By the 2020s, Marvel established itself as one of the biggest brands in all of entertainment and pop culture. Its movies play to massive audiences of adults and kids all around the world. They are as mainstream as it gets.

Those are the movies, though. Back in the day, and even sometimes in modern times, Marvel’s comics got weird. Really weird. They might feature familiar superheroes as talking apes, or take an austere science-fiction movie and turn it into trippy series featuring a robot man with extending limbs. Marvel once published a comic celebrating and reprinting all their biggest continuity errors, and they’ve also published the adventures of a pro athlete turned superhero who fights crime in an indestructible football uniform.

These are by no means hypothetical examples I came up with off the top of my head; these are all real Marvel publications put out by the company at various points in the last 50 years. And the list below features many more examples of truly bizarre Marvel comics, none of which, we’re willing to wager, will ever get their own Marvel Cinematic Universe movies.

(Then again, we could be wrong. Believe it or not, one of the books below almost became a Steven Spielberg movie. Then it almost became a Quentin Tarantino movie! No, really — keep reading.)

The Weirdest Marvel Comics Ever Published

Of all the thousands of comics published by Marvel, these are far and away the strangest.

More From KUBC Gold