Comic Book Moments You'll Never See on the Big Screen

Comic Book Moments You'll Never See on the Big Screen
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It seems that you can't go to the cinema hall anymore without watching a comic book adaptation. Some of them are good, some great, while others... not so much.

It's a great time to be a comic book fan, but sometimes the changes to the source material can be more than a little baffling. At other times though, you look at the comic and say, yeah, "that's never, ever, at all, going to be a movie." Comics may have made the transition from being a nerds-staple to a much-wider audience thanks to the movies, but the fact that cinema needs to retain that mass appeal, the films can never get as crazy, violent, or just messed up as the comics.

Movies like the Dark Knight trilogy were a lot "darker and grittier" than their counterparts from the Marvel stable, while films like Watchmen and V for Vendetta showed us an entirely different side of the superhero story.

But despite that, they still fall short of depicting the kind of things that comic book fans have come to take for granted. For example, when news broke that in the new Ant-Man movie that is going to release next summer, it isn't Hank Pym but rather Scott Lang we'll be seeing, things made a lot of sense, because Pym... has problems.

Hank Pym, the original Ant-Man, is a genius who discovers particles that let him grow or shrink in size, along with a helmet that lets him communicate with insects. While these powers do seem puny, and you might think you can defeat Pym with just a vacuum cleaner, he's actually a pretty successful superhero. Plus, he's pretty influential in Marvel's canon, since he was one of the founding members of the Avengers, and also the creator of Ultron.

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In the Marvel Cinematic Universe though, Tony Stark creates Ultron, and Hank Pym is just the scientist who develops Pym Particles, while it's Scott Lang who is Ant-Man; and that is probably a good move, because over the years, Pym's image has become defined by his relationship with his wife.

So, if Hank Pym were Ant-Man in the movie, the Internet would flood with scans from the comic where he uses his powers to... pleasure his wife, the Wasp. That's just weird, but unfortunately, spousal abuse also seems to have become a part of the character over time, and that's not something most people want to see in a superhero movie.

Of course, movies do tend to gloss over some of the worst parts of the heroes we're seeing. That's why, when we see Tony Stark, we don't really get much of a picture of the horrible behaviour his alcoholism causes. We see just a little piece of it, in Iron Man 2, and later learn that it was a calculated move on Stark's part to get Rhodes to take an Iron Man suit, eventually becoming the Iron Patriot. Disney even rejected the "Demon in a Bottle" storyline, even though Iron Man 3 director Shane Black had initially wanted to do so.

Ant-Man's wife beating and Tony Stark's alcoholism are just two things the movies steer clear of. Sure, Batman is a lot grittier, and the kill count for the last Superman movie should number in thousands, if you factor in collateral damage, but there are some things that are too dark even for those films to show.

For instance, one of the most famous comics about the Batman and the Joker was written by Alan Moore. Batman: The Killing Joke is a one-shot story that gave a lot of insight into the Joker, and has gone on to define how other writers have treated the character as well.

In the Killing Joke, the Joker wants to show how "one bad day" can turn a good person into a monster, and he sets about trying to break Commissioner Gordon. He does this by shooting Barbara Gordon (Commissioner Gordon's daughter) leading to her paralysis, and then stripping the commissioner and chaining him in an amusement park. The Joker and his henchmen forced Gordon to look at pictures of Barbara - horribly wounded and naked - to drive him crazy.

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The plan doesn't work though, as Gordon retains his sanity, but in the ensuing fight with the Joker, it's heavily implied that Batman kills the joker at the end of the comic, by snapping his neck barehanded.

There are just so many disturbing things happening in this comic that you don't know how to even list them all out.

Moore has written more than a few disturbing books by now - he's also famous for works such as From Hell (about Jack the Ripper) and also, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen books.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has already been turned into a movie with Sean Connery (and Naseeruddin Shah), but that one was a terrible flop, so it's possible that someone will want to reboot it soon. However, League is also a fairly typical work from Moore, so it's safe to say that a full half of the book will be pronounced unusable.

From an invisible man pretending to be a holy ghost who rapes girls in a convent school, to vampire sex, to a whole range of alien horrors, the books leave no stone unturned while trying to tell a story about what would happen if the most famous characters from literature all got together to form a super-team.

If you're not convinced, then here's just one sample. When Mr Hyde (of Dr Jekyll and...) finds out that the Invisible Man (Griffin) has betrayed the League to Martian Invaders, he takes his revenge quickly and on the spot. Not by using his monstrous strength to kill Griffin - no, instead he brutally rapes the man, and then leaves the still invisible body to go have breakfast with the other members of the team.

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As Griffin slowly dies in the library, his blood slowly starts to become visible - eventually covering the entire table and Captain Nemo runs off to discover the body. It's a gruesome scene, even if all the gore is off-screen, for the casual nature in which Jekyll tries to have a normal conversation while dripping in his victim's blood, in the face of everyone's shock.

Not that Marvel has kept away from all gore either. In an issue of Ultimatum - a five-issue comic book that was a part of the Ultimate Marvel universe - Ant-Man and Hawkeye are desperately searching for the Wasp after a series of natural disasters. They come across the mutant Blob, eating her corpse. Pym gets so angry that he grows to giant size, and then bites of the Blob's head, killing the mutant.

Speaking of Marvel, there's also Wolverine. Now, Wolverine's power is not the metal claws he slices and dices everything with. That's just a fringe benefit. The real power is his healing factor that lets him get sliced and diced in turn, and still come back for more. And over the many years that the character has been around, we've seen writers take advantage of this to deal crazy amounts of damage at the hapless mutant, and we've seen his healing power stretched to the literal limit.

Like the time the Punisher killed Wolverine by taking his hand and using the adamantium claws to stab Wolverine, before throwing him into an electric transformer, where we see Wolverine's skin melting off, his eyes busting, and his hair flying off his skull. In another issue, the Punisher shoots Wolverine's testicles off and then drives over him with a steamroller.

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In yet another comic, Ultimate Wolverine vs Hulk, the Hulk heads to Tibet to find peace and meets the Panchen Lama. In Tibet, the Hulk learns to control his rage, but then Wolverine comes to find him, and in his usual charming style, gets the Hulk riled up in seconds. An enraged Hulk literally tears the Wolverine into two parts, and just as the Hulk is about to eat one of Wolverine's legs, the She-Hulk shows up.

The Wolverine wakes up again later, reduced to nothing but a head, being debriefed by Nick Fury. Fury catches him in some lies, and finally, in a rage, shoots Wolverine in the head. The rest of the story, frankly, doesn't get any better, or any less confusing.

And all this is just a small sample of the madness that people get up to in the world of comic books. So, sure, comic books are all over the movies now. But it's going to be a while yet before the two are fully interchangeable.


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