack of diversity on the page meant that it seemed to be an entire planet of outer-space
caucasians.
Rather than just going forward with new stories that would show Krypton as a planet with varied
ethnicities that would be similar to Earth's, which seems like a pretty simple solution,
the creators came up with an explanation for why we hadn't seen any black Kryptonians:
they lived on their own segregated island that we'd never seen before.
Vathlo Island made its first appearance on a map of Krypton that referred to it as the
"home of a highly developed black race," who had the same scientific achievements as the
rest of their planet.
Looking back, it's easy to say that their hearts were in the right place, but as modern-day
Superman writer Mark Waid said, the whole thing is "pretty embarrassing."
Before he moved to Metropolis and started fighting evil as an adult, Clark Kent patrolled
the skies of Smallville as Superboy.
That raises a question, though: when did he switch to Superman?
Dig through some back issues, and you'll find the answer: it was when he lost his virginity
to a woman who had been brainwashed by a robot teacher from space that his dad made.
Obviously.
There are only a couple of stories about Teacher, a Kryptonian robot made by Superman's dad
that was meant to guide little Kal-El and make sure he knew about his home planet, but
one of them goes way too far.
Thanks to the robot's meddling, a classmate named Misty was able to figure out Clark's
secret identity.
She revealed her discovery right before they shared a passionate embrace, which led to
the next panel, where Ma and Pa Kent mention that Clark's bed hadn't been slept in the
night before.
It turned out that the entire thing was orchestrated by the Teacher to find out what would happen
if Clark had to watch someone he loved die in front of him, which in Misty's case happened
when she was brained with a rock thrown by a sasquatch.
Classic teaching method.
Clark managed to avoid the temptation to take revenge on Bigfoot, and the Teacher determined
that he was ready to be called a man.
The good news is that Misty's death was faked, but the bad news is that she was being mind-controlled
through the whole relationship before having her memory erased.
Needless to say, this story was never mentioned again.
Believe it or not, Supergirl has had even worse luck in the romance department than
her cousin.
How bad?
Well, back in the Silver Age, she wound up dating a horse without even knowing it.
To her, he was "Bronco" Bill Starr, a rodeo rider so skilled that, as Supergirl herself
said, he was "almost part of the horse."
Which part… we'll leave that up to you.
It turned out, however, that "Bill" wasn't Bill at all - he was actually Supergirl's
own pet steed, Comet, who had been turned into a human thanks to a sort of magical reverse-werewolf
curse.
And just to add another weird layer to it, Comet wasn't actually a horse, either.
He was a centaur named Biron who had been exiled to space back in Hercules' time and
cursed by Circe, whom you may remember from The Odyssey.
The thing is, he never tells Supergirl any of this, instead keeping it a secret so he
can date her as Bronco Bill for a few days, which is a pretty creepy way for a horse to
act.
"The creepiest days are when you don't hear from the horse at all."
The qualifications for who got to join the 30th-century teenagers of the Legion of Super-Heroes
always seemed pretty arbitrary, which is exactly what you'd expect from a bunch of kids deciding
who got to be in their special club.
In fact, every time they held auditions for new members, they wound up rejecting a handful
of wannabes, but none were more messed up than the one we saw in the pages of Secret
Origins #46.
That issue is mostly known for featuring Arm-Fall-Off Boy, a "hero" who does exactly what his name
says, but it also introduced readers to Fortress Lad.
He had the ability to turn into a giant metal fortress and was rejected because the Legionnaires
didn't think he'd be that useful.
They were wrong, though - when another reject erased their memories and threatened to blow
them away with a laser pistol, he protected them.
And here's where it gets disturbing.
The villain of the story wound up erasing Fortress Lad's memory completely, leaving
him unable to turn himself back into his human form, or even remember he was once human at
all.
Then, she died before she could restore the Legionnaires' memories of the other applicants.
