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Despite being Marvel's flagship title, Fantastic Four has a lot of terrible runs. The worst of them, and that's a tight race, has to be Steve Engleharts. Roy Thomas and Marv Wolfman were just bland. JMS, De Falco, and Millar were terrible enough to be put in this thread on their own, but it's Englehart that hits the bottom. His run starts in #304. The series had been drifting a bit since Byrne had left a year earlier to go do his thing on Superman. Englehart was the first regular writer since him. The very first thing he does is introduce the FF's new villain: Quicksilver.  Anyway, step two is at the end of the issue. He does the thing that everyone with a long run on the FF does: change up the team. Of course, Englehart does it in his first issue. It's Reed and Sue's turn to quit this time. Crystal the Inhuman stands in for one of them (and thus gets to keep Quicksilver around as a villain), while the other replacement member is the second Ms. Marvel. She's literally a manhater whose back story is that she got gang raped by supervillains. This being 1987 they couldn't actually say it, but take a look:  She gets to join after Diablo's diabolical plan to appear in the middle of the street in front of the assembled Fantastic Four and kill them nearly works. The plot is foiled when Ms. Marvel walks up behind him and punches him while screaming about hating all men.  That's good enough for Ben so she gets to join the team. Of course, having two super strong, invulnerable characters on the team wouldn't do. So a few issues later while they're fighting their new villain the Evil Television Arab:  And Ms. Marvel is alternating crying about being a helpless woman with angrily denouncing all men, she and Ben get launched into space. After joining the 150 mile high club, they get hit by a radiation storm and the result is that Ms. Marvel is now also rocky and orange. Since that doesn't really help differentiate the characters, Ben Grim becomes spiky like a pineapple.  With the new team set up, Englehart gets into things like revisiting Secret Wars II so that he can retcon in more information about the Beyonder. He also continues the eternal story of his pet character Mantis, the hot female asian martial artist who wore almost nothing as a costume before wearing almost nothing as a costume was cool. Bringing Mantis in to continue the story about how she's so awesome is something Englehart has done in pretty much every series he's written, including ones for other companies. So, jumping ahead to issue 326, a new writer is on board! A Mr. John Harkness. Suddenly the previous story about Mantis being awesome and Kang doing cool stuff and the Fantastic Four hanging around and noticing how awesome they were ends and we get a series of completely disjointed, one issue stories that make absolutely no sense. Of course Harkness is actually Englehart throwing a fit about editorial interference (though editorial should have definitely interfered more). For example, in one of these the PC that Reed was building turns out to be Ultron. Guess he should have gone with Linux. All of these stories are the dreams that the FF are having after being placed in pods by an evil Watcher. He's making them live out all of the storylines that Englehart had been planning for his run, only compressed down to single issues. The storyline ends with the team breaking out and the evil Watcher going, "Well, that was cool to watch. Catch you guys later!" and then teleports them home. Here's the ultimate capper, though. Once they escape and defeat  Fortunately, the next issue starts the Walt Simonson run and so there was a happy ending. Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Aug 3, 2013 |
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Aug 3, 2013 21:56
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It has occurred to me that I could do another post just on the Claremont FF run that would just be "Spot the fetish". It combines all the worst aspects of 90's comics with all of Claremont's worst excesses and a guest appearance by real-life NPR reporters who become victims of those excesses.Bobulus posted:Didn't they get rid of her character by having her get depressed about her appearance and commit suicide by throwing herself onto the third rail of the subway? That was one of the first comics I read as a kid, and I had absolutely no idea what was going on or who this character was. She tried to, but it didn't kill her. That was in the terrible De Falco run. You see, Dr. Doom cured her of being a thing during the Simonson run which was a way to write her out of the book and bring back the original team (it also part of the single greatest issue of Fantastic Four ever). But when De Falco took over, Dr. Doom turned her into an even worse thing:  As a coincidence, that was the issue that made me give up on the Fantastic Four for a long time. Technically 375 was where I said, "Screw this," but I forgot to pull my pre-order for that issue. Since then I have gone on to read literally every single issue of FF. Do you want to know about how the counter-earth Johnny got turned into an evil space hockey goalie? I can tell you that. Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Aug 3, 2013 |
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Aug 3, 2013 22:24
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Jerusalem posted:Who was responsible for this monstrosity of a costume? The order to sex things up was definitely Tom De Falco. The abomination of the design is by Paul Ryan, current artist of The Phantom newspaper strip.
