10 Comic Books Where Evil Won

In terms of "must-read" Marvel comics, Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross' Marvels is absolutely up there with the best of the best.

The series, which released over the course of four months in 1994, chronicled the development of the Marvel universe through the eyes of Daily Bugle reporter Phil Sheldon, who personally witnesses the world transition from the Golden Age of the 1930s and forties to the Marvel Age of the 1960s. It's a fairly seminal work - one defined by its beauty and the story's deep reverence for the superhero genre.

But then there's Ruins, which is everything Marvels isn't.

Released a year after Marvels and with an entirely different creative team, Ruins essentially explored a version of the Marvel universe where everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

Instead of transforming into an angry rage monster, Bruce Banner's run-in with the gamma bomb test turned him into a hulking mass of grotesque tumours. The United States is also run by an oppressive dictatorship and the Avengers are a rebel group based in California who suffer significant deaths as the result of a Quinjet crash.

It's just all a bit grim, really. Literally everything goes wrong and not even Galactus is spared. Oh, and Nick Fury's a cannibal - just in case you thought it couldn't get any weirder.