Line #15 MindScrew/ComicBooks


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9	* ''Franchise/{{Batman}}'':
10	** ''ComicBook/TheKillingJoke'' managed to confuse everyone who read it, [[spoiler: ending with Batman and the Joker laughing over a joke. The third to last frame shows the characters' feet with the headlights of a police car between them, the second to last removes the characters' feet, and the last simply shows the wet ground they were standing on.]] Creator/AlanMoore has since admitted that he has several regrets writing this graphic novel, based in part on a rather misinformed understanding of the characters at the time.
11	** ''[[ComicBook/BatmanGrantMorrison Batman: R.I.P.]]'': 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)...
12	* ''Central Park'', a short Franco-Belgian comic by Jean-Luc Cornette and Christian Durieux. The story goes like this: Johan and Yasmina are a Belgian couple visiting Central Park while on vacation in New York. Johan poses for a picture with one of the zoo's polar bears, who then strikes up a conversation with him. No-one sees this as unusual -- the bear himself eventually lampshades this. In the meantime, Yasmina disappears. As Johan searches for her, mysterious walls began to spring up throughout the park, blocking his paths and preventing him from leaving. He meets another person trapped in the park, "Snake", a hobo who used to be a taxi driver by the name of Theodore Roosevelt -- oh yeah, all the taxi drivers that Johan and Yasmina encountered in the city had the names of U.S. presidents. At one point, Johan's shoes are mysteriously replaced by a pair of rollerblades. Norman, the polar bear, shows up again, jogging through the park and wearing Johan's missing shoes. History is revealed to exist between Norman and Yasmina, and through it all, the walls around the park continue to grow...
13	* 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, 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.
14	* ''ComicBook/TheFilth'': 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.
15	* ''ComicBook/FinalCrisis Aftermath: Escape''. In which Tom "Nemesis" Tresser finds himself in a mysterious city, along with all DC's other "spy" characters, and apparently it's the future setting of ''OMAC'', complete with Lilas and GPA agents, or maybe it isn't, and characters die, but come back, and when ''he'' dies, the whole thing starts again. Appropriate, since the whole book is an homage to ''Series/{{The Prisoner\|1967}}''.
16	* ''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.
17	* 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.
18	* ''Franchise/MarvelUniverse'':
19	** ''ComicBook/XCutionersSong'': 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.
20	** ''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 "ComicBook/TheCelestialMadonnaSaga". 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.
21	** ''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 explain away all plot holes and incoherent storyline reveals as "Wanda being crazy, hence it's not supposed to make sense".
22	** The ending of the Spider-Man story "ComicBook/ADeathOnTheFamily", 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?
23	** 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.
24	** The 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?
25	** ''ComicBook/FantasticFour'': Reed Richards is the sole, possibly-patented inventor of the Laws Of Physics for Universe 616. 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.
26	** 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.
27	** ''ComicBook/MoonKnight'' is by far the most recognizable Marvel series for this trope. Marc Spector died in Egypt but was resurrected and chosen to be the Fist of Khonshu and deliver his judgment...or so he says. Many of his stories delve into the mystical realms on the Marvel Universe and into Marc's broken mind. The main ambiguous aspect of the character is whether or not Khonshu is even real or something Marc fabricated from his mental illness. While major crossover stories imply Khonshu does exist, it's still up to the reader to decide.
28	* The point in which ''ComicBook/TheMaxx'' jumps from trippy to actual MindScrew may vary from person to person. Some may say it's when the villain turns out to be a giant psychopathic self-help-fueled banana slug; other may say it's just right before the revelation of why Julie's Outback was created (that part with the Hooly); or maybe when [[spoiler:Sarah comes back from DisneyDeath as an Isz]]...
29	* ''ComicBook/{{Marville}}'': Long-debunked scientific hypotheses. Parodies that don't make sense. Wolverine as the first human. Dinosaurs speaking Hebrew. Random switching from parody to serious philosophy and back again. Given that the philosophy is so silly and the comedy is so poor trying to tell which part is which is liable to make your head hurt.
30	* ''ComicBook/{{Rork}}'': What you expect with massive KudzuPlot, {{Time Travel}}s, (TimeyWimeyBall included), {{Dimensional Traveler}}s, SchizoTech, and {{Eldritch Abomination}}s all around? This comics is like whole new level Mind-screwiness.
31	* ''ComicBook/{{Superlopez}}'': ''Los Petisos Carambanales'' is about an attempt of Escariano Avieso to mess with Superlopez's head and making him retire.
32	* ''ComicBook/{{Superman}}'' story arc "ComicBook/BrainiacRebirth": In the beginning, Brainiac tries to use the energy of an imploding super nova to break free from his planet-prison, but it takes his physical body apart. Brainiac's molecular essence disperses throughout the universe, until finding an ancient planet-sized living computer built by unknown beings. Merging with its cells and tapping into its memory banks, Brainiac's essence learns the universe's history, before drifting across the cosmos and studying every single world and civilization. Once he has learned everything he needs, Brainiac's essence moves through a black hole caused by the previously mentioned super nova, goes back in time, wittnesses the Creation of the universe, and feels the "Master Programmer" seeks his destruction, using Superman as His instrument. All of sudden, everything vanishes and his molecular essence has been returned to his time and computerized prison, where Brainiac starts building himself a new mechanical body, a process that will take months and some kind of womb-like device. So, why did Brainiac's conscience survived disintegration and kept his molecules around? Why did it decide travel through the universe? How and why did it travel through the time? How did it return to his own time and place? Where did the planet-sized computer come from? Absolutely nothing of that is explained.
33	* ''Venerdì 12'' has Judas, Aldo's servant capable of magic. He spends most of the series [[JerkWithAHeartOfGold mocking and tormenting Aldo and anyone they meet but also helps him with his daily life and trying to lift the curse that turned him into a monster]]. In the GrandFinale he plays an indirect but decisive role into lifting the curse by [[spoiler:not tormenting and chasing off Dulcistilla and exposing Bedelia as a living memory of the time they spent together brought to life by the curse, leading to Aldo recovering the self-esteem he needs to let the memory go and accidentally lift the curse]]... And then the very last panel of the series [[spoiler:shows him in the cursed carillon, meaning he was part of the curse all along]].
34	* ''ComicBook/WontonSoup'' by James Stokoe is a space trucker cooking opera set in a universe that makes the ''Franchise/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'' seem sensible and simple. It's impossible to list the craziness of the series in one sentence but as an example one time the two main characters get [[MushroomSamba high off the brains]] of one of the galaxy's oldest races, a failsafe program within the brain attempts to lead them to crystal forged from the hopes of a thousand alien geniuses. They simply have to say a safeword and the crystal will flush out the bad vibes, instead they stare at each other and then reach the same conclusion "Let's smoke it!" and somehow the comic goes even further into MindScrew territory.

Context MindScrew / ComicBooks