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Aug 4, 2013 03:32
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laz0rbeak posted:"So it was that the series developed into something as rich and unpredictable as its earliest days, and regained all the lost readership - up through issue #321..." Yeah, it was just one year before when She-Hulk had been a member. And like I said, every creator with an extended run on FF eventually changes the team up to explore a different dynamic. Englehart did it in his very first issue. Also, his complaint about editorial interference which he responds to by making the FF secondary players to his Mantis storyline is a terrible idea. That storyline wasn't great when he started it on the Avengers back in the 70's and got really loving annoying when he brought her into everything. OTOH, I didn't know that the Beyonder story was a direct editorial demand, so Englehart gets a pass on that one. laz0rbeak posted:DeFalco's stuff is certainly not very good, but he at least keeps things interesting. And Paul Ryan's art is way better than the art during the Englehart era. I genuinely like Paul Ryan's artwork on that run. I wouldn't put him in the top tier of artists but he did a very respectable job with the crap he was handed in a period when a lot of artists completely lost their ability to present a narrative in their art. Wapole Languray posted:The thing is, Lee and Kirby both appeared in their FF run, but they had the good goddamn sense to write themselves in as the in-universe Fantastic Four comic team, were part of the plot by being threatened by Doctor Doom, and didn't show their faces. This is just terrible. The real problem with that ending is how it completely derails thing to stroke his own ego. That page is literally one page after the Even Byrne writing himself into the FF (a moment I didn't care for) is handled better. It's part of a month wide gag event, integrates reasonably into the existing storyline, and the team doesn't abandon their loved ones to go see him.
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Aug 4, 2013 17:46
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The Question IRL posted:
Fate could quality as a Worst Run all on his own. He's the XTREME 90's version of Dr. Fate. But is L.A.W. really worse than Extreme Justice?
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Aug 14, 2013 00:24
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Fate reminded me of the worst run of Dr. Strange. I can't accompany this with a huge set of images since I don't have digital copies of these issues (the Fantastic Four DVD is really handy), but I can give you the gist of it. So Dr. Strange is another one of those troubled characters. A lot of creators love the guy but very few are capable of doing him well. I've been told that everyone who goes to Marvel has a Dr. Strange pitch. If there's one character who I'd love to write at Marvel it's Dr. Strange. And yet he gets stuck with a lot of short, weak runs. For pointing out terrible runs there was the period in the sixties where they tried to superhero him up by giving him a face mask and secret identity (this will be important later). That was followed by a crazy period where people were trying to tell an epic story with him but the writers changed every single issue. Englehart was cool but he was kicked off the book right after Dr. Strange's wife screwed Benjamin Franklin (I did not make that up). There was the heavy metal Dr. Strange period in the mid-eighties where he was using black magic and turning evil. But the worst for me was when they decided to 90's him up and go the XTREME route. Quick, name your top three picks for Dr. Strange writers; the guys who you know would knock it out of the park if they got their hands on the book. I bet you named writers who were especially good with the fantastic, mystical, and epic. The kind of people who write urban fantasy that has a huge scope and wondrous things around every corner. The last guy you'd name, however, is David Quinn. Quinn, if you're not familiar with the name, is the creator of Faust (the comic, not the legendary figure who turned up in Marlowe and Goethe) and that gives you an idea of what went through editorial's mind when he was selected to write Dr. Strange when things were at a weak point. "Oh, he does magic stuff. Dr. Strange is perfect for him!" Except, of course, his magic is grim, brutal, violent, and unpleasant. Tonally, it's completely wrong for Dr. Strange. So Quinn comes on board during one those periods when Strange's powers have been stripped away because of the "too powerful" issue that lazy writers complain about. And this is what he does with that:  Now, I should say that I don't blame Quinn at all for what happened here. It's obviously that the problems