Voodoo Shark / Comic Books

• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
  • EndGame, a four issue story arc leading up to and including issue 50, has become notorious as a mystery whose plot twists and reveals only raised more questions then they answered:
    • The plot hinges around Sonic being framed for the death of Princess Sally during a mission in Robotropolis, after Sonic apparently cut Sally's rope while she scaled a building, making Sally fall to her death. The truth was explained when Drago revealed to his girlfriend Hershey the Cat that he had been paid off by Robotnik, and had duped Hershey into wearing a fullbody Sonic costume that had a special eyepiece that made her see Sally as Snively, meaning Hershey was accidentally responsible for the deed. Ignoring questions about foreshadowing, this reveal made little sense. First of all, there's no explanation for how Drago convinced Hershey to dress up as Robotnik's most hated enemy. Furthermore, the suit is stated to make anyone viewed by the wearer look like Snively, which raises the questions of why Hershey didn't hear Sally, or why an eyepiece that made everyone look like someone else would ever be invented. Third, the whole thing had several factors that could have gone wrong, like Hershey being in the wrong place at the wrong time or seeing the wrong person (or more than one person at the same time, for that matter). Finally, another part of Robotnik's plan involves him replacing King Acorn with an Auto-Automaton, a lifelike robot duplicate which had been an established part of Robotnik's forces, which just begs the question of why Robotnik didn't just make a Sonic Auto-Automaton instead of the costume.
    • Sonic eventually runs into Dulcy the Dragon, who realizes he's innocent despite Dulcy not being present during the mission in Robotropolis, because dragons can tell when a person is lying and are incapable of lying themselves. Beyond the fact that this ability had never been mentioned before, it raises the question of why no one brought this up when Dulcy earlier met with the Freedom Fighters. Dulcy even gives an "As You Know" to Geoffrey and Knuckles about her ability to sense truth, indicating that the Freedom Fighters already know that Dulcy has this power. So if Dulcy's truth-sense could prove whether Sonic was guilty or innocent without fail, how did no one consider that? The Freedom Fighters might have forgotten about Dulcy's power in the heat of the moment after Sally's apparent murder, but the idea that no one would so much as suggest using Dulcy's truth-sense to figure out if Sonic was the true culprit when Dulcy was physically present creates the Voodoo Shark.
    • Robotnik's plan centers around the Ultimate Annihilator, a Doomsday Device capable of erasing a target from existence. At the climax of the story, Robotnik fires the weapon on Knothole Village, enraging Sonic and leading to their final battle, after which the weapon is overloaded by earlier sabotage and erases the Doctor himself, with Sonic also getting hit in the blast. However, Sonic comes across Knothole shortly thereafter, both looking none the worse for wear. Dr. Quack explains that Snively had reprogrammed the Annihilator to target only Robotnik, in order to usurp Robotnik's empire. This raises the question of why Snively wouldn't want to erase the Freedom Fighters, considering he views them as an enemy and would have to defeat them to secure his power.
    • Sally was meant to be Killed Off for Real, but the higher-ups vetoed it. To get around this, a scene was added of Dr. Quack handing off her death certificate to Robotnik, later explaining that Robotnik, having learned of Knothole's location, had kidnapped Quack's family and forced him to pronounce her dead. In reality, Sally was in a coma, and Quack had placed her in a healing chamber disguised as a coffin. This raises the question of why Quack, despite being privy to Robotnik's scheme, never told this to anyone else.
  • When talking about What Could Have Been with his run on the comic, several of former writer Ken Penders' explanations for the events in "Mobius: 25 Years Later" come off as only creating more plot holes than they fixed.
    • Locke's sickness and death was due to cancer he developed from a bad interaction with his self-experimentation to create Knuckles and the Master Emerald. If that's so, why doesn't Knuckles have cancer, even though he resulted from those same experiments?
    • Rotor's Word of Gay reveal would not have impacted his modern-day depiction; he would've only realized he was gay five years prior to the events of Mobius: 25 Years Later. After he was already married to a woman. Ignoring the fact that having Rotor only be gay in the future means nothing to the readers, having Rotor find out that he's gay so late in life, and during what's implied to be a long and fulfilling marriage, really strains the credibility of this reveal.
    • Also according to Penders, this was the significance of a line in issue #157 where Eggman calls him "dear Rotor", and Sonic assumes this means Eggman knows something he doesn't. The implication is that Eggman will out Rotor if he doesn't cooperate. But that brings up the question of why Rotor's homosexuality is worthy of being blackmail in the first place. Simply put, for this blackmail to work, the Freedom Fighters would not only have to be ragingly homophobic to the point that they'd kick out Rotor for being gay — a big point of contention all by itself — but they'd also have to be pretty stupid not to see that Eggman would be trying to sow chaos in their team. What's more, Rotor has been a Freedom Fighter for decades at the time of Eggman's threat; this blackmail would thus also be predicated on the fact that, in that length of time, nobody else noticed anything that would suggest that Rotor was gay.
    • According to Penders' original idea, "Mobius: 25 Years Later" is supposed to be the "true" future, and the one where Nicole came from, which doesn't really make that much sense. First of all, the story was built around time needing to be fixed to prevent The End of the World as We Know It, and Ken's run ended with Sonic going back in time to do just that. No way you can claim it to be the one true future, in that case. Second, unless Past Nicole was destroyed before the story started — and Word of God confirmed she wasn't — both Nicoles should exist at the same time. Thus, the two Nicoles should have the info they need to figure out what happened and how to fix it, but the story claims they don't. It was later retconned that Nicole comes from the same Alternate Universe that Eggman came from, and that the "X Years Later" Zone was a separate one from both of the others.
  • In Ian Flynn's follow-up, it was mandated that Shadow be the Big Bad, having conquered the world in Sonic's absence. The reason Shadow was able to do this already confused many, since there was never any explanation on Sonic's disappearance or subsequent reappearance other than time travel. But the fans were mostly wondering why a Shadow Archetype Byronic Hero like Shadow was suddenly a tyrant. The explanation was given in Mobius: 30 Years Later that Shadow was doing it for Maria. Unfortunately, this made just as little sense, since Maria's wish for Shadow was to give people a chance to be happy; Maria's words would really have to be contorted to justify Shadow's actions.
  • It was established that Sally married Shadow in this universe too. When Shadow is defeated, it's revealed that Sally still loved Sonic, and only married Shadow to try and tame him. How Sally thought marrying Shadow would placate his tyrannical ambition in the slightest is not explained.
