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Unreliable Narrator / Comic Books

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Comics are the easiest medium to accomplish this in, since you can have the narration saying one thing above the panel and the panel show what's really happening, whereas in Film, Western Animation, and Live TV you might have the narrator's speech conflict with the scene, necessitating a more "flashback" style to show this. It is very common to have a narrator say one thing and the below panel completely contradict it.


  • Word of God states that Dilios of 300 is an unreliable narrator; all of the supposed inconsistencies with actual history are actually bare-faced lies, with Delios stretching the truth about who did what and how many there were. This naturally justifies the comic's explicit use of Rule of Cool and Refuge in Audacity.
  • Anya's Ghost: Emily's entire backstory about being killed by a maniac is a lie, and she was never engaged, in fact she murdered her supposed fiancé (who was a boy that rejected her advances) together with his sweetheart and her death was actually caused by being chased by a mob that had arisen from said murder.
  • Done in-universe with Astro City's Manny Monkton, a comic book publisher who encourages his writers to play fast and loose with the facts to make their stories more exciting.
    "The kids don't want facts. They want drama! THRILLS!"
  • Marvel Adventures: The Avengers: In Issue #2, Spider-Man warns the Hulk (too late) about a gigantic man-o-war, telling him to steer clear of its toxic tendrils. Later on, the Hulk tells Spidey of how he would never betray the Avengers because he knows they always try to help him. In the background of that panel we see a flashback to Spidey warning Hulk, but this is how he remembers it: "Get off that creature! BIG danger!"
  • Ballad for Sophie has Julien Dubois, a retired star musician, who decides to tell his life story to a persistent intern who sleeps overnight on his doorstep until he lets her interview him. Upfront about how he's going a bit batty and how he always struggled with drug addiction, his otherwise cogent account starting from the 1930s becomes peppered with strange and contrived features. These include his piano teacher and later agent Hubert Triton having the head of a goat, his psychiatrist looking exactly like the long-dead Sigmund Freud, a homeless man who helped him while he was living on the streets of World War 2 Paris greeting him decades later without him or his pet bird not having aged a day, and a memory of his rival François Samson playing on a flying piano during a competition, which he insists can be corroborated by various reviews of that performance but is likely him just making literal a colorful metaphor in his recollections.
  • Batman:
    • In Arkham Reborn, Jeremiah Arkham turns out to be just a tad loopy, to the point where it turns out his "beauties", three patients who seem relatively functional but have to be kept apart for their own safety, don't actually exist, and some of the time he's the supervillain Black Mask (another one). When he recovers his memories as to where his marbles actually went — it involves the Joker, Hugo Strange, and a suggestibility-enhancing drug, and even that is left ambiguous regarding how much of it is true — in his reflection, he sees himself as Black Mask.
    • May be the case for the Wrath, a criminal who serves as a literal "anti-Batman" to the extent that his costume was designed to resemble Batman's and his origin even occurred on the same night as Batman's, as his parents were criminals killed right in front of their child. When Batman faces the second Wrath (the first was killed when he fell into his own trap), the villain tells Batman that his mentor's parents were shot, unprovoked, by a Gotham police officer when the original Wrath was a child. However, as the officer who killed the Wrath's parents was his future ally James Gordon, Batman knows for a fact that events didn't play out that way, but it is left up to the reader if the first or second Wrath are just unreliable (was the first lying to make himself seem more sympathetic or did he tell the truth and the second has twisted it to further "justify" his own crimes?) or victims of a Self-Serving Memory.
    • Also applies to Lincoln March, AKA 'Owlman'; an agent of the Court of Owls, he claims to actually be Bruce Wayne's younger brother, Thomas Wayne Junior, born disfigured and left in an orphanage until the Court took him in and gave him various treatments to restore him to health. Bruce doesn't believe that his parents would have hidden the existence of a brother from him, and speculates that the Court twisted the facts he could find out about March's history just to convince him that he was Thomas Wayne Jr., even talking with Dick Grayson about alternative explanations for all of March's supposed evidence, but admits that there's no way to be certain if March is right or wrong without a DNA test.
    • In "The Batman Nobody Knows", a classic comic book that inspired two animated episodes, two of the kids have versions of Batman that are pure speculation, but one got his story from an ex-con intending to Scare 'Em Straight. Unfortunately, said ex-con decided that making Batman seven feet tall and able to bounce back onto the roof from a clothesline rather than using his Batrope would make for a better story.
