10 Embarrassing Comic Book Moments Writers Had To Explain

[Music] the weirdest thing about american comics at least when compared to other forms of sequential storytelling like manga for instance is that the original writer has very little say over what the books are doing now different writers and artists always come onto books to keep things feeling fresh and to clean up any potential messes made by previous creative teams the following moments were not only stupid but just so flat out embarrassing for the characters they were attached to that later writers had no choice but to address them but not always for the better so i'm ewen this is what culture comics and here are 10 embarrassing comic book moments writers had to explain number 10. spider-woman's origin any fan of spider-woman knows the humorous behind-the-scenes info of marvel creating her simply to have a spider-woman character before anyone else could get their hands on such a marketable concept however speed does not equal quality so when they brought on archie goodwin to write up her origin spiderwoman's original backstory was weird the original backstory in question well she was a literal spider whose dna then went through a round of musical chairs courtesy of the high evolutionary who has a bad habit of doing this sort of thing to animals all over the place why archie goodwin thought this was a good idea is anyone's guess but never underestimate what a writer is capable of bringing into this world when under the kind of time crunch mr goodwin must have been at the time in any event in literally the very next issue written by the incomparable marv wolfman it was revealed that jessica was lied to about this being her backstory and then the series moved on and frankly thank god number nine captain america in the 1950s by now the story of steve rogers before and after the second world war is legendary and seared into the minds of kids across the world he becomes a super soldier punches hitler in the face he has a buddy named bucky they survived the war cap becomes a schoolteacher romance is a woman named betsy ross because subtlety is for the weak and he fights communists oh wait i'm i'm sorry is this is this not how you remember it going well there's a simple explanation for that stan lee took over right in captain america after joe simon left timely comics and was the one who had to figure out what cap was supposed to do after the war ended so he rebranded him as captain america commie smasher yeah it didn't last for long so years pass with not a peep heard out of our buddy cap until avengers comes along to completely flip the script on what happened to steve turns out the cap readers saw smashing the aforementioned commies was someone else entirely and the real captain america was frozen in a block of ice the 1950s captain america would return and cap's bronze age comics as a fascist terrorist before being flashed out further in ed brubacher and steve epting's seminal captain america run in the late 2000s number eight leslie tompkins let stephanie brown die of all the members of the bat family stephanie brown is by far the most disrespected one but the folks writing her any progress she makes or growth she undergoes is swiftly undone by the time someone new takes over and that's if you're lucky if you're not lucky then you get the events of war games in this story to prove herself to batman stephanie decided to enact one of batman's plans to take control of organized crime in gotham city however this plan required the active participation of batman's criminal identity matches malone without whom the plan quickly falls apart the point is that at the end of this story stephanie is murdered by black mask despite bruce managing to get her to his doctor friend leslie tompkins in time it turns out that leslie let stephanie die as a sick form of protest to show how bruce lets teenagers join his crusade for justice which is infuriating on so many levels i don't even know where to start luckily this was quickly fixed to instead be a bold-faced lie that leslie told bruce in order to help stephanie leave to have a normal life she soon returned and had a really cool stint as bad girl in brian q miller's run which you should all go read it's really good number seven the absence of marvel heroes throughout the 1950s for the longest of time one of the great unaddressed plot holes of the big two was the fact that there was this completely blank space of time between the second world war and the silver age of comics where there were no superheroes despite the heroes from the war still being allegedly around well in the year 2000 roger stern decided to address this with an entire series called marvel lost generation last generation is exactly what you think it is there is a lot of time in the marvel universe between the last adventure of captain america and the arrival of the fantastic four and this series is pretty much all about filling in the gap of what happened in that time not only does it show off brand new characters exclusive to the series but it also shows what happened to other characters who didn't get the continuation that cap and bookie would eventually get lost generation isn't the best comic of its day not by a long shot in some areas but it does exactly what it sets out to do makes the marvel universe feel more alive by addressing of the biggest holes in its narrative number six hawkman's origins of all the dc heroes the mythology behind hawkman and hawkgirl is by far the most confusing trying to decipher how these two work is liable to make your eyes roll up into the back of your head because it's about as consistent with its timeline as a bar of used dish soap even when rebooted post-crisis no one could agree on a single timeline of events leading to the book just appearing muddled and confused mostly because it was muddled and confused from top to bottom that was until the grand master of reboot jeff johns came along to try and clear the air it was he who came up with the reincarnation cycle that you might know from the cw incarnations of these characters which ultimately was the best course of action given the many many contradictions that played the characters over the years number 5 hal jordan becomes parallax let's face some facts here hal jordan is not the most interesting green lantern not by a country mile with that having been said i can understand writers wanting to do something