Early Installment Weirdness/Comic Books

• 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 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.
  • The Joker originally had No Sense of Humor
• 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 jiraffes being decapitated by telegraphic wires). 10 years later, the collection released to celebrate the 60th anniversary had its first issue come with a facsimile of Donald Duck #1, letting readers experience Early Installment Weirdness firsthand.
• The early 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.
• Usagi Yojimbo had a bit of unevenness in the beginning: in addition to being a bit more violent than it is now, non-mammals and humans are seen in crowd shots and two human/oids have speaking roles (they're both villains). Currently the only non-mammal characters are Lord Hebi, a giant snake, and his human boss Lord Hikiji, whose face hasn't been seen in ages. I can only speculate what foreigners could look like since lions, tigers, and rhinos already live in Japan.
  • Stan Sakai has stated that he regrets having made Hikiji human.
• The first few Hellboy stories are very odd to read in comparison to later installments, thanks to John Byrne's writing. Under Byrne, Hellboy uses a Private Eye Monologue to describe the story, tying him more closely into the Nineties Anti-Hero archetype. When Byrne left and Mike Mignola, the series' creator, took over dialogue in addition to plotting and art, this form of exposition vanished.
• While Neil Gaiman's The Sandman has always taken place in the DC Universe, early issues were much less shy about depicting the title character interacting with other DC characters. Hell, the first story arc features Dr. Destiny as the Big Bad, as well as John Constantine, Mr. Miracle, Martian Manhunter, Etrigan, and the Scarecrow in supporting roles and/or cameos. For the bulk of the series, the Endless and associated characters more or less exist in their own continuity.
  • In addition, while the comic was always very dark, the first story arc was closer to a straight-up horror comic.
• First two Nemesis the Warlock stories - Terror Tube and Killer Watt - refers to Torquemada as chief of Tube Police, while later he is referred to as "Grand master Of Termight". Nemesis spends both stories inside his ship, with no clue about his identity or appearance, saying nothing but his Catch Phrase Credo!, which he tends to use at odd moments. A lot implies it wasn't even established that Nemesis is even an alien back then, with narration referring to him as "not ordinary man" at best.
• Originally Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were a parody of the gritty comics of Frank Miller, in particular Daredevil and Ronin.
• The Fantastic Four wore civilian garb in their first two issues.
  • Also, the Human Torch looked like a featureless yellow blob of flame.
  • As well as the Thing looking very lumpy and uneven.
  • Doctor Doom acquired the ability to switch minds with whomever he had eye contact with. This is an ability that he occasionally uses even in the newer comics, but it was an odd concept for the time.
• Ultimate Marvel Team-Up was done very early in the life of the Ultimate universe. As a result, a lot of characters like Hulk and Iron Man appeared before they were given headlining roles in The Ultimates and are noticeably different then what would come.
• After his first appearance in Tales of Suspense #39, Iron Man spent the next few issues travelling back in time to visit Cleopatra, fighting a robot caveman built by aliens, preventing a race of people who lived inside the Earth from invading the surface world, and having several other wacky adventures. It wasn't until Tales of Suspense #45 (the first appearance of Pepper Potts, Happy Hogan, and supervillain Blizzard) that he started to edge more towards superhero territory.
• 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 has a different shield and costume in his first issue.
• Upon reading the first 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.)
• This can be applied era to era in comics but especially the Silver Age which generally has the silliest and most over the top plots and really sticks out from the other eras with many of the most popular characters of today being invented or taking on their most recognizable forms in that era.