  • The Sonic Adventure arc had normal, non-mutated humans appear. Naturally, Ken Penders wanted to make a separation between Overlanders (mutant humans) and non-mutant humans. A simple solution would have been to have an invisible difference, like Overlanders having an extra internal organ or a slightly different bone structure or something you wouldn't notice just by casually looking at the two subspecies. Instead, the "explanation" is that Overlanders have Four-Fingered Hands, whilst normal humans have five. The problem is that the comics had already introduced Overlanders with five fingered hands, like Arial and Athena. Not only that, but Dr. Robotnik's new robot body has five fingered hands, despite it being designed by and for an Overlander. This would eventually be made moot during Ian Flynn's era, where all the Overlanders (including Snively) would be redesigned to have five fingered hands.
• Batman:
  • The biggest bugbear in the mythos is why Batman doesn't just kill The Joker. Many answers have come forth, and most of them have additional holes in either the story or logic which open up. Whatever the Watsonian explanation is, the Doylist reason Batman doesn't kill the Joker is because Joker stories sell well.
    • Batman sometimes claims that if he breaks his one rule about never killing anyone, he won't have the willpower to make himself stop killing all criminals. Thing is, Batman has killed criminals before — Ra's Al-Ghul is a madman Bats is willing to kill, but Ra's has the advantage of having access to Lazarus Pits, so he won't stay dead. So does killing Ra's Al-Ghul somehow not count? And considering Batman has so much Heroic Willpower that he's used the power ring of a Green Lantern before (which is fueled by the willpower of its user), the idea that Bats wouldn't be able to restrain himself is a huge stretch.
    • The claim that killing the Joker won't reduce crime in Gotham is based on the idea that there will be an Evil Power Vacuum, and someone just as bad if not worse will appear when Joker is gone. But certain arcs make clear that even an Ancient Conspiracy like the Court of Owls has nothing on the Joker in terms of destructiveness, not to mention viciousness and sheer cruelty.
    • Commissioner Gordon is occasionally said to be forcing Batman's hand, declaring that if Bats ever kills the Joker, Gordon will consider Batman just as crazy as all of the other super-criminals and bring him down. The Joker is a notorious Cop Killer, and it's not like cops themselves never kill anyone. It's considered a risk of the job, both in-universe and in real life, that police officers might have to kill people in the line of duty. So the idea that Batman wouldn't get a pass on killing the Joker after all the good Batman's done for Gotham City and the Gotham PD seems awfully harsh, especially when Gordon is on good terms with Batman in all other aspects. It also opens the can of worms of why no cop has ever shot the Joker dead — Gordon and certain people under his command may be knights in shining armor looking to have him arrested come hell or high water, but Gotham is canonically the second most corrupt police force in America — no dirty cops ever had the desire to shoot the Joker as a contract kill, ironic use of self-defense, or just because they were having a bad day and wanted to vent their frustrations on somebody that no one would miss?
    • Claiming that the decision to kill the Joker should only be in the hands of the law is shown to be rather naive. New Jersey, where Gotham is sometimes said to be, is a state with no death penalty. And even if it had the death penalty, Joker gets sent to Arkham Asylum and breaks out with such frequency, or implements plans while supposedly contained therein, that Joker Might as Well Not Be in Prison at All even when he does get sent up the river.
    • Post-Rebirth, Batman reveals that the Joker, if killed, will exude a variation of the Joker Toxin contained in his heart that will immediately turn anyone nearby into a Joker clone. This is the origin of The Batman Who Laughs. But that explanation has a few problems. How does the Joker have the knowledge to implement a neuro-toxin that powerful into his heart? He's good with chemicals but that still seems like it should be well beyond his capabilities. If the Joker has the ability to create a variant of the Joker Toxin that powerful, why not mass-produce the stuff? Sure, Joker clones would be unpredictable, but Joker isn't about long-term planning. In fact, Joker once waltzed into the Batcave and killed himself, knowing he could corrupt Batman into becoming another Batman Who Laughs, which was only averted by Alfred resuscitating Joker and Batman managing to get a cure in time. Does every other Bat-villain have similar countermeasures like this? And if they don't, what's Batman's excuse with them? Couldn't Batman kill Joker in a manner that doesn't involve going anywhere near him, like poison gas or launching him into space? Plus, the Joker died at the end of Joker's Last Laugh, but no toxin activated before he was resuscitated. So what's stopping Batman killing Joker now that it's been revealed that what Bats was so worried about won't happen? Finally, and perhaps most glaringly: how does Batman know the Joker did that?
    • Also, on a side note, it’s worth noting that in many Elseworld stories and alternate continuities where the Joker died (Like in Kingdom Come, Injustice or The Burtonverse), none of these Jokers had anything like that miraculously convenient toxin. Otherwise, anyone who was close to their dead bodies at the time of their deaths (Like Magog or High Councillor Kal-El) would have presumably been Jokerized, which proves that only the Joker from the Batman Who Laughs’s dark universe had that toxin in his heart. Also, even if they did have it, the toxin itself seems to have a limited range, otherwise the Batman Who Laughs wouldn’t have been the only one infected when it was released. So what’s stopping someone from just killing the Joker from really far away, out of the toxin’s area of effect (like with a sniper rifle or any other kind of long-range weapon, for example) to make sure that they don’t get turned into another Joker themselves? Or alternatively, why not just give the Joker a heart surgery to remove or disable the toxin device before executing him?
    • And The Batman Who Laughs miniseries has Batman deliberately expose himself to the toxin in order to think like his counterpart. So he's not that concerned about it.
    • The Joker's own explanation is possibly also worth mentioning — after dismissing any idea that it could be a moral or legal issue, he thinks that Batman doesn't kill him for the same reason he doesn't kill Batman — because he wants the "game" to continue. Obviously, we're not meant to agree with that one ... but it's as close to "because Joker sells comics" as you can get in-universe.
  • Batman fans were understandably outraged when Stephanie Brown, the fourth Robin was brutally killed off during Batman: War Games. Due to the backlash from fans, she was brought back several years later, with the reveal that she had faked her death and gone into hiding. Though most fans were willing to swallow a clumsy retcon in the name of Stephanie returning and Leslie Thompkins (who was changed from deliberately letting her die to orchestrating Steph's time in hiding) no longer being totally unlikeable, it still raised a few questions:
    • Why did she need to hide? It didn't seem like Black Mask cared enough to be hunting her down. If she needed time to recover, it'd probably be better to do it in a place with Batman's resources rather than the next continent over.
    • What reason was there to keep this hidden from everyone, including people like Tim Drake and Cassandra Cain who could definitely be trusted?
    • Most glaringly: Stephanie's ghost showed up twice in the pages of Batgirl (2000), and was clearly more than a hallucination, giving Cassandra advice she couldn't possibly know.
