History MindScrew / Comicbooks

** If you thought ''The Killing Joke'' was mind-screwy, then you're never going to make it out of ''[[ComicBook/BatmanGrantMorrison Batman: R.I.P.]]'' with your sense of reason intact. Batman having a whole separate personality triggered by an arbitrary gibberish phrase that's a ShoutOut to a Silver age Batman comic ('Robin Dies At Dawn!'), the Joker cutting his own tongue in half with a razor and having no lips and being almost unintelligible because of it, Dr. Hurt potentially being a demon or the devil (your interpretation ''will'' vary)... Yeah, ''Killing Joke'' is a cakewalk compared to that storyline. Then again, Grant Morrison wrote it, and while they ''are'' considered one of the better Batman authors, their work, as mentioned above, can be ''very'' mindscrewtastic.

* The ''ComicBook/DoomPatrol'' were originally billed as the "World's Strangest Heroes!" back in the 60s. They treated their superpowers like disabilities and frequently fought strange enemies, but with the original comic being so old, [[OnceOriginalNowCommon it might seem rather normal nowadays]]. This is not a problem, though, as in the late 80s, the aforementioned Grant Morrison took over the recently-launched SoOkayItsAverage revival with the intention of making it weird like the original. What they ended up writing was something far ''weirder'', and the result is a SurrealHorror story in which the Doom Patrol engages in numerous metaphysical fights with {{Humanoid Abomination}}s and [[OrderVersusChaos the forces of law]], with relatively little focus on action. Special mention goes to the Scissormen, who are red hollow figures with scissors for hands who speak in NonSequitur and cut people from reality leaving a two dimensional hole behind them. Those people were then brought to the Scissormen's dimension: Orqwith, which was a city created when a group of linguists wrote an encyclopedia about a fake world in braile (This is, by the way, a ShoutOut to Creator/JorgeLuisBorges's Literature/TlonUqbarOrbisTertius), that later turned real and ate their creators. The Scissormen's arrival to Earth is heralded by signs of the Apocalypse, such as fish falling from the sky, a shadow killing its owner or spontaneous combustion. The Doom Patrol destroyed Orqwith by exploiting a contradiction revealed in the solution to a variation on a traditional riddle. While Morrison's run is the most famous by far, its SpiritualSuccessor[=s=], the runs of Rachel Pollack and Gerard Way, are similarly experimental and bizarre.
* ''ComicBook/TheFilth'' is another comic book by Morrison and is as weird as you would expect. For starters, the protagonist, Greg Feely has a double life as Ned Slade, secret agent of a paradimensional agency called "the Hand" that regulates the worst vices in society, such as sex or violence. Sounds comprehensible, right? Well, Ned Slade was consumed by Greg, who is a "parapersonality", an alternate leisure personality, and now has forgotten he once was Slade. Except it isn't, and the parapersonality is actually Ned Slade, and the Hand has a collection of parapersonalities that injects to normal Joes to turn into spies. Speaking of the Hand, its director is an EldritchAbomination made of compost and animal tendrils, and the directors of the subdivision "The Palm" are a yellow man and a green man, who percieve time non-linearly and are drawn in a [[NonStandardCharacterDesign weird puntillistic art style.]] By the by, the true intentions of the Hand are to collect the ink of a giant pen in the sky of its dimension, which is used to create a comic book that is a two dimensional world called "the Paperverse" which the Hand raids for their fantastical technology. Want to get even weirder? The giant pen is Greg's. That's because the world that the Hand inhabits is actually a stain in Greg's kitchen, and Greg committed suicide above it and maybe it's all a DyingDream. Or maybe it's all just the dellusions of a pedophile weirdo. There are also soviet monkey assassins, kids with ant heads, body-jumping parapersonaities, giant flying sperm fucking Los Angeles and Greg is revived as a vessel for a microscopic life species.

