8 Strangest Alternate Versions Of Beloved Superheroes

The 70s were weird, really goes without saying. Whereas nowadays we comic book readers like to take ourselves super seriously because comics are for adults now damnit, in their formative years comic properties tended to veer more towards the more campy and silly side (insert gif of Batman doing that groovy dance from the 1960s show here).

The adverts featured in comics of the time reflected this, and the Hostess Cakes Spider-Man ads are probably one of the more infamous examples. For those not in the know, Marvel and Hostess once teamed up to advertise Twinkies using Spider-Man, who had to defeat a myriad of villains using great power and great responsibility. Whoops, sorry, no, using Hostess Cakes.

The natural culmination of all this came about in the excellent Spider-Verse story, a Spidey based crossover event which saw every Spider-Man from every Marvel universe banding together to fight The Inheritors.

This included Mangaverse Spider-Man, Marvel 1602's The Spider and Spider-Man Reign - the latter of which gets his head caved in by his dead wife's tombstone. As you would expect, the story features such a wide variety of Spider-Man references that it really deserves its own list – mostly just to include the bit where two Spider-Men chat about spotting "that guy from Seabiscuit" and "the guy from The Social Network" halfway through a fight.

The event featured Morlun, long-time Spider-Man villain, going toe-to-toe with the Spider-Twink (don't Google that, for the love of God) with all references to the brand replaced with "golden sponge cakes". But it is indeed the same Spider-Man of Earth 51914, who eventually gets choked to death/absorbed, clutching flowers meant for MJ in his hands.

Well at least he didn't kill her with his sperm.