  • When DC redesigned Batman's costume in the 90s for the Troika storyline, they decided to release a book called Knight Gallery, which showed off the various rejected concepts. However, to explain the book's existence further and offer a framing device, they offered the idea that Batman himself had created the artwork, and the reader was essentially looking at Batman's own concepts, facilitated by little notes in the margins supposedly by the man himself. Unfortunately, this results in most of the notes making very little sense, because the concepts are too finished to look like something Batman sketched up in a brainstorming session: for instance, he remarks on one fully-colored and inked illustration dripping with detail to "drop the shoulder spikes." It also makes very little sense that instead of refining the designs one at a time, all the designs seem to have been made from scratch. And on top of all that, why would Batman spend what looks like hours drawing, inking, and coloring dozens of costume designs that are almost completely cosmetic? Shouldn't he be, you know, stopping crimes?
  • Batman readers have long wondered why Bruce Wayne, given his mind-boggling wealth, doesn't pour some funding into fixing Gotham's rotted infrastructure, or at the very least get some competent doctors at Arkham Asylum. Some stories, including Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, try to explain this by implying that Gotham's Wretched Hive status is the result of a supernatural curse that's trapped it in perpetual misery; in Serious House, for example, Amadeus Arkham ends up imprisoned in his own asylum and scratches a summoning spell into the walls of his cell, binding a bat-like "spirit of madness" to the place and dooming it to eternal insanity. That would be fine and dandy if Batman didn't personally know magic-wielding heroes who interact with demons and hellspawn on a regular basis. Yes, we know that Superman Stays Out of Gotham, but given that Bruce is supposed to be the epitome of logic and intelligence, you'd think he would swallow his pride enough to realize that all the training in the world can't help an ordinary human fix a problem that's magical in nature.
• Captain America:
  • Captain America's shield is described as being made of Vibranium, a material that's said to absorb all kinetic energy from impacts. If that were the case, it raises a host of physics problems: bullets should stop dead rather than ricochet off it, it shouldn't be able to actually hurt people by bashing them with it, and most damningly, it shouldn't be able to be moved at all, since moving an object imparts kinetic energy to it. That's fine; they've retconned the shield to be a vibranium/steel alloy (some sources call it vibranium/adamantium, but adamantium wasn't invented in-universe until a decade later) rather than pure vibranium (the alloy being created via an unrepeatable accident). But then, how was the shield crafted in the first place, if the alloy would absorb and/or deflect any energies directed towards it?
  • Captain America's shield, after being broken to pieces in Fear Itself, is repaired by Tony Stark, adding the Asgardian metal Uru. This doesn't explain why a broken and repaired shield, with the addition of a metal known for its heaviness, would function just as well aerodynamically as before, not showing any change in weight when carried or thrown, especially if this is unenchanted Uru. And if the Uru is enchanted, because Tony Stark just knows how to work enchantments into it, then why leave the shield as it is without adding flying and laser beams (especially given that this is Tony Stark we're talking about)?
  • Captain America was famously frozen near the end of World War II after falling into the Atlantic Ocean, and was found decades later after Namor accidentally freed his body from a block of ice. This falls under Artistic License – Biology, with the handwaved explanation that the Super Serum in Cap's veins prevented him from freezing to death or drowning. John Ney Reiber and Chuck Austen apparently thought this was too unbelievable, and instead came up with a story revealing that Cap never fell into the ocean, and that he'd actually been put into cryogenic stasis by the government after being given Fake Memories from a virtual reality helmet. Rather than being found when the Sub-Mariner came across an Inuit tribe that was worshiping his body, he was instead found when Namor stumbled upon the abandoned lab where his stasis tube was being held. So apparently, the science behind the Super Serum allowing Cap to survive freezing temperatures was too far fetched, but the government having access to the advanced virtual technology required to recreate realistic fake memories in 1945 somehow wasn't? It also raises the question of why the government left Cap to rot in a derelict lab somewhere to begin with, when they clearly thought he was a valuable enough asset to warrant being kept alive and frozen in the first place. Fittingly, the story was rendered Canon Discontinuity, with Captain America's classic story being canon again.
• Fantastic Four (2018) introduces a jaw-dropping change to Franklin's lore: he was never a mutant; he just subconsciously changed his DNA to make it look like he was one, because he idolized them so much. This creates at least three major plot holes:
  • There was just a mini re-establishing Franklin as a mutant, and Sinister had acquired Franklin's DNA because he was a mutant.
  • Franklin was seen as a mutant before he would even be old enough to know what a mutant even was, he was a mutant during a time where they were hated and despised, and he mostly received prejudice from the populace for being a mutant.
  • Xavier exiles him from Krakoa for not being a mutant, despite multiple books establishing that non-mutant allies are welcome on the island. And he would certainly be welcome, considering he was shown to have a lot of friends there, and most of Krakoa's leaders would be ambivalent to him, or are people who cherish him as a friend.
• The Flash:
  • The Flash (Volume 1) #167: "The Real Origin of the Flash" revealed that Barry Allen had not been given his powers by a lightning bolt hitting a shelf of chemicals, but by a magical extradimensional being (every hero needs one, apparently) named Mopee. Just one of the many problems with this is pointed out by Barry in the actual story, when after Mopee leaves, he suddenly realises this doesn't explain how Kid Flash got his powers.
  • After his return in 2009, Geoff Johns was retconned that the Speed Force that all speedsters tap into is actually generated by Barry Allen, and he's not just another user of it. This was seemingly to explain why he couldn't be disconnected from it or have his speed drained like everyone else could, and to make him seem more important to the mythos. However, it was established that the Speed Force runs across all of time meaning it existed before Barry was ever born. Not only that, but Barry has lost his powers before. This retcon was so poorly received and created so many questions regarding how it could happen that every writer after Johns hasn't mentioned it and in fact directly contradicted it, with the Speed Force once again being an extradimensional energy source that has always existed and Barry losing his powers numerous times.
  • The "Finish Line" arc reveals that Eobard Thawne possesses a Negative Speed Force power that allows him to hypnotise people. Since he does this at superspeed, nobody knows he did it, so he can essentially push people into doing things that he himself says they'd never do. This is used to explain disliked character choices, like Bart ignoring the Flash Family to hang out with Young Justice, Barry and Wally coming to blows in "Flash War", and most importantly, Wally covering up his manslaughter at Sanctuary. The problem is that Eobard is a time traveller and, combined with his well-known penchant for messing with the timeline, this should make him nigh unbeatable, especially if he used it to win a fight. Instead, he only apparently used it to make characters act out of character during the specific times fans disliked. Oh, and in some of the instances he used it, the characters were alert and channelling the Speed Force, so they should have seen him since Eobard is not an especially fast speedster compared to others.
• Flashpoint (DC Comics) revealed that the timeline changes that happened because Barry traveled back in time to save his mother were the result of the Speed Force causing timeline ripples. However, some readers noted that Nora's death at the hands of Thawne was already a timeline change, and no timeline ripples occurred then. Often, this is blamed on the Negative Speed Force, the source of Eobard Thawne's speed, being incapable of making as drastic a timeline change compared to its positive counterpart, which turns the Speed Force into the living embodiment of No Good Deed Goes Unpunished in the process.