* ''ComicBook/TheInvisibles'' is probably one of the most surreal and complex comic books ever written. The synopsis, "a cell of freedom fighters fighting against the supernatural forces of fascism", is correct but doesn't capture the full scope of the series. The cell? Members of a higher dimension organization called "The Invisible College" that has been operating for centuries by a group of androgynous figures dressed in harlequinn bondage gear. The freedom fighters? Modern day shamans who can casually travel from fiction to reality (or from reality to fiction, who knows?), manipulate our world through ideas, stories and complex alphabets and be possessed by Aztec Gods. The fight? Maybe it's a pointless fight because order and chaos are actually one in the same (since there is no us/them, only we) and it's just a training created by the universe (or a sentient satellite) to strenghten humanity for when it achieves Nirvana. The supernatural forces of facism? A cabal of alien Gods (who may be trying to rewrite the story from the outside) who live in another higher reality called "The Outer Church". Oh, and where this two universes overlap, our reality is created, which may be a pentadimensional hologram of a larval universe that will be destroyed/be born/elevate itself on 2012, which will be supervised by the aformentioned sentient satellite (who may be the universe's placenta) and the reincarnation of the Messiah in an English juvenile delinquent. Yep, it's [[RunningGag Grant]] [[Creator/GrantMorrison Morrison]] again.
* A certain scene in ''ComicBook/JohnnyTheHomicidalManiac'' pulls a particularly screwy example: the schizophrenic titular character is having just another debate with the Doughboys, two voices in his head he identifies as two styrofoam figures he painted. There's nothing much out of the ordinary at first. However, when a third 'voice' in the form of a dead rabbit tries to warn Johnny that the Doughboys are trying to use him, the perfectly ordinary styrofoam figures ''start moving around by themselves'' and proceed to tear the rabbit's head off, and continue to move around for the rest of the scene. Johnny briefly remarks that he's never seen them move around like that before, and one replies "Well, the rabbit provoked us." However, near the end of the scene Johnny stops in mid-rant and asks "Um, how come you guys aren't moving around anymore?" The other simply replies ''"We can't move around - we're made of styrofoam."''
** That one gets [[MindScrewdriver cleared up]] later. Basically, later on, you discover that Johnny is actually at the epicenter of the accumulation of human negative feeling, so much so that it fuels kind of magical happenings. Thus, the Doughboys can occasionally move around, Johnny can never get caught for his crimes and the other stuff that doesn't fully make sense is explained.
* Marvel Comics has several:
** X-Cutioner's Song: Was Stryfe Cyclops' infant son all grown up and seeking revenge? Was Cable just a cyborg clone of said son, trying to justify his existence as a failed lab experiment by becoming a super-hero? The ending left so many unanswered questions in spite of writers went into the crossover outright stating that the story would reveal all about Cable's origin and why he and Stryfe had the same face.
** ComicBook/TheCrossing: Kang has been manipulating EVERYONE in the Avengers, from stealing Vision and Scarlet Witch's kids (and Quicksilver's daughter' Luna in the future) and brainwashing Iron Man and Hank Pym to use as sleeper agents, with Hank Pym going insane when he resisted Kang's brainwashing. And all of this being done in the name of destroying the "Celestial Messiah", who in the end turns out to be a monster that threatens to destroy all of time and space and not the bringer of peace as previously stated in the classic saga "The Celestial Madonna".
*** Creator/KurtBusiek eventually cleared things up by [[CanonDiscontinuity making everybody involved a Space Phantom]] and the whole scheme a plot from Immortus (Kang's future self... [[TimeyWimeyBall maybe]]) to troll the Avengers into not leaving Earth for a while.
** ComicBook/AvengersDisassembled, made worse when you consider that fans of the Avengers (and several other writers at Marvel) reject outright Brian Michael Bendis and Tom Brevoort's attempt to WordOfGod explain away all plot holes and incoherent storyline reveals as "Wanda being crazy, hence it's not supposed to make sense".
** The ending of the Spider-Man story "A Death in the Family", which ended with Norman Osborn pulling out a gun after Spider-Man accused him of trying to bait Spider-Man into putting him out of his misery via putting Flash Thompson in a coma/going to the media and trying to scapegoat Spidey for Gwen Stacy's death via incompetence. Was Norman contemplating suicide or was he, as he insisted to Spider-Man, not suicidal and pondering why he didn't just shoot his rival?
*** Everything involving Mysterio since Kevin Smith killed Quentin Beck off counts in a lot of ways, since Marvel can't decide if Quentin is still dead or faked his death in the above mentioned Smith story, or if he's now some sort of half-zombie/half demon being sent from hell to make mischief on Earth.
** The recent Sisterhood of Evil Mutants arc in Uncanny X-Men; was it really Madelyne Pryor in charge of the Sisterhood? Was it her evil doppelganger from another universe? The Phoenix Force taking Maddie's form in order to screw with the X-Men, while plotting to once again steal Jean Grey's corpse in order to gain corporal form?
** [[ComicBook/FantasticFour Reed Richards]] is the sole, possibly-patented inventor of the Laws Of Physics for Universe 616. [[note]] It involves a story where he and a incorporeal being travel back in time to the Big Bang: the being creates the universe, while Reed invents physics, ''based on his own memories of physics''. From the very same 616 universe. Wow.[[/note]]
** The ''X-Men'' storyline "Here Comes Tomorrow." Suddenly and without warning, the comic is catapulted into a hellish BadFuture AlternateUniverse full of old characters, new characters (most of whom have very little explanation as to who they are), and new characters related to old characters, plot points that you'd think would be very important being dropped almost offhandedly and then immediately forgotten about, bizarre lines of dialogue like "I drowned the last whale," and to top it all off, the final scene takes place in the DisneyAcidSequence of a dimension that is the Phoenix Force's realm. The writer? Creator/GrantMorrison, natch.

