10 Comic Books Where Evil Won

9. Ruins

Marvel Ruins
Marvel Comics / Terese Nielsen

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.

Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.