The Alternates is a comic book miniseries by Patton Oswalt, Jordan Blum, Tim Seeley, and Scott Hepburn. It is set in the same universe as Oswalt and Blum's previous miniseries, Minor Threats, and published by Dark Horse Comics.
Years ago, a group of low-level metahumans find their way to The Ledge, an alternate universe in which they enjoyed vastly expanded powers. When a crisis came to The Ledge, they joined forces as the Alternates in order to repel it and protect the real world, at the cost of being stuck in the mundane world. Now they struggle to make meaning of their lives in a world where they're nobodies. When one of their own, the Divider, is found dead in his apartment after trying to access The Ledge again, they team up once again to figure out what happened to him.
The Alternates contains examples of:
- Alliterative Name: Multi-Monster's civilian name is Mary Marie Munoz.
- All Your Powers Combined: Multi-Monster can call up the physical attributes of any monster from fiction, while Persona can summon the skills of any of her past lives, which include Allen Pinkerton, a pharaoh, a samurai, and... an Appalachian clog dancer (which actually does come in handy at one point.)
- Bittersweet Ending: The Alternates manage to defeat the Originals and prevent their plan to flood the city with Prestige, but the Originals are all killed and the Alternates have to live with the knowledge that they basically stole their lives.
- Cool Car: Trip drives around in the Trip-Rod, a massive old-fashioned hot-rod that he can summon at will.
- Did Not Get the Girl: In the finale, Tripper realizes that he is in love with Mary, but also realizes that, as her sponsor, he can't act on those feelings or else one of them would have to leave the group. Not wishing to put Mary in that position, he decides not to act on his feelings.
- Even the Girls Want Her: In the second issue, Mary uses her powers to disguise herself as a hot goth so that she can hang out with Crab Louie's daughter Alyse and her supposed boyfriend, knowing that they've been buying prestige to try and give themselves powers. Her disguise works a little too well; it turns out that Alyse is bisexual and has a thing for Morticia Addams.
- Fantastic Drug: The miniseries revolves around the Alternates investigating a drug called "Prestige", which bestows random superpowers upon users.
- Forced Sleep: In the first issue, the Searcher puts an entire diner to sleep with her powers so that she can talk to Tripper and Multi-Monster alone.
- God of Knowledge: Lamla is an ancient god who knows how to find almost anything on Earth and is willing to give that information to those who know the right question to ask.
- Insufferable Genius: Kid Curious is a supragenius who regularly tells the other Alternates that they are so far below him in intellect that they might as well be another species and that the only reason he hasn't killed them all yet is because then there would be no more meetings and he'd have nothing to do.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: In the second issue, Kid Curious manages to come up with a weaponized version of Alzheimer's disease, just for shits and giggles. He ends up using it to wipe the memory of a drug dealer after the Alternates interrogate him, even though he insists that he'd already erased his own memories of how to create the weapon.
- Lotus-Eater Machine: This is the true nature of the Ledge: The Ledgerstone created it as a way of trapping the Originals so that he could use their memories to construct and populate a new reality. In exchange, he provided them with fantasies of having god-like powers.
- Mundane Utility:
- Multi-Monster has the ability to call upon the physical traits of any monster from literature or popular culture. In the second issue, she borrows the face and torso of one of the Brides of Dracula to turn herself into a hot goth.
- Persona can call up the skills of any of her past lives. At one point, she summons up the skills of an Appalachian clog dancer so that she blend in at a dance club.
- Physical God: The Ledgerstone, the source of both the Ledge and its distilled version, Prestige, is a massive god-like being. After the Originals kill him and try to shower Twilight City in his blood to transform everyone, Kid Curious figures out how to take all of his power into himself, and uses it to reset everything back to normal, except that now he's still got all that power.
- The Reveal: The Alternates got their team name not because they're C-List Fodder, but because they're alternate-reality versions of a team that was sent into the Ledge and never came back.
- Screw Yourself: While looking through the Divider's journals to try and find a hint about where he got access to prestige, Mary discovers that he was so bored with his mundane life that he started keeping an exhaustive record of every possible way that he could use his powers to literally go fuck himself. She's so appalled that she almost wishes she could kill him herself just for making her read it.
- Tropaholics Anonymous: The Alternates used to be an ad-hoc super-team, but now they're basically a support group for people struggling with their mundane lives.
