The 5 Most Insane Celebrity Comic Book Cameos

5

Jay Leno meets Spider-Man (2002)

Superheroes and late night TV hosts have a curious history of teaming up to fight evil. The Avengers guest-starred on Letterman, and the cast of Saturday Night Live joined Spider-Man in defeating the Silver Samurai.

These unlikely team-ups combined two great tastes that don't seem to go together, but, like Nutella and Jagermeister, somehow make perfect sense when you're absolutely shitfaced.

In July 2002, Marvel Comics debuted Jay Leno & Spider-Man: One Night Only. Marvel presumably created this three-part crossover to capitalize on the release of the Spider-Man feature film, but why they chose Leno to be the star is anyone's guess. You wouldn't think Leno's audience of senior citizens would overlap much with audience for Spider-Man on the Venn diagram.

Where it goes wrong ...
We have to start with One Night Only's criminally ridiculous plot, wherein Spider-Man and Leno team up to film a General Motors commercial, then get attacked by ninjas. What the hell help is Jay Leno going to be in a ninja fight? Couldn't they, say, have them attacked by a race of aliens whose only vulnerability is really stale monologues and awkward, polite laughter?

No, instead we get a 52-year-old Jay Leno practicing kung fu on a ninja-defeating level:

Don't bother trying to find this comic in stores. Marvel divided it into three parts and tucked it non-sequentially at end of random serieses during summer 2002. This is bad for the 2.5 of you who actually wanted to read this turd, but good for the rest of us who avoided accidentally running across it.

And to make things worse ...
The writers tantalized us with a promising homoerotic subtext, yet for some reason chose not to pursue it.

4

Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran meets The Joker (1988)

The team-up of The Joker and Ayatollah Khomeini in Batman #429 may seem unorthodox, but there was historical precedent for it. Political leaders have appeared alongside superheroes ever since the inception of the modern comic serial. For example, Captain America and Superman took on Hitler and his Nazis during World War II. More recently, First Lady Hillary Clinton appeared with supervillain Lex Luthor at Superman's 1993 funeral.

How that hasn't been turned into an Obama campaign ad is beyond us.

Where it goes wrong ...
This cameo provides what has to be the most fucked up portrayal of '80s-era international affairs since Rocky IV.

The Ayatollah appeared in the infamous "Death in The Family" issue, in which the Joker blew up a warehouse on Jason Todd, the second Robin. On September 15, 1988, Batman fans had a mere 36 hours to call DC's 900 number and choose whether his taut little green-Speedoed ass survived the blast. Being the charitable souls they are, comic fans voted 5343 to 5271 to ice the Boy Wonder, thus sparing him a lifetime of counseling and sexual maladjustment.

3

John Walsh meets The Outsiders (2004)

In Outsiders #17 through #19, America's Most Wanted host John Walsh teamed up with Teen Titans spin-off squad, the Outsiders.

The premise of superheroes coordinating with the media had promise, assuming that at no point would John Walsh, say, whip out a jetpack.

Where it goes wrong ...
First off, who the hell were the Outsiders?

They were a C-List superteam made up of twentysomething hard-bodies who bickered often, swore freely and enjoyed indiscriminate sex:

Note that "the Pequod" is their superhero battle-jet, which apparently had a lot of suspicious stains on the seats. So they acted less like the Justice League and more like the cast of The Real World. This similarity probably had to do with the fact that the series was penned by Judd Winick, a.k.a. Judd from The Real World: San Francisco, a.k.a. the season the housemates kicked Puck off the show.

2

Princess Diana joins the X-Statix (2003)

In 2003, writer Peter Milligan announced that the deceased Diana, Princess of Wales would be joining the X-Statix, a media-whoring X-Men spin-off team. In an interview with The Guardian UK, Milligan noted that "Diana exerted a strange, mysterious power from beyond the grave," so why not turn that into a mutant power?

Diana was set to appear in a storyline cheekily titled "Di Another Day." Her zombified body would join the X-Statix, thwart assassination attempts from the British Royal Family, and thwart further assassination attempts from her jealous teammates, who would grow increasingly annoyed that she was hogging the limelight.

1

Muhammad Ali in Superman vs. Muhammad Ali (1978)

The most iconic boxer of all time versus the most iconic superhero of all time sounds like a knockout of guilty pleasure kitsch. Sure, the writer has to devise some excuse for Superman to throw the match. Nobody wanted to watch Superman punch a ragged hole in Ali's torso, as he could so easily do.

Where it goes wrong ...
Given the comic's title, you would think Muhammad Ali is ostensibly the hero of the piece. Sadly, the boxer spends most of the comic getting in Superman's way. The comic opens with Clark Kent bumping into Muhammad Ali, who is inexplicably schooling a cadre of 12-year-olds in a game of basketball.