10 Most Disturbing Comics Relationships

If people didn't like knowing weird things about famous people's relationships, gossip tabloids would have run out literal millennia ago. Be it harmless curiosity or depraved schadenfreude, people's private lives are fascinating to most - and this is something that carries through into knowing all the hot gossip about our favourite comic characters.

Or perhaps former favourite characters might be more appropriate, as many of the more mentally scarring comic relationships have the potential to really mar a character that you would otherwise love - until their inevitable retcon, as very few comic creators actively want to portray super creepy relationships aside from the ever-popular Joker and Harley Quinn.

Although seeing messed up relationships is weird, it also makes the universe seem all the more real for its bizarreness, by showing us that even iconic heroes can have strange and often disturbing pasts.

With huge age differences, mistreatment, and the occasional lifelong brainwashing scheme being surprisingly common, some comic relationships prove that adding superpowers to volatile people is almost invariably a recipe for disaster.

That, and also the fact that superheroes are officially the last people you should go to for relationship advice.

Being the child of parents who have had a nasty break up is never going to be a pleasant experience. When your father is a superhero, and your mother is a villainous terrorist who is willing to use you as a pawn to get back at him, however, the whole thing gets even worse than it would be already - which makes Damian Wayne's life really, really rough.

Forgetting that Talia actively hid Damian's existence from the Dark Knight for thirteen years - which is a pretty awful move regardless - the fact that so many comics involve her using their son as either leverage or an outright hostage against Batman is a solid reminder of just how callous Talia is to the man she is supposedly still in love with.

Talia wasn't worlds better when the pair were actively together either, as her insistence that Bruce join her father's evil organisation involved her both totally ignoring what the hero stands for, and also what he would want.

On the plus side, Damian ended up turning out pretty well, so there's at least a silver lining to be gleaned there.