The Messed Up Part Of These Superheroes Nobody Ever Talks About

Before he moved to Metropolis and started fighting evil as an adult, Clark Kent patrolled the skies of Smallville as a kid, which raises the question of when he officially made the switch from Superboy to Superman. Was it when he turned 18? When he went to college? When he moved out of his parents' house and got a place in the big city? No. 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.

The story was told in 1977's DC Super Stars #12, in one of a handful of stories about Teacher, a Kryptonian robot that was meant to guide little Kal-El and make sure he knew about his home planet. This time, though, it went way too far by roping in Misty, a classmate of Clark's. Thanks to the robot's meddling, Misty was able to figure out Clark's secret identity, revealing 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 essentially being mind-controlled through the whole relationship and her long night with Clark. Once the Teacher had no more need of her, he erased her memory and sent her on her way. Readers weren't quite so lucky, but needless to say, this story was never mentioned again.

Not that the Legion's standards for membership were all that rigorous. If anything, the qualifications for who got to join the 30th-century teenage super-team seemed pretty arbitrary, which is actually exactly what you'd expect from a bunch of teens 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, which happened so much that the kind-hearted rejects were able to form their own club of "Substitute Heroes" to fight the ones who were more bitter about it.

And the weirdest reject of all made his first and only appearance — as a living, sentient being, anyway — in the pages of Secret Origins #46. That issue is mostly known for featuring Arm-Fall-Off Boy (who does exactly what you think), but it also introduced an erstwhile applicant called 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 his mind completely blank and unable to turn himself back into his human form — and 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 who only wanted to protect them.

As for why Teen Tony had to sacrifice himself, well, to say that it's complicated is underselling things quite a bit. The short version is that there was a giant monster called Onslaught, made up of a combination of Professor X and Magneto, that was threatening to destroy the world. Since it fed on mutant energy, all of Marvel's non-mutant heroes (except the high-selling Spider-Man) had to stop it and sacrifice their lives in the process. Which, in retrospect, is a pretty accurate metaphor for the rest of the company being steamrolled by the X-Men's overwhelming popularity in the '90s. 

The story doesn't end there, though. The heroes were reborn in an event called — wait for it — Heroes Reborn, which took place on a world without mutants and allowed superstar creators Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee to reboot the Avengers, Iron Man, the Hulk, and the Fantastic Four. That still left readers wondering what the in-story reason was for this brand-new Earth, though, and eventually, it was revealed that they'd all been transported to a new miniature universe created by Franklin Richards, a kid who didn't even understand his own reality-altering powers.

And it turned out that he'd actually been carrying around the entire Heroes Reborn universe in the form of a toy ball for the better part of two years. The ball/universe still exists, too, but it's no longer stuck in Franklin Richards' toy box. Instead, after Franklin's carelessness almost caused an entire universe to be eaten by an alligator, it wound up in the possession of godlike beings, who presumably just find themselves whiling away good chunks of eternity by playing a game of cosmic four-square. Just count yourselves lucky that Franklin wasn't really into fidget spinners instead.

Killing off a character can be a pretty tricky thing. Barry Allen, for example, had arguably the best death ever, sacrificing himself to save the entire multiverse in the pages of Crisis on Infinite Earths, paving the way for his longtime sidekick to take over as the Flash — a death so perfect that when he came back from the dead 30 years later, many readers thought it was actually a disservice to the character. But if that's the best-case scenario, Hal Jordan might've gotten the worst.

Not only was he replaced by a brand-new character who had to deal with everyone around him constantly talking about how Hal was the best Green Lantern ever, he also had one of the most brutal heel turns in comics history. After his hometown of Coast City was destroyed by the Cyborg Superman while the genuine article was busy being dead — long story, but you probably already know about how Superman got beat to death by a bone monster in bike shorts that one time — Hal snapped. Driven by a desire to undo the tragedy, he turned on the Green Lantern Corps and went on a murder spree to collect their rings, and then used this power to try rewriting time itself as the supervillain Parallax.

When Jordan returned to his role as Green Lantern — after a bizarre path that saw him sacrificing his life and serving as the undead embodiment of the literal Wrath of God — "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 bug made of fear that possessed Hal in his darkest moments, controlling his actions and somehow avoiding the notice of the actual aspect of the Almighty Himself that had been inhabiting Hal's ghost. With Parallax removed, he was back in action on the side of the good guys, with no one really worrying that maybe a guy who started killing people because a space bug told him to might not be that reliable to begin with.

The Marvel Universe has a lot of strange locations. The Savage Land, an isolated jungle full of dinosaurs hidden within the ice of Antarctica. Monster Island, a Pacific isle populated entirely with Godzilla-sized kaiju. There's even the Blue Area, a pocket of breathable, Earth-like atmosphere on the Moon. But none of them even come close to being as staggeringly bizarre as Wewelsburg II: The Town That Was Hitler.

One of the more well-known pieces of trivia in the Marvel Universe is that their version of Adolf Hitler was a lot harder to kill than his real-world counterpart. In 1963, the Fantastic Four took on a villain called the Hate-Monger, who turned out to be a clone made by Nazi scientists after they smuggled Hitler's brain to a replica of a German castle they'd built in the Bolivian Andes. What the Fantastic Four didn't discover, however, was that those same scientists had developed a serum that would imprint Hitler's memories onto anyone who ingested it — and in the struggle, it seeped into the local water supply.

In 2010's Taskmaster miniseries, the Marvel Universe returned to Wewelsburg II, only to find that the area's native population had become a town full of Hitlers who were constantly warring with each other and attempting to annex each other's homes. Fortunately, S.H.I.E.L.D. was able to get the situation under control, but if you really want to know what that would be like, there's some "good" news: Twitter still exists.

The giant robot isn't the only extra bit of Spider-Man's crimefighting equipment that's usually overlooked, but it's a lot more fun to talk about than the time he had retractable bone claws in his wrists.

It happened in a story called "The Other," and the short version is that someone figured it would be a cool idea to make one of Marvel's most relatable superheroes into a pawn of cosmic spider gods. He died and came back to life, turned into a giant spider-monster, emerged from a cocoon, left a Peter Parker-shaped husk full of spiders behind, and gained the ability to shoot webs organically, rather than using his old mechanical web shooters. Oh, and he got the "stingers," which were huge pieces of bone that he could use for stabbing people, because hey, if it worked for Wolverine, why not?

Eventually, Peter's powers — which also included a mystical psychic awareness of all spider-related activity in New York, which is bananas — would revert back to normal, leaving his bone claws and fangs mostly forgotten. But to be fair, that did take a literal deal with the devil.

One sad fact of comics is that, like a lot of media, they lagged behind in reflecting the real world in a lot of ways. Flip through any old comics from the Silver Age, for example, and you're not likely to see anyone on the page who isn't white. 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 white people. 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 in Superman #239, on a map of Krypton that referred to it as the "home of a highly developed black race." Looking back, it's easy to say that their hearts were in the right place — at the very least, they cleared the extremely low bar of keeping them as advanced scientists like the rest of Superman's people — but as modern-day Superman writer Mark Waid said, the whole thing is "pretty embarrassing." And the worst part? That's not the only time in the Silver Age that "island full of black people separated from the rest of the world" was used as a major plot point.

This isn't really messed up in the way that other things on this list are, but Wolverine's hair is the same shape as his mask, and if you actually stop to think about that, it is buck wild. Seriously, if you saw someone take off a baseball cap to reveal a perfectly baseball cap-shaped pile of hair on their head, you would lose your mind. You'd be talking about that for years.