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Early Installment Weirdness/Comic Books: Difference between revisions
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* Many superhero comics. [[Superman]] was a [[Flying Brick]] who couldn't fly, only jump (hence, "able to leap tall buildings in a single bound") and run (hence, "faster than a speeding bullet"); [[Batman]] killed his adversaries.
** [[X-Men]] villain [[Magneto]], in contrast to his contemporary portrayal as a [[Well-Intentioned Extremist]], was a straightforward bad guy without any redeeming features. He also had psychic powers that were nearly a match for Charles Xavier's, including [[Astral Projection]].
** During the early years, DC's different heroes very clearly took place in separate continuities - an issue of ''Batman'' from the 40s, for instance, had Dick Grayson get an autograph from Jerry Siegel, identified by name and explicitly noted as "the creator of Superman".
*** Early Timely (Marvel) Comics did the same. In the very first [[Captain America (comics)]] story, the Human Torch is mentioned as being "a hero from the comic books". About a year later, Cap and the Torch met in a crossover story.
** Superman was probably the most notably different of these lacking many of his current powers, sporting a different (and often inconsistently illustrated) costume, killing bad guys, and being something of a rebel. But especially weird, given his current international sensibilities, is when we're told that "Superman says 'Go Slap a Jap'" as seen on many World War 2 era covers.
*** In part this is because Superman, Batman, and some of the others listed here were introduced before the genre was codified as they were the codifiers of many of it's tropes. Their early adventures were the [[Early Installment Weirdness]] of the entire genre.
** Batman originally wore purple gloves.
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* The Brazilian distributor of Disney comics released in 2000 a special celebrating the 50th anniversary of their [[Donald Duck]] magazine. The description of the first issue listed all that could be found weird: differences in language/spelling (apart from the 1950s version being quite formal, Portuguese underwent several orthographic reforms) and character names (biggest one was [[Goofy]] being called Dippy - though the story has him being called "a goofy guy"), unfinished stories (it was published across 3 issues as movie serials were popular in those days), only eight pages in color, and a trivia section filled with [[Values Dissonance]] (telling stories of animals suffering accidents, such as ''j''iraffes being decapitated by telegraphic wires). 10 years later, the collection released to celebrate the 60th anniversary had its first issue come with [[Embedded Precursor|a facsimile of Donald Duck #1]], letting readers experience Early Installment Weirdness firsthand.
* The early ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog (comics)|Sonic the Hedgehog]]'' comics were very comedic and often even stranger than what we have today.
** Also, Rotor Walrus was named 'Boomer' and Sally was pink. Later on Sally had blonde hair before changing to a brunette.
*** The reprints of the early issues have been subjected to a bit of [[Orwellian Retcon]]; the plots are obviously unchanged, but the design and naming continuity errors have been edited.
* ''[[Sonic the Comic]]'' was just as bad. For a while it was full of one-shots that barely related to each other, often with [[Off-Model]] drawings. It took several issues for it to become plot-orientated, and even afterwards it took a while for it to drop the oneshot routine.
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* Similarly, the [[Martian Manhunter]], having first appeared at the start of [[The Silver Age of Comic Books]], was more like a detective than a superhero in his initial appearances and only became a superhero when superheroes started to get popular again.
* Notably, Bruce Banner originally turned into the [[Incredible Hulk]] at night. He was also originally coloured grey, but this changed to green, as grey was hard to reproduce consistantly in the 1960's.
* [[Captain America (comics)]] has a different shield and costume in his first issue.
* Upon reading [http://www.reading-room.net/SC22/SC22p1.html the first] [[The Silver Age of Comic Books|Silver Age]] ''[[Green Lantern]]'' story, you get the impression that the Green Lantern Corps (referred to only as space-patrolmen in the story) do not generally call themselves Green Lanterns -- in fact, "Green Lantern" was only an alias Hal adopts for himself.
* [[Knights of the Dinner Table]]: The series started as a comic strip in the back of SHADIS gaming magazine and as such, the character were flat and Sara had not been added yet. The Knights were simple gamer stereotypes shifting to fit the gag of the strip (for example, Dave, Bob and Brian all knowing the stats for a monster whereas in later strips, only Brian had stats and charts memorized like that.)
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