  • Ed Brubaker's Books of Doom miniseries tells the origin story of classic Marvel Comics supervillain Doctor Doom, seemingly narrated by Doom himself. However, at the story's end, it is revealed that the narrator is actually one of the Doom's Doombots, telling the story that Doom has programmed into it, leaving to question how much of it was true.
  • In The Boys, The Frenchman (who's known to be insane) decides to tell Hughie his "Origin Story" which is an obvious fabrication that involves his father being murdered during a baguette-jousting tournament. He then jumps out the window, and when Hughie asks if any of it was true Butcher says "only the last line" about his devotion to the team. It's implied that he isn't even French and was an Englishman who somehow lost his mind after joining the French Foreign Legion.
    • However the very next issue has him relate to Hughie The Female's Origin Story, which is implied to be much more truthful.
  • Vincent Santini, the narrator from Brooklyn Dreams, tells us in the first page he can't remember much from his past, so he'll tell us the best he can. The whole story is him telling us about his life the way he wants to remember it. He even says "I'll weave you some lies about my life, and who knows they might be true."
  • This is the thing that is going on in Captain America: Steve Rogers and the Secret Empire storyline. With Steve's mind altered by the Red Skull and Kobik during Avengers Standoff, our hero is believed to be an agent of HYDRA introduced to the group as a young boy. We know this to be fake as we're shown how this happened. However, as the story keeps going, we go further into the rabbit hole and it even calls our recollections into question as it seems to be revealed that the Nazis were actually going to win World War II and the Allies' use of the Cosmic Cube prevented that at all, turning Cap into the big blue boy scout we all know and love. For the most part, those who are confronted with these revelations have automatically called bullshit on them.
  • Happens once in a while in Diabolik, as the characters may gloss over some particulars (for example, when narrating the flashback of "Diabolik, Who Are You?" the title character didn't say numerous important particulars), not know the truth (some of the facts from "Diabolik, Who Are You?" are later shown wrong in "The True Story of King's Island", as King flat-out lied to Diabolik), or flat-out lie (in "Diabolik's Secret" Eva is forced to tell a journalist a story about Diabolik that nobody knew... And lied, before mailing to their competitors evidence that it was a lie).
  • In Druid City, no one character in particular serves as a narrator in a traditional sense, but it does become clear that certain details about how some characters are drawn change after the character in question is disassociated with the lead character. For example, once Hunter Hastings (the lead) and Misa Saito (a character in question) end their second relationship and potential lasting friendship, Misa's hair is drawn in a completely different style and certain qualities that she has disappear. All of these changes are not commented upon by any other characters, so the assumption could be that Hunter's opinion was shaping her appearance for the audience to some degree.
  • It should be obvious at the beginning of Earth X that Uatu the Watcher is an unreliable narrator: he's an alien from a culture that has very different values from humanity's. It should be further obvious when Uatu does things like object to World War II on the grounds that "humanity was not yet ready for a master race". But most readers were used to Uatu's style of narration and problematic "neutral" moral stance from What If?, so Uatu manages to carry on the illusion that he's a friend of humanity for several more issues.
  • Fantastic Four #15 offers this introduction to the Thing.
  • The comic continuation of Gargoyles introduces the character Shari, a young woman and high-ranking member of the Illuminati with a penchant for telling stories, usually with a historical or mythological basis but which sometimes contradict each other. During a storyline within which she told a sequence of such tales to Thailog, he attempts to call her out when he notices one such contradiction...to which she simply repeats the first half of the catchphrase she begins all her stories with, emphasizing that they are not necessarily meant to be fully accurate retellings of events.
    Thailog: You said Moses gave the Stone to Gathelus and Scota...before leading the Hebrews out of Egypt!
    Shari: The story is told...
    [beat panel]
    Thailog: "Though who can say if it be true?" Right. Continue.
  • Dreadwing, the main antagonist of Gold Digger, has a mymior, a magical journal of sorts for dragons. He lost his original one, but he was able to create a "new and improved" mymior for himself and it's clear that Dreadwing's jaded and evil mindset has heavy influence over his writing, such as putting everyone except him in a negative light, trying to justify his many crimes and giving questionable overviews of his relationships with other characters.
