I have a fan boy’s delight from watching Avengers: Infinity War. It’s a movie-moment ten-years in the making. When Marvel first announced they were going to make some sort of cinematic universe leading up to the first The Avengers film I scoffed. We all did, right? Studios have tried to make compelling superhero movies for years and while there are some good ones before Iron Man in 2008, they pale in comparison to this master plan. The fact that it worked and worked well for The Avengers is astounding and it’s only gotten better since.

So many heroes from the printed media are now living, breathing right before our very eyes. In your wildest nerdy dreams did you ever think Marvel would make something like Guardians of the Galaxy and have it be good? Heck no that sounded crazy, but they did it. This Marvel Cinematic Universe also made nerdy topics like this okay to enjoy without getting made fun of. In fact, everybody goes to see these films like they’re the new Westerns, or something. It’s incredible, but that said there are some funny differences that are easy to point out. That’s right. It’s time for some more Marvel memes this time comparing the comics to film. As if it needs to be said there will be spoilers ahead based on all current nineteen movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and some other Marvel films.

25 Small Scale Victories

The original Civil War arc in the comics was a long time coming. It spanned multiple issues centered on multiple characters including the Avengers, Spider-Man, the X-Men, Blade, and so many others. If you were a Marvel super hero chances are your stories would be somehow involved with Civil War. It lasted a whole year in terms of releases starting in 2006 and ending in 2007. It was a big deal for a variety of reasons. Who do you side with? Do you want to protect the secret identity of super heroes, or do you think they should be registered? Again, it was a huge deal at the time and one I was hoping would bleed into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Finally, at long last, it was announced as a tie-in to the third Captain America movie. It follows roughly the same idea of a registration act forcing heroes to reveal their secret identities albeit tweaked to fit the movie universe better. It’s a great movie, but it doesn’t hold the same gravity as the comics. Sure it was more than this meme points out in that there were other fights, but in terms of size there is no comparison. The comics were better.

24 Tastes Like Freedom

Anyone who says comics should be taken seriously should go back to the original print runs of Marvel’s classic heroes throughout their beginning and follow them through their entire anthology. There’s a lot of silly stuff in there that may have made sense at the time, but because we live in an age where we can find seemingly anything from any era on the Internet, it’s going to be made fun of at some point. Now I know what you’re thinking meme fans. I know that the comic image on the left is a fake. That is to say, the art is real, but the text is fake.

People have gone through and found ridiculous images like this, deleted the text, and then added in their own to make it hilarious. The best ones are the types that seem like they are plausible. That is to say, stuff that feels like it could have been written in that era. Again, go and look at some classic panels and you’ll be amazed by how goofy they are. Fake or not this meme with Chris Evans looking awkward makes that joke even stronger. Maybe we’ll get to see a reference to this someday in an after credits video.

23 Agent Of Crossovers

Before The Avengers made its debut in 2012, rustling our fated heroes together, there were two big characters that were trying to connect every Marvel film. That would be Nick Fury, visiting each member of the team and offering them a position as part of the Avengers Initiative. Working alongside him was Agent Phil Coulson who started out small and then became this huge phenomenon out of the blue due to fan devotion.

The fan has become the star.

Now for all intents and purposes the Marvel Cinematic Universe is it’s own thing. It borrows concepts and characters from the comic, tries to be faithful to the source as much as possible in terms of personality, but also does its own thing to create, well, another universe. That is all except for one character that never appeared in the comics prior to the movies. Yes, you guessed right. It’s Agent Phil Coulson. Despite being offed in The Avengers he was revived for the TV show, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and more importantly is now in the comics. How about that? A movie hero so popular he made it into the comics. His actor, Clark Gregg, must be thrilled. That has to be a high honor for him.