crazy to make him less of a bland piece of square jawed 50s error white bread but maybe emerald twilight might not have been the best move to go with during the death of superman event a nuclear bomb reduced hal's hometown of coast city to a smoldering crater when in the throes of grief he attempted to rebuild his home with his power ring the guardians of the universe decided to be their usual gigantic dickish selves and immediately banished him from the core enraged hal went on a rampage absorbing the power of every power ring he could get his hands on and killing all but one of the guardians in the process this of course led to karl raynor becoming the new green lantern this move was unpopular in ways one can scarcely imagine even after hal became the specter in a quest for redemption when jeff jones reintroduced the character as a green lantern and green lantern rebirth he revealed that hal had been under the control of the embodiment of fear known as parallax number four power girls boob window for a long time supergirl was just straight up gone from the comics due to her growing out of her cousin's shadow and taking on the mantle of powergirl okay so it's a little bit more confusing than that but good luck finding someone crazy enough to explain all those supergirl and powergirl ratcons it ain't me chief this change lasted for quite a long time but her default outfit has always drawn aya from various readers due to its gigantic boob window in the center now originally the explanation for this boob window was that there was going to be a shield in the center but when cara saw that the outfit superman had made for her the outfit that was supposed to represent her independence had just another s symbol in the center she tore it out as a form of protest and then jeff jones came along to give the following real reason the real reason why power girl has a boob window is because she hasn't found a way of filling the hole because she doesn't know what she's meant to stand for and she gets really sad about it what makes this not work as well as jeff jones's other retcons like say the power ring color spectrum is how insincere it comes off as we all know the actual reason why the hole is there comics's long and famous affair with a male gaze you want to introduce an overly sexed up character just because own that don't try to give some insincere nonsensical philosophizing reason behind it because i guarantee you everyone will see right through it and it'll be magnificently cringe-inducing number three blue beetles goofiness in justice league international justice league international was always meant as a more comedic book and ted cord has always had a sort of sly wit and goofiness to him especially when teamed up with his best buddy booster gold who is impossible to be serious around this isn't the problem here the problem is that the comedy with blue beetle was often completely at odds with his character and a lot of that had to do with the writers of the book just not taking chords seriously on a fundamental level now on a standalone issue basis this is not necessarily a problem but overall there was just a sense that ted wasn't taking his hero duties as seriously as his peers well a few years later they explained what was going on turns out his company had been falling apart for years up to that point with ted's personal life not doing much better and his goofier attitude was how he coped with the stress number two the batman of zuridar the silver age was weird especially for heavy hitters like batman with the comics code authority breathing down their necks 24 7 dc couldn't write any of the true crown detective stories that batman had been made famous for so they decided to just throw anything at a wall to see what stuck zurina was a version of the cape crusader from a far off planet introduced in one of the comics in the 1960s and then never seen again until our good buddy grant everything is canon no matter how insane morrison took over batman and boy do i love them for it so considering how dark and intense the morrison era of batman was how would everyone's favorite egghead handle something as wacky as the batman of zurina well simple they explained that the batman of zurinar was actually an alternate persona of bruce's that he simply imagined to in fact be a different version of himself altogether zurinar is a delusional state of bruises that he pulls out in emergencies making the zurinar persona somehow even weirder than it already was and even better too of course and number one spider-man's hatred of protesters as legendary a creator as steve ditko was he was a bit of a fountain head which is the phrase i've just coined for people who really like and ran probably a bit too much ditko's obsession with objectivist philosophy was seen in pretty much every issue of his original run of the question as well as of course his work on the original run of the amazing spider-man the most infamous case of ditko's objectivist philosophy making his heroes look like total jerks as far as spider-man is concerned at least comes during the era of peter being in college where he yells at a group of protesters in what is one of the most quintessentially a 60s white guy wrote this moment in a comic that was already 90 comprised of moments just like that obviously later writers just kind of chose to ignore this embarrassing moment but a moment this embarrassing cannot remain unlampshaded forever so it came to pass that the great alguien would come along to make fun of this truly cringe-inducing moment in the pages of captain america and the mighty avengers number one by having spider-man himself directly reference it as a cringe-inducing memory and those were 10 embarrassing comic moments writers had to explain know of any other weird moments that had to be retconned let me know in the comments below and while you're down there it would be great if you could like the video if you enjoyed it and subscribe to what culture comics so you don't miss another upload going forward remember you can find more content like this at worldculture.com forward slash comics and more of me on twitter if you want to at ewan ruins things that's all for now though take care and i will see you soon bye

Channel: WhatCulture Comics

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Id: TnvaIg-EaH8

Length: 12min 31sec (751 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 07 2021