Flat Earth Atheist / Comic Books

• Achille Talon has a guy claiming he isn't afraid of ghosts because he talks with his revenant cousin at every full moon, and he is a skeptic. Actually the guy was part of the fake ghost conspiracy, but still...
• Jenny Sparks of The Authority is an Anthropomorphic Personification of an abstract concept (a century), who is an atheist.
• Beta Ray Bill is an atheist who hangs out with the Norse gods. He also met The One Above All once.
  Bill: I am alone. I look at the heavens and think them empty. And if not empty, I find the idea of worshiping whatever dwells there obscene. It doesn't change what is right. If there is nothing but what we make in this world, brothers... let us make it good.
  • Bill has never outright dismissed or challenged Thor's claims to godhood and made this statement after witnessing the damage of religious wars. His people were destroyed over the struggle between the traditional religions and the new belief of Bill as a god, the Skrull invasion of Earth in the name of their god, a madman causing genocide in the name of his religion, and further Skrull infighting over whether to follow the traditional Skrull gods or take Bill as their new god.
• Captain America: In a 2017 storyline, Steve Rogers visits a town doing a big Captain America celebration. He talks to some folks to get their views on Cap. When he brings up "Cap" on ice for so long, a man laughs "Oh, you're an Icer." It turns out there's a large section of people who think the entire "frozen in ice for decades" story is a cover for the government simply giving the Cap mantle to someone else. Steve just smiles in reply.
• In an issue of DC's Checkmate, a wizard describes magic to an atheist skeptic as "the cheat codes to the universe".
• Touched on by the City of Heroes comic books. A sizable portion of the eponymous city has been overrun by zombies powered by the magics of ancient evil "gods", another group of mages summon ghosts and devils and gods regularly within city limits, and one of the major canon heroes makes his armor out of demons. Many heroes still scoff at the concept of Prometheus and Zeus when talking to the former is an important part of making the local phlebotinum work again.
• Doctor Terrance Thirteen, the Ghost Breaker, is The DCU's preeminent example, earnestly believing that aliens (like Superman), magicians (like Doctor Fate), and supernatural beings (like The Spectre) simply don't exist at all. He's treated unilaterally as a joke. Ironically, in his original appearances before continuity held sway (that is, before The DCU was firmly established as a Shared Universe where nearly all DC properties resided), the ghosts and magicians he went up against always were fake and his skepticism was presented as a virtuous trait; but when continuity started drawing all DC books into one reality, he was first shown the spirit of his dead father by the Spectre, then he was teamed with the very mystical Phantom Stranger, and from then on he was always wrong, simply because the Stranger's very existence demanded it be so. Dr. 13 currently lives outside of the time stream, aware of his own fictional nature; he is teamed with an alien, a vampire, a French caveman, and a talking vampire gorilla with Nazi leanings, his daughter is a rather powerful witch, and he believes none of this.
  • The one-shot Vertigo Visions: Doctor 13 took this to its logical conclusion by putting him in a mental institution.
  • There have been two alternate takes on Dr. 13, making his skepticism something other than the Idiot Ball. In Neil Gaiman's The Books of Magic, the fact he doesn't believe in magic means it simply doesn't work around him, in a cross between Clap Your Hands If You Believe and Weirdness Censor. In Grant Morrison's Zatanna he visits a mystical dimension and is happy to admit something's happening, but defines it all in scientific terms. (Quantum mechanics and M-theory get a lot of crap past the scientific radar.) There's also the Architecture and Morality take, wherein he's simply strongly in denial of reality.
  • He's met the DC comic staff so he knows they're all fiction.
  • Dr. 13 frequently alternated in stories where the Phantom Stranger appeared opposite him showing a prior story that was pure trickery he'd revealed only to have things a bit more supernatural (obviously) much of but not always when they were together. He also once disproved that ghosts haunted a house by showing it was actually ALIENS using the house as a stopover point as they teleported across the universe. He's always been the example of the devout worshiper of science whose blind spot always has him refusing to accept the evidence of supernatural things because he operates under the (obviously proven wrong) premise that nothing supernatural actually exists.
  • In the New 52 The Phantom Stranger title, he's been reinvented as a "scientific occultist" in the mold of Egon Spengler. His ancestor, the original Terrence Thirteen in All-Star Western, on the other hand, is the ultimate Flat-Earth Atheist: at one point his ghost chides the modern-day Terry for believing in the supernatural.