• Heroes in Crisis: The resolution to the murderer mystery, that Wally West failed to keep his internalised Speed Force energy in check which created an electric storm that killed everyone but him, has a few problems, which is why it was impossible to figure out.
  1. The Speed Force is not something that is internalised, but an external force tapped into. It doesn't need to be kept in check evident by how casual every single speedster is and in how they use it, and how useful an at-will explosion would be for other users who haven't used it this way. This explosion was later retconned into the Speed Force trying to expel someone interfering with it from within in a Flash story years later.
  2. If this need to contain the Speed Force was real, then why wasn't Wally equipped with power dampening technology which is shown to exist in the DCU? If that's not possible, why wasn't Wally kept separate from everyone else while having his mental health crisis that would definitely impede his ability to keep the Speed Force in check?
  3. Electrocution should have been easy to determine as the cause of death. Making all of this worse is that Barry Allen was one of the lead investigators and is a trained CSI and a Flash, and would know all about this struggle to contain the Speed Force if it were true, and he'd probably know if Speed Force electrocution differed from regular electrocution.
• The Incredible Hulk: There was the attempt to absolve the Hulk of any major charges for his rampages by arguing that, improbably, he's never killed anyone during them. Bruce is so concerned he might and also that intelligent, he subconsciously restrains the Hulk and calculates his actions so he never kills anyone. This idea is mainly the pet of writer Greg Pak, and other Marvel writers have ignored it before, after, and even during Pak's tenure on the character. Brian Michael Bendis, for example, used a tie-in to establish that the Hulk rampage leading to Pak's epic Planet Hulk arc killed more than two dozen bystanders.
• Infinite Crisis: It was revealed that the pocket paradise which Alexander Luthor had created for himself, Earth-Two Superman and Superboy-Prime at the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths was actually more of a baren dimension, sealed off from the rest of reality by a crystal wall which showed all the DCU's events in real time. The crisis proper started when Superboy-Prime, disgusted by darkening of the universe and its heroes' corruption, punched the wall in frustration, shattering it and freeing himself and the others to try creating a Merged Reality, whether it wanted remaking or not. This would have worked well as an allegorical image, but the creators stated that the wall was an actual physical representation of the DCU's timeline, and used the damage caused by Superboy's punch as a catch-all handwave to explain away some of the event's less explainable facts, most notably "dead Robin" Jason Todd suddenly waking up in his grave and Maxwell Lord's completely-out-of-nowhere betrayal. The fans were neither convinced nor amused, and "SUPERBOY PUNCHED TIME!" became something of a rallying cry. Since then, the editorial staff seems to have realized its mistake, and has been at pains to re-retcon some of it. For example, lines from the Batman & Robin title strongly suggest that Todd's body was actually rejuvenated in a Lazarus Pit, which makes for a far more palatable explanation. The single comic book issue devoted to explaining this stated that Jason Todd's mind was rejuvenated by a Lazarus Pit... after Superboy-Prime punched him back to life. Later stories seem to have quietly dropped the Superboy part, and this was helped by Batman: Under the Red Hood setting a strong precedent for the Lazarus Pit explanation that it was made canon later.
• JLA: Act of God: Every explanation or handwave as to why this group of heroes was affected by The Black Wave or where this group went just generated more questions without really answering the first one. The Black Wave only temporarily stopped the tech heroes' and villains' gear from working (we see Steel, Booster Gold and cybernetic villain Sonar back in action). So why did Kyle Rayner's Green Lantern ring (and Star Sapphire's gem) and Atom's shrinking belt stay inert? Why did the Black Wave affect heroes of extra-normal origin (like Superman, Aquaman, Starfire or Martian Manhunter), since they had no metagene to neutralize? The magic heroes suddenly vanished - so how are Wonder Woman (empowered by the Greek Gods), Billy Batson (Captain Marvel is explicitly magic-powered), Linda Danvers (an angel), Metamorpho (empowered by an Egyptian god artifact) and Red Tornado (at the time was an Air Elemental) still around? And any number of the above should've kept Hank Henshaw (the Cyborg Superman) off the board. Also, the answer the comic all but states ("God did it") comes with its own questions. Namely A) Why? B) If this, indeed, is some sort of punishment for metahuman arrogance, why then allow them to pick up where they left off with technology? C) Why allow them to truly start over via Superman and Wonder Woman's son? The comic also never addresses what happened to the rest of the Amazons or Atlanteans (or Gorilla City) or any other such meta enclave on Earth (probably to avoid making "The Wave" responsible for several genocides).
• Legion of Super-Heroes:
  • The 60s comics were fairly notorious for Monochrome Casting and Humans Are White, with the common joke being that the team had more blue people on it than black, and even crowd shots often being edited to remove black people. In the 70s, it was revealed that this was because... all the black people on Earth had become racial separatists, and now lived on an island off the African coast that occasionally vanishes entirely. On top of being staggeringly racist (Mike Grell even had a Writer Revolt over it), it raised countless questions. How did the entire black population of Earth become racial separatists, a viewpoint that was controversial even back then? Did Earth become so racist at some point that even native Africans wanted to leave their homelands? Why are black people still the biggest prejudice target when aliens are walking around? How can this one island support a billion-plus black population? Why didn't they just colonize another planet if they wanted their own society so badly? Every writer since has completely ignored the idea, and for good reason.
  • The post-Crisis Superman storyline Time and Time Again had Superman bouncing between the past and the future, with the future being successive periods in Legion history, beginning with the classic version. However, while Legion history was mostly untouched (Superboy aside) by Crisis on Infinite Earths, it was completely rewritten by Zero Hour: Crisis in Time!, which didn't affect Superman's history. Four years later, a story in which the Time Trapper recreated the sixties Legion had Superman's encounter with them take place in the middle of it. Since the Time Trapper's temporal alteration isn't meant to be "real", this doesn't entirely make sense, and doesn't explain the encounters with the 70s and Five Years Later Legion, unless they also took place during this story, and he somehow ended up in Time Trapper's other pocket timelines. Which doesn't fit how Time and Again is supposed to work and overcomplicates both stories. Since Time and Time Again was seven years old at this point, the simplest solution would have been to just ignore it, and if anyone asked say "Yes, he still travelled to the future, but it was a different one".
• The Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty graphic novel has to explain Liquid's repeated spiritual possession of Ocelot, which goes unexplained in the original game. The comic does some scenes from Ocelot's point of view, showing him having visions of The Sorrow, a spirit medium from the next game, and Ocelot's biological father. Readers may assume that this implies Ocelot unknowingly inherited spirit medium powers from his father, which was and still is the common fan theory... except later Snake corners Liquid to ask him how he's able to possess Ocelot and Liquid states that it's because of powers he inherited from his father, stating that Solid is not in command of the true magic built into Big Boss's soldier genes. Due to the nature of the series it perhaps should be clarified that the ability to possess things through his body parts was never, ever shown as being one of Big Boss's abilities.
