Bizarro Episode / Comic Books

• Marvel Universe: Marvel's Assistant Editor's Month was a traditional Fifth Week Event where the assistant editors created bizarre stories that would never be allowed otherwise. Sometimes they also included serious stories. Sometimes they WERE serious stories, thus becoming a Bizarro Episode inside a week of Bizarro Episodes.
• Deadpool Vol 4 #20 Wakandian Vacation was a Breather Episode set after the bleak "The Good, the Bad, and, the Ugly" arc and is one of the strangest issues that Marvel has ever done. After being abandoned by Cable in 1960's Wakanda, Deadpool is soon tasked to find cosmic puzzle pieces by a Watcher and a Giant Pungeon Master Robot known as The Ruler of Earth (not the kind of ruler you think, he rules nothing) for seemingly no reason. This takes him to a few locations, including the Negative Zone. Along the way, he upsets Mangog, who chases him for the rest of the issue, Ben Grimm, Fin Fang Foom, and Odin. Oh, and he accidentally blows up the moon. Also, a baby Watcher poops, which Odin uses to power Asgard for the next 1000 years. All in all, the issue makes zero sense, especially to newer readers who may not get some of the references. So, basically a parody of the more weirder elements of the Silver Age.
• Knights of the Dinner Table: The strip "Heroes on the Town" shows us a world where Bob, Dave, and Brian fully roleplay their characters, treat NPCs with respect, and are generous to a fault. In short, they live up to a lawful good alignment instead of just paying it their usual lip-service. Sara's behavior remains unchanged from canon universe. It can be quite bizarre to any reader used to their normal behaviors. At the end it's shown to be a wish-fulfillment dream of the DM's.
• The Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics)/Image Comics crossover special. Chronologically meant to take place between the Return of the King special and issue #57 in the Sonic timeline, it has Particle steal the Master Emerald and bringing it to Dr. Ian Droid, so Sonic, Knuckles, and the Freedom Fighters travel to the Image Comics Earth to reclaim it, and end up joining forces with the Image Heroes. In the end, Knuckles ends up wishing for everything to be restored to the way it was before, and afterwards, all but Particle and Shadowhawk forget the whole thing ever happened. Dr. Droid was supposed to make a return appearance in a later miniseries, as the threat Knuckles was prophesied to defeat. Thanks to Executive Meddling, though, that plot was dropped and the miniseries got turned into the infamous "Mobius: 25 Years Later" arc.
• Like the above example, almost every intercompany crossover is a Bizarro Episode. They remain popular because of the potential for an Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny, and if nothing else, there's always the hope that fans of one character will read the crossover and decide they like the other character as well and start reading that — basically, companies trying to cross-pollinate their fandom. However, for legal reasons these crossovers very rarely have any impact on ongoing continuity (although it happens occasionally), and works set in different universes tend to have different assumptions and physical laws, in particular about Power Levels. Most intercompany superhero crossovers have involved characters casually running into each other even though if they existed in the same universe they really should have had plenty of encounters before now or something, and afterwards are never mentioned again in-story unless there's another crossover.
• Robin (1993) has an odd bit where Killer Moth starts asexually reproducing and fills an abandoned YMCA with tiny rude versions of himself that try to eat each other and grow to adulthood in about a week, and start running about Gotham nude attacking people when they're big enough to get out of the pool. This new power of Walker's was never mentioned or used again.
• Issue 34 of the first incarnation of Marvel Comics' What If? consisted of nothing but humorous takes on the Marvel Universe and its characters (a good number of them one-panel stories, even), culminating with "What Will Happen When Stan Lee Reads This Issue?" He fires the entire staff. 'Nuff said. Issue 34 of the revived series did it again, although without the epilogue.
• X-Men:
  • Uncanny X-Men #153, the classic "Kitty's Fairy Tale", in which Kitty regaled young Illyana Rasputin with a made-up Fairy Tale casting herself and Colossus as heroic pirates, and other members of the X-Men as their allies to rescue the Phoenix Genie. Some see this issue as a coda to the Claremont/Byrne era, as it shows Kitty fully assimilating with the team to the point where she can gently rib her teammates for their peccadilloes (as the story progresses the rest of the X-Men listen in and enjoy a good laugh), and even give the Scott and Jean in her story the happy ending which they were denied, making it an in-universe Breather Episode.
  • Uncanny X-Men #44 took place during a story arc where the team battled the Brotherhood of Evil and had a Crossover with The Avengers. However, this specific issue instead featured a largely unrelated plot where Angel battled Red Raven, a forgotten Golden Age hero. The story then veered off into a subplot about Red Raven having to prevent the return of the Winged Humanoids who raised him, before Angel ultimately left to continue his search for the Avengers. The only real explanation is that Roy Thomas, a well known Golden Age fan, wanted to feature one of his boyhood heroes in one of the books he was writing.
• Superman:
  • Usually, when Mr. Mxyzptlk makes an appearance -see The Supergirl-Batgirl Plot-, Superman is put through bizarre situations which are undone when Mxyzptlk is forced to go back to his dimension.
