15 Most Inappropriate Comics Storylines Of All Time‏

Comic books have never been afraid to push boundaries. Captain America socked Hitler in the face years before the US had even engaged the Nazi menace, superheroes have been used to illustrate countless societal ills, and Superman made it okay for people to wear their pants over their trousers.

The form has been home to countless brave editors, writers and artists who are keen to make their mark and really say something with the comics they produce. Sometimes, though, those creative teams are misguided in their choice of topic, or in the way that they go about exploring it. Sometimes they've not really thought through the implications of introducing heavy themes like drug abuse, incest and rape into their superhero stories. Or at least, you'd hope they hadn't, because the alternative is that they thought it totally fine to trivialise horrible subjects, or purposefully made squeaky clean superheroes do bad things for shock value and publicity.

All publicity is good publicity, though. Sort of.

These controversial comic book storylines - featuring everyone from Batman to Tigra - have often been some of the publisher behind them's biggest sellers, sometimes even becoming classics of their genre. That doesn't stop them being massively inappropriate for a variety of reasons, not least of which being that they usually involve characters who are otherwise fun, colourful kids favourites.

Here are fifteen of those very, very inappropriate comic books story arcs.