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Gavok posted:Venom just came back after two years of zero comic book appearances (shocking in its own right) and insisted on joining the Sinister Six. They didn't take kindly to this and betrayed him. Venom decided that he was going to pick them off and kill them one by one. Spider-Man would try to fight them both off and stop anyone from dying. Any capable writer could turn that into a really cool story. Not only did Mackie fumble around on it, such as the issue where Venom "killed" Sandman, but he didn't have a single ending in mind. Venom just kind of stopped with no explanation. He took out Sandman, then he went after Electro and Kraven, then he de used he wanted to get back together with his ex-wife, then she killed herself and he swore vengeance on Spider-Man, then the symbiote is stolen by Senator Ward and the last time we see Eddie Brock in Mackie's run is him being detained by the cops when he tries to go into a church to confess his sins. E the Shaggy posted:Oh man, that reminds me of the horrible "Evil Senator" arc during Mackie's run, since I think the Senator was responsible for Venom loving off. The Senator Ward thing drove me nuts. I think it ended up being a loose tie-in with the Maximum Security crossover in the Avengers and X-Men books. Of course, the big thing in Mackie's Spider-Man run was what I suppose you could call the dry-run for OMD, where Mary Jane is seemingly killed in a plane crash and Spider-Man thinks she was kidnapped by Doctor Doom, then he ends up homeless, has his costume stolen while sleeping rough and ends up moving into a swinging bachelor pad with Robbie Robertson's son.
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Jul 31, 2013 07:47
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OMD happened because Joe Quesada wanted it to happen, that much is clear, but the fact that Marvel took delivery of Loeb's scripts for Ultimates 3 and Ultimatum, read them, reviewed them and thought, "Yep. That's another world-beater," remains one of the most perplexing mysteries of modern comicdom.
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Jul 31, 2013 22:48
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Mike From Nowhere posted:During the storyline where the X-Men are all in space and expecting to be taken over by the Brood, Nightcrawler is seen praying and he and Wolverine have a conversation on the subject. Wolverine straight up says "I don't believe in God - never have, never will." I'm quoting from memory, but that's the gist. When Nightcrawler appeared in the X-Men animated series, he was already a priest while Wolverine thought God had it in for mutants, then at the end of the story arc Nightcrawler gives Wolverine a Bible and Rogue finds him confessing his sins in a church. Not that it kept him from coveting Cyclops's wife, of course.
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Aug 1, 2013 00:41
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Gavok posted:There's also the annoying Venom-eats-Carnage story. Venom breaks into the Vault, kills some guards and beats up Carnage. He eats the symbiote to make himself more powerful. On Venom's side, all he does is beat up Spider-Man and not kill him because "Wait, Carnage is trying to fight its way out! I'll be back later!" After that, his supposed power boost is never mentioned again. Cletus Kasady is still alive and when Mackie feels the need to bring him back as Carnage, he has him simply find a new, red symbiote in the Negative Zone. The story right after the Sinister Six one was a Carnage story, except it wasn't really, it was just Cletis Kasady running about New York in his underpants covered in red paint brandishing a knife.
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Aug 2, 2013 02:50
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Best moment from the Spider-Man cartoon.
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Aug 3, 2013 17:48
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TwoPair posted:I'm not sure if this counts since it technically isn't a real run as much as it is a part of a run, but I'd nominate Bendis's Avengers work as being real drat bad near the end. Dude ran pretty much all the Avengers stuff for years entirely through Dark Reign pretty well, then stuff kiiinda just started falling apart. I'd say the beginning of the end was the Fear Itself tie-in books where he did that godawful cut-in interview poo poo like I was watching a loving reality show, but apparently some people actually liked that, so whatever. What's the general consensus on Bendis's work on Avengers? I've not read New Avengers beyond the one story arc where the Collective shows up and re-empowers Magneto, and I've heard a lot of people slag him off for his Avengers stuff, but if he managed one hundred straight issues of it I can't imagine it have all been bad. quote:The gently caress is this? Okay, so Osborn actually had a little mini (that was actually good!) where he got put in some underwater secret prison so the government could make sure he couldn't plead insanity or somehow lawyer up and dodge jail time any of the normal ways rich supervillains like Osborn and Lex Luthor do. So he was held without a charge. BUT the end of that mini ends with Osborn going and turning himself in and going into the Raft. Then he gets broken out at the start of this storyarc. But it doesn't really matter, because the end of Siege still involved him being caught on TV having a mental breakdown in Green Goblin facepaint as he crashed a tiny kingdom into Oklahoma! And the start of the Osborn mini has everybody agree that they could hit him for treason or like five other crimes at any time, they just wanted their case to be airtight, so why don't they just do that now? But suddenly, because he showed up in a power suit, the Marvel public goes full retard and starts turning on the Avengers. It's like the start to Grounded or something. I expected someone to ask Iron Man why he didn't cure their cancer. I liked "the 24-hour news cycle goes after the Avengers" angle a lot better when Kurt Busiek did it, myself.