22 A Widow Of Tears

Hollywood didn’t think the world was ready for a superhero movie starring just women or at least led by a woman. They were wrong and Wonder Woman was a smash hit at the box office. It was a moment for little girls everywhere to point at a movie and get inspired by it. A movie where women could be heroes and not princesses that needed rescuing, or background noise. This was DC, by the way, a company with a movie studio that seemingly couldn’t find a good story if it bit them in the face. That is to say, all of their connected universe films are pretty terrible all except Wonder Woman.

Girls can kick butt too!

So what’s the deal, Marvel? Are you just going to let DC show you up? I know Captain Marvel is slated for 2019, which I hope is good. Not just from a critic standpoint, but I want more films for women. All that said what I’m basically leading up to is this meme. It’s all well and good for Captain Marvel, but where is the spy action thriller for Black Widow, one of the oldest running stars in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. She has tons of solo comics, but no solo films. Make it happen, Marvel!

21 Cuts Like A Spider

Our first mark of a really good Marvel movie was Spider-Man in 2002 followed up by the superior Spider-Man 2 in 2004. I thought this series could do no wrong. Once it was announced Venom was finally coming to the big screen via the third sequel I was pumped. Then I saw Spider-Man 3 and oh boy is it a classic. Classically awful that is. Ba dum tss!

First of all, it tries to cram in three villains into a single movie, which is bad in and of itself. Second, it tries to deal with a love triangle with three girls vying for Peter. And three, combined with all that we have Peter dealing with the Venom Symbiote, which is a great arc in the comics, but displayed poorly on film. Like this meme says, emo doesn’t mean dark. That suit is supposed to turn Peter psychotic. Instead, he has the confidence of a man in one of those Viagra commercials that just swallowed a half bottle of pills and is ready to get busy for a month full of pleasure. As corny as this emo transformation is it’s at least hilariously bad and you can have a good time watching it.

20 A Four Person Team Gone Wrong

The Fantastic Four was Marvel’s first superhero team. They were more than that. They were a family too. If any team deserved to be on the silver screen it was these four heroes. Now they have been translated into film, but very poorly. The first time was in 2005 with Fantastic Four, which I somehow saw in the theaters three times. It actually might have been four, but I lost count. It’s all a blur to me. I didn’t necessarily love it, or hate it either. I was in high school, certain other clicks wanted to see it, I had the free time, etc. You get the picture.

It’s inoffensive. But the sequel, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is pretty rough. They took that character and turned him into a heaping pile of dung. As lackluster as those two films were nothing compares to the reboot that came out in 2015. I heard it was bad, which dissuaded me from seeing it in theaters, but I had to know why it was so bad. How can so much money go into something so awful? Well, I don’t know how, but Fox did it. The movie is just boring and not even fun to pick on, which is the worst kind of bad.

19 The Furious Two

When I was growing up I knew Nick Fury was a white dude with brown hair, silver streaks, and an eye patch. That’s the original more “classic” version of the character that I gathered from comics and more importantly the Spider-Man cartoon from the 90s. That’s how I found out about a lot related Marvel heroes like Nick Fury and his S.H.I.EL.D. organization, The Punisher, Blade, and more. It doesn’t really stand the test of time compared to its counterpart Batman, but it was useful in some regard. That was when I was younger though. Older me knows Nick Fury as Samuel L. Jackson.

The modern ebony and ivory duo.

In the Ultimate Marvel universe, they made that version of Fury black too, but more so than that it looks just like Jackson. That has to be a cool feeling for him. Now origins and colors aside, if the two ever met I bet they’d have a similar reaction as in this meme. It’s not necessarily an anger thing over race so much as it would be a shock. Meeting another version of yourself is one thing, but seeing that other person as another race must be even more shocking. Of course, both Nick Fury agents deal with a lot of crazy stuff so perhaps this wouldn’t be that strange after all.

18 Space Stoned

This subject matter is more confusing than Drax’s comic origins. First of all here’s something you may know about Avengers: Infinity War. It’s about the Infinity Stones. Duh, right? Well did you know they’re called the Infinity Gems in the comics? Why would Marvel Studios change the name from gems to stones for the movie universe? After researching a bit I couldn’t find a definitive answer, which suggests to me no one cares. Is a ruby a gem, or a stone? You could really call them either and no one would probably make a fuss. Here’s something you absolutely don’t know regarding these gifted gems.

