10 Controversial Comic Book Couples Fans Hated

2. Ms. Marvel... And Her Son

Ms Marvel Son
Marvel Comics

You know things are bad when you have to open an entry with a preemptive sigh, but here we go anyway.

Sigh.

Just when you thought comics couldn't get any weirder (or more misogynistic), in comes a little storyline from Avengers #200 which involves Ms. Marvel falling in love with her own son. It gets worse too, because not only did she give birth to her own son (who she then fell in love with, bear with), it later transpired that she'd been raped by him too in order to ensure (yep, you guessed it), his own birth.

The Avengers, seemingly ignorant to the trauma Carol Danvers had just endured, rush to congratulate her on the birth of this baby and even offer encouragement when she later decides to spend an eternity in limbo with her now adult child, with no one protesting otherwise.

Rectified by Chris Claremont a year later in a different X-Men comic (where Carol quite rightly admonishes her former teammates for letting her leave), Carol Danvers' brainwashed relationship with her own son (and the Avengers tacit willingness to facilitate it), remains one of the most repulsive storylines ever to have been published in the pages of a Marvel comic, and by far one of the worst couplings ever to have been put to print.

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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.