The following have their own pages:
Other Comic Books:
- 2000 AD:
- In the editorial for a 2005 issue of the 2000AD stablemate Judge Dredd Megazine detailed the difficulty the editor (then Alan Barnes) had on deciding whether or not to run a reprint of a 1970s strip Charley's War, a strip about the World War I. The first page of the re-run started with a full page spread of a Zeppelin Raid on London, with frightened citizens running into a Tube Station yelling "It'll be safe down there." To make matters worse the Editor recounted how this dilemma arose on the last day before the deadline, the 8th of July 2005, after a terror attack on the Tube. Ouch. He did, however, decide to run the strip.
- Zombo: The President of Earth is Donald Trump. He's a President Evil shouting gibberish who constantly fires everyone around him. This became less funny after Trump actually won the U.S. Presidential election in 2016 (a possibility he had boasted about for several years prior) with many accusing him of nativism and authoritarian policies.
- The ending to the Adventure Time Graphic Novels Volume 1: Playing With Fire has Finn and Flame Princess confessing their love towards one another, even sharing a kiss like they are a happy couple. Cue Frost & Fire where Finn Took a Level in Jerkass and through his manipulations and some predictions, Finn and Flame Princess broke up and Finn has since became estranged from her as a result.
- The first Aggretsuko comic focuses on a strain of mutated flu specific to the company called the "C-Virus", spread by employees not taking sick days and turning them into green, shuffling zombies. This was February 2020...
- Asterix: The Chariot Race (published in late 2017) features a Roman antagonist by the name of Coronavirus (even more awkward are the massive crowds of people chanting his name). As a bonus, the story takes place in Italy, the first country out of Asia to suffer an outbreak of the virus and one of the countries in Europe hit hardest by it.
- Intentionally invoked in Atomic Robo: in flashbacks, Robo and his company Tesladyne are based in New York City, and have all kinds of adventures there over the years with super-science mishaps, enemies with old grudges, and general weirdness. Tesladyne moves out of NYC almost immediately after 9/11 because Robo realizes that nobody in-universe would find that stuff surrounding his company remotely tolerable anymore.
- Another 9/11 one: The Big Book Of The '70s (published in 2000) had a section on the rise of terrorism, which ended with the first WTC bombing.
- In the only Captain Electron comic, the titular hero is called to rush to Manhattan while in the middle of a separate "computer science" mission. When he arrives in New York, he finds a plane...buried halfway in the Chrysler Building.
- Part of Chaos! Comics character Chastity's backstory was being molested as a child by her father. Justiniano, the artist for Theatre of Pain, the miniseries that detailed her backstory, was arrested for possession of child pornography.
- One of the German Club Nintendo comics (Mario in Mariozilla) had Mario turning into a giant and going to New York City to contact Dr. Light for help. On his way to Dr. Light's residence, Mario accidentally destroys several buildings, including the Twin Towers
◊, which is Played for Laughs. - Disney Ducks Comic Universe:
- Several Italian Disney comics featured Uncle Scrooge as the owner of a newspaper that always seemed to be teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. This was always played for laughs. It doesn't become so funny once you consider the present situation of print media. It gets even worse by the fact that some writers portray the paper as a normal functioning respected news source, giving a reader that reads the stories in a certain order the idea that the paper was a successful venture that started spiraling into the abyss.
- Also concerning Scrooge: a Don Rosa story has a floating money bin (It's a Long Story, involving alien phlebotinum) flying through twin towers◊... as you can see in the image (one of the balloons has an asterisk), a recent reprint has a footnote saying the comic was made before 9/11 (1997, to be precise).
- Elvis Shrugged: In the story, the record business has collapsed due to so many quality musicians leaving, causing record sales to plummet. This was published in 1993, prior to the debut of the World Wide Web and, later, the rise of Napster and iTunes, which would cause the sales of actual CDs to plummet, not due to a significant change in what was popular, but because it was easier and cheaper.