** If you thought ''The Killing Joke'' was mind-screwy, then you're never going to make it out of ''[[ComicBook/BatmanGrantMorrison Batman: R.I.P.]]'' with your sense of reason intact. Batman having a whole separate personality triggered by an arbitrary gibberish phrase that's a ShoutOut to a Silver age Batman comic ('Robin Dies At Dawn!'), ComicBook/TheJoker cutting his own tongue in half with a razor and having no lips and being almost unintelligible because of it, Dr. Hurt potentially being a demon or the devil (your interpretation WILL vary)... Yeah, ''Killing Joke'' is a cakewalk compared to that storyline. Then again, Grant Morrison wrote it, and while they ''are'' considered one of the better Batman authors, their work, as mentioned above, can be ''very'' mindscrewtastic.

* The ''ComicBook/DoomPatrol'' were originally billed as the "World's Strangest Heroes!" back in the 60s. They treated their superpowers like disabilities and frequently fought strange enemies, but with the original comic being so old, [[SeinfeldIsUnfunny it might seem rather normal nowadays]]. This is not a problem, though, as in the late 80s, the aforementioned Grant Morrison took over the recently-launched SoOkayItsAverage revival with the intention of making it weird like the original. What they ended up writing was something far ''weirder'', and the result is a SurrealHorror story in which the Doom Patrol engages in numerous metaphysical fights with {{Humanoid Abomination}}s and [[OrderVersusChaos the forces of law]], with relatively little focus on action. Special mention goes to the Scissormen, who are red hollow figures with scissors for hands who speak in NonSequitur and cut people from reality leaving a two dimensional hole behind them. Those people were then brought to the Scissormen's dimension: Orqwith, which was a city created when a group of linguists wrote an encyclopedia about a fake world in braile (This is, by the way, a ShoutOut to Creator/JorgeLuisBorges's Literature/TlonUqbarOrbisTertius), that later turned real and ate their creators. The Scissormen's arrival to Earth is heralded by signs of the Apocalypse, such as fish falling from the sky, a shadow killing its owner or spontaneous combustion. The Doom Patrol destroyed Orqwith by exploiting a contradiction revealed in the solution to a variation on a traditional riddle. While Morrison's run is the most famous by far, its SpiritualSuccessor[=s=], the runs of Rachel Pollack and Gerard Way, are similarly experimental and bizarre.

