5 Eyebrow-Arching Superhero Stories Hollywood'll Never Make
Despite how it might look, not every superhero story has been turned into movie by now. Some are too risky for Hollywood, some are too weird ... and some are just plain dumb. So dumb, in fact, that comic books are the only medium that could get away with publishing them. Behold, superhero moments so stupid, not even Tinseltown will touch them:
The Ninja Turtles Convince Hitler To Kill Himself
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures was an all-ages comic created for the specific purpose of preventing '90s children from looking at the original TMNT series and finding out it was a gritty underground comic full of gore and murder. Adventures was published by Archie Comics and featured child-friendly storylines like, uh ... Michelangelo being tortured by the U.S. government, or Raphael honoring the victims of the Holocaust in what is admittedly the most satisfying way possible:
As is usually the case with WTF comic book panels, knowing the context only makes this weirder. It all starts in a possible future in which the Turtles fly around in samurai robot armors. One day, the Adult Mutant Samurai Turtles find out that 1) someone preserved Adolf Hitler's brain, and 2) a mutant shark hooked up the brain to Donatello's time machine. After managing to attach robot arms and legs to itself, Brain Hitler uses the machine to travel back in time to the end of World War II so he can team up with his past self and change history. Man, fascist leaders have a real hard time handling defeat, huh.
The Turtles hop on the time machine to stop the Hitlers. Brain Hitler is easily defeated (because he's just a brain), but his full-bodied counterpart puts up more of a fight and ends up pointing a gun at the Turtles. Luckily, Hitler's primitive 1940s mind is unable to comprehend the concept of totally radical mutated reptiles, so he assumes that our heroes must be demons, and Leonardo is like "Yep, that's us." And so, we find out the true reason Hitler shot himself in his bunker in 1945: he thought a bunch of color-coded talking turtles were coming for his soul, an impression they encouraged.
Hitler kills himself just as the Turtles are transported back to the future, denying them the ultimate satisfaction of watching his skull explode. Not exactly material for the Saturday morning cartoon that this comic was supposed to emulate, but we have to admit that this would have made a cool bonus level for the Turtles in Time Super Nintendo game.
Hulk Wants To "Smash" His Cousin
Like most fun-filled superhero stories, this one starts with the main character longing for the embrace of his recently deceased wife. The first seven pages of Incredible Hulk Annual 2000 are just Hulk moping around in the desert, but then we get to the action. Unfortunately, it's the kind of action that has its own disturbingly popular category on PornHub: cousin-on-cousin.
See, after Hulk goes on one of his customary rampages, the Avengers show up to calm down their old buddy. Among them is She-Hulk, who happens to be Bruce Banner's first cousin, so she tries to reason with him ... only for Hulk to body slam her with no provocation. SPOILERS: that's just his way of flirting.
The Avengers notice that Hulk is acting even more brutish than usual, especially around She-Hulk, so the Vision analyzes his movements and matches them to some videos he found on a "rather interesting anthropology website" (if you think monkeys boning is interesting). Turns out Hulk is just "showing off" to assert dominance over She-Hulk, because he wants to "mate" with her. He misses his dead wife and wants to drown those feelings away with some wild taboo screwin'.
She-Hulk's reaction goes from horrified, to ... kind of curious, apparently?
But She-Hulk is only stringing him along before telling him that she's not interested, because he's just not her type (the "cousins" part appears to be secondary). The Incestuous He-Hulk goes back to moping for a while, only to snap and go all incel on She-Hulk, yelling that it's HER fault he's alone, as if he was entitled to sex with anyone who's also big and green.
The worst part? She buys it. When Hulk leaps away to punch buildings elsewhere, the other Avengers want to go after him but She-Hulk weepily tells them to leave him alone this time, like they owe him a few free deaths because she didn't bang him.
THE END. As for the Vision, hopefully he's cleared his browser cache since this story, or there might still be some monkey sex videos somewhere in his robot brain.
The Top X-Men Writer Couldn't Stop Writing Mind Control Plots
Writer Chris Claremont holds two important records: 1) he has written more X-Men comics than anyone else, and 2) he has also written the most scenes in which a superhero is mind controlled, becomes someone's slave, and starts wearing skimpy (or skimpier) clothes. If you don't believe us, there's a whole blog cataloging hundreds of instances of his mind control fetish. The most famous example is the time a two-bit villain managed to turn the mega-powerful Phoenix into his personal dominatrix, causing her to go insane and blow up a planet full of broccoli people.
At least she didn't have to kneel in front of her new master, which is a stage direction that has appeared in way too many Claremont scripts. Bonus points if tentacles are involved!