• The snarky Lovable Rogue drow elf Downer from Kyle Stanley Hunter's comics Downer: Wandering Monster and Downer: Fool's Errand calls himself an atheist, despite the fact that he lives in a Dungeons & Dragons world rife with magic and deities. This leads to problems, as no normal cleric will heal his injuries or resurrect him when he dies. Ironically, in the end, it was Downer himself who ascended to become the God of the Game (for about five minutes) when the Ulolok channeled its power through a slain Downer.
• Nicely justified in Neil Gaiman's take on The Eternals, when Mark Curry refuses to believe Ikarus is an ancient immortal who was worshiped as a god because he lives in the Marvel Universe. "It's a weird world out there, dude. But if Spider-Man said he got his powers from reading Chariots Of The Gods, guess I'd figure he was crazy too."
• In the Age of Ultron tie-in for Fantastic Four, Mister Fantastic tells his views on afterlife thus: "I am a man of science. There is no God. There is no Heaven. There is no Hell." Just to put this in perspective, not only does he personally know Thor and Hercules (and incidentally was established as believing in a God many times in the past), but he's actually been to Heaven and met God^note Well, Jack Kirby as well.
  • Heck, just a page or so earlier in that very issue with the above quote, Ben talks about Doctor Doom's machine for contacting the afterlife, which everyone present knows about.
  • There's also the fact that an earlier FF story^note Marvel Double Shot #3 was entirely devoted to Franklin and Reed talking this over in a fairly sensitive manner, ending with Reed stating that although he didn't subscribe to any particular organized religion, he did believe in God.
• After the pro-registration forces won Marvel Comics' Civil War (2006) crossover, Howard the Duck reluctantly went to the local government office to register as a non-human. There he was informed that the Cleveland government had been aware of the rumors of the "Cleveland Duck Man" for years, and their official policy had always been that he didn't exist. The fact that he was now standing there in front of them was not sufficient reason for them to change that policy. Howard leaves the office in an excellent mood, reassured that he'll never have to pay taxes, be drafted, or interact with the government in any way. Naturally, his luck being what it is, he's eventually forced to register anyway.
• Deconstructed viciously in Immortal Hulk with Dr. Frye, a Mad Scientist whose militant atheism is not only called out as delusional and nonsensical given the world he lives in, but also leads to him having an equally nonsensical Mortality Phobia and obsession with becoming immortal... an obsession that drives him to commit sociopathic experiments on his own son.
• JLA Heavens Ladder had the Justice League meet an alien race that had no religious beliefs... and as a result were doomed to cease to exist when they died, as they had no specific afterlife to go to after death. Using their incredible technology, they decided to create their own heaven instead! The plot of the series is kicked off when their lack of a religious belief means they have no frame of reference, leading them to kidnap several planets (Not just the populations of planets, the planets themselves, and everything on them) to study the civilizations and figure out how to make a perfect heaven.
• The modern Mister Terrific in the Justice Society of America is an atheist, and he was questioned about this and gave the example mentioned (that there were godlike, or close enough entities running around who didn't call themselves gods). Sometimes he has excellent reasons for his beliefs and sometimes he doesn't, Depending on the Writer. Some writers like to use him as a Strawman Atheist.
• Brainiac 5 of the Legion of Super-Heroes. In the postboot continuity, he scoffs at his teammate Shikari's feelings about finding a way home during the "Legion Lost" storyline. (In his defense, though, the setting he lives in is at the "sufficiently advanced technology" stage or close to it.) If anything, the end of that arc justifies Brainiac 5's skepticism, as the creator deity worshiped by all the local lifeforms turns out to be a Sufficiently Advanced Alien and former teammate Element Lad.
  • On the other hand, this version of Brainy is the one who had his appearance and personality "upgraded" by the godlike Anomaly, an encounter that M'Onel and especially Andromeda considered nothing less than a religious experience. On the other other hand, Brainy had eventually expressed worry over the sudden change in his personality, and had deliberately begun reverting back to a muted form of his earlier snarkiness, so who knows how he felt at this point about the Anomaly that caused it.
