We all love to celebrate the comics we love (I hope), though thought it would be fun to share some series we’ve read which were horrible.
What series did you ever collect/read that you regretted the time you spent?
To keep things interesting, try and avoid comics which simply haven’t aged well and try and reference ones one DC Universe because misery loves company!
I’ll kick things off with Infinity Inc. (2007). Not only was the story impossibly boring, the constant tease of Steel on the cover but never costumed in the book, got old quick. Read if you dare.
Arion Lord of Atlantis is the first one that pops to mind. The series starts in the middle of a plot line set up in another series and never explains backstory. Characters are super flat. Arion either has godlike powers and stomps everyone or has lost his powers only to regain them all a few issues later.
Battle for Bludhaven is another one that leapt to mind.
To be fair, I’m not generally a swords and sorcery kind of guy. I like the premise for this thread and think others will too. I think this one might go on for awhile.
This one isn’t the worst of the worst, but I didn’t enjoy it much.
I just couldn’t get into the story because I felt the destruction the Amazons caused was being reported, but not experienced. As reader, I just didn’t feel it.
I have a few bones to pick. For discussion’s sake, I’ll start with the most controversial: Grant Morrison’s JLA.
First: I crunched the numbers. 73% of the issues and 63% of the overall story arcs concern an alien invasion of some variety. A bunch of aliens invading and the Justice League having to run around punching things is fine for one or two stories, but it gets old when it begins to feel like that’s all the writer knows how to write.
And I’ll never understand why people were impressed by Prometheus. Much like a certain other Morrison creation, he has all of Batman’s bad habits with no redeeming qualities. He just is arbitrarily better than anyone ever, and has the perfect gadget to beat everybody, even when it’s completely meaningless technobabble (“neural chaff”) or there’s no way he would actually have access to the gizmo in question (When and where did someone make a weird neural disk of Batman’s fighting skills, and why is there only one person with the equipment to interface with these disks?). Then he loses because he literally forgets that Huntress and Zauriel existed.
And that’s just one arc. Throughout the entire run, Morrison seems to insist on almost coming up with interesting ideas, but then not following through with them or changing his mind halfway through. What is the Philosopher’s Stone? What was the point of the Wonder World characters? What happened to all the brainwashed White Martians (Mark Waid follows up on this, but Mark Waid is not Grant Morrison)? In one issue, Superman announces that the League is about to disband, but then at the start of the next issue their roster doubles in size and no one addresses the disbanding thing. The Starro arc focuses on some weird dream battle with the creature, but the invasion is actually warded off by Martian Manhunter pulling some psychic trickery. They give the entire population of Earth superpowers, but then summarily ignore that when Batman gives Superman a pep talk and Supers just punches some stuff and saves the day on his own.
This is why I’ve been stubbornly resistant to reading anything else by Grant Morrison. If this is supposed to be some of his more sane and legible work, I don’t want to see what happens when he’s actively trying to be incomprehensible.
[Don’t say the Eternal books, everyone’s expecting it, they get the idea. Don’t say the Eternal books.]
clears throat
So–City of Crime. A year-long story in Detective Comics maybe a decade or more ago, but there was one issue in the middle where broke off because of some bigger event going on or some such. Anyway, CoC was long; really freaking long. I remember a lot of narration, art that wasn’t exactly to my liking (but I probably wouldn’t say is bad, per se), and one weird scene of undercover Bruce saying how much he desired some married woman. That and some involvement of Mr. Freeze are about all the details I can recall. I don’t know if I still have it, though; may’ve sold it off years back when I got rid of a bunch of comics I didn’t like.
I can’t remember the title, but I remember there was an Elseworlds story, I think it involved some supernatural monster. All I really remember is that it was the only example of art that I just couldn’t find at all redeemable, and Dick Grayson got decapitated. I bet Dan Didio loved that.
I wouldn’t say that this is the worst comic series I’ve ever read by a long shot, but for sheer hours invested vs. entertainment gained, I’d have to go with Scott Synder’s Batman, mainly because I read the whole blasted thing despite generally not liking it. THERE ARE SOME GOOD ISSUES IN THERE (after the Court of Owls nonsense and before James Gordon becomes RoboCop), but every time his run started to build up good will with me again, he’d do something that just killed it. Plus, it feels like Gotham City has a No Man’s Land-esque experience every single year, and after a while, it’s just like, “Yeah, Gotham has been essentially destroyed again. Yawn.”
It’s kinda a shame. I love The Black Mirror, and I’m kinda fond of the first third of Zero Year before it jumps the shark repellent bat-spray.
(And yes, I meant Scott Snyder. I caught the typo just as I was pressing the Post Comment button, and by that point, it was too late. Edit button, please!)
Its leader is Bruce Wayne’s long-lost brother. What is this, General Hospital?
If Batman is up to his fourth Robin and still hasn’t figured out that the whole city is being controlled by a secret society, that’s sheer incompetence.
Batman had just gone up against two other (more plausible) secret societies, the Black Glove and Leviathan. It was getting pretty redundant.
Zombies in owl suits. That’s ridiculous, and not even amusingly so.
1.)It’s ambiguous as to whether or not he is Bruce’s brother.
2.)The point is that Batman doesn’t know the city nearly as much as he thinks he does. At the beginning he’s super confident that he know everything about Gotham, then he’s proven wrong. Sure, it is a bit ridiculous that he didn’t know. But the Court has been around for centuries. They would know how to stay hidden.
3.)Yeah but this isn’t annoying to read like a Grant Morrison story (in my opinion) is.
4.)I think they’re fun to watch get beat up. They’re basic goons for Batman to punch and not have to worry about dying. It’s satisfying and cathartic to watch after Batman got destroyed by the Court earlier.
But seriously how are zombies in owl suits any more ridiculous than a man with a permanent clown face or a crocodile man? It’s not that weird of a villain for Batman to fight. Gotham is a crazy place.