Weirdest Comic Book Adaptations Of Famous Characters

If you're watching a movie these days, chances are it's based on some sort of comic book. (Wasn't La La Land a Frank Miller title in the '80s?) But what about the other way around, when comics are the ones doing the adapting? Whether it's a movie, a video game, or just a blatant rip-off of another company's graphic novels, when popular characters get the comic book treatment, things often go very awry.

For our many octogenarian readers, let's take a quick trip down memory lane. Man, the 1930s were great, huh? Bread lines, shantytowns, and every week a new episode of The Shadow, the superhero radio drama that made eating your own shoes palatable.

Yup, The Shadow was once a phenomena, spawning detective magazines and books, and helping shape the very concept of a superhero. But alas, no matter how high you climb in the world of entertainment, it's hard to stay on top. As more caped heroes came onto the scene, The Shadow faded into the background, becoming yet another forgotten footnote of history.

That is, until 1989, when DC Comics realized there was no point in keeping the character limping along unless they were actively ruining him at the same time. That's how The Shadow, a man of mystery, who used his power to cloud men's minds as much as fisticuffs, found himself sporting Uzis and flying cars to fight crime. Also, because the '80s were the '80s, the comic was loaded up with graphic sex and violence.

When that turned out not to be nutty enough, the writers chopped off The Shadow's head and strapped it to a robot body because writing sober is for losers. Now, with the ability to shoot lasers, he didn't need to waste time figuring out what evil lurked in the hearts of men. He just ripped it out with his bare hands. Unsurprisingly, the comic was canceled at the exact same moment he turned into RoboCop, leaving Alec Baldwin as the only one with the guts to do a crappy version of this beloved character.

In the 1970s, a licensing deal with a little film called Star Wars helped save Marvel Comics from going bankrupt. Realizing this whole space opera thing might be a moneymaker, Marvel did what any floundering comic company looking for a quick fix would do, and locked down the rights to Star Trek. Okay, to be fair, not all of Star Trek. In fact, the only rights available were to the franchise's lackluster film debut, so anything from the original series would be out of bounds. So, after a three-issue adaptation of the slow paced, heady Star Trek: The Motion Picture, what did the Enterprise crew do?

If you guessed face off against Dracula, then congratulations, you just won yourself a nice pat on the back. For their first original mission as part of the Marvel family, Kirk, Spock, and the crew stumbled upon an outer space haunted house, full of public domain baddies like Dracula and Frankenstein's monster. You half expected Abbott and Costello to show up in red shirts. It's a bizarre right turn, and trust us, with no clear direction, and an endlessly rotating creative team behind the scenes, the Marvel series just kept getting weirder and weirder. And while there were some fun stories over the title's three-year run, Star Trek would get the axe before it could complete its five year mission.

During the run, Kirk and crew found themselves solving murder mysteries, facing off against the Loch Ness Monster and battling a planet of garden gnomes. In one issue, McCoy broke the Prime Directive and started a genocide. In another, Ensign Rand married a blob of energy, ostensibly because Captain Kirk never took her on a "stardate." McCoy, at one point, straight up slapped his daughter for marrying a Vulcan. What? He's a doctor, not a loving parent!

First-person shooter games are notoriously hard to adapt, because doing so removes the star of the show—you. Thankfully, that didn't stop the makers of Doom, the ubiquitous '90s video game, from commissioning one of the weirdest comic book adaptations of all time.

This one-issue giveaway, an utter failure upon release, shows what happens when you pay your writers in methamphetamines. Full of mind-bending rants, outrageously graphic violence, and insane non-sequiturs, this is less a comic than giant love letter to murder.

The issue starts out with the game's lead, an anonymous marine, going absolutely crazy, ranting to himself like a schizophrenic on a street corner, while ripping a demon's spine out with his bare hands. And boy oh boy, he's just getting started. He spends the comic's 15 pages lusting after guns, telling himself knock-knock jokes, and murdering every imp, zombie, demon, and specter he comes across. You see more guts in one panel than a astroenterologists sees in a year.

And then, just in case you thought you knew what sort of comic you were reading, there's one beautiful moment when our marine sobers up just enough to deliver a monologue about the environment for "our children ... and our children's children," presumably to land that Captain Planet crowd. It was the '90s, after all.

DC and Marvel comics have at each other's throats for nearly sixty years. They've fought each other for a share of the market, stealing talent and characters along the way. But every now and again, when the stars align and their bank accounts' bellies rumble, the two companies team up to see how much money they can make when they work together, like a Justice League novel written by Ayn Rand.

That's how we ended up with Amalgam Comics, a publishing company founded by the two rivals in 1996. As teammates, they decided to play the ultimate game of "What If," combining their most popular characters into singular stars. Wolverine and Batman became Dark Claw, Doomsday and Doctor Doom became Doctor Doomsday, and Solomon Grundy and The Hulk became Skulk. (What? They can't all be winners.)

It was from these creatively lazy depths that one true superstar emerged. His story begins, where else, at the Weapon X project. Our hero is recruited, along with a Canadian orphan named Logan Wayne, to take part, but something goes horribly wrong. While having adamantium fused to his bones, he's deformed and driven mad. Now a remorseless killing machine, he adopts a new name. Hyena, the Cackling Canine of Crime.

So, if all the characters in this imprint are mixed up versions of DC and Marvel characters, who does this guy draw from? A deformed madman with a maniacal grin? A body builder's physique, with unbreakable claws? Why, if we were to guess, we'd have to bet that this young man was a merging of two great supervillains, The Joker and Sabertooth. And because we already knew the answer, it appears that we were right.

There are reimaginings of characters, and then there's whatever the heck Superman was in the DC miniseries "Whom Gods Destroy." Legendary X-Men scribe Chris Claremont was brought onboard to reinvent the DC universe, and boy did he, thanks to some help from Nazi Greek gods.

Yup, in this bizarre reality, The Third Reich never fell and still rules over Germany. When Superman and Lois go investigate, they find that the god Adonis sits on the Nazi throne and uses mythological creatures to stay there. Oh, also, Wonder Woman is a Nazi, which can't be that popular with the ladies back on Paradise Island.

At one point, Lois is turned into a new, not-so-evil Wonder Woman, and Superman is turned into a Centaur, forgetting who he is in the process. To bide his time, he gets drunk and makes whoopee with a bevy of centaur ladies, as any red blooded centaur would do. When Lana Lang shows up, she straps a bridle to his mouth, and rides him until he remembers his superhero past (seriously!), transforming him again, this time into a woman, to pay penance for all his crimes against womankind, or something. Yup, it's that nuts.

Lady Superman then faces off against a Nazi minotaur, while Lois Lane Wonder Woman and Nazi Wonder Woman have a smackdown that reads pretty sexual, if you ask us. Together, Lady Supes, Lois Wonder Woman, and Lana, imbued with the power of the Oracle of Delphi, defeat The Reich once and for all. As payment for their good deeds, the three retire to the Moon, to live happily ever after. Oh, also Lois Wonder Woman made out with a goddess made of fire at one point, but we all saw that coming. Right?