- G.I. Joe: In an issue of the Marvel series the Joes go against a Middle-Eastern dictator that commanded an army of radical zealots and was backed by a Terror group. Twenty years later America went to war against several Middle-East countries ruled by dictators backed by zealots with ties to terrorist groups.
- In Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, there are several insert strips of a character called Happy Noodle Boy, drawn by Johnny himself, who frequently shouts out nonsense phrases at others before being shot brutally by a bystander. Cue the panel later on when Johnny remarks that he was bullied as a kid, and that they made fun of his skinny frame by calling him "Noodle Boy". And then the realization comes that Happy Noodle Boy most likely represents Johnny's desire to give in to his inner insanity before dying and relieving himself of the pain he feels.
- A 1995 Judge Dredd arc had Dredd travel back in time to prevent an alien disease from spreading. To do this, he had to blow up a plane...over New York...in 2001. The twin towers are visible in the background as the plane crashes into the river. The scene was even on the front cover with the caption "Airport 2001".
- In a one-off story from 1978, a criminal demonstrates his power by causing the World Trade Center to collapse. Ouch.
- The end of Kick-Ass Volume 1, where Chris sets up his Avenging the Villain story-line by quoting The Joker, with volume 2 crossing the Moral Event Horizon by causing a mass shoot-out in a suburban area. The Aurora Theater shootings make this uncomfortable to some. The fact that he started with a group of children makes it even worse after the Newtown shootings.
- Memetic is about a deadly meme spreading through social media and turning people into rage-filled psychos ready to kill each other. This is something that could never actually happen, right? Consider the spread of the QAnon conspiracy theory, born as a joke (probably) in a 4Chan thread in 2017. It basically states that the world is in the clutch of a cabal of Satanist cannibal pedophiles who kidnap and torture kids to extract an elixir of long life, and Donald Trump is the only one who can oppose them. It started as a fringe belief and in 2020 it became a full-blown cult, spreading through internet beyond the borders of the USA and all over the world, thanks to the effects of the real-life pandemic that forced almost the whole planet to stay inside their homes for months, and to the increasingly more polarized political landscape of the USA. Of course it did not cause the collapse of society in three days (as in the comic book), but some of its believers have been involved in crimes (murder included), the FBI listed its most extremist believers as a potential domestic terrorism threat, and there have been numerous cases of people being forced to cut ties with family members and lifelong friends after they have become akin to religious extremists after following QAnon-based social media pages.
- The first issue of Miracleman: The Silver Age shows young superhumans LARPing as Kaiju and costumed heroes on a pacific island, destroying a replica city. Part of the scorekeeping involves destroying buildings, and both towers of the World Trade Center are included in the damage.
- The Spanish slapstick comic Mortadelo y Filemón had tons of minor background jokes, but the most infamous is this panel from a 1992 issue, in which an airplane is seen crashed into one of the Twin Towers.
- My Little Pony: FIENDship Is Magic:
- Celestia calling Sombra "a Unicorn whose heart was as black as night" in Season 3. He's a Living Shadow made by an Eldritch Abomination crystal to rule the Empire via The Power of Hate, and after years of failing to Screw Destiny by doing good, he finally snaps and invokes Then Let Me Be Evil.
- Everything about Princess Luna's guilt over Nightmare Moon now that we see what she did to her subjects and how she plagued ponykind with horrible nightmare for 1000 years. This was all before Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep? revealed that her guilt was far, far worse then anything fans predicted.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW):
- In the first comic arc, the Mane Six jokingly call Chrysalis "Cheese Legs". In My Little Pony: FIENDship Is Magic, it's shown to be the result of injuries inflicted by Celestia hundreds of years prior, not to say they weren't well deserved.
- In Issue 74, when Zephyr Breeze appears, he and Fluttershy's relationship seems to be much better than it was previously, with the two having affectionate nicknames for each other and playfully joking around. She even calmly helps pull him out of a panic attack. Come Season 9 episode "Sparkle's Seven" when Fluttershy mentions him to Spike, she says that he (Zephyr) could learn a lot from Spike about being a good little brother.