• The Mickey Mouse comic "Topolino e il mostro di Micetown". Basically: near the end of the story, the villain has used his transformation machine to turn into a duplicate of Mickey. Due to the way the transformation process works, the villain will change back within a few seconds, at which point the original Mickey will be disintegrated. However, the transformation machine then simply explodes for no reason, which saves Mickey. He later tries to explain that the machine became "confused" because he and the villain looked exactly alike, which is an explanation that makes no sense in any way (for one, the machine's express purpose is to make two things look exactly alike, so why doesn't it explode with every use?).
• The 2017 Runaways series insists that it's only been two years since the death of Gert, which happened over a decade ago in the real world. It might have been feasible to reconcile this with the Comic-Book Time, except that the Runaways have participated in a number of Marvel events in the years since, raising the question of if all those events, some of which destroyed whole cities, all happened within a two-year span.
• There was a time where writers kept trying to explain the famously fan-service laden Power Girl costume. The resultant explanations were almost invariably absurd, the most infamous being the claim that she left the "boob window" on her outfit with the intention of putting a Superman logo there once she got his permission (if it was such a big deal, why not just put some normal cloth there and patch the logo over it later?). The worst part about is the completely unnecessary nature of the answer; Power Girl could just like the costume design.
• Spider-Man:
  • Aunt May's return from the dead in late 1998's "The Gathering of Five/The Final Chapter" storyline deserves a mention here. For easier reading, we'll list the sequence of events leading up to the Voodoo Shark moment in numbered order.
  1. Aunt May was in a coma. She awoke, eventually, and shared many anecdotes and heartwarming moments with Peter and Mary Jane, and congratulated Mary Jane on her pregnancy. She even admitted that she had known that Peter was Spider-Man for some time, because Peter couldn't have lived under her roof for so long without her at least seeing the signs. She was in denial for quite a while.
  2. In Amazing Spider-Man #400, Aunt May suffered a relapse, and passed away peacefully in bed. Peter held her hand as she passed away, reciting their favorite passage from Peter Pan: "second star to the right, and straight on 'til morning". At May's funeral, she was buried next to Uncle Ben, with her gravestone reading "SHE TAUGHT US LOVE." To many fans, this was seen as a well-done Tear Jerker moment, and a good send-off for the character.
  3. Marvel Editor-in-Chief Bob Harras insisted that Aunt May be brought back from the dead. It didn't matter that Aunt May's death was handled just fine in the eyes of many, it didn't matter how much of a Tear Jerker it was, it didn't matter that there was a funeral, and it didn't matter that the characters had moved on. Harras was the boss, and his word was law.
  4. Thus, the Voodoo Shark moment. In 1998's "The Final Chapter", Spider-Man enters Norman Osborn's house, only to find Aunt May alive and well, waiting for him. Norman Osborn explains that he switched Aunt May with an actress engineered to be identical to Aunt May, who spent a long time practicing her mannerisms until they were identical. It was this actress who died in ASM #400.
  5. This led to several questions. For one, how could this actress be so good as to fool Peter Parker? Aunt May was practically his mother. They lived under the same roof together, and Peter would have known something was wrong; even if his Spider-Sense somehow didn't activate, this actress couldn't possibly keep up the act forever. Second, just when was this "switch" made? How could this actress have practiced Aunt May's mannerisms, and become so good, when the real Aunt May was in a coma? Third, why in the world would this actress stay in character even when she was dying? Osborn claimed she saw it as "the performance of a lifetime," but you'd think such an apparent maestro would want (and be able to qualify for) an actual acting role, not impersonating some random old lady unknown outside of her own family. Fourth, where and how did Norman find this absolute savant? Fifth, if Norman wanted to emotionally torture Peter by making him think his surrogate mom died, why not just kill her instead of bothering with this elaborate ruse? The books never provided any answers, and just moved on from there without addressing it any further.
  6. Also, a much more plausible explanation would be that the one who died was also a clone created by Norman.
  • Also in One Moment in Time, Quesada claims that One More Day was retconned out of continuity and Mephisto never made a deal with the Parkers — so he never saved Aunt May; she got better thanks to Peter's love and determination. After everyone up to God himself told Peter that May was as good as dead.
    • Similarly, when Aunt May gets shot, the comic decides to fill the plot hole of Peter having people that could heal Aunt May by having Doctor Strange give Peter the power to be in all places at once, allowing Peter to ask everyone for help, but is unable to get any assistance. This is quite a plot hole: how can no one in the Marvel universe fix a bullet wound other than Mephisto? Doctor Strange can grant Peter omnipresence with a flick of his wrist, but he couldn't heal a bullet wound? Doctor Strange himself is a surgeon; is using magic to help Peter really so much less intensive than just doing surgery?
    • With how convoluted the spell's impact had become, when Spider-Man: No Way Home adapted the One More Day storyline into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it simply excised Mephisto from the story to make Doctor Strange much more helpful ... mostly by having him make the deal instead.
    • Also, why is continuity altered? Because of Peter's deal with Mephisto? So Mephisto undid his own deal as part of the deal? That seems ... self-defeating.
  • Mention must also be made of the return of the clones to kick off The Clone Saga:
    1. In 1992, during the Evolutionary War Crisis Crossover, The High Evolutionary kidnapped the Gwen Stacy clone, hoping to figure out how her creator, an otherwise ordinary college biology professor, could pull off a scientific miracle like making virtually-instant, viable, fully-grown clones.
    2. He discovered that Prof. Warren didn't, in fact, clone Stacy or Spider-Man: He used a retro-virus on two innocents with similar phenotypes to Peter and Gwen and used it to overwrite their DNA and turn them into virtual clones. This is confirmed when one of the Young Gods (an obscure group of uplifted humans from different cultures and time periods Marvel attempted to resurrect) removed the virus from the Stacy clone, turning her back into the woman she used to be. No more Gwen Stacy.^note This was the goal of Spidey's creative team, who wanted to remove the shadow of Gwen Stacy from Peter and Mary Jane's relationship. A later issue of Web of Spider Man explains that recurring villain Carrion was the result of a variant of the virus that went bad, becoming The Virus.
    3. Along comes the Clone Saga, where all that gets tossed out the window. Not only are the clones back (including the presumed dead Spider-Clone), but the Gwen Stacy clone has reverted to being Stacy again, and complaining about how that Young God tried to turn her into someone else. How? The High Evolutionary lied about the retro-virus out of jealousy. Turns out he and Miles Warren (AKA The Jackal) were colleagues, once upon a time, and he couldn't stand the fact that Warren figured out the holy grail of biology when he, with all his other accomplishments, couldn't.
