I've decided that the best comic book storyline is when characters who are ostensibly either male or masculine give birth to themselves. Surprisingly, I am aware of three separate examples of this happening.
The first I'm quoting from a list I found:
3) Spider-man Mutates Into a Giant Pregnant Spider, Spectacular Spider-man #17–20
I’m pretty sure a lot of people who recoil in disgust from The Other, a big Spider-man crossover written primarily by Peter David, Reginald Hudlin, and JMS, are in fact confusing it with this particular story. Changes was written by Paul Jenkins, a writer well on his way to becoming the Howard Mackie of the new millennium, and ran in Spectacular Spider-man nearly a year before The Other crossover started running in Amazing Spider-man, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-man, and Marvel Knights Spider-man.
Both stories use the basic premise of Spider-man acquiring primordial “insect” and “bug” powers through a weird quasi-mystical rebirth experience. Both stories make the rebirth stupidly literal, featuring scenes where Spider-man gives birth to himself by dying and then having a new body explode out of his own corpse. Changes gives Spider-man the movie’s organic web-shooters and a frankly bizarre ability to talk to ants, while The Other built on that to give Spider-man a host of other powers like night vision. All of these powers, incidentally, have since been abandoned and ignored.
The main difference between the two stories is that The Other is fucking Shakespeare compared to Changes. Even if you don’t take a passionate stance on the status of Spider-man’s web-shooters, Changes is still a ball of fucktarded idiocy. The plot hinges on the mind-blowingly ridiculous notion of roughly one in every three people having a latent “insect gene” that makes them susceptible to the mind control super-powers possessed by a new villainess called The Queen. Lest you accidentally not comprehend her importance instantly, she has complicated backstory that ties her in with Captain American and Nick Fury in World War II, and involves making her one of the super-bestest fighters and spies evar. She is of course presented as one of the most dangerous forces on Earth by story’s end, and gets hold of a bomb that could easily let her destroy New York.
Anyway, the Queen’s super-contrived power over the “insect gene” somehow means that, upon kissing Spider-man, she was somehow able to infect him with a something-or-other that makes him slowly start mutating into a giant bug.
Mary Jane contributes by bitching at him and making him go to a Klingon nerd-wedding. Eventually Peter mutates completely into an eight-foot-tall giant spider that immediately joins the Queen in the underground lair where she intends to ride out the detonation of the bullshit bomb. After much pointless dicking around, a scientist reveals that Peter isn’t just a giant spider that the Queen intends to fuck later, he’s also a giantpregnant spider. Eventually he dies and in the process “gives birth” to himself just as looked before he began mutating from human form into spider-form. Spider-man uses his new powers to get a hilariously easy defeat over the Queen, and there are many shots of Peter’s organic webshooters that make him look like he’s jizzing out his wrists.
Someone, at some point, seriously believed Changes would be acceptable as a story that changed Spider-man forever. Think about that for a minute. Let it soak into your brain. Changes was full of the sort of fucking idiocy that readers always want to forget as quickly as possible, from an overpowered new villain to really poorly-done characterizations. As a way to sell comics die-hards on the movie-style organic webshooters, it couldn’t have fucking failed harder.
Numbers two and three I mentioned earlier. In Jamie Delano's run on Animal Man, the storyline starts with Animal Man getting killed off. His life force latches onto a bacterium or something and he keeps getting eaten by bigger and bigger stuff and then possessing those things. Through this process he works his way up the food chain until eaten by his daughter's pet triceratops. The triceratops then gives birth to an egg out of which Animal Man hatches. In case you were afraid it got normal from there, Animal Man then turns into a gargoyle like creature by having crazy animal sex and then commands hordes of misc. animals to eat him, thus dying at the beginning and end of the storyline.
Swamp Thing, written by Rick Veitch turns into a visibly female version of himself, complete with breasts, and then births out a new copy of himself, while the old female degrades into dirt. I don't remember exactly how Swamp Thing turned into a woman or why this was essential to the plot, but it definitely needs to be on the "People who gave birth to themselves" list.