* The ''ComicBook/DoomPatrol'' were originally billed as the "World's Strangest Heroes!" back in the 60s. They treated their superpowers like disabilities and frequently fought strange enemies, but with the original comic being so old, [[SeinfeldIsUnfunny it might seem rather normal nowadays]]. This is not a problem, though, as in the late 80s, the aforementioned Grant Morrison took over the recently-launched SoOkayItsAverage revival with the intention of making it weird like the original. What they ended up writing was something far ''weirder'', and the result is a SurrealHorror story in which the Doom Patrol engages in numerous metaphysical fights with HumanoidAbomination[=s=] and [[OrderVersusChaos the forces of law]], with relatively little focus on action. Special mention goes to the Scissormen, who are red hollow figures with scissors for hands who speak in Non Sequitur and cut people from reality leaving a two dimensional hole behind them. Those people were then brought to the Scissormen's dimension: Orqwith, which was a city created when a group of linguists wrote an encyclopedia about a fake world in braile (This is, by the way, a ShoutOut to Creator/JorgeLuisBorges's Literature/TlonUqbarOrbisTertius), that later turned real and ate their creators. The Scissormen's arrival to Earth is heralded by signs of the Apocalypse, such as fish falling from the sky, a shadow killing its owner or spontaneous combustion. The Doom Patrol destroyed Orqwith by exploiting a contradiction revealed in the solution to a variation on a traditional riddle. While Morrison's run is the most famous by far, its SpiritualSuccessor[=s=], the runs of Rachel Pollack and Gerard Way, are similarly experimental and bizarre.
* ''ComicBook/TheFilth'' is another comic book by Morrison and is as weird as you would expect. For starters, the protagonist, Greg Feely has a double life as Ned Slade, secret agent of a paradimensional agency called "the Hand" that regulates the worst vices in society, such as sex or violence. Sounds comprehensible, right? Well, Ned Slade was consumed by Greg, who is a "parapersonality", an alternate leisure personality, and now has forgotten he once was Slade. Except it isn't, and the parapersonality is actually Ned Slade, and the Hand has a collection of parapersonalities that injects to normal Joes to turn into spies. Speaking of the Hand, its director is an EldritchAbomination made of compost and animal tendrils, and the directors of the subdivision "The Palm" are a yellow man and a green man, who percieve time non-linearly and are drawn in a [[ArtShift weird puntillistic art style.]] By the by, the true intentions of the Hand are to collect the ink of a giant pen in the sky of its dimension, which is used to create a comic book that is a two dimensional world called "the Paperverse" which the Hand raids for their fantastical technology. Want to get even weirder? The giant pen is Greg's. That's because the world that the Hand inhabits is actually a stain in Greg's kitchen, and Greg committed suicide above it and maybe it's all a DyingDream. Or maybe it's all just the dellusions of a pedophile weirdo. There are also soviet monkey assassins, kids with ant heads, body-jumping parapersonaities, giant flying sperm fucking Los Angeles and Greg is revived as a vessel for a microscopic life species.

* ''ComicBook/TheInvisibles'': Is probably one of the most surreal and complex comic books ever written. The synopsis, "a cell of freedom fighters fighting against the supernatural forces of fascism", is correct but doesn't capture the full scope of the series. The cell? Members of a higher dimension organization called "The Invisible College" that has been operating for centuries by a group of androgynous figures dressed in harlequinn bondage gear. The freedom fighters? Modern day shamans borderline [[HumanoidAbomination gods]] who can casually travel from fiction to reality (or from reality to fiction, who knows?), manipulate reality through ideas, stories and complex alphabets and be possessed by Aztec Gods. The fight? Maybe it's a pointless fight because order and chaos are actually one in the same (since there is no us/them, only we) and it's just a training created by the universe (or a sentient satellite) to strenghten humanity for when it achieves Nirvana. The supernatural forces of facism? A cabal of alien Gods (who may be trying to rewrite the story from the outside) who live in another higher reality called "The Outer Church". Oh, and where this two universes overlap, our reality is created, which may be a pentadimensional hologram of a larval universe that will be destroyed/be born/elevate itself on 2012, which will be supervised by the aformentioned sentient satellite (who may be the universe's placenta) and the reincarnation of the Messiah in an English juvenile delinquent. Yep, it's [[RunningGag Grant]] [[Creator/GrantMorrison Morrison]] again.

