Superhero comics: What insane story/character developments do avid followers take for granted but would blow the minds of anyone only peripherally aware of them?

Rulk's war on peeping toms will never end!

Scooby is possessed and tears out Shaggy's throat until Shaggy is resurrected by the Phoenix

that is a whole lot of throat-tearing

forks you really gotta see it -- the Watcher actually does his whole opening splash page narration bit, followed by page two GIANT PUNCH'D IN THE FACE, it's kinda amazing

scans plz?

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Gd8NBIma-zo/SGVQShCogZI/AAAAAAAAELc/4cyFQrI28Yc/s400/Hulk+4+-+punchesOutWatcher.jpg

hahaha wait

lol forever! that is unbelievable; i have to have that as my avatar

OW!

Thing is that the Rulk isn't Banner at all, I guess there is a big mystery of who it is (probably Glenn Talbot back from the dead, I guess). Banner got shot up with some stuff at the end of the whole World War Hulk and right now he cannot become 'the Hulk'.

The gray Hulk stuff when he became Mr. Fixit that Peter David did is awesome. I also really liked the Planet Hulk stuff. That wasn't the first time they had shot the Hulk into limbo though, as Dr. Strange shot him into mystical limbo when Bill Mantlo was writing the book for a couple of years back in the 80s. I think the

The Arizona desert where the Hulk was born is pretty much the biggest home locale for the character. One of I think most brilliant things about the Hulk is how he just jumps around and doesn't even fly.

Ravid Ranner?

It would be awesome if Rulk turned out to be David Banner from the TV show instead of Bruce Banner from the comics. Head-slappingly stupid as that sounds, it would fit right in with Loeb's writing.

has he done that sort of thing before?

Sounds like bargain basement imitation BKV plot twists

The thing is that Loeb is terrible as far as ideas go and the only way his writing really works is when an actor can successfully make you ignore the bullshit inherent in it (see Heroes S1) or when he basically says "yes, this idea is shit, laugh at it" (The RULK, apparently).

His Ultimates run was actually a worse concept than David Banner as Rulk.

Hank Pym is under house arrest at Ultimates Mansion. One of Pym's Ultron robots drugs him and leaks a sex tape of Stark and the Black Widow to the Internet. These distract from the robot's fatal shooting of the Scarlet Witch. Magneto abducts Wanda's corpse and retreats to the Savage Land, where he is confronted by the Ultimates. Pym and Wasp discover the truth about the Ultron robot, which has adopted the identity of Yellowjacket and uses the Ultimates' DNA to create a series of android duplicates. Although the true Ultimates destroy their android counterparts and Yellowjacket, Quicksilver is apparently killed by Hawkeye. The Wasp then invites Pym to return to the Ultimates, and he accepts. The mastermind behind the robot's plot is revealed to be Doctor Doom.

yikes

ha, yeah that looks like the kind of thing I would've plotted out in junior high on the inside cover of a social studies book

One of Pym's Ultron robots drugs him and leaks a sex tape of Stark and the Black Widow to the Internet.

I mean what the fucking fuck

Magneto abducts Wanda's corpse and retreats to the Savage Land

exeunt, pursued by a bear

That summary misses Captain America masquerading as the Black Panther for no particular reason I remember. Just more wha?

The first rule of drama is that if you show an ultimate nullifier in the first act, it will be shot by the end of the comic.

And then read a summary of Ultimatum. What Loeb did to the Ultimate Universe makes me feel uncomfortable just for knowing.

Hawkeye helps Hank Pym search for the Wasp, but they discover the Blob eating her corpse.

This kind of sums up the ickyness that is Ultimatum.

Deaths

* Angel - Killed and partially eaten by Sabretooth. (Ultimatum #4)
* Beast - Drowned. (Ultimatum #1)
* Blob - Head bitten off by Hank Pym. (Ultimatum #3)
* Cannonball - Blown up by Madrox. (Ultimatum #3)
* Captain Britain - Blown up by Madrox. (Ultimate X-Men #100)
* Cypher - Presumably blown up by Madrox, shown alongside other casualties (Ultimate X-Men: Requiem)
* Cyclops - Shot in the head by Quicksilver. (Ultimatum #5)
* Daredevil - Found dead by Spider-Man. Presumably drowned. (Ultimate Spider-Man #131)
* Dazzler - Drowned. (Ultimatum #1)
* Detonator - Tortured and killed in the Savage Land. (Ultimatum #3)
* Doctor Doom - Head crushed by the Thing. (Ultimatum #5)
* Doctor Strange - Killed by Dormammu after his body is constricted, causing his engorged head to explode. (Ultimatum #4)
* Emma Frost - Blown up by Madrox. (Ultimatum #3)
* Forge - Tortured and killed in the Savage Land. (Ultimatum #3)
* Franklin Storm - Drowned. (Ultimate Fantastic Four #58)
* Hard-Drive - Tortured and killed in the Savage Land. (Ultimatum #3)
* Hank Pym - Blown up by Madrox. (Ultimatum #3)
* Juggernaut - Hit in the eye by a poisonous dart shot by a Sentinel soldier. (Ultimate X-Men #99)
* Longshot - Tortured and killed in the Savage Land. (Ultimatum #3)
* Lorelei - Killed by Wolverine. (Ultimate X-Men #100)
* Madrox - Killed by Wolverine. (Ultimate X-Men #100)
* Magneto - Decapitated by Cyclops. (Ultimatum #5)
* Nightcrawler - Drowned. (Ultimatum #1)
* Polaris - Blown up by Madrox. (Ultimatum #3)
* Professor X - Neck broken by Magneto. (Ultimatum #2)
* Psylocke - Listed by Marvel as dead, shown alongside other casualties (Ultimate X-Men: Requiem)
* Sunspot - Blown up by Madrox. (Ultimatum #3)
* Syndicate - Dead after one of his heads is blown off by William Stryker. (Ultimate X-Men #99)
* Thor - Surrendered his soul to Valhalla. (Ultimatum #3)
* Toad - Listed by Marvel as dead, though his death was never shown.
* Wasp - Cause of death unknown; corpse partially eaten by the Blob.(Ultimatum #2)
* Wolverine - Killed by Magneto after the adamantium is ripped from his skeleton.(Ultimatum #5)

I know I keep saying it, but this is TOTALLY the kind of shit me and my friends plotted out in junior high.