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Aug 15, 2013 20:28
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Wanderer posted:Don't be this guy. Yeah, sorry.
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Aug 15, 2013 22:39
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bobkatt013 posted:Speaking of Young Avengers. The first 12 issues and special are pretty good. However, due to the writers other commitments he was unable to continue the title and it left the characters in limbo. So last year out came Avengers: The Children's Crusade. The story made no sense what so ever and completly destroyed some characters. It had delays and everything about it was pointless and awful. Huh. I was thinking I might like to read that. I liked the original series and special; it reminded me a lot of the stuff Geoff Johns had been doing with Teen Titans (probably no surprise, because I think Heinberg was sharing a studio with Johns at the time) but I thought it was more enjoyable than that series. It's a pity to hear the follow-up wasn't great.
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Aug 17, 2013 19:14
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TwoPair posted:Doom kills Cassie Lang after she comes running at him. Almost immediately after that Wanda and Wiccan manage to remove Doom's new powers. He reveals in a huff that he is actually responsible for influencing Wanda to do all those bad things she did ("CHARACTER FIXED" says Allan Heinberg, hi-fiving himself) and takes off to Latveria. Does the Thing show up to squelch his head afterwards?
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Aug 17, 2013 21:18
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I'm disappointed to hear that it's not great, because I liked the original YA series a lot and one would hope that the originators of the characters would be able to keep it up.
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Aug 17, 2013 21:53
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Based on the story description and the title, I assume Age Of Ultron is trying to be the Avengers version of Age Of Apocalypse. As with the YA story discussed above, it's a trifle disappointing to hear that it didn't go so well, because one of my favourite Avengers stories was an Ultron story.
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Aug 18, 2013 16:18
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I don't normally like to indulge in thread necromancy, but I've been thinking about this topic and I believe I've come up with one. It's the Jane Espenson story arc from Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight ("Retreat"). Obviously, you can take advantage of the medium to try things that just wouldn't be feasible for television, and some of the earlier arcs had tried that. Unfortunately, it was a bit hard to take it seriously when you have the Slayers (who have suppressed their supernatural abilities for plot reasons) digging trenches, wearing helmets and and fighting the US army with machine guns and rocket launchers (especially while the previous main story arc was Buffy transported to the far future to fight evil future Willow, which seems like something the TV show actually would've done). Season 8 was never a perfect series (I'd say the first half was good, not great, with the Brian K. Vaughan story arc as the highlight) but the whole thing seemed to lose the plot a bit after that run. That's how it seemed to me.
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Oct 10, 2013 22:41
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I'm afraid so. I was going to mention that, but I couldn't come up with a description that adequately conveyed how supremely bizarre the whole thing is.
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Oct 11, 2013 13:08
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MelvinTheJerk posted:That said, one of the worst comic runs of all time is Byrne's West Coast Avengers run, where he decided to tell me through a series of comic books that he hates me and that I should hate him too. As I understand, that was John Byrne deciding to fix a bunch of problems that nobody knew existed unless they had the insight and wisdom of John Byrne, wasn't it?
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Oct 15, 2013 14:38
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SALT CURES HAM posted:Every Byrne run is the worst run. I'm dead keen on his Fantastic Four run.
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Oct 15, 2013 15:15
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I remember reading that run when I was about 12, and the whole mystery surrounding Mysterio really bugged me. You never find out who or what he was, and for some reason he's involved with the Senator Ward story arc, but that's never resolved either. I suppose you can put some (but only some) of the blame Kevin Smith for killing him off in Daredevil and messing everything up.
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Oct 15, 2013 15:32
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There's a rumour that most of what Byrne did on WCA arose out of a petty grudge against Englehart be use he disliked Englehart's run on FF. I wouldn't be surprised if it was true.
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Oct 15, 2013 19:37
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I've heard that Byrne wanted to retcon Magneto's past as a Holocaust survivor to spite Claremont when he was writing X-Men: The Hidden Years.
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Oct 16, 2013 12:06
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Mr. Maltose posted:Not on that. Like, of all the good x-stuff that we can trace to Claremont (and that's a lot of good stuff) Magneto as noble villain and witness to the ultimate in mans inhumanity to man is the biggest. I like to imagine that if you're trying to get a rise out Claremont, you'd probably have better luck with a panel were Storm says, "Actually, no, I'm not into bondage."