with this period are all on the editorial side. They decided to turn Dr. Strange into a horror book and strip him of his powers and Quinn was the hatchet man for that job. When you approach things from that perspective, you can understand why they would pick him. But that doesn't turn this into a good run of comics. It's packed with all the 90's comics problems. See that "part 15" on the cover? That was Quinn's second issue which was part of one of those horrible, convoluted crossovers with a block of books that Marvel was doing at the time. The basic concept of the run was that Dr. Strange gets poisoned by a killer batwoman who wants the title of Sorcerer Supreme. Since he's stripped of all his abilities, he hands it over it over and hides outside of time to lick his wounds and recover. However, there's an XTREME superhero called Strange who shows up and beats people senseless while taking their mystical doodads. And a mysterious, evil businessman who looks just like Dr. Strange calling himself Victor Stevens that's doing evil things. It turns out that Dr. Strange split himself into three parts while he was recovering and the split personalities fight each other in a confusing and not very compelling storyline. All of this is set in yet another tearing down of the character. His house is destroyed again (I swear there's only one other house in the Marvel universe that gets destroyed more often than the Sactum Sanctorum), supporting characters are killed off, and the whole thing suffers from an unnecessary attempt to rebuild the character. The reason I single Quinn out over anyone else is that he had the longest of any bad Dr. Strange run. He went from issue 60 to 79. Nearly two years of this divided, depowered Dr. Strange storyline.
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Aug 14, 2013 02:51
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E the Shaggy posted:I know that particular Dr Strange was weak, but drat it, I stand behind Midnight Sons being :metal101: It's divisive, I'll give it that. I think that people who aren't Dr. Strange fans are going to be more forgiving of its flaws than people who are Dr. Strange fans, though it's still about as 90's they come.
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Aug 14, 2013 04:31
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prefect posted:I actually liked both Englehart and the black magic Dr. Strange. Englehart is one of the best runs, but I just wanted to mention the weird ending.
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Aug 14, 2013 12:30
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prefect posted:That whole storyline started because it was the Bicentennial in the US, and Doc wanted to show Clea some American history. (And it wound up with Doc witnessing the destruction and re-creation of the universe. Just one year after he witnessed the destruction and re-creation of the universe! He can't seem to keep the universe in one piece.
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Aug 14, 2013 13:58
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prefect posted:Did I get the order of things wrong or did I forget one time that happened? I'm thinking of Sise-Neg. Sise-Neg was the end of the Marvel Premier series which led into the second Dr. Strange series. But when Dr. Strange was time traveling and Englehart was abruptly pulled off the book, the next round robin of writers effectively went back to that same well. Technically it was just the earth that was destroyed and recreated exactly as it was before in that second story, but it's closer enough.
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Aug 14, 2013 15:39
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Wanderer posted:The issue is that we never saw Osborn's rise to power from the perspective of someone who didn't already know he was a loving lunatic. The problem with that is Norman Osborn has been so publicly evil and insane that there isn't anyone who would care and wouldn't be aware of this. Imagine if Donald Trump tried to run for office again and his running mate was Sarah Palin. Now multiply that by a thousand. That's how the public should be reacting to Norman Osborn. Besides, could you really take a man seriously if you had pictures of him doing this?  No man in America can hold any major government position after being publicly seen and photographed straddling that large of a phallic object.
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Aug 15, 2013 22:27
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Wanderer posted:On 616, Richard Nixon killed himself after being revealed as one of the leaders of the Secret Empire. Aliens are real. Tony Stark was the Secretary of Defense for a while. Thanks to the sliding time scale, that is now George W. Bush.
