What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?/Comic Books

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


What Do You Mean These Comic Books Weren't Made on Drugs?

  • Many, many comics published by DC Comics during The Silver Age of Comic Books. Prime examples are any Superman-related comic from the 1950s or anything involving Bob Haney. And the Jimmy Olson series, (which, according to this list, also contained vast galloping herd of Unfortunate Implications.)
    • Marvel Comics, on the other hand, did in the inside art what DC did in the covers. Artists like Steve Ditko (who doesn't even consume alcohol), Jim Steranko (whose stories even contained some veiled anti-drug elements) and, to a lesser extent, Jack Kirby, famously created some trippy concepts.
      • Doctor Strange in particular made use of such psychedelic terrain imagery, that although it wasn't made on drugs, it was mentioned to be a popular comic for drug-users.
      • Steranko was one of the first artists allowed to write his own stories simply because no one else could write anything approaching his level of WTFery.
    • I second these two.
  • Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, a highly symbolic story illustrated by Dave McKean that features very weird and unusual versions of Batman and several of his villains and was primarily written late at night after long periods of no sleep, as Morrison was very straight-edge at the time.
    • While not technically drugs lack of sleep can cause hallucinations.
    • That being said, read Batman RIP and tell me that it wasn't made on drugs. It contained a full issue of Batman getting high off of weapons-grade heroin, dressing up in a red and purple Batsuit and calling himself "The Batman of Zurr-en-Arrh" while beating criminals up with a baseball bat and talking to Bat-Mite, who may or may not have been a product of said weapons-grade heroin. This was an elaborate throwback to an obscure Silver Age-era story about Batman getting superpowers on Planet X, which was equally as trippy.
    • And then there were his runs on Doom Patrol, Animal Man, and The Invisibles, which were most definitely made on drugs. A lot of drugs.
      • Surprisingly, Morrison says that Doom Patrol and Animal Man were not written on drugs. Given that he says The Invisibles most certainly was written on drugs, it seems unlikely he would lie about the first two and not the third.
      • Morrison has said some of Doom Patrol was influenced by shrooms but his work before that (including Zenith, Arkham, and Animal Man) is all straight-edge. Morrison has mentioned he's less into drugs and more into chaos magic which is where the majority of his trippiness comes from.
  • See the bit immediately above about Grant Morrison? Same deal with anything by Alan Moore, but with added gnostic theory, obscure literary references, and erotica.
    • This would be Alan "expelled from school for selling LSD" Moore?
  • If the Doom comic is not a Stealth Parody, this seems to be the next logical conclusion.
  • Carla Speed-McNeil's comic book series Finder may or may not be set on Earth in the distant future and features feathered dinosaurs who teach university courses, a college student minoring in anthropology and majoring in prostitution, a character who dreams of reuniting with his long lost father in the form of a locked outhouse, domed cities with pedestrian traffic jams and apartment buildings carved out of living trees ...and the author is a happily married woman with two kids (and a lot of weird interests).
  • The image is from a series named Mighty Samson, which is your typical fantasy barbarian series à la Conan the Barbarian—but it takes place After the End in the post-apocalyptic land of N'Yaark, which is overrun with mutants, monsters, and Mix-and-Match Critters.
  • Marvel's Star Wars Expanded Universe comics were all over the place in quality, and some issues were... out there. Many, many cat aliens, the psychic energy-eating rabbits called Hoojibs, the eight-foot green Lepus Carnivorous, a rather inane superweapon, and just in general some very odd plots and characters.
    • "Eight-foot green Lepus Carnivorous"? Grunny, is that you?
  • The Umbrella Academy. Pick any issue from either "The Apocalypse Suite" arc or the "Dallas" arc, really, and then consider that its writer has been clean and sober for years now.
    • The Breakfast Monkey. Then consider the fact that the creator of The Umbrella Academy wasn't doing drugs yet when he created The Breakfast Monkey.
  • Radioactively grown turtles that fight as ninjas and eat pizza. Need I say more?
  • Neil Gaiman's Sandman series has a good few stories like this. Especially Despair and Delirium's chapters in Endless Nights.
  • The DC Universe "New Guardians" mini-series has a cast of racial and ethnic stereotypes that frequently talk about sleeping with as many people as possible. Okay that doesn't qualify, but the 2nd issue, which has Snowflame, a drug dealing supervillain that worships cocaine as a god and snorts to gain superpowers, so everyone wanted him to win. And all this from a comic that tried to talk about real world issues.
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