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Oct 16, 2013 13:24
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SALT CURES HAM posted:Or have Nightcrawler say he doesn't actually have a forked dick. Or have him say, "Oh, good grief, no!" when he learns his girlfriend is actually his sister in disguise, rather than, "Oh boy!"
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Oct 16, 2013 13:32
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Going back to the John Byrne West Coast Avengers talk from a page or two back, I've recently seen this claim that almost everything Byrne did in the comic was motivated by his dislike of Englehart's run on Fantastic Four (which itself doesn't seem to be terribly well-liked).
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Oct 26, 2013 12:55
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bobkatt013 posted:The first Origin was the thing that introduced him as James and the Way shitfest was suppose to fill in the blanks, but instead we got Romulus. Yeah, one was Wolverine: Origin and the other was Wolverine: Origins, I think.
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Oct 31, 2013 17:20
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I've never quite been able to determine exactly how much of JSA was Goyer's work. Aside from the very early Robinson issues I've always seen it as a Johns thing (I guess mainly because JSA and Teen Titans were where he did pretty much all the build-up to Infinite Crisis) and Goyer was sort of there at the same time. By the way, was that the run with all the shenanigans about Shazam stealing Billy and Mary Batson's powers and turning Black Adam and Isis into statues?
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Nov 2, 2013 22:32
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Or is it Sputnik posted:After CoIE, 95% of the JSA was shunted off to demon Limbo to fight Ragnarok forever (yes, really). They were brought back in 1991 in a 3-issue miniseries that didn't make no sense no how, and got an ongoing. Said ongoing was cancelled by the editor after three issues, and two years later Zero Hour happened so half the JSA died, the rest disbanded. Dr. Fate turned into Mystic Punisher for a couple years. Green Lantern started calling himself "Starheart". I'd never read Zero Hour when I started reading JSA, but even in spite of that, Metron randomly showing up to tell the team they have to help him fight Extant felt kinda clunky to me pacing-wise. Similarly, even though I had read the "Rock Of Ages" story arc in JLA, I wasn't entirely sure how exactly the Extant story tied into the Worlogog stuff Morrison had been setting up, probably because I never read any of DC One Million either.
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Nov 2, 2013 23:48
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redbackground posted:It's really amazing that the headline JUSTICE LEAGUE title back then was as far from what we today consider a JL title should be. It was super low-key, full of characters nobody knew about, and stakes that I guess were kind of high, on a good day. If the words "Justice Leauge of America" weren't on the cover, you would never know. The fact that it took until 1997 for DC to realize that "Oh hey, we should put the Big Guns in one book!" is sort of crazy. I wonder what DeMatteis and Giffen could've done if they'd been allowed to do that in 1987. I mean, that's what they wanted to do in the first place, right?
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Nov 5, 2013 16:21
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Mr. Maltose posted:Sorry, Obsidian Age was the greatest long form Superfriends joke ever written. Manitou Raven was okay. I think Manitou Raven was originally going to be Super-Chief. Honestly, I don't really mind Kelly's JLA. It's not as good as the Morrison or Waid, but there's been worse takes on the team.
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Nov 6, 2013 00:58
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I've also quite enjoy what I've read, which admittedly isn't a huge amount, of Kelly's run on X-Men post-"Operation: Zero Tolerance" (though you might as well call it the Kelly/Seagle run, given how closely intertwined it was with UXM while Seagle was writing it at the same time). It's an overlooked period in the X-Men's history but I think it stands up to some of the post-Heroes Reborn relaunches that were happening concurrently. Same deal with the subsequent Alan Davis run on both of the main X books; overlooked but perhaps underrated.
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Nov 6, 2013 01:33
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bobkatt013 posted:Are you reading Ultimate Spider-man? That comic has always been amazing. The worst runs in Ultimates other than Loeb is all the X-men runs between Vaughn and Woods. These runs introduced awful stupid characters that no one liked. The plots made no sense and also the characters acted completly out of character. There is also plots that went no where and was just poo poo tossed on the wall and never solved. I think Robert Kirkman's run was where I checked out. He's the one who decided Ultimate Nightcrawler would be a colossal homophobe sort of out of the blue (heh) and revealed Ultimate Beast was only slightly crushed to death by falling rubble, wasn't he? It wasn't a gradual thing, either, the downturn was like going over a cliff. Then again, I don't think I've re-read it since it was published, which must have been nearly ten years ago, so perhaps I'm misremembering it.
