Designation: None A lot of the alternate timelines on this list have hinged on a fork in the road, where history took a wrong turn, and the consequences were catastrophic. Ruins is not one of those timelines. Ruins is the timeline where everything in the Marvel Universe went completely wrong from the very outset, and it's both horrific to behold and hilarious. Following the lead of Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross's celebrated mini-series Marvels, which documented the early days of the various superheroes from the perspective of photojournalist Phil Sheldon, Ruins parodied that series by showing the Murphy's Law version of the Marvel universe: everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. To wit, Wolverine's flesh is slowly melting from his body due to the toxicity of his adamantium bones, a cannibalistic Nick Fury who shoots prostitute Jean Grey, a Mystique diagnosed with multiple-personality disorder who overdoses on her medication, and a Bruce Banner who wasn't transformed into the Hulk as a result of gamma bomb test gone wrong, but instead mutated into a big mass of cancerous tumours. All these atrocities are rendered in gory detail by a succession of artists, and each new twist on a Marvel Comics legend is darkly comic in a way Ellis never really got to do again. Which might be for the best, because there's only so many times you can see Silver Surfer going mad and ripping open his own chest cavity. In space!
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