Another Classic Claremont Cliche consists of putting the mind control victims in chains, preferably while they're wearing something revealing. Fun fact: at least one of the characters below is a minor!
Our most perceptive readers may have noticed a pattern regarding the gender of the mind-controlled mutants we've shown so far. Not only does Claremont usually do this to X-Women -- he usually does it to one X-Woman in particular: Storm. Which sucks for her, but on the upside, she's gotta have an impressive wardrobe by now because of the all the outfits she's been forced to wear over the years:
And these aren't even all the Storm examples. Claremont has had her mind-controlled by characters from all corners of the Marvel Universe, from Loki to Emma Frost to Dracula. We're guessing his editors keep shooting down a story where she becomes a mind slave to handsome writer called "Clark Chrismont" or something. There's always fan fiction, sir.
John Byrne's Gay Guy, With The Power Of Gayness
Writer/artist John Byrne jumped to fame working on X-Men with Chris Claremont, with whom he shares certain ... special interests (one rhymes with "bind bontrol betish").
But Byrne's massive influence extends beyond Marvel's merry mutants: he reinvented Superman in the '80s, wrote and drew some acclaimed Fantastic Four stories, and created Marvel's first openly gay superhero back when gay people were banned from the Marvel Universe. Impressively, that wasn't even Byrne's first foray into LGTBQ representation. Less impressively, his first gay hero was called Gaylord LeGuye, a.k.a. Gay Guy. And he looked like this:
Gay Guy's secret origin is that, as a young boy, "notorious female criminal Ruby the Dyke" stole his lollipop, leading young Gaylord to decide that "all ladies are nasty." Somehow, this results in him becoming a heroic crimefighter and not a dudebro who leaves incoherent insults in female celebrities' Instagram posts.
Gay Guy has a secret base under his beauty salon and drives a Homobile. Although the actual Gay Guy series only ran in a college newspaper, Byrne managed to slip in some references to the character while working at Marvel. Charisma, a Gay Guy enemy who can make (almost) any male do her bidding just by showing her face, appeared in Byrne's Fantastic Four run under a slightly different spelling.
More significantly, Karisma's origin established that she worked for a Mr. LeGuye at Gaylord Cosmetics -- meaning that Gay Guy himself is part of the Marvel Universe. He looks considerably less stylish in this incarnation, though.
Now, to be clear, we're not saying that the legendary John Byrne is terrible because of a tongue-in-cheek comic strip he drew during his college years. Nah, we think he's terrible because of the unhinged bullshit he posts on his message board today.
Foreskin Man, By Male Genital Mutilation Bill Comics
Right now, some Hollywood assistant somewhere is going through a massive pile of old comics, looking for characters not owned by Marvel or DC that could potentially make a billion dollars. That means that, every once in a while, that almost certainly underpaid assistant comes across an issue of Foreskin Man and starts wondering if their sanity has finally collapsed under the weight of thousands of crappy drawings of muscular people.
But no, Foreskin Man is a real comic published by a real organization called Male Genital Mutilation bill Comics, a group of anti-circumcision activists (or "intactivists," as they seriously call themselves) who decided that superhero comics were the perfect medium to spread their message. In his secret identity, Foreskin Man is the head of the Museum of Genital Integrity, a whole ass building devoted to art pieces about babies getting their dinguses dinged.
But, secretly, Foreskin Man uses his completely unexplained powers to save babies from being circumcised by the monsters working for the "pro-circumcision lobby." And we do mean literal monsters, like Dr. Mutilator here:
Another Foreskin Man villain is Monster Mohel, a sinister rabbi whose official trading card reads: "Nothing excites Monster Mohel more than cutting into the penile flesh of an eight-day-old infant boy." Other anti-circumcision organizations reacted to that issue with a resounding "WTF IS THIS, YOU'RE NOT HELPING."
If you're wondering, the Monster Mohel issue ends with Foreskin Man stealing baby Glick from his father, who wanted him circumcised, and giving him to a commune of hippies so they can raise the child fully intact. In his next classic adventure, Foreskin Man meets a fellow hero called Vulva Girl, protector of vaginas everywhere. Vulva Girl also sings the comic's official theme song, which features the horniest lyrics to be used in a superhero soundtrack since Batman Forever:
Foreskin Man, I need your lovin' tonight
It's the only thing that makes me feel right
Foreskin Man, I want that slip and slide
Won't you please come glide inside?
In the end, Foreskin Man did achieve something remarkable: uniting both sides of the age-old circumcision debate to say "man, this shit is crazy."
Follow Maxwell Yezpitelok's heroic effort to read and comment every '90s Superman comic at Superman86to99.tumblr.com.
Top Image: Mirage Studios