  • John Constantine from Hellblazer tends to get unreliable, especially if he's depressed or drunk. If there was a scene where he actually didn't see it (but we readers do), he will tend to second guess everything and can only imagine what could have happened. Although not an accurate description, John's gory imagination makes up one hell of a comic panel.
  • Injustice: Gods Among Us deserves a mention as it is narrated by Harley Quinn who grossly exaggerates her involvement with the Insurgency.
    • Issue #7 of Year Two has Sinestro recapping his backstory and how his Green Lantern ring was forcefully taken from him. While his narration paints himself as a Well-Intentioned Extremist who was "liberating" his home world from a corrupt government, the comic itself shows that he was really a bloodthirsty tyrant who ruled his planet as a murderous dictator with a 0% Approval Rating (even his own wife killed herself to get away from him, but he's in denial, believing her to have been murdered).
  • An annual had Iron Man villain The Mandarin telling his life story to a film maker, with the captions showing his version of the events, and the panels showing the complete opposite.
  • Done by Vladek in Maus. He tells his story to his son and real-life author of the comic Art Spiegelman, but the sections shown from Spiegelman's creates a clear dissonance between Vladek's past and present self, to the point of where one would wonder how much of what he's saying about himself is true. He often portrays himself as generous to others going through the same struggle as him, but in the modern day he's shown to be extremely selfish and concerned with money. And one point, he even exclaims to Art, "At that time it wasn't anymore families. It was everybody to take care for himself!"
  • In The Mighty Thor #356, Hercules and Jarvis are taking a stroll in the park, and a group of kids ask him if he's stronger than Thor or not. Hercules begins to narrate their last encounter. Humbled and ashamed by the vast superiority of Hercules over him, Thor asked him for an arm wrestle, to see if he could regain the will to live. Jarvis laughs at the idea of Thor trying to defeat Hercules, and points out that he doesn't remember any such scene. "Oh, of course, it happened while you were on vacation, dear Jarvis!". So, Thor was defeated in a second, hit Hercules in the head with his hammer, began to destroy the city in a tantrum... Mr. Hercules, that doesn't make sense, aren't you making it up? Oh, this Jarvis may be a prince among butlets, but as a spectator he leaves much to desire. Where were we? Oh, that the fight got into the Empire State Building which was destroyed... but such a thing never made it to the newspapers, because the Avengers repaired it immediately! And he goes on, on, and on... that is, until he realizes that the kid asking isn't his fan but a fan of Thor, who feels sad for his hero. Where were we? Oh, that Thor was about to receive the final blow... and suddenly showed that he was holding his strength, beat the crap out of Hercules, and sent him to another state with a single punch. Yes, it really happened! Would Hercules lie to you?
  • This is one of the rules governing the stories in Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard.
    • June states that the stories can be neither "complete truths", nor "complete falsehoods." Exactly how much of any given story is true or false is left as an exercise to the reader, and they vary from the relatively plausible (a story of brief and unlikely companionship between mouse and bat), to the truly outlandish (a mouse king who rode into battle upon a weasel, a Guardmouse who saved a town from a flash flood and drought by swallowing the flood waters then spitting them back out to serve as a reservoir).
    • Amusingly, one of the most plausible stories — a play on "Androcles and the Lion" in which an African mouse manages to befriend a lion that's impressed with its bravery and resourcefulness (pulling the thorn out of the lion's paw is in there, but is outright established to be a secondary factor at best) — is discarded out of hand because the North American mice of the series have never seen or heard of lions or hyenas before, as well as the fact that it's told by a known lunatic who claims to have heard it from a beetle, which aren't talking animals in Mouse Guard.
  • In Phonogram, one issue of "The Singles Club" has a back-up strip that tells the story of the previous story, "Rue Britannia", from the perspective of a minor character in the previous work. The minor character is a friend of David Kohl, the protagonist of the previous story, and tagged along for part of it. As the minor character is not part of the world of the 'phonomancers' like Kohl, it's pretty clear from his telling that he really had no clue exactly what was going on, but it's nevertheless a reasonably faithful version of events. Until the end, whereupon the minor character suddenly produces a big gun, shoots what he thinks was the bad guy, saves Kohl's life and then swaggers off to have a threesome with two beautiful women. Kohl, needless to say, is not particularly impressed with this addition to the narrative.