    4. So... Why didn't he just admit defeat at first? He'd never shown that kind of Dr. Doom-like ego before. Or why didn't he study Gwen longer to try cracking the code? And why would the Young Gods go along with the lie? And how could she revert from the Stacy clone if there were no virus (and how did she change back to Stacy)? And to muddy the waters further, the "Carrion as The Virus" retcon was kept, explaining that the retro-virus was real, just a side project of Warren's.
    • The whole mess was the result of Science Marching On: In the years after the original Clone Saga, scientific research indicated that human cloning wasn't possible and so the retro-virus retcon was meant to cover for that. But then Science Marched On again and human cloning was back in the realm of possibility, so the High Evolutionary retcon was thrown in to undo the earlier retcon, resulting in everything becoming needlessly convoluted and ultimately, it never needed to happen in the first place—was scientific accuracy really that important in a story that stars people with radioactive spider powers?
  • Speaking of the Clone Saga, it turns out that Peter was the clone and Ben the original. A ballsy move, and one the writers eventually decided to undo by explaining that the genetic tests had been rigged... somehow... even though Peter and Ben did the tests themselves. The rigging was done by a friend of Peter's, who turned out to be, with no plausible motive, working for the long-dead Norman Osborn, who was alive with no satisfactory explanation given. The whole thing just degenerated into a mess of Voodoo Sharks. Of course, ignoring the obvious solution is that the labels just got mixed up.
  • Clone Saga making yet another appearance: two major recurring figures in the arc were Judas Traveller and Scrier, mysterious entities who seemed to be intrigued by Peter's struggles. Both seemed to possess all manner of strange powers, with Scrier being able to appear almost anywhere and Judas Traveller seemingly being a Reality Warper, and it sparked a lot of general grumbling from the fanbase who felt they didn't fit well in a Spider-Man story. Consequently, in ASM #417, they decided to reveal that, in reality, Judas Traveller was just a mutant with illusion-creating powers, and the feats he'd demonstrated beforehand were actually just him messing with people's perceptions, and Scrier was actually just a cultlike organization of men who all wore the same uniform and could therefore pretend to appear anywhere. The problem is that neither explanation actually jives with how the characters were presented beforehand. For instance, in one earlier comic, Judas Traveller causes Spider-Man to time-travel to a Bad Future to convince Spider-Man to do something, only to call off the scheme when he discovers that his own powers were causing the problems there—if this is an illusion, then this means that Judas Traveller intentionally made it look like he couldn't control his own power and thwarted his own scheme for no clear reason. Meanwhile, Scrier is hard to dismiss as just a bunch of ordinary guys with smoke and mirrors, when previous comics had shown him walking through walls.
• Superman: Some writers have tried to come up with their own explanations to justify Superman's disguise (he disguises himself in more subtle ways like posture or voice, he's created various alibis that "prove" Clark and Superman are different people, most people don't assume Superman has a secret identity...). In Superman (1939) #330, Martin Pasko suggested that Superman's disguise worked despite all the close calls because he also had a "super-hypnosis" power that prevented anyone from noticing Clark Kent's resemblance to Superman. This depended on his glasses, which were made out of pieces of his Kryptonian spaceship; in one comic Lois Lane saw Clark Kent in a suit and no glasses and assumed it was Superman trying futilely to disguise himself as Clark. Fine, fair enough, Superman does lots of things superhumanly well due to his speed and intellect and they're all called separate superpowers. But this just raises more questions, like why does a wig work as a disguise for Supergirl? Why does this disguise work over television? Also, there are many stories where Batman and Superman dress as each other. Does Batman have Bat-hypnosis? And why doesn't Superman use his hypnosis in more obvious ways, like hypnotizing villains to stop being evil?^note He did do that to a group of Always Chaotic Evil Qwardians once, but he doesn't usually.
• Transformers:
  • In The Transformers (IDW), Simon Furman felt that there should be some kind of explanation as to how the whole gender thing worked for the Transformers. The explanation given (Arcee was formerly "male", until Jhiaxus genetically modified her to have female gender) comes off as a little strange, raises massive issues concerning the Transformers portrayal as living beings. And it didn't delve into how reproduction works for Transformers, something that is directly linked to the whole gender issue, forcing a later writer to work it out.
  • The Transformers (Marvel) featured a good number of these, due to being Merchandise-Driven and advertising an increasingly gimmicky toyline, but the pinnacle would likely be the Pretenders. In the toyline, Pretenders were simple hollow action figures of armored humans and monsters that could pop open to reveal a simple Transformer. This was interpreted by the comic writer into being a fifty-foot organic shell resembling a human or a monster, which contained a regular-sized robot controlling the shell like a sort of reverse mechsuit. But then why are they called "Pretenders"; what could they possibly pretend to be? This was explained in a storyline where Arc Villain Scorponok inexplicably decides that his army needs subterfuge (something he'd never needed before), and rather than simply having his troops take on new altmodes, he designed the entire process (despite having no prior scientific inclination) and subjected six previously-unseen troops to it. He claimed that, under their new guises, their identities as Decepticon soldiers would remain concealed—because apparently, a giant weapon-wielding monster is completely inconspicuous. Then, when the Autobots get sent info explaining the process, they reverse-engineer the process to create their own Pretenders, for no apparent reason. Keep in mind, size-changing technology was pretty common in the series, so there was no reason to make the Pretenders giant to begin with and they could have easily just been a way to hide as humans (indeed, that was the route Transformers: Super-God Masterforce went with).
  • The Beast Wars toyline featured two characters named Prowl, one an owl and the other a lion who was part of a combiner. Much later, the Beast Wars Sourcebook claimed that the lion was the same guy as G1 Prowl, since he was on a team with guys named Ironhide and Silverbolt. Okay, fair enough, but the owl Prowl was the one who had a very similar bio to G1 Prowl, looked a little similar, had the same motto and function, and even "believed himself to have been a great military strategist in a former life." To reconcile this, the Sourcebook claimed that this Prowl was actually Prowl II, a clone of Prowl who originated from the Japanese series Binaltech. Except Binaltech can't canonically lead into Beast Wars; it's explicitly an alternate timeline. And even if it could by Broad Strokes, by the end of it, Prowl II was effectively dead. The whole thing became one of the longest-running Continuity Snarls in Transformers, until it finally got a patch job in "Ask Vector Prime" as the Binaltech Prowl having hopped universes and recreated Prowl II.
