Weirdness Magnet / Comic Books

• John Constantine has spent most of his life as a weirdness magnet, as have many of his ancestors. It seems to run in the blood...
  • Oh, it's worse than that. Turns out John's unborn twin is using synchronicity (the ability to warp reality, making things work out for him, that comes with being the "Laughing Magican") to screw with John's life. The twin uses the power to attract all the bad stuff that happens to John whilst using the power to stop him dying from it (neatly explaining all the bad stuff that happens to everyone around him but John manages to escape). Why may you ask? So John will give up, commit mental suicide and allow the twin to take over.
• Devi D. from I Feel Sick, from dating a zombie and a serial killer/psychopath, being attacked by a cat with acid for blood, having her painting come to life and try to drive her insane, Devi can never escape her insanely bizarre life. Her friend Tena even lampshades her status as a weirdness magnet.
  • Fellow JTHM-spinoff star Squee has it even worse. Aside from his sentient teddy bear and Johnny, Squee's Hilariously Abusive Childhood has also contained aliens and their experimentation, giant evil dustmites, The Antichrist and his father, zombie classmates, an evil cyborg grandpa, and far too much more. Oh, and this kid's probably only 7 years old.
  "It's like my life is being done by an awful, awful cartoon guy..."
• Shade, the Changing Man lived in Hotel Shade, which the Angels told him would "draw madness to it like a magnet." John Constantine visited there, as a matter of fact.
• The main character of the comic Major Bummer is this by design — the implants that give him and various other characters in the series powers are programmed to attract one another as well as other weirdness, like demons.
• Peter David played with the concept of a 'chaos river' for his Supergirl series. This partly explained why a superhero fought so much oddness while living in a small town.
• The protagonist of Blue Devil, as noted on the main page.
• Aardvarks in Cerebus the Aardvark act as magical amplifiers; one consequence of this is that strange things tend to happen around them without their conscious control. For Cerebus, it's even worse because he doesn't have the full set of aardvark artifacts, which has (unbeknownst to him until late in the series) thrown his entire destiny into chaos.
• Ivy Town from The All-New Atom was described as this by one of the series antagonists. Either the writer or the series creator are to blame. In universe, Atom foe Chronos and his temporal manipulations are partly to blame.
• Astro City
  • It's mentioned that there are superheroes in other cities and countries, but most places with heroes seem to only have a handful, whereas Astro City has a highly disproportionate number. One character compares the city's abundance of super-beings as the equivalent to Los Angeles' earthquakes.
    • Flashbacks show that even thousands of years before the city existed, the land itself attracted heroes of legend, including the super-powered kind.
  • Matilda "Tildie" Armstrong just seems to have a knack for being around weirdness, like her school being the center of a pickpocketing ring, or going to a museum just as a snake cult stages an attack. She's also stopped aging for some reason...
• In one Batman comic (maybe during Broken City) a cop remarks that the answer to the issue someone has posed to them of what would make for a good Gotham City "reality show" would be The Outer Limits.
• Jeremy... well, the Feeple family in Ninja High School have all sorts of strange and odd thing happening to them throughout their lives. The town they live in, Quagmire, just seems to like these kinds of people.
• Superman:
  • The titular hero once had this to some degree, but the Silver Age Superboy was worse. He lived in a small town, yet was continually beset by space aliens and other strange things that found their way there by pure coincidence.
  • Jimmy Olsen is well-known for this quality. There's a reason why Superdickery has made a drinking game out of counting the times Jimmy gains superpowers through one way or another, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Being a newspaper photographer in Metropolis kind of justifies all the weirdness he gets subjected to, but even then, Jimmy is to the city of Metropolis what the city of Metropolis is to the rest of the world: always the victim of whatever crazy catastrophe happens to be going down in The DCU on any given day or night.
  • Lois Lane was also one of these Pre-Crisis, but unlike Jimmy Olsen, who's continued being this since the Silver Age (including a full-blown, targeted, massive example in Countdown to Final Crisis), she's since become notable for actively chasing after weirdness with a frenzy.
• A few strips in 2000 AD have used this as a premise; namely Bec & Kawl and Caballistics, Inc.
• Xombi. David Kim's status as an immortal, artificial zombie makes him the target of a lot of weird plots.
• Zayne Carrick from Knights of the Old Republic. The Force seems to have a very perverse sense of humor when it comes to him.
• The Incredible Hulk, especially in the Silver and Bronze Ages. Even when he had successfully eluded the military and anyone else who might be chasing him, he would inevitably just blunder into a landing alien spaceship, or try to take a nap in a cave and discover it's a supervillain's hideout, or try to find privacy on a desert island only to find it's full of monsters, etc... when all the poor lug really wants is some peace and quiet.
• Rick Jones, longtime ally/sidekick/mascot of The Avengers, is such a big example that he's infamous for it in-universe and listing the number of utterly outlandish things that have happened to him almost purely by coincidence could fill up the entire page. Lampshaded and taken up to eleven in Avengers Forever.
• Usagi from Usagi Yojimbo has an amazing tendency to attract all the weird and dangerous things in any area he is passing through. He will accidentally bump into an ancient, mystic sword and get himself in the middle of an anti-shogun conspiracy or become number one on a local psychopath’s “to kill” list. No matter how much he tries to avoid it, he always ends up in a fight. If it's not Youkai he has to kill, then a village needs to be saved from a Yakuza. Most of his friends are not ordinary people, either. This happy bunch includes: a bounty hunter, a powerful daimyo, said daimyo’s Action Girl bodyguard, the former head of a ninja clan who would love to get rid of Usagi, an Old Master, a Classy Cat-Burglar, and a professional demon hunter.
• Cal McDonald from Criminal Macabre has been attracted to weird things all his life since he encountered a decapitated corpse as a kid. As a grown up, he is a private detective that deals with vampires, werewolves, et cetera. Being a Weirdness Magnet has taken its toll though, since Cal also a drug addict.
• The Fantastic Four are either looking for something beyond normal, or attract some out of this world creature or being. Or they attract it by accident, or stumble upon it by coincidence.
• Let's be honest — if you're a superhero at all in any universe, you are this. If you go on holiday, you'll be abducted by aliens or transported to another dimension and if you stay home you'll find yourself under attack by gnomes. Also note that in the Marvel Universe 90% of superheroes live in or near to New York City; nobody in the Marvel Universe wants to go to New York City because this number of weirdness magnets causes some truly strange things to happen there. Chief among the New Yorker superheroes is a native denizen: Spider-Man. One of his most vocal and infamous opposed out-criers, J. Jonah Jameson at the Daily Bugle, does have a point that while New York City had its fair share of crimes prior to the web-slinger, once Spidey showed up the weirdness cranked up in turn. Some of it was in direct relation (or retaliation) to Spider-Man, but most of it just seemed to coincidentally crop up after he hit it big. He takes it in stride usually, if he's not loathing it openly with a quip.
• Achille Talon is both this and a Doom Magnet, as the surreal nature of the comics leads to most doom causes being utterly weird. By the time of the last long episodes of the series (which eventually switched back to 2-pages gags instead of 44 pages adventures), all the other characters had became Genre Savvy enough to scream whenever something weird happens that they should have known it and that they were wrong to have taken Talon with them. This is justified by the anthropomorphic personification of Destiny for some reason finding Talon amusing, and having decided to use him as his personal Cosmic Plaything.

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