Can we just stick with one name, please?

Original they were actually referred to as the Soul Gems. Yep, not kidding at all. If you somehow get ahold of Marvel Premiere #1, which came out in 1972, you can learn all about them. I won’t tell you how to get it, but there are ways. Wink. Now as comics often tend to they were retconned into Infinity Gems the next time the story of Thanos was retold because Soul Gems just sounds too cheesy, right? In the grand scheme of things, everything is named poorly in comics so it really doesn’t matter.

17 Bitten By Spider Love

Whether we’re talking about the Fox cartoon, the comic portrayals, or the movies, Mary Jane Watson has never moved me. She’s all over the place in terms of emotions and none of the depictions call out to me. I’m more of a Gwen guy myself. Yes, I know things often go bad for her character, but I inadvertently tend to gravitate toward tragic heroes who wind up being destroyed time and time again. Cough, Full Metal Alchemist’s Maes Hughes, cough. That’s a list I could easily write more about, but let’s put that idea aside for now.

My friends call me MJ.

What I should say was Gwen was my gal until I saw Spider-Man: Homecoming wherein we found out Michelle Jones is shorted to MJ, which I know is like a duh moment, but it still surprised me when it happened. Is that the biggest twist in the whole movie? Maybe. Either way, she’s awesome, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I want her to date Peter. That may ruin her in my mind and if the Marvel Cinematic Universe writers are off the script the sequel, I doubt Sony’s writers could handle that relationship with tact without having to resort to clichés. Let’s just say my Spider-Sense is tingling.

16 Not The Drax I Know

As I already mentioned before I knew nothing about Guardians of the Galaxy before seeing the film version. I assumed Drax’s character was right on the money, but I was very wrong. They changed a lot. First of all he’s mostly depicted as green in the comics. Why did they make him gray instead? My guess is to not confuse audience members who might think he may be related to Gamora based on skin color. That’s only one small difference compared to how much else they changed about his background.

That guy smoking a pipe on the left side of the panel is in fact Drax. Yes, that’s right. He was once a human from Earth. I know. My mind was blown too. See in the original story Drax was an ordinary man named Arthur Douglas. Thanos is still the one responsible for destroying his family and leaving him in a weakened state of mind. In this mindset he is visited by Kronos who takes his sprit, puts it into a warrior’s body, and boom, there’s the birth of Drax the Destroyer. I can see why a complicated story like that was left out of the films. The movie version seems better.

15 The Quick And The Gone

For all this mutant talk I want to discuss Marvel Studios’ first plan for them in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They tried to implement them in the weirdest way possible in Avengers: Age of Ultron. They made a deal with Fox to lend the mutant characters of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch into the movie. Here’s the thing though. They aren’t mutants. In fact, they’re legally not allowed to use mutant in any context regarding the films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. How crazy is that?

What’s the deal with Quicksilver?

What are Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch considered in that movie then? Uh, experiments? You can tell they had no idea what to do with them. I can practically see them shrugging their shoulders while suggesting they got powers from Hydra experiments. I just don’t understand why they even made this deal in the first place. Also after all that Quicksilver gets destroyed. What a waste! Also, for some more weird stuff, those two are the children of Magneto, a huge part of who they are. Imagine if they got Wolverine in and he could use claws as a weapon, but they don’t come out of his skin. That’s not Wolverine! That deal was like a weird Monkey’s Paw situation.

14 Save Us From Ourselves

There are two things that I remember about the Ben Affleck 2003 Daredevil movie. One, “Wake Me Up Inside” by Evanescence. As I write this it automatically popped into my head and now it surely won’t get out until I go to bed. Two, my aunt brought this movie up over Thanksgiving the year it came out, surprising my uncle that she saw it without him. Girl power? Personal stories aside this movie is trash. At the time I liked it, but I was a dumb teenager that ate up any superhero movie like I was some kind of street rat begging for scraps. I was desperate!

