4. Radioactive Spunk Spidey
Marvel ComicsHere's a second question for you: What's the thing that draws people to Spider-Man, that makes the character such an enduring part of our cultural landscape? Well, one reason might be that, despite the fact he goes through all sorts of personal tragedies and professional tribulations, he always comes up smelling of roses and with a wise crack to hand. You can never beat Peter Parker, thanks to his good humour and incredible resolve. So it makes sense to do a series where he doesn't have any of that and he's a depressed, bitter old man right? Again, we don't see the appeal, and yet Spider-Man: Reign still came out anyway. Directly inspired by Frank Miller's horribly nasty look at the future of Batman, where he's become a sort of jackbooted fascist icon who revels in the violence he reigns across the dystopian Gotham City of thirty years from now, Reign saw Peter Parker retired from being a superhero, a 70-year-old widower who runs a florists. Meanwhile, New York is under the control of totalitarian police regime which has all but stamped out supervillains, but also cracks down on civil liberties. Brought back into action by J Jonah Jameson, who apologises for all the years he hounded Spider-Man, Peter regains his previous form and has to do battle with the Sinister Six, who the city's corrupt mayor releases from prison at the wall crawler's return. Having suffered from memory loss and loneliness in his old age, Doctor Octopus reminds Peter of his horrible personal life by digging up Mary Jane's corpse. It turns out she died of radiation poisoning as a result of, ahem, doing the horizontal mambo with her husband, who had the stuff running through his veins thanks to the spider that gave him his powers. So whilst Reign is actually a pretty turgid and self-consciously "gritty" comic that isn't too insane or out of the ordinary, it does include a scene where Spider-Man holds his dead wife's decomposed body and yells about how he killed her with his radioactive spider semen. Which, yep, that's coming up as a strong positive on the patented WhatCulture INSANITY meter.