  • Superboy (New 52): Issue #8 is an entire issue of Superboy fighting Gen¹³ character Grunge, who in the new universe is a Ravager. There was no build up to this issue, has no bearing on the series proper, it's just Superboy and Grunge fighting as Grunge talks about the qualifications of being a Ravager, and it is never mentioned again.
  • Both issues of the Supergirl — Matrix Convergence tie-in, which are written by Keith Giffen, notorious for writing satirical stories about the DC Comics staff, current status quo, and characters.
• The Tintin story Flight 714 starts out normal enough for an adventure of that franchise: Tintin and company are kidnapped by Rastapopulus's henchmen, who later keep them prisoners on a tiny island somewhere in Indonesia. But it soon becomes clear that something weird is going on, and it turns out that aliens have been coming to the island for millennia. And yeah, everybody except for Snowy (Tintin's dog) are forced to forget all about the adventure due to Laser-Guided Amnesia. Even compared to other "Tintin" stories, which acknowledge the existence of things like Voodoo magic or the Yeti, this is generally considered to be the odd one out.
• The Asterix story Asterix and the Falling Sky has two kinds of aliens (an Expy of Mickey Mouse and his Superman Expy bodyguards versus Manga-like insectoids and robots) suddenly turn up in Ancient Gaul to fight over the right to get the magic potion. And it all of course ends with the "good" aliens erasing everybody's memory of the whole episode. Even within a franchise, where there is plenty of magic and several other fantasy elements, this is generally seen as the weirdest "Astérix" story of them all.
• One issue of the Grant Morrison Doom Patrol featured a Lee/Kirby styled version of DC's most prominent magical characters at the time. It turned out to be All Just a Dream of one of the characters, a sentient street named Danny. Doom Patrol is essentially this for The DCU in general, and considering it exists in the same universe as aliens, gods, sorcerers, and Ambush Bug, that's really saying something. The franchise is often a vehicle for surreal, high-concept ideas, especially under the pen of the aforementioned Grant Morrison.
• Super Mario Bros.: For the German Club Nintendo comics, Super Mario in Die Nacht des Grauens (Super Mario in the Night of Horror) was this. Okay, the series was already bordering on the bizarre to begin with, but most others at least have something to do with the source material. This one? Had Mario as Van Helsing leading Link and Kirby through an adventure in their now possessed tower home to defeat Wario and Abigor, the latter of which was a demon from hell. It also features a zombie Princess Peach, Jason Voorhees, Chucky and Leatherface as characters and an absolute ton of other things from horror films.
• The "Rock Zombies" arc of Runaways features Chase's new boss, a radio shock-jock, attempting to take over Los Angeles with a cursed song that turns anyone who listens to it (and who has undergone plastic surgery) into a zombie. Out of Character moments abound (like Karolina apparently being over Xavin, Klara becoming a gamer girl, and the Staff of One eating someone), the Big Bad just disappears without any real comeuppance, the zombie spell is reversed off-panel, and none of the events of the arc are ever mentioned again. (Granted, this is the penultimate story arc before the series was cancelled.)
• Transformers: More than Meets the Eye:
  • Issue #43, which diverges from the book's typical space adventures to depict a Community-esque genre homage of sitcom. The characters spend most of the issue in their human holomatter disguises and the tech is even more scientifically soft than the anything else in the comic. However it averts the "never mentioned again" symptom thanks to James Roberts' insistence on avoiding filler no matter what; the issue, despite its strangeness, actually develops the plot a bit, furthering Swerve's character development and setting up the Agent 113 subplot.
  • The Christmas Special at first seems to be purely non-canon nonsense; it features a Dr. Seuss-esque rhyming story about Starscream inventing a new holiday done in a cartoony art style. The main feature is a bizarre pastiche of Christmas tropes where for reasons that totally make sense the crew must decorate a large conical green thing with baubles, string up lights, wear paper crowns, and spend the evening nestled snug in their B.E.D.s. It's implied that some of this is because Brainstorm invented a "contrivance engine". And yet, it's actually canon; the swarm of scraplets that Whirl befriends shows up again in the series finale.
• Archie Meets the Punisher, if only because of its ludicrous premise. The weirdest thing about it? It's actually considered to be good.
• Infinity Wars (2018): The Infinity Warps, taking time out from the series's main premise of everyone fighting over the Infinity Stones to instead focus on mashed-up versions of various characters and their escapades. They're generally held to be the best part of the crossover.
• Swamp Thing: The most outlandish and strange story ever would be "Chester Williams: American Cop" from Mark Millar's run, an out-of-continuity satire on right-wing politics where New-Age Retro Hippie Chester Williams has an epiphany that leads to him becoming a conservative police officer who turns his back entirely on defending the environment and being progressive. The weirder highlights include Swamp Thing being easily cowed into submission when he confronts Chester over his change in attitude, Chester getting his lesbian ex-girlfriend Liz Tremayne to come back to him just by kissing her and the story ending with Chester successfully running for President.

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