It was a different time when these movies still hadn’t found their footing and all decisions were made by CEOs who had never picked up a comic book in their life. This film is so bad I can’t convince my friend to watch the Netflix show because that movie burned her so bad. Ouch. There’s some hard-hitting proof of actual trauma. One day I’ll heal her wounds, but for now, I can make fun of Dare Devil safely. If you’re curious it is kind of fun in a bad way, but yeah. The real comic Dare Devil would be furious if he saw it.

13 Hulk And Morty

What can I say? I couldn’t resist turning the Hulk into a Pickle Rick meme. There’s more to it than just the color though, which is the obvious part. You could also say this joke is a commentary on how slow and dumb the Hulk is. So much so that he’s too late on the whole Pickle Rick joke and also that he doesn’t quite understand it. That’s why he calls himself Pickle Hulk. If I was better at Photoshop I would make him look like a pickle, but sometimes over editing a joke can make it less funny.

Anyway, his comic book counterpart is not much smarter. That is to say, he didn’t begin to have intelligence, but once Bruce Banner got more control over the transformation his Hulk side started to become more cognizant of his surroundings. The movie version is getting there, but he’s a long way off from the comics. That’s why this confused shot of the comic Hulk is great to show him sort of looking down on the film side. Almost like he’s thinking what the heck are you talking about Hulk, or that’s beneath us now Hulk. Don’t lower us down to Ricky and Morty meme territory.

12 Coon And Friends

When Marvel Studios succeeded with The Avengers it felt like they were on cloud nine. It’s as if they thought if we can make this work then we can get anything to work on film. That’s why we got solo films based on Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, and most obscure of all, Guardians on the Galaxy. I knew about the other two through various means, but I had never in my life heard of Guardians of the Galaxy before. Even when Rocket Raccoon was added into Marvel vs Capcom 3 I was clueless. When I asked friends they just mentioned he was like an animal cyborg. Suffice it to say even among the comics this team was obscure.

Now they can thank their lucky stars that the film was successful because it helped reboot interest in the comics. As the meme jokes, no one cared about it until the movie arrived. Now it’s one of the top five films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That is to say in my book at least. Does that also count for the comics? No probably not, but hey, at least it got a little boost. After Avengers: Infinity War, I’m curious where the movies can go next with that crew.

11 That Old Bird

Most of my knowledge regarding Spider-Man, X-Men, and Batman came from cartoons. Batman the Animated Series has stood the test of time, but the other two have not. Well, those Marvel songs have, but that’s not relevant here. Their quality really isn’t an issue either. Good, or bad I learned a lot about these universes through the cartoons, which got me interested in checking out the comics as a source material. Boy was I surprised at the differences with a lot of these characters.

Let’s get into Spider-Man specifically. To me, his villain, The Vulture, was this old man who was trying to rejuvenate himself with a crystal, or something. He was a washed up has been, which I liked the idea of. When it was announced this character was going to be in Spider-Man: Homecoming and was going to be played by Michael Keaton I was a little hesitant. He’s older, but not seemingly ancient like the comic version. Also, Keaton feels too cool to be The Vulture. Well, my worries turned to glee as his portrayal might be my favorite villain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, redefining the goofy comic counterpart. Michael Keaton can do wrong and I hope he’ll return soon.

10 Merc Without A Mouth

Comic book movies, as I have pointed out many times in here, were pretty bad before the Marvel Cinematic Universe opened up. I guess I should say hit or miss with the latter being the default review. As terrible as some of these examples are you can at least point out some faithful references to their comic counterparts. That is to say, they can look and act like them, but maybe other things made the movie bad. What I’m trying to get is that there is one example that is the worst-case scenario. A movie that mutated a character poorly if you will. Yes, I’m obviously referring to Deadpool from X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

His nickname in the comics is the merc with the mouth since he never stops talking. That’s like his thing. Well, that and breaking the fourth wall, which coincides with that. All Fox had to do was have him say funny stuff and what do they do instead? Seal his mouth with a skin flap. Thankfully Ryan Reynolds got to help reboot the character with Deadpool in 2016 and now a sequel is close at hand. Hopefully, it can continue to make good on the Deadpool name.

