Public Service Announcements is eigenlijk de Amerikaanse Variant van Postbus 51. Maar naast TV spotjes hebben deze in het verleden ook gebruik gemaakt van comics om het vooral jongere publiek te wijzen op bepaalde dingen. Alleen is dat ook diverse keren vreselijk fout gedaan, en daarom heeft de website Cracked.com deze lijst gemaakt. Vooral de nummer 1 is behoorlijk gestoord, maar aan de andere kant geen genade voor mensen die dieren wat aan doen.

#1. If You Hurt Animals, the X-Men Will Mess You Up

What do you get when you combine the X-Men and Doris Day? Possibly the most deranged and ineffective animal rights PSA ever made.

In 2004, the Doris Day Animal League (which in this context sounds like an awesome superhero team, but it's actually a nonprofit animal advocacy group) joined forces with major comics publishers for a program called Comics for Compassion. As part of this program, special animal-themed issues of certain comics were produced, including a story where the X-Men tackle the problem of animal abuse the same way they'd deal with a Sentinel attack: by using their mutant powers to terrorize a bunch of kids.

The story introduces a new mutant named Squid-Boy, who has the ability to breathe underwater and, well, vaguely resemble a squid.

After Squid-Boy discovers some mutilated fish by his favorite swimming spot, he goes to Jean Grey, the X-Men's resident telepath, and asks her to use her powers to locate whoever killed the fish, but Jean refuses to use her powers on anyone without their permission. Soon they discover a dog that was brutally tortured, and Jean attempts to read the dog's brain to learn what happened, but proceeds to completely lose her shit.

Once Jean learns that the dog was murdered by some boys who also killed the fish, the rational superhero response would have been to visit those kids and teach them that hurting animals is wrong: they are teenagers, they'll listen to anything a man who can shoot lasers from his eyes and a redhead in tight leather will tell them. But this is the X-Men, not the Super Friends, so instead, Wolverine pays the boys a visit in their treehouse and threatens to cut them with his adamantium claws.

Before Wolverine can murder anyone, however, Jean Grey shows up and uses her telepathic powers to torture the boys by making them experience all the pain they had inflicted on the animals, including what it feels like to have their arms cut off.

So, remember when Jean lectured Squid-Boy about how unethical it would be to use her telepathic powers on anyone without their permission? Apparently psychic torture doesn't count as that. But hey, at least it served the purpose of teaching the boys a valuable lesson, right? Not really: At the end of the comic, one of the boys tosses a cat tied to a brick through a window of the X-Men's home, for which he gets sent to prison. So remember, kids, if you even think about hurting animals, the X-Men will destroy your life.