I hear ya. Sadly, Loeb isn't in junior high; he's 50-something.

chaining who killed whom is kind of hysterical

Basically, after much foreshadowing, Dr. Doom's masters, the Marquis of Death and his apprentice, arrive on earth. The Marquis mocks Doom's failures and opens a portal to the Cretaceous period, dropping Doom there to be eaten alive by dinosaurs. Once the Fantastic Four have defeated the Marquis, Doom reveals that he was in fact the Marquis's new apprentice all along, having survived millions of years by using the dark arts, and has now become significantly more powerful, posing a greater threat.

Last plotline in Millar's FF. This was far more wtf when you were reading it in floppies tbh.

So wait, Dr. Doom is now Bruce Wayne now? WTF.

Ha!

Dr. Doom is now Vandal Savage & Jason Blood rolled into one.

Just popping in to say that I'm really enjoying this thread, although I'm sadly unable to contribute.

wow, that Ultimate stuff is more horrible than I imagined

Ditto! That Ultimatum stuff is nuts.

Xpost

It is kind of sad that Marvel pretty much trashed the Ultimate stuff. The Spider-man and Ultimates stuff was pretty good. Thing about the X-men is that they immediately went right back to just doing re-hashes of the dumb stuff that kind of corrupted the line in the first place.

It is either the editors have no clue how to say no or these are their stupid ideas. I'm actually leaning a bit to the latter for a lot of this stupid stuff.

I like the idea of Elseworld or Ultimate kind of things, I'd just like to see a writer have a good long while to tell their take. That is one of the things that I thought was kind of cool about the Ultimate Spider-man stuff I read. Take something like Sandman Mystery Theatre, that book was excellent and I would love to see someone do the JSA like that book or fit that continuity. Thing is do do something like that and make it work, it would take a few issues.

One of Pym's Ultron robots drugs him and leaks a sex tape of Stark and the Black Widow to the Internet.

― so says i tranny ben franklin (HI DERE), Monday, September 21, 2009

only Loeb could make this not awesome

sex tapes! internet! a-whomp-bam-boom!

Since I haven't read comics in years, I thought I'd keep a running list of the stuff that has blown my mind, but I'll admit it--by the time I got to the end of this thread my mind had been blown multiple times over. Also it has made me glad I missed alot of this.

Was the Ultimate line starting to not sell very well or something? I still haven't figured out why they pretty much wrecked it and collapsed it into fewer, shittier books.

I could be wrong, but i think because after ten years of the Ultimate universe basically fast-forwarding through 40 years of original Marvel Universe storylines, they canceled out the intended effect of the Ultimate line, a simplified reboot that new readers could get into without baggage of so much history. It might not have been the best idea to have a new line-wide crossover every summer, eh?

Ultimate X-Men was basically a crazy mess within a few years, UF4 was frankly never that great to begin with. The first two Ultimates series were entertaining, and Ultimate Spider-Man was pretty consistently readable since Bendis and Bagley stuck with it for the most part, but really the whole unified universe concept (that they were trying to create from the '60s Marvel days) had gotten overwhelming - sad because it started out pretty promising with most books connecting somehow to the global super soldier projects. It probably didn't help that Ultimates 2 and 3, both major books for the universe, had major delays - I was sort of out of this by the time they were working on Ultimates 3. Can someone provide more clarity on the last two or three years?

Ummm. It just got messier - or at least USM did. It turned out Peter's dad was alive after all and had been working on a super soldier project in secret. He had created a cloned MJ (? Might have female leads confused, but cloned from Peter and her cells) who became Spidergirl for a while. Kitty Pride started going to Peter's school and he was seeing her behind MJ's back. Final issue was atribute to 'Nuff Said.

It's back post-Ultimatum and Peter is seeing Gwen. MJ and Kitty are friends. My head hurts.

The Gwen Stacy that's some kind of weird Carnage/Venom symbiote and/or clone? And MJ and Kitty are friends? ...How is this a fresh start?

This goes with the Kitty Pryde one: Count Dracula is afraid of Stars of David.

Just logged in to mention Jason Todd:

He was originally Robin but was killed off after readers voted successfully by telephone to have him murdered. He came back 14 years (RL time) except it wasn't him it was a shapeshifter. But then he did come back when Superboy-Prime, the evil Superboy from our world that we, the readers, live in, punched reality too hard. He most recently went by the name Red Hood, who used to be the Joker.

And now Morrison has another Red Hood, who may or may not be him, that has a kid sidekick

...And that sidekick's name is what? Minge?

No her name is Scarlet, she is angry about how ugly she is since Professor Pyg gave her a lumpy pigface.

They should have given Red Hood an entire posse and called them The Crimson Tide.

The Mandarin has a ring that can turn people Chinese.

Looking forward to Jet Li replacing Robt Downey Jr. in sequels.

All of the Justice League have died at least once except Wonder Woman