  • The fandom's equivalent to "Superboy punched time!" would be the Unicron Singularity, a Negative Space Wedgie caused by Unicron's death. This served as a Cosmic Retcon intended to explain a variety of things, most notably why Transformers: Cybertron is so different from the shows it was meant as a sequel to (the actual reason being that it was a Dolled-Up Installment). Most fans found the whole thing fairly baffling, especially given the many snarls that resulted from this. For example, combination in Cybertron is treated as an unheard-of innovation, when nearly every Autobot in Transformers: Energon had some form of combining ability. What the heck did Energon look like with no combining involved? And if Cybertron isn't a sequel to Energon, but instead some unseen parallel version of Energon that happened without its central gimmick, then why bother calling it a sequel at all? Later material to involve the Singularity realized this and tended to use it as a joke; one thoroughly tongue-in-cheek story claimed that Off-Model animation is the result of the Unicron Singularity.
  • The "multiversal singularity" conceit, a concept going on during a period when Hasbro was attempting to focus on the Thirteen, was pretty infamous for creating these, to the point that it ended up getting erased by Cosmic Retcon. The idea is that certain characters have only one version of them who exists in any universe—so for instance, the Sideways who pops up in the Unicron Trilogy is the same guy as the one who pops up in Robotmasters. Also, the Thirteen, a cast meant to be major figures in the lore, were all treated as such. Sensible enough on paper... but it quickly created a ton of problems, with the most infamous being what happened with The Fallen when he appeared in the second live-action movie. He's clearly not the same guy as the one in his first appearance in the comic series The War Within, and moreover, he dies at the end of the movie. When asked if they were the same guy, Hasbro confirmed this was true, and The Fallen's bizarre multidimensional powers meant that dying wasn't really a problem for him. However, this raised the problem that he also loses in the various adaptations, retellings, bios, and other merch connected to the film, including a "young reader" adaptation where Optimus casually throws the guy into space◊, and each one of these is meant to be its own universe. This created the situation where an interdimensional dictator with vast unholy powers apparently traveled to dozens of worlds to attempt the exact same scheme over and over, and failed every single time. What a loser.
• West Coast Avengers had an awkward storyline in which Mockingbird allows Old West vigilante the Phantom Rider to die because he had drugged her into loving and sleeping with him. Things become more awkward in the Mockingbird solo series, the final issue of which seemingly implies that Mockingbird and the Phantom Rider's relationship was consensual, which contradicts absolutely everything that we had been previously shown, and raises the unfortunate implication that Mockingbird had cheated on her husband Clint Barton (Hawkeye) with a man who she then killed for... some reason (to cover up the affair?) while lying and saying that it was because he had brainwashed and raped her.
• Marvel again: The retcon that adamantium caused lead-like blood poisoning. Given adamantium's stated properties, its allergenic properties should be more like titanium than lead (i.e. should not cause a universal reaction). It was stated that Wolverine and Sabretooth's healing factors could deal with the blood poisoning.^note Which was a mild retcon from earlier revelations that the imperfect bonding process Wolverine went through rendered the subject's bones unable to produce red blood cells, necessitating a healing factor It was assumed that adamantium-bearing bad guys Lady Deathstrike and Cyber, being cyborgs, had some sort of artificial mojo to deal with it. Which left the otherwise normal Bullseye, who had adamantium-laced bones, and had neither a healing factor nor cyborg parts to explain why he hadn't keeled over with blood poisoning. Rather than answer the question, they eventually stripped the adamantium from Bullseye.
  • According to Daredevil #197, the process that was performed on Wolverine was done using incomplete notes, hence forcing a need for Wolverine's healing factor to keep him alive, while Bullseye's process was done by the originator of the method, which did it 'properly' and hence Bullseye does not need a healing factor. What keeps this in Voodoo Shark territory is that the process was performed to let Bullseye move again after he suffered a severe spinal injury that paralyzed him. And if they removed the adamantium, how did Bullseye suddenly heal from a broken back?
  • Secondary VS: Adamantium is very heavy (Wolverine is 5' 2" and 300+ lbs with adamantium attached.) How was the otherwise un-enhanced Bullseye able to move at his normal speed after receiving the treatment?
    • Adamantium being super heavy is another thing that came out of nowhere. It used to be that one of the reasons they used it was because it was super light. One comic has Wolverine going through a metal detector and the security stopping him for having EIGHT pounds of metal hidden somewhere on him.
  • Wolverine and related characters have another one that sprung up in the late 2000s, which tried to maintain some tension when Wolverine can heal from anything — Wolverine, and by extension Sabretooth, Daken, X-23 and everyone else in that "family" of characters, will die from drowning. The explanation is that, if their brains are cut off from oxygen long enough, they die like anyone else, which also explains why beheading would kill them. Okay, so... how about just shooting their lungs into oblivion so by the time they regenerate, the brain is dead? How about an explosion that destroys the lungs and airways? How about brain damage that stops the body from breathing? How about all those times the characters are functionally dead and walk it off? Basically this means you could kill one of these guys the same as any other person as long as your method involves depriving the person of air or screwing up their lungs bad enough. The comics have largely ignored these possibilities and maintained the whole "beheading or drowning is the only way" idea.
• X-Men:
  • The comic famously has poor, poor Madelyne Pryor, who was retconned into a clone of Jean Grey created by Mr. Sinister and planted to seduce Scott, so that Sinister could have the super Scott/Jean baby he'd been gunning for since day 1. But he already has both of their DNA, which makes going through the rigmarole of giving Mads her false identity and hoping Scott is screwed up enough to date a perfect copy of his dead girlfriend seem very stupid. At the point this happens he can't yet create fully-functioning clones, but while Madelyne was "born" brain-dead (the Phoenix Force gave her life), the rest of her worked just fine, so he could just as well have used her as a living incubator.
  • For many years, the Juggernaut was consistently shown to be all but unstoppable, able to shrug off attacks capable of crippling cosmic entities like Galactus and Mephisto. Then during Onslaught, the Juggernaut gets a taste of The Worf Effect, as he gets knocked clean across two states and ends up comatose for several days just to show how badass Onslaught is. Things only went further downhill under Chuck Austen's pen. Juggernaut, who before had been capable of going for weeks if not years without air, food, or water, can suddenly drown in Austen's first story featuring him. There was absolutely no explanation for why the Juggernaut was suddenly very stoppable, and later authors have scrambled for something. The latest line comes from Fear Itself: The Worthy, which says that Juggernaut's power goes "up and down on Cyttorak's whim". That is something that has never happened before, not even when the Juggernaut went dimension-hopping with Doctor Strange and tried to kill Cyttorak when coming face to face with him. For another example, when the Juggernaut screwed up a bet between Cyttorak and other deities in The Eighth Day, he was confirmed to still possess unstoppable strength from Cyttorak's enchantments in the follow-up story The Ninth Day.