* The ''ComicBook/DoomPatrol'' were originally billed as the "World's Strangest Heroes!" back in the 60s. They treated their superpowers like disabilities and frequently fought strange enemies, but with the original comic being so old, [[SeinfeldIsUnfunny it might seem rather normal nowadays]]. This is not a problem, though, as in the late 80s, the aforementioned Grant Morrison took over the recently-launched SoOkayItsAverage revival with the intention of making it weird like the original. What they ended up writing was something far ''weirder'', and the result is a SurrealHorror story in which the Doom Patrol engages in numerous metaphysical fights with HumanoidAbomination[=s=] and [[OrderVersusChaos the forces of law]], with relatively little focus on action. Special mention goes to the Scissormen, who are red hollow figures with scissors for hands who speak in Non Sequitur cut people from reality leaving a two dimensional hole behind them. Those people we're then brought to the Scissormen's dimension: Orqwith, which was a city created when a group of linguists wrote an encyclopedia about a fake world in braile (This is, by the way, a ShoutOut to Creator/JorgeLuisBorges), that later turned real and ate their creators. The Scissormen's arrival to Earth is heralded by signs of the Apocalypse, such as fish falling from the sky, a shadow killing its owner or spontaneous combustion. The Doom Patrol destroyed Orqwith by exploiting a contradiction revealed in the solution to a variation on a traditional riddle. While Morrison's run is the most famous by far, its SpiritualSuccessor[=s=], the runs of Rachel Pollack and Gerard Way, are similarly experimental and bizarre.

* The ''ComicBook/DoomPatrol'' were originally billed as the "World's Strangest Heroes!" back in the 60s. They treated their superpowers like disabilities and frequently fought strange enemies, but with the original comic being so old, [[SeinfeldIsUnfunny it might seem rather normal nowadays]]. This is not a problem, though, as in the late 80s, the aforementioned Grant Morrison took over the recently-launched SoOkayItsAverage revival with the intention of making it weird like the original. What they ended up writing was something far ''weirder'', and the result is a SurrealHorror story in which the Doom Patrol engages in numerous metaphysical fights with HumanoidAbomination[=s=] and [[OrderVersusChaos the forces of law]], with relatively little focus on action. While Morrison's run is the most infamous by far, its SpiritualSuccessor[=s=], the runs of Rachel Pollack and Gerard Way, are similarly experimental and bizarre.
* ''ComicBook/TheFilth'' is another comic book by Morrison and is as weird as you would expect. For starters, the protagonist, Greg Feely has a double life as Ned Slade, secret agent of a paradimensional agenncy called "the Hand" that regulates the worst vices in society, such as sex or violence. Sounds comprehensible, right? Well, Ned Slade was consumed by Greg, who is a "parapersonality", an alternate leisure personality, and now has forgotten he once was Slade. Except it isn't, and the parapersonality is actually Ned Slade, and the Hand has a collection of parapersonalities that injects to normal Joes to turn into spies. Speaking of the Hand, its director is an EldritchAbomination made of compost and animal tendrils, and the directors of the subdivision "The Palm" are a yellow man and a green man, who percieve time non-linearly and are drawn in a [[ArtShift weird puntillistic art style.]] By the by, the true intentions of the Hand are to collect the ink of a giant pen in the sky of its dimension, which is used to create a comic book that is a two dimensional world called "the Paperverse" which the Hand raids for their fantastical technology. Want to get even weirder? The giant pen is Greg's. That's because the world that the Hand inhabits is actually a stain in Greg's kitchen, and Greg committed suicide above it and maybe it's all a DyingDream. Or maybe it's all just the dellusions of a pedophile weirdo. There are also soviet monkey assassins, kids with ant heads, body-jumping parapersonaities, giant flying sperm fucking Los Angeles and Greg is revived as a vessel for a microscopic life species.