  • The Sandman: Invoked with a story that Cluracan tells in a tavern. He talks about when he was sent as an envoy to an impoverished nation, was imprisoned, and managed to escape as well as destroy the corrupt ruler. The other patrons call him on this, and he freely confesses to adding and removing parts of the story to make it more interesting, though the only thing he outright admits to fabricating is a sword fight he had with the palace guards (he added it to spice up the climax, which he felt was otherwise pretty boring). He states they can choose to believe him or not. How much of it actually is true is left up to the audience's interpretation, as is the case with all the stories told in the tavern, though in his tale Cluracan is still an amoral ditz and a drunk who gets himself in trouble, requires Dream to save him, and dethrones the ruler out of revenge rather than duty, none of which is out of character.
  • The Scott Pilgrim series. It's revealed in the final book of the series, Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour, that Scott's memories of his past experiences with his ex-girlfriends were altered by Gideon Graves, meaning some of the events shown in the previous books may/may not be entirely false.
  • Done in Steelgrip Starkey and the All-Purpose Power Tool via thought balloons and dialog from Flynn "Flyin'" Ryan. Although he's secretly the tool's inventor and the mastermind behind Mr. Pilgrim, his thoughts often read like he's unaware of the big picture. Done particularly egregiously when he and a cohort are making plans, and he still refers to Mr. Pilgrim in the third person.
  • At the beginning of Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade, Kara tells a tale of abusive parents banishing her to Earth because she requested seasoning. Superman gives her an "Okay, now tell me the real story" stare and she relents.
  • The Superior Foes of Spider-Man: This is used as an excuse for any continuity errors- the series is framed as a story Boomerang is telling a stranger at a bar, and anytime he says something that doesn't make sense with other stories, the other ones were right and Boomerang is just lying to the guy.
  • In his debut in Supreme Power Emil Burbank shares his story to a military contact, making himself sound a promising and eager scientist. The panels show the truth, which is that Burbank is a murderous sociopath who doesn't care who he steps on to get ahead.
  • Teen Titans Go!:
    • In Issue #40, some H.I.V.E. 5 villains recall past run-ins with the Teen Titans. The flashbacks show that, in most cases, escaping the heroes took more luck and less skill than their narrations suggest.
    • When Beast Boy narrates his origin, he messes up several details and keeps forgetting where his parents were and which creature they were dealing with.
  • In the first annual for Thunderbolts Citizen V tells new member Jolt how the team formed. As Jolt is unaware they're really villains in disguise, V (aka Baron Zemo) alters details from locations (he says he met Techno in Minneapolis when the Fixer was in Atlanta) to their origins and the true reasons they formed.
  • Common in Twisted Tales. Examples include:
    • "Banjo Lessons": A man narrates, in increasingly detailed flashbacks, the circumstances that led him to have a psychotic break and murder his friends. He claims it's due to his suppressed rage over an incident where they killed and ate a dog while on their hunting trip, but a court sees through him and realizes the truth — "Banjo" the dog was actually their (black, while the men were white) hunting guide.
    • "Me An' Ol' Rex": A mentally disabled hick boy is beaten by his abusive father, but finds solace in "Rex", his dinosaur friend. Rex eventually grows bigger and begins eating people who the boy feeds to him. The boy eventually commits suicide because he knows he'll be blamed for the people's disappearance. We then discover that "Rex" is not a dinosaur, but his father, who was driven to cannibalism when locked in the shed for the boy's own protection. The dinosaur story was his delusion or lie.
  • In Twisted Toyfare Theatre, the perpetually drunk Iron Man tells Spider-Man about how Bucky died (again).
    Iron Man: I shtood my ground, but it wash too late! The Shweathogs got him...
    Captain America: "Sweathogs"? I thought Pez Dispensers were chasing you!
    Iron Man: Thash the weird part...
  • Rorschach in Watchmen is a good example of this, especially when he talks about himself. The artwork actually uses an unreliable framing device (one of many the work contains) to show "Rorschach" in the first person and Walter Kovacs in the 3rd person (walking around in the background of the same chapter), leading to The Reveal. This both misdirects the audience as to who Rorschach is behind the mask, and contributes to the sense of Rorschach's disconnection from "the man in the mirror", so to speak.
  • Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons: Going along with Written by the Winners, the opening narration invokes this saying there is no "objective" version of history and that this is simply the Amazons' version of it.


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