Unreliable Narrator/Comic Books

Examples of Unreliable Narrators in Comic Books include:

In addition to all the below examples, it should be noted that Comics are the easiest medium to accomplish this in, since you can have the narration saying one thing above the panel and the panel show what's really happening, whereas in Film, Western Animation, and Live TV you might have the narrator's speech conflict with the scene, nessessiting a more "flashback" style to show this. It is very common to have a narrator say one thing and the below panel completely contradict it.
It should be obvious at the beginning of Earth X that Uatu the Watcher is an unreliable narrator: he's an alien from a culture that has very different values from humanity's. It should be further obvious when Uatu does things like object to World War II on the grounds that "humanity was not yet ready for a master race". But most readers were used to Uatu's style of narration and problematic "neutral" moral stance from What If?, so Uatu manages to carry on the illusion that he's a friend of humanity for several more issues.
Rorschach in Watchmen is a good example of this, especially when he talks about himself.
- The artwork actually uses an unreliable framing device (one of many the work contains) to show "Rorschach" in the first person and Walter Kovacs in the 3rd person (walking around in the background of the same chapter), leading to The Reveal. This both misdirects the audience as to who Rorschach is behind the mask, and contributes to the sense of Rorschach's disconnection from "the man in the mirror", so to speak.
Ed Brubaker's Books of Doom miniseries tells the origin story of classic Marvel Comics supervillain Doctor Doom, seemingly narrated by Doom himself. However, at the story's end, it is revealed that the narrator is actually one of the Doom's Doombots, telling the story that Doom has programmed into it, leaving to question how much of it was true.
The Strontium Dog revival used this as a Retcon: the authors claimed that the classic series was folklore, and the new series was closer to the 'truth'.
- Lost in Space was similarly retconned in a '90s comic book. The goofy aliens from the TV show were said to be Penny's interpretations. For example, one that was depicted as a giant carrot was "really" a tentacled Eldritch Abomination.
Word of God states that Delios of 300 is an Unreliable Narrator; all of the supposed inconsistencies with actual history are actually bare-faced lies, with Delios stretching the truth about who did what and how many there were. This naturally justifies the comic's explicit use of Rule of Cool and Refuge in Audacity.
- By extension, the same applies to the film adaptation. But just try telling this to your average fan. I dare you.
Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin's six year-old imagination has the tendency to run away with him, resulting in spectacular fantasy sequences featuring characters like Spaceman Spiff, Stupendous Man, and Tracer Bullet. Then, of course, there's Hobbes himself, Calvin's stuffed tiger to whom he attaches a personality. Hobbes is even drawn differently when other characters are in the panel, to reflect how they see him as just a toy.
- Word of God is deliberately mum on whether or not Hobbes is just a stuffed toy, or really somehow alive.
  - And then there's the storyline where Hobbes ties Calvin to a chair and Calvin's dad find him and can't for his life figure out how the heck Calvin has managed this...
Recent issues of The Boys have been about the backgrounds of other members of the titular group beyond Wee Hughie. Mother's Milk was relatively straight forward. Frenchie's was... not. This is partially justified by Frenchie being craaaaaaaazy.
The Killing Joke. Not only would this go hand-in-hand with the Multiple Choice Past that The Joker explicitly says he has but may also explain the story's ending.
The Scott Pilgrim series. It's revealed in the final book of the series, Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour that Scott's memories of his past experiences with his ex-girlfriends were altered by Gideon Graves, meaning some of the events shown in the previous books may/may not be entirely false
Done in Steelgrip Starkey And The All-Purpose Power Tool via thought balloons and dialog from Flynn "Flyin'" Ryan . Although he's secretly the tool's inventor and the mastermind behind Mr. Pilgrim, his thoughts often read like he's unaware of the big picture. Done particularly egregiously when he and a cohort are making plans, and he still refers to Mr. Pilgrim in the third person.
In Twisted ToyFare Theatre, the perpetually drunk Iron Man told Spiderman about how Bucky died (again).

Iron Man: I shtood my ground, but it wash too late! The Shweathogs got him...
Captain America (comics): "Sweathogs"? I thought Pez Dispensers were chasing you!
Iron Man: Thash the weird part...

Vincent Santini, the narrator from Brooklyn Dreams, tells us in the first page he can't remember much from his past, so he'll tell us the best he can. The whole story is him telling us about his life the way he wants to remember it. He even says "I'll weave you some lies about my life, and who knows they might be true."
This is one of the rules governing the stories in Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard. June states that the stories can be neither "complete truths", nor "complete falsehoods." Exactly how much of any given story is true or false is left as an exercise to the reader, and they vary from the relatively plausible (a story of brief and unlikely companionship between mouse and bat), to the truly outlandish. (A mouse king who rode into battle upon a weasel, a Guardmouse who saved a town from a flash flood and drought by swallowing the flood waters than spitting them back out to serve as a reservoir.)
- Amusingly, one of the most plausible stories—a play on "Androcles and the Lion" in which an African mouse manages to befriend a lion that's impressed with its bravery and resourcefulness (pulling the thorn out of the lion's paw is in there, but is outright established to be a secondary factor at best) -- is discarded out of hand because the North American mice of the series have never seen or heard of lions or hyenas before, as well as the fact that it's told by a known lunatic who claims to have heard it from a beetle, which aren't talking animals in Mouse Guard.
Iron Man villain the Mandarin. A recent Annual had him telling his life story to a film maker, with the captions showing his way of the events, and the panels showing the complete opposite.

Back to Unreliable Narrator