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Aug 16, 2013 00:32
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E the Shaggy posted:INFINITY GAUNTLET (which he is smart enough to steal from the Illuminati). This is something that's bothered me way more than it should. The guantlet is nothing. It has no power. It's essentially the setting that the important thing, the infinity gems, were in. It's just the glove that Thanos happened to put on that day after he finished brushing his teeth. This is like if I found cosmic laces and then after my inevitable defeat when Slapstick and/or Squirrel Girl tied them together, everyone fought over the Nikes left behind.
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Aug 16, 2013 20:45
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WickedHate posted:Why does Cyclops have a gun? He has eyebeams! A better question is how is he holding it?
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Aug 18, 2013 04:58
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Onmi posted:Oh goodie so nobody has done Ben Raabs run on Green Lantern yet. Setting aside my problems with Marz in general, there's a lot stuff wrong in this paragraph. Green Lantern was nowhere near cancellation at the time. It wasn't a best seller, but it was doing solid middle range numbers (here's a hint that it wasn't a problem: you don't give a dying book three spin off series). Then editorial decided to 90's up the book and get in on some of that sweet Death of Superman/Knightfall sales (like pretty much every other DC book at the time). The writer at the time, Gerald Jones, didn't want to derail his plans so he was abruptly yanked off the book despite his next three issues, the climax of his five year story arc, were already written and solicited. Marz was then handed a set of pretty stupid lemons by editorial (Only one Green Lantern! Everyone must die! Hal is a bad guy now!) and decided to make lemonade.
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Feb 11, 2014 02:20
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Edge & Christian posted:FEBRUARY 1993 (Green Lantern 35 - Not in Top 100) This would be just after they launched the Guy Gardner series, Green Lantern Quarterly was coming out, and Green Lantern Mosaic was being published (and bombing). Given that, I suspect that the reason it doesn't show up in the top 100 that month is that either it was delayed and slipped out of the month or was just overwhelmed by other superstar books. I think at that point anything in the top 250 was... well, not safe but a publisher could justify keeping it going. FWIW, though I don't like Marz's writing I wasn't one of those "Bring back Hal!" lunatics. I was annoyed at the editorial meddling with a book I had been enjoying and didn't blame Marz for that. All of the DC super hero books at the time took the exact same kind of swerve. It was like the New 52 twenty years early...
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Feb 11, 2014 05:40
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bobkatt013 posted:The only time that Barry was ever interesting was in Return of Barry Allen. If you don't like crazy silver age goofiness where Flash was right behind Superman for insane awesomeness, then you are dead to me.
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Feb 11, 2014 23:01
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Thinking about it, the last hundred issues of the original Flash series were pretty bad but I think the only run ( ) that stands out for that is the last couple of years. Cary Bates wrote The Flash from about issue 210 to 350 with a handful of gaps and fill ins. In the late bronze age he tried to move The Flash to more of a Marvel style of writing and it collapsed painfully. But it's really exemplified by the final two years which were one long story.So, some set up. Around issue #275 Iris Allen, Barry's wife, is murdered out of the blue. This triggered a long, bad storyline where Barry investigates her death, goes through a bunch of his enemies who all could have done it, and then it turns out that she was killed by The Reverse-Flash decides he's going to kill Barry's fiance (a nearly complete non-character who gets yanked out of the story quickly) at the altar and they get into a big punch up. It ends with RF rushing into the wedding and Barry choking him out from behind. Doing this at .9c is apparently as bad for you as getting your ankle snagged by a webline after you fall off a bridge and everyone at the wedding is shocked to see the Flash suddenly appear standing over the Reverse-Flash dead from a broken neck. Now some of you may think, "Oh, this is the most cut and dry case of justified killing in history. The only complication is that the regular people at the wedding couldn't have witnessed the event, but the police and DA would have to be pretty stupid to not just take the Flash at his word considering his history of beating up villains and the villain's history of murdering women. And if they didn't, there were people there with senses fast enough to know exactly what happened. You might think that, but you'd be wrong. Thus begins two years of the stupidest legal farce ever presented in pop culture where the hoops that have to be jumped through are absurd. The Flash doesn't take his mask off as part of the proceedings until over a year into the story but he's received plastic surgery because his face was beaten into being unrecognizable so no one knows he's Barry Allen. His fiance is institutionalized and Barry aggravates her condition by showing up in her locked room to talk to her ("Barry Allen has been missing for weeks! She must be crazy!"), before just vanishing entirely from the story. The Flash has to save his own jury from a supervillain without letting them know he's saving them because for some reason he won't be satisfied with a mistrial (something that should have occurred a dozen times over in this thing). And finally he beats the rap through jury tampering by his dead, time traveling wife possessing the jury foreman.
