A running gag in Groo The Wanderer has someone call the protagonist "slow of mind" at the start of an episode, then at the end — which usually is hours, possibly days later — Groo stops what he's doing and says "Hey, what did they mean, slow of mind??"
An extreme example is an episode where Groo has a flashback to his childhood and remembers what his granny once called him. After the flashback he has the usual reaction several years later.
A recent Superman comic begins with Supes batting at a charity baseball game. He is eventually called away to deal with a bad guy. The fight ends with the two of them in orbit and Superman smugly assures his foe that the battle is over. An orbiting baseball knocks the baddie unconscious.
Another one features Superman dealing with an invasion of every villain ever. Early in the fight, he chucks a nuclear villain called Neutron into orbit. The last four baddies throw Superman onto an island littered with kryptonite, surround him, and declare victory. Only for Neutron to land on the island, exploding and KO'ing them.
In the Batman miniseries Arkham Asylum: Living Hell, the Joker and Two-Face escape from Arkham. The Joker then decides to start killing people whose names are palindromes. One issue later, the first person whose name is a palindrome on his list is an old captain who's called for help by the Asylum staff, and so Batman gets to know about the incident and catch the Joker at the same time, tying the antics back to the plot.
Watchmen. On the very first page a guy with a sign walks down the street, past the Comedian's apartment. A few pages later the two detectives walk by him. In the next chapter he's outside the Comedian's funeral, and he watches Moloch leave. In the next chapter he buys a copy of the New Frontiersman, and a copy of the gazette. In the fifth chapter he exits the Gunga diner and digs through the trash can. At the end of the fifth Chapter Rorschach is arrested and unmasked and holy shit, what do you know, the random street character was Rorschach! The significance of everything that character does is made clear once you know his secret.
Not to mention the cover, which is a yellow background with a black diagonal oval and splash of shiny red. Turns out it's a smiley face with a splash of shiny red over one eye. Turns out that's a smiley face pin with a splash of shiny red. Turns out that's a smiley face pin with a splash of blood. Turns out it belongs to a dead man, who turns out to be the Comedian. This sets off the plot and we never see it again...until the very end when a grimy "reporter" wearing a shirt with a yellow smiley face drips a blob of ketchup on the eye right as he is fishing Rorshach's journal out of the in-basket, which contains everything about the plot that was hand-waved away to fulfill Ozymandias' Xanatos Roulette, and the frame zooms back in to end on the same image the book started with.
Actually, you do see it again before the very end on Mars, after Manhattan's glass clockwork house is broken, the debris forms the second eye in the face just as the Doc is talking about "thermodynamic miracles", events so unlikely as to be impossible which happen none-the-less
At the beginning of issue of Green Lantern, Hal Jordan describes Larfleeze as "a cross between a boar and one of the Muppets. The furry one, who hung out with chickens." They fight for an issue, and at the beginning of the next one:
Green Lantern: Gonzo. His name was Gonzo. That was driving me crazy.
In Sonic the Hedgehog #4, Rotor initially wants to abandon Bunnie, saying that "Robotnik could follow us by using her!" Over a hundred issues later, Robotnik does just that.
In The Simpsons Comics, one issue had Bart letting some nerds hide in his dad's car's trunk. Grampa pop out from the trunk and asks if the "robots issued by the government that steal [our] teeth are gone?" Later, one of the nerds visits Frink, who reveals one of his robots and casually mentions that it was used to help the government steal teeth.
In an early issue of the Ultimate X-Men miniseries Ultimate War, Beast off-handedly mentions that the Danger Room is malfunctioning and he ended up fighting holographic Orthodox Jews when he wanted ninja assassins. He later needs to distract attackers with the ninja assassin program...
Years ago Scrooge McDuck had an adventure involving Little Green Men from a planet so distant that a round trip took eight years. At the end of the story they headed for home, promising to return as soon as they could. Eight years later, pretty much to the day, a new story was published in which the aliens returned. The second story was pretty crap, but just the fact that someone had remembered all that time was pretty awesome.
A Joker story shows the Clown Prince of Crime being interviewed by a celebrity psychologist. On the first day, the Joker tells the doctor a joke about a man who stubs his toe on a brick, sees that it's Brick #237, and then throws it away. At the end of the story, the Joker beats the doctor to death with Brick #237.*
Batman 80-Page Giant 2010 #1
Dr. Ryan: I don't get it.
Joker: You will.
HA!! BRICK JOKE!! I GET IT!!
Horndog - Leonard has drunken sex with Charlene, the girlfriend of his best friend, Bob. Leonard wonders if Bob will "be okay with this", or if he'll "want to run my head through a meat grinder". Two strips later, after Leonard reveals what he did, Bob tells him that he wants to run Leonard's head through a meat grinder.
In Volume Two of the Scott Pilgrim series, Scott is walking somewhere at night, and in one panel we see the moon. But it doesn't look right; there seem to be two big holes in it. It just seems weird on the first read, and nobody in the book says anything about it at the time. Near the end of Volume Three, however, we find out why it looks like that and what it has to do with the story.
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