Foreshadowing/Comic Books

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Examples of Foreshadowing in Comic Books include:

• Elf Quest comics have a lot of foreshadowing. One of the best examples is in the original series. In ElfQuest #2 the Wolfriders are resting up during a grueling desert journey, having managed to find a little water. Cutter, however, wants to do some more exploring, and his friend Skywise reluctantly agrees, complaining that "you won't sit still 'til you've found us a blasted waterfall". Several years later (in both real and comic time), in ElfQuest #9, Cutter and Skywise are involved in a literal Cliff Hanger beside - you guessed it - a giant waterfall.
• The retelling of Sleeping Beauty in Castle Waiting features this. The evil witch proclaims to the Opinicus—a griffin-like creature that she was riding—that after today, she'll ride the Devil himself as her steed and he'll thank her for the privilege. It turns out to be exactly correct, but not in the way she meant—her wickedness was worse than the standards the Devil considers acceptable and he disguised himself as the Opinicus on her return trip to personally carry her off to Hell.
• Watchmen's Pirate Story.
  • Heck, all of Watchmen. If we made a complete list it'd be longer than the rest of this page. Just from the first three panels (read here): the blood on the smiley recalls the five-minutes-to-midnight Doomsday Clock that'll appear again, and then there's the red-headed guy being Rorschach.
• In Alpha Flight, Northstar's sexuality was foreshadowed for years - right back to the beginning of the series - before he came out in #106.
• A clever one foreshadowed a death in Fantastic Four, where the team are visited by the future Invisible Woman, who mentions that future Reed Richards and Ben Grimm died to get her there, but she doesn't mention Johnny Storm. This is a good way to do so as Johnny died about twenty issues later. Foreshadowing far ahead, but making the death more effective.
• The era of Grant Morrison's Justice League of America started with Midsummer's Nightmare, where a villain gave all of humanity super-powers, leading to chaos and mayhem, in order to prepare them for a nebulous apocalyptic threat. When that threat finally appeared in the form of the "anti-sun" Mageddon, the League was only able to beat it by...giving everyone on Earth superpowers.
  • In the first proper arc of Morrison's run, the White Martians also mentioned that they'd experimented on humanity in the distant past, with the result that a species who should have been superhuman ended up only human. The anti-Mageddon plan pushed human evolution to the super-race it was destined to become.
• All Fall Down - On his first trip to the moon, Pronto complains about being "boxed in." In issue five, he is in a crate, arriving at the same destination, as AIQ Squared's secret weapon.

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