The Legion just assumed they'd found a new clubhouse, and promptly started making renovations
inside something that had once been - and still was - a living being.
Killing a beloved character can be tough trick for a comic to pull off at the best of times,
but Hal Jordan might've gotten the worst death a superhero has ever had.
After his hometown of Coast City was destroyed by the Cyborg Superman while the real Superman
was busy being dead - long story - Hal snapped.
Driven by a desire to undo the tragedy, he turned on the Green Lantern Corps, went on
a murder spree to collect their rings, and then used this power to try rewriting time
itself as a supervillain called Parallax.
The next few decades saw Jordan being replaced by a new character, dying, briefly serving
as the undead embodiment of the literal Wrath of God, and then finally returning to the
role of Green Lantern again.
In order to re-classify him as a good guy.
"Parallax" was retconned into being something other than just a name Hal thought sounded
cool when he started serial-murdering his coworkers.
Instead, it was now a giant yellow space cockroach made of fear that possessed Hal in his darkest
moments, controlling his actions.
With Parallax removed, he was back in action, with no one really worrying that maybe a guy
who started killing people because a space bug wasn't all that stable to begin with.
Harley Quinn isn't exactly a superhero, but her overwhelming popularity means that over
the past 20 years, she's been treated as a protagonist far more often than she's been
a straight-up villain.
She's always been characterized as a sympathetic character whose genuine love for the Joker
allowed him to manipulate her into a life of crime.
But while it's easy to identify with someone who followed her heart down the worst possible
path, it gets a little more difficult when she starts blowing up children in a large-scale
terrorist attack, without any involvement from the Joker.
"We're bad guys, it's what we do."
After getting out of the Suicide Squad, Harley winds up on a crime spree that involves blowing
up a police station and everyone in it, and that's just where it starts.
The real crime comes a few pages later, when she distributes dozens of free video games
to the families of Gotham City and then watches without emotion as they explode at her command.
All told, there are 19 explosions that happen on the page, and it's implied that there are
a whole lot more.
Sympathetic or not, blowing up a couple dozen families makes it pretty hard to like somebody.
Batman is well known as a hero who's prepared for any situation, up to and including an
exploding shark, but it turns out that there are some things that go beyond even Dark Knight's
understanding.
And one of them is the internet.
After returning from a time-travel adventure where everyone presumed he was dead - that's
another long story - Bruce Wayne decided to reinvent global information technology.
He called it "Internet 3.0," a world-wide web that would be under the protection of
Barbara Gordon, the former Batgirl who had reinvented herself as the ultra-hacker known
as Oracle.
Batman even gave her a digital avatar with special "cheat codes" and anti-malware technology
so they could battle against cyber-crimes.
And if that sounds like a bunch of random words from a hacking scene in one of those
cop shows for old people, well, that's about how it worked out.
“This isn't good.”
It turned out that with this new world of "virtual museums, department stores, and schools,"
Batman basically just invented Second Life about eight years after we had it in the real
world.
The only big innovation?
If you died on Internet 3.0, you died in real life.
Maybe stick to personalized boomerangs and rocket cars, Batman.
One of the problems of having a shared universe is that it raises a lot of questions.
If they live in the same world, for instance, then there's a chance Superboy could've stopped
Batman's parents from being murdered, if he knew it was going to happen.
Which he did.
In a story published back in 1960, Thomas Wayne moved to Smallville to work as the town's
resident doctor, and brought his son Bruce along with him.
Even at that young age, Bruce's knack for fighting crime was evident, and he wound up
taking on some bad guys while disguised as "The Flying Fox" - which, of course, is a
kind of bat.
Rather than dissuading him from such a dangerous hobby, Clark Kent was happy to team up with
him, because his "time telescope" showed him that Bruce grew up to be Batman.
Armed with this knowledge, Superman was perfectly happy to let the Waynes die because it meant
he got to have a friendly coworker in the future.
Yikes!
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