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Feb 11, 2014 23:32
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The Question IRL posted:To be fair to the Trial of Barry Allen. (which it probably doesn't deserve but still....) the Prosecution in it did put forward one really good argument why the Flash was on trial, after it called Kid Flash to the stand. (Which by itself presents problems but still...) It's an interesting legal question along with the problem that the Flash could have done anything when it was impossible for normal people to witness it. But when you're dealing with questions of mental state you pretty much have to decide if you trust the guy. Considering Barry was so beloved that the city built a museum dedicated to him, I'm pretty sure that they would give him the benefit of the doubt on this one. Hell, Barry just has to say, "Whoops! I was trying to incapacitate him!" (which he probably was doing) and there's no crime there since Zoom was in the process of trying to kill someone. If the DA wanted to be a complete rear end in a top hat and was an idiot (which this story requires one way or the other), they haul Barry into court, he says this, the jury goes "Yeah, the dead guy did try to murder everyone in the city last year and the guy on trial has stopped him multiple times without a problem," and the thing wraps up quickly. But the DA should realize that there's no chance of conviction without jury tampering (which happens anyway before there's more jury tampering) and not waste the tax payer's money trying to prosecute him. And as a reminder: there was two years of this. Two. God. drat. Years. The OJ trial went faster and was more sane. Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Feb 12, 2014 |
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Feb 12, 2014 02:30
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bobkatt013 posted:Yes its called 99.9% of everything that Claremont wrote post Uncanny X-men 280. I'm sorry, your finger slipped over a key from "1" to "2" in that number.
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Apr 11, 2014 21:52
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Metal Loaf posted:Right at the start of his Marvel career, Todd McFarlane was going to be assigned to GI Joe, but Hama refused because he thought McFarlane's storytelling was very weak. McFarlane was put on Hulk instead; Peter David also thought his storytelling was very weak, but decided to make the best of it becuase he didn't think was getting another shot at a regular writing gig anytime soon. They're right. McFarlane is terrible at storytelling with art. He drew pages that were better suited as pinups which is what the teens buying comics wanted which is a large part of why the early 90's sucked so hard in comics.
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Apr 27, 2014 01:55
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TwoPair posted:Anyway let's cut to Clark quitting the Daily Planet. It's something that makes sense honestly. I mean, everybody's made/heard jokes about the how outdated the notion is of Clark Kent still being a newspaper reporter in the 21st century, so why not shake things up? Perez had the Daily Planet get bought out by Morgan Edge (basically a stand-in for Rupert Murdoch and other terrible controlling-the-media types) in his run and Morrison had established his Superman as being a strong upstanding social justice guy, so it makes even more sense. Lobdell put these together and got this: FWIW Morgan Edge was Rupert Murdock back in the 1970's, or whoever was the controlling media mogul who was ruining everything back in the 1970's. Either way, he's an old character that was being used in the exact same role so at least that's one thing you can't count against Lobdell. The rest is totally his fault, though.
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Sep 21, 2014 00:30
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There's something amusing about how Darkseid is the only supervillain like that who ever chills out in people's living rooms. Imagine if the FF came back from the moon and found Doom spread out on their couch and going through episodes of Two and a Half Men off their DVR.
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Sep 22, 2014 20:13
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