- My Little Pony Micro Series:
- Fluttershy is worried about anyone finding about her secret chamber in her micro-issue. Normally, this would be a funny joke, but considering the fan-made animation, SHED.MOV, this can border on creepy.
- Back in the early 1990's, Valiant Comics released Nintendo Comics System. One of those comics was Game Boy, using characters from Super Mario Land. The first story had Tatanga and his army invade the World Trade Center. The second story had Tatanga and his army hijack an airplane, then hijack the space shuttle Colombia.
- Issue #7 of Paper Girls (published in July 2016, just months before the US Presidential Election that year) features a discussion as to whether or not Hillary Clinton — a woman — could be elected president in modern-day America. Flash forward to November... she wasn't elected.
- A deliberate example occurred during the "Rainmaker" arc of PS238... While Tyler, Zodon and Guardian Angel are sent outside during the rain on flag-duty, Zodon riffs about how Tyler's 'mere human' immune defense system surely cannot withstand the rain and is likely to cause his imminent death. A short while later, The Rainmaker temporarily neutralizes Guardian Angel's powers in order to get past her; when she then proceeds to stand out in the rain for over an hour, she catches a multitude of opportunistic bugs... which her immune defense system is entirely unprepared to handle, since it had been completely protected by her "Guardian" power until then. Since her powers return shortly after, they proceed to 'protect' her from syringes and inoculations that could've saved her. Less than a day later, she's dead. She got better.
- A Sesame Street comic from around 1976 showed a giant Cookie Monster climbing up the Twin Towers (possibly in reference to Dino De Laurentiis's King Kong, an upcoming release at that point), having taken huge bites out of them... Obviously not so silly in a post-9/11 world.
- The Metal Virus arc of Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW) hit its lowest point storywise (with almost the entire world having been converted into Zombots, including several main cast members like Shadow, Vanilla, Vector, and Tangle, The Restoration losing their spirits (especially Cream and Whisper), Eggman and Starline losing control of the Zombots, Sonic beginning to slowly lose his ability to fight off his infection, and The Deadly Six taking control of the Zombots and wreaking further havoc upon the world) as the pandemic started spreading around the world. In fact, the comic itself ended up being shelved for three months after IDW's distributor, Diamond Comic Distributors, temporarily stopped distributing new products due to the pandemic.
- An in-universe example (or in-multiverse, anyway) from an issue of the early 80's Marvel Star Trek comic, where the Enterprise is on a mission to help evacuate a world that's about to die:Kirk: But, these people will have lost their world! Imagine how they feel!
Spock: Captain...at times like this I am most thankful that a Vulcan cannot!- Two decades later, in the 2009 film...
- Star Trek: Early Voyages: In "The Fallen, Part One", which was published in 1997, the World Trade Center can be prominently seen in the New York City skyline in 2254.
- Tank Girl had an early story in which the Devil appears on Jimmy Savile's distinctive Jim'll Fix It armchair, and then gets defeated by being made to believe that he is Jimmy Savile. Funny at the time, but now...
- One of the very first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Mirage) comics had the bad guy threatening to collapse the Twin Towers if he wasn't paid a ransom of thousands of dollars. A new re-print, which had a note at the very edge of the paper "(Remember this comic was released a long time before 9/11)"
- On the subject of 9/11, the Transformers Marvel Comics featured Galvatron visiting an alternate universe, where New York had been devastated and Rodimus Prime's corpse was strung up between the smoking stumps of the Twin Towers.
- The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: During the The Transformers: Dark Cybertron crossover, Getaway's reaction to seeing the Rodpod, a vehicle designed to look like Rodimus's head, is a disbelieving, "And this guy is your leader." In the "Dying of the Light" arc, Getaway betrays Rodimus and leads a mutiny against him...citing that specific moment as the one where he decided Rodimus had to go.
- The Gamebooks Role-Playing Game You Are Maggie Thatcher was a Character Exaggeration of the much-reviled prime minister, and yet the whole thing did not look all too implausible in real life. For example, one of the options was to privatize the police force, which David Cameron actually proposed years later.