9 No Powers For You!

Time for a little nerdy talk about Disney Infinity 2.0, which was the set that focused on Marvel’s heroes. It holds a special place in my heart because I was granted the amazing opportunity to review not just the game with the starter pack, but the entire launch collection. It’s one of my most cherished possessions along with being a fun review. Personal congratulations aside, I have a point to all of this. One of the figures that came with the Spider-Man play set was Nova.

More like Nerfed Core.

Now at the time I thought he was just some super hero I had never heard before, but he’s connected to Guardians of the Galaxy. Remember the Nova Corps from the first film? In the comics they are infused with super powers, but nobody in the film seems like they’re gifted at all. In fact in Avengers: Infinity War apparently the planet was destroyed very unceremoniously. That has to be a shocker to all of the stars involved. Being offed on screen is one thing, but being destroyed off screen has to be even worse. Poor John C. Reilly. Now you’ll never get a taste of the Nova Corps’ true power.

8 Infinity Love

I waited ten whole years to see the Infinity Gauntlet arc represented on film and it was worth the wait. It’s good, but not great. The one plus that trumps any negativity is the sheer ambition, which Marvel Studios miraculously pulls off. It is a little too crammed, but not in a confusing way. For all of its pacing flaws, I’m surprised how much they made me care about Thanos. He’s twisted that’s for sure, but I can see where he’s coming from in regards to destroying half the universe’s population. The reason why in the film, as he explains, is to diminish famine. Fewer people means more resources for all. That’s all well and good, but that’s not why he did it in the comics.

If you followed the most recent interpretation Thanos wanted to wipe out half the universe because he was in love with a celestial being known as Lady Death. He wanted to show her he could have the same impact on life as she does to impress her. Wow. Now that is a cheesy romance we want to see on screen.

7 Founding Fathers

This is more of an interesting history lesson than it is something to point and laugh at. Brushing up on my Marvel knowledge I was able to read through the founding members of the Avengers in the comics compared to what the founding members were in the movies. First, let’s get into the films, which is weird. Founding is an odd term for the movies since no one really sticks together. Between films, they go their separate ways, but whatever. Semantics aside, the founding members of The Avengers film include Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America, Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Thor.

The comic book version is very close with a couple of minor differences. Their beginning team consisted of Iron Man, Ant-Man, the Wasp, Thor, and the Hulk. While I’m not sure why Hawkeye and Black Widow were included in the films, I can say it was an obvious choice to substitute in Captain America since he is a bigger name in the zeitgeist compared to both Ant-Man and the Wasp. Lucky for them they’re finally getting their own team up movie even though it’s not the original Ant-Man and the Wasp, but still, close enough. I want more Paul Rudd, please!

6 Extinct-Men

As great as the achievement that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they can always do better. One glaring hole in their construction is the lack of mutants, which is to say X-Men. For those unaware of the controversy let me spell it out for you, as it is complicated to the average viewer. Since the original X-Men film in 2000, Fox has owned the rights to all film adaptations of the property even though it is a Marvel comic. The same goes for Sony and Spider-Man. It’s such a weird concept to explain. Imagine if Disney gave the rights to Fox to make Donald Duck films, and Disney’s inner studios couldn’t touch him. That’s strange, right?

Thankfully Sony made a deal to get Spider-Man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe first with Captain America: Civil War. They even helped make Spider-Man: Homecoming, which is in my top five films in this pantheon. The deal is also pretty complicated though, but we won’t get into that here. Where are the X-Men now? With Disney acquiring Fox it’s only a matter of time before Scarlet Witch turns into a proper mutant, hopefully. There are some other big mutants I want to see which we’ll get into.