  • X-Men Blue: Origins redefined Nightcrawler and Mystique's connection for a third time. This time, Chris Claremont's original plan to make Mystique Kurt's father (via shapeshifting, using aspects of both of Kurt's original fathers, Charles Wagner and Azazel, for some reason) and Destiny his real mother was made canon. And they explained that the previous explanations for Kurt's parentage were false memories, generated by Charles Xavier's burial of the real story^note At their request, as they were forced to abandon Kurt after being outed as mutants, and didn't want to live with the pain of losing him. Mystique asked for her memories to be buried, rather than erased, giving her a chance to recognize her son if she ever encountered him. Xavier warned that suppression rather than removal could cause her mind to generate false memories around the real. This explains the previous explanations of Kurt's paternity.. Even accepting that convoluted retcon, there's still a problem: Destiny is OLD. Old enough to be the namesake and inspiration for Irene Adler in the Sherlock Holmes books (Which would've made her over 100 years old at the time of her first appearance). And she does NOT have Mystique's powers to keep herself young. Even applying Marvel's sliding time scale and barring another major retcon, either Kurt is FAR older than we've been led to believe (and has Mystique's slow aging) or Irene had Kurt when she was somewhere in her 70s. (And that's alongside Xavier apparently knowing the truth the whole time, adding another line item in the controversial "Xavier Was a Bastard All Along" ledger.)
• In the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) episode "Planet of the Turtleoids", Bebop and Rocksteady exclaim that they're currently at the zoo that they came from, forgetting the fact that they were originally humans and not animals prior to being mutated. The Archie Comics series tried to explain that they gained the memories of the boar and rhino that they touched and morphed into, but that doesn't explain why this doesn't apply to any of the other mutants in the show.
• One big example that stretches not just comics from either company, but also various adaptations, which replaced all Spandex, Latex, or Leather with plated armour, with characters ranging from Batman to Superman to the Flash to Daredevil to many others, replacing their spandex-looking suits with a look that resembles Iron Man. Putting aside personal taste, it was done to 'modernise' and make the characters seem realistic, as they believed it was impractical for these characters to not wear body armour. Except there is several major problems with this:
  • Firstly, plated armour is not realistic modern armour, with armed combatants having long-since stopped wearing it in real life for good reason. Regardless of any protection it might provide, the suit would greatly reduce mobility of the wearer, as the plates would need to be suitably strong to properly protect against hits, and thus heavy, and while this wasn't an issue for melee combat, the employment of firearms rendered this ineffective as they would be sitting ducks. This is seen in action in various live action adaptations, where the actors behind the characters have often talked about difficulty moving in the suit (until changes were made, Batman couldn't turn his head), or even just observing the way an acrobatic Fragile Speedster fighter in the comics becomes a Mighty Glacier in the adaptation to accommodate the fact they can't move easily in the suit. Indeed, in real combat, it's generally recommended to wear only a limited amount of armour (mostly on the chest and head), and otherwise wear light clothing like army fatigues, in order to allow full range of movement so that one can maybe dodge, as not getting hit is still preferable.
    • A justification for the above that's often given is to excuse the plates as being made of a fancy sci-fi material that's "light and flexible" to eliminate the problems with moving. However, if this is the case, there's no reason for this fictional material to even need to be plated (other than Rule of Perception); as demonstrated with Black Panther, who wears skin-tight Vibranium fabric that absorbs outside kinetic force, if you're going to go the route of creating a fictional, fantastical material for your armour to be both bullet proof and easy to move in, there's no reason to not just make it look like fabric, other than the aforementioned Rule of Perception.
  • Another issue that's overlooked is the way armour plates work, as in real life, the plates are designed to break when hit hard enough; this is to absorb the damage so that it's not carried over to the person wearing it. As such, the armour would need to constantly be repaired and replaced, which might be sustainable for someone like Batman, but for a street-level loner like Daredevil or a variety of other heroes whose secret identity isn't wealthy beyond imagination, it would be an expensive and difficult thing to maintain. By contrast, a simple fabric costume with only light protection would be much easier to repair even with a limited income, and is much easier to explain how they got ahold of the suit in the first place. While the plates could just be strong enough to not break, this would turn the force of the bullet inward to the wearer and put them at risk of internal bruising.
  • Also another problem that's overlooked is that these suits would be incredibly difficult to actually put on by yourself (which is why knights formally had squires). Again, while not an issue for Batman who has a butler (though this creates the hilarious visual of Alfred having to help Batman put on his suit), or any Crimefighting with Cash heroes who might have a machine set up to "dress" them, a loner hero with low income and an I Work Alone attitude would have difficulty. Even within the same circle as Batman, Batgirl and Nightwing both adopted looks like this in the New 52, but while they were associated with and supported by Batman, they didn't have anyone to help them suit up at night.
  • In many cases, the character has superpowers that circumvent some of these issues (such as Super-Speed that allows them to dress themselves instantly, Super-Strength to enable them to carry to extra weight and still move quickly, or some sci-fi handwave for how the plates are repaired), but in many of these cases the superpowers eliminate the need for the armour in the first place. While someone on the low-tier Super Weight like Deathstroke might still benefit from some heavy armour as he's not bullet proof (though he does have an enhanced Healing Factor) and is strong enough to not be incapacitated while wearing double his own weight in armour, a more higher-tier character just straight up doesn't need it. The Flash and Superman both move at Super-Speed to levels that are faster than bullets, so they're able to just dodge bullets, and their powers come with means to render them bulletproof anyway, so unless they're fighting a villain strong enough to still harm them, there's no benefit. In some cases, armour would be detrimental, as it would increase wind resistance when moving, add needless weight, and, while they're strong enough to move in it quickly, would still be uncomfortable.
  • Then there's just the fact that it's much harder to store these suits; while a fabric suit could be worn under one's clothing or folded and carried in a bag, plated armour would be much more conspicuous and harder to hide or take anywhere. While some super-powered characters might have means to get to their suit quickly, the non-powered heroes would need to have their suit hidden close by at all times. In the Flash's case, where he carries his suit very heavily compressed in a ring (and discounting how implausible that is in and of itself), having the suit be made of plate armor would make this practice outright impossible.
• A licensed comic for The Real Ghostbusters, titled "Hair Today... Egon Tomorrow!", attempts to explain why Egon is blond in the cartoon. Allegedly, immediately after the first movie, he studied some toadstools, one of which Slimer put into his soup, and Egon, thinking the soup was just mushroom soup, ate it, and since this was a fictional toadstool species, all it did was bleach his hair. However, this raises a few plot holes:
  • If cartoon Egon's blond hair is artificial, then how come he has so many blond ancestors (as seen in "If I Were a Witch Man" and "Egon's Dragon")?
  • In Ghostbusters II, Egon's hair is brown again, yet in episodes of The Real Ghostbusters set after the movie, it is back to blond. If this change is canon to both the movies, then why did Egon's hair change three times?
  • Since Egon is an expert on mycology, how did he not notice that the toadstool in his soup was a different sort of mushroom from the kind people eat?
  • The comic claims the hair change happened after the first movie, yet "Citizen Ghost" has a flashback to the events of the first movie, and Egon's hair was already blond.