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Nov 8, 2013 18:40
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Here's some really early Mark Millar for you: (Had the picture because I wanted to make this post about STC in the underrated runs thread, but I've already posted in it and don't want to double-post)
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Nov 8, 2013 20:43
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El Gallinero Gros posted:It's almost hard to believe it's Millar, nobody's getting raped, acting like a misogynist or sexist or racist or anything. I've made a mistake; Alan McKenzie scripted that story. Not really sure how I missed that. This story, on the other hand (from Sonic the Comic #2), was written by Millar:        Fairly pedestrian stuff, I guess. Millar's run on STC probably deserves to be mentioned in this thread, anyway, because it was pretty poor. You can turn out decent and entertaining stories even if you're writing a kids' comic and the source material is Sonic the Hedgehog (as Nigel Kitching would demonstrate when he became the main writer) but Millar's admitted that he was half-assing his stories and only wrote them because he needed the money to pay for his wedding. He also wrote a Streets of Rage adaptation, which probably prefigured his more recognisable style. I'll see if I can find any scans of that. Wheat Loaf fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Nov 8, 2013 |
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Nov 8, 2013 22:51
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I was going to say that I think Byrne's okay when he evidently cares about the characters he's working with (the X-Men, the Fantstic Four, Superman, to some extent Alpha Flight) and he's terrible when he cares more about proving how he has the best ideas (pretty much everything else, but especially West Coast Avengers and maybe Iron Man), but after those pages... erm, I'm not so sure if I particularly want to...
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Nov 11, 2013 14:43
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Was that something Byrne added to the history of the FF? I'd thought that pre-dated his run. Still a bit  though.
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Nov 11, 2013 21:12
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Jerusalem posted:What's even better is that this is the name he uses because he thinks using a codename was ridiculous and immature Well, in that case, he ought to have called himself Danny Chase. 
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Jan 1, 2014 02:13
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TwoPair posted:I'm pretty sure everybody's in agreement on that. I've recently started posting on the CBR forums; seems like there's a lot of people who'd disagree over there.
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Jan 5, 2014 16:26
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Skwirl posted:Yeah, isn't it usually just about him liking a girl he can't have (I'm basing this mostly on Claremont's Excalibur, which is the most recent thing I've read with a lot of Nightcrawler, and even then it's because she's with Captain Britain, nothing to do with her being repulsed by his appearance). Sometimes he seemed to be after Meggan more than Wolverine was after Jean. Anyway, as regards his appearance, by the time they got to Excalibur, he was a handsome swashbuckler who looked like Errol Flynn, so he didn't really have that much reason to angst. Of course, that's probably just Alan Davis; Phoenix went from being skinny and waifish to looking like this (although in this case, she got a new body in Mojoworld in a Claremont story). Jerusalem posted:Who is also his sister "Ohboy!"
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Jan 14, 2014 11:52
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Probably why he got to draw the Women of Marvel covers.
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Jan 14, 2014 16:17
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What's the common consensus on the worst Fantastic Four run? Englehart? DeFalco? One of the non-descript ones from the 1970s when they had really naff villains like Janus the Nega-Man and Salem's Seven?
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Jan 14, 2014 16:46
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laz0rbeak posted:I'd definitely vote Englehart. Most of the 70's runs at least had something to recommend them. John Buscema's art, the divorce storyline from around 140-150 (where Namor tricks everyone into getting them back together), Perez doing art on the next run, or Conway's big Doom showdown around issue 200. Millar and DeFalco have plenty of dumb ideas, but Englehart is just telling awful stories with ugly art. He also seemed to think he'd get great mileage out of a newly married Johnny Storm being around Crystal, but she's married too and there's really no tension at all. I'm maybe not the best judge because I sort of liked bits and pieces of the Claremont and Pacheco/Marin/Loeb runs... 
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Jan 14, 2014 19:32
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E the Shaggy posted:"I'm the best there is at what I do, and what I do is EVERYTHING EVER!" Here's another mostly terrible run: X-Treme X-Men by Chris Claremont. Started okay, had some interesting ideas, but then it collapsed under the weight of its own mysteries and subplots. Salvador Larroca left the book and Claremont devoted an entire story arc to Storm getting caught by fiendish transvestites who run a mutant gladiator/sex slave racket in South East Asia, where Callisto has been modified with tentacle rape arms, and the villain's henchmen wear gimp suits and have BDSM as their mutant power.
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Jan 15, 2014 11:29
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Parahexavoctal posted:for those of you who hated Englehart's run on FF, you need to see the run he disavowed (credited to 'John Harkness'). Is that the one where he wrote himself into his last issue and said, "It'll take a better writer than me to sort this mess out!"
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Jan 15, 2014 18:36
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