Although the objective here seems to be locate aberrations in otherwise illustrious careers, I keep thinking of those writers who suddenly went from producing great works to lousy ones and just stayed on course.  Frank Miller went from Dark Knight to Year One to Batman/Spawn with no gradual decline in between as far as I can tell - it's as if he just woke up one day and said "I need to start balancing off my legendary status by writing a lot of crap and I have no time to lose!"  I know there was an eight year gap between those first two stories and the third, but I haven't seen much change in the quality of his Batman work in the eight year gap or so that followed Batman/Spawn and ended with Dark Knight Strikes Again (or All Star Batman for that matter).

I remember being shocked with how bad the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film was when it came out.  I can never understand why we can't get decent adaptations of so many great comics when the source material itself provides detailed pictures as if to say "This is how everything should look and these words inside these balloons pointing to peoples mouths is what everyone should say".

Now, if I told you that the screenplay was handled by a fairly well known comic writer, would you guess that the writer I'd be referring to was James Robinson fresh off a wonderful run on Starman?  How is this possible?  I suppose that I may be overestimating the amount of control a screenwriter has over a film (Kevin Smith has a great story about having to shape his Superman Lives film script around Jon Peter's eccentricities) but at the same time, the writing for that League film seemed about equal to the writing which soon followed in Robinson's Cry For Justice work and Superman run.

I don't know, it's as if some writers are capable of writing really, really well or really, really terribly but not knowing how to do simply "decent".