• This trope is parodied in one part of a MAD article, "What if God Were One of Us?" In one of the gags, Woody Allen is having lunch with God in a restaurant (where God is eating spaghetti); Allen tells Him, "I want you to know I'm still an agnostic, even though you're right here in front of me because it's hard to believe the omnipotence of a man with crab meat in his beard."
• Marvel 1602 has a variation on this in its version of Thor. He's not an atheist, but he refuses to accept his own divinity because he's a member of The Knights Templar, and a devout Christian.
• In the Marvel Universe, Science Heroes like Iron Man and Hank Pym acknowledge that Thor might be an actual god (though they tend to think of him and all other mythological beings as closer to sufficiently advanced aliens; Thor was actually retconned to be this by Warren Ellis, but who knows if it stuck) and that characters like Doctor Strange, the Beyonder, and the Scarlet Witch are doing something beyond their comprehension. That doesn't mean they're comfortable with not understanding what's going on, don't stop looking for ways to explain it, or that they're specifically religious. The closest we ever get is one or two incidents of straight-up desperation praying after all viable options have been exhausted. The only science hero that has no problem accepting all of this is Bruce Banner. Though this is a relatively recent development and there are several older stories where these guys have little problem accepting magic and gods or at least being convinced of it rather quickly. Flanderization in action.
• In an issue of Planetary, the Drummer uses almost the exact same explanation to Hand Wave magic into the realm of his infomancer powers.
• Quasar started out his series as an atheist/antitheist, but after the seminal "Cosmos In Collision" storyline a couple of years in, he became more of an agnostic ("Maybe I'm not the atheist I thought I was. Maybe I just haven't discovered the god that's right for me..."). This was likely helped by the fact that in said storyline, he died and was resurrected. God in the Marvel Universe is called The One-Above-All who appeared to the Fantastic Four as Jack Kirby, a person they know. It runs a bit in the family: at one point Quasar has a conversation with his by-then deceased father who is quick to point out that the fact the conversation is happening is still no proof of such a thing as an afterlife.
• The hero of Savage Dragon remained an atheist even after being sent to Hell (by a villain's magic), witnessing a fistfight between God and Satan, and having a conversation with God. His rationale throughout the whole ordeal was that it was just some weird dream. Later storylines have involved Godworld, a planet housing every god of every pantheon, but these gods are treated like any other superpowered menace, with the question of their legitimacy being unimportant to the story.
  • Of course, this is the Image Verse, where Heaven and Hell interact with the human world very explicitly all the time, but inter-title continuity among the Image books has been always a dicey proposition.
• Subverted in the latest Scarlet Spider series, starring Ben Reilly. He was resurrected and killed through cloning multiple times, and he remembers every one of those instances. The experience has left him with a rather nihilistic outlook on life, as he ponders how he only ever experienced nothingness beyond death. To his credit, he quickly throws this all aside after he encounters the personification of Death, who shows him his own soul and very explicitly confirms to him that he did go to the afterlife; he just can't remember the experience. It's like the writer specifically wanted to show how ridiculous strict atheism is in such a fantastical setting.
• This is essentially the whole point of SHOOT First. The agents of the Secular Humanist Occult Obliteration Taskforce are atheistic as a rule, despite fighting supernatural forces from various religions. SHOOT considers such entities "Outside Actors" and characterizes them as powerful aliens or somesuch (more "not what they claim" than "not real") — and furthermore holds that buying into the idea that, say, the giant rock guy with writing on his chest is a golem, gives him greater power. At various points, many of the characters wonder if they're actually "right"; while the Outside Actors that they encounter seem pretty villainous, SHOOT has no real proof that their interpretation of their actions or their existence is at all accurate. One member actually secretly secured a document from the Vatican ensuring his passage into Heaven, just in case. He claims there's no doubt in his mind that his position is the right one, but that from a scientific standpoint it would be idiotic to not have a Plan B.
  • Another character has been trying to avoid her son's questions about what happens after you die, even though his father was a fire-breathing demon with horns and wings and the kid may be The Antichrist.
• Miguel O'Hara, Spider-Man of the year 2099 has been shown to be openly atheistic. Not believing there is a God is one thing, but then he also has explicitly said that upon death a person's soul or mind does not "go" anywhere, but simply ceases to exist. That second one seems a strange claim for an atheist in a world where it has been shown that a variety of afterlives do explicitly exist and have been seen numerous times across various series. That aside, a person's mind can exist as a psychic entity completely separated from the body, and several people have blatantly returned from the dead.
• Spider-Man has a Crisis of Faith in The Amazing Spider-Man (Dan Slott) despite having personally met God shortly before the events of One More Day.
• Ted Knight, Starman, who hung around the JSA for a long time but was still convinced that science explained all of it... somehow. Depending on the Writer, it sometimes did (for a certain definition of "science", anyhow...) And most of the actual "gods" in the setting were actually sufficiently advanced aliens anyway.
• A fairly complex example from Stormwatch: the Eidolon was a man who died, and instead of reaching the afterlife, he was trapped in a place between life and death—a living ghost who wished to kill people to show the world God didn't exist and this was the only life we have...ok, but here's the issue: he lived in the shared universe of Image Comics. Not only is there documented evidence of MULTIPLE Gods existing in Image—in particular in the Wildstorm universe he originated from but also the other universes in the Image multiverse—but many of the heroes received powers from or have in some way come into physical contact with Gods. This includes the Judaeo-Christian God, who isn't nearly as nice as he is in the Bible but is, without question, an actual life form. Also, as if this weren't enough, he was a member of a team with no less than three other people who were either Gods, related to Gods, or received powers from Gods, including the Goddess of Murder. Also also, Eidolon existed in a world where the ability to travel between universes, access to the afterlife, and even technological exploration of other dimensions—many of which were also ruled by or inhabited by Gods—was not only commonplace but well known to the public. One of the teams in this world, The Authority, rode around in a spacecraft inside of the fucking arteries of a being best described as a nicer version of Azathoth! Not just a God, the God! So, in other words, Eidolon is just some mutant who has immortality of a sort, didn't clinically die after being in some accident or whatever years ago, and interpreted this as a confirmation of atheism—even though he has access to a mountain of publicly available scientific evidence debunking atheism top to bottom!
• In Sub-Mariner: The Depths, Dr. Stein is a rather horrifying deconstruction, as he is so obsessed with clinging to a materialistic view of the world that he goes out of his way to destroy evidence of anything that contradicts such a view, even if it means committing murder.
• Ratchet in The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye is a die-hard atheist. One of his crewmates is eventually revealed to be the literal personification of Primus, the Transformers' god (the IDW comics are set in a universe where Primus doesn't turn into Cybertron), which actually seems to briefly make him even less religious because he views the whole thing as "deeply silly" ^note  Interestingly, it would later be revealed in the sister series that all Cybertronian religion was manufactured by a time-traveling Shockwave in order to steer Cybertronian civilization on a specific course, but Ratchet and the rest of the Lost Light crew never learn this. To be fair to Ratchet, this also means that the fake Afterspark in the "Lost Light" arc doesn't fool him for more than a minute. And in the Distant Finale, after he's married Drift, he lightens up a bit and starts being willing to meet Drift halfway.
  Ratchet: I'd like an explanation so I can reject it.
• This is true for most of the characters in the Ultimate Marvel universe, where magic and mysticism are far less common. For instance, Hawkeye refuses to believe that Ghost Rider is an actual servant of Hell, despite the fact that he personally witnessed Thor leading an army of Asgardians into battle against Loki's demonic hordes. Even if the reader knows better, a lot of the magical characters like Ghost Rider and Doctor Strange are just assumed to be mutants or Reality Warpers by the rest of the cast.
• Played for laughs in The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl when Doreen hits it off with a guy on a date...until she learns not only does he not believe in Squirrel Girl but he thinks super-heroes don't exist. He also doesn't believe in aliens, magic, etc and when attacked by a monster, asks Doreen to take video of these "robots" to expose the "false flag operations."
• In The Unfunnies, the Big Bad Troy Hicks says there being no afterlife is one of the reasons he's invaded the cartoon world to escape his execution. He does this by making a literal Deal with the Devil, performing satanic rituals before the story begins and during the climax, which begs the question of where he thinks he's getting his powers from.
• The X-Men were once sent to a world shaped according to Dante's Inferno. Colossus claimed he was proud to be an atheist when he saw how cruel God was. Nobody pointed this out.

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