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Post by rich on Sept 11, 2024 16:38:18 GMT -5
The kind of comic where you had high hopes, that you found dashed within pages. I'm not talking about Liefeld/Jemas/terrible creator stuff you knew would be bad, or comics you didn't pick up because you knew you'd hate them (Brand New Day, Wolverine:Origin, etc). But not only are you not just disappointed, you have a visceral reaction to just how darn awful the comic is. Here's my list of four.
I had a hiatus in buying comics from 2001 onwards, and around about 2005 I walked into a comic shop I'd never visited before and asked the owner to recommend me any one trade- whatever was his favourite with new material from the last couple of years. He recommended Wanted. Awesome, I thought. JG Jones I had a very high opinion of, and Mark Millar had written some fun comics around the turn of the millennium. I didn't just dislike that book- I literally hated it. It was the single worst thing I've ever read in my life. I contemplated tearing it to shreds to improve my mood. I think the art was fine, and nearly 20 years later I can't recall specifically why I despised it, but I did.
I chalked it off as an aberration on Millar's part. He'd written good work before, and my friends ran into him in a London pub before he was 'famous' and he bought them all drinks and was a nice guy. This brings us on to my hated comic number two. Wolverine: Enemy of the State. Utter garbage. A brain dead story, and it turns out I don't like JRJR's art with modern colouring, which is a shame because I have loved lots of his books. Overall it reminded me of Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe, without any humour.
Next, this one comes with a caveat of sorts: The end of Batman: No Man's Land- I kind of knew if would be bad, because it degenerated into junk about 1/3 of the way through, which was a real pity because it started well and the premise was fun. I'd pulled the whole lot, but was behind with my reading, so I had a ton of issues to work through already by the time I realised it wasn't good. Nothing prepared me for the badness of the ending, though. Unbridled nerdrage ensued. I haven't touched a Rucka comic since, bar an excellent Spiderman one shot issue of his I'd already purchased.
Last up: We3. I love other work from the creators, but I simply hated this too. Awful, awful, awful story. Unpleasant and unentertaining.
That's my list! I can't think of anything else I've ever had high hopes for and hated. Nothing comes close to how much I disliked those. I know none are truly 'classic', but fall within the years this board discusses. I look forward to hearing what generated everyone else's nerdy hatred, and if any lessons were learnt. For me- unless I'm confident in the creators, just borrow from the library!
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Post by Deleted on Sept 11, 2024 16:48:33 GMT -5
Anything with a Rob Liefeld cover.
*runs from tomatoes hurled by icctrombone*
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Post by codystarbuck on Sept 11, 2024 17:12:00 GMT -5
"Hated" is a strong word; utterly disappointed is more apt, for me. Ultimates turned out to be that, for me. I didn't hate it, per se; but I did hate the portrayal of Captain America as a bit of a reactionary, because being of the WW2 Generation somehow meant "ultra-conservative," despite it being the time of Roosevelt's New Deal. That I could chalk up to ignorance of the details of American History. The portrayal f Hank Pym, as a serial wife beater, coupled with the implied incestuous relationship between Quicksilver and Scarlet With was the other nail in the coffin. Hawkeye wen't from being a complex character to being a mix of Bullseye and Neo, from the Matrix, right down to swiping the high rise attack, from the film. Captain America is leaping from planes, without a parachute and trading punches with the Hulk. It was all shock value and massive leaps in logic, plus derivative plots.
It shouldn't have surprised me though, as his run on The Authority was similarly loaded with shock value and swiped ideas. Kick Ass is similar....at least the film version. I don't need shock jock comics in my life.
Frank Miller started falling into that realm, for me, with Sin City, as it progressed (That Yellow Bastard is where we start parting company) and it just got worse, with The 300 and Holy Terror. Really, he started losing me with the Elektra graphic novel. The more I saw of his work, the darker and more negative it seemed and only the collaborative stuff, with Geoff Darrow (Big Guy & Rusty, rather than Hardboiled) and Dave Gibbons stood out.
John Byrne was similar, as he progressed at Dark Horse. next Men was interesting, at the start; but, after a while, I started to question if he really had a destination in mind, as it never seemed to be moving towards an alluded conclusion. That was the best, though, apart from the sheer fun of The Torch of Liberty. Danger Unlimited was just the Fantastic Four in indie drag and Babe was neither funny nor subversive enough to rise to being a She Hulk copy. meanwhile, he is slagging off Image for doing pastiches of their Marvel work. Mr Pot, meet Mr Kettle! I preferred Legend to Image; but, Mike Mignola was the creator who was using the opportunity to do something different and original (relatively speaking) while Art Adams was mostly having fun, when he could produce any work. Byrne was rehashing old work, in a lesser form and Miller was swiping from much better crime writers and turning into a reactionary.
Hate I would reserve for the Punisher in The 'Nam! It was a cheap sales stunt and insulting to the veterans of the war, like Doug Murray, who fought against such things, for a while, before parting ways with Marvel; and Don Lomax, another veteran, whose own Vietnam Journal was far better than the bulk of the Marvel series. It was also a mix of comic book and action cliches, in what had been a serious examination of the war and its effects on those who fought it. It was worse than forcing Kirby's Eternals into the Marvel Universe.
The other would be Fury, from Marvel's Max imprint. Yet another twisting of a character for shock value.
On the whole, I have pretty good instincts for things that I know will either fall flat with me or just p@#$ me off and I just avoid them.
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Post by rich on Sept 11, 2024 17:13:02 GMT -5
Anything with a Rob Liefeld cover.
*runs from tomatoes hurled by icctrombone*
But you knew you'd hate that before reading it 😅 Have you never intensely disliked a comic when reading it? (Discounting comics by Liefeld you may have read out of morbid curiosity!) |
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Post by rich on Sept 11, 2024 17:20:49 GMT -5
Hated is indeed a strong word, but it applied to Wanted, We3 and the end of No Man's Land for me. (I mainly just thought Wolverine: Enemy of the State was terrible).
I'll counterbalance this thread soon with one about unexpectedly good comics!
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Post by riv86672 on Sept 11, 2024 18:06:33 GMT -5
Hate is definitely a strong word. And yet, not strong enough for how I felt about Grant Morrison’s first X-Men issue…  …and then the entire run as a whole. |
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Post by Ricky Jackson on Sept 11, 2024 18:21:30 GMT -5
Only one comic that I've read in the last nearly 5 years qualifies. And shame on me for actually trying to read it, based on its reputation...
Marville
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Post by driver1980 on Sept 11, 2024 18:27:01 GMT -5
Has to be All Star Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder for me. By the end of the first issue, I began to wonder if this was some joke that I was not privy to.
Since I don’t know if there is more than one comic called that, for the avoidance of doubt, I’m referring to the Frank Miller book that debuted in 2005.
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Post by rich on Sept 12, 2024 2:55:56 GMT -5
I've not been able to read anything Miller created since Hell and Back. Whilst he is the creator of my all time favourite comics on one hand, I was shocked by what he was creating this millennium. I borrowed a few of his books from the library from the past 24 years, but wasn't able to finish any. There was no way I could hate them, though, as I was expecting them to be bad based on the art, or tidbits of dialogue I'd seen online.
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Post by rich on Sept 12, 2024 4:58:30 GMT -5
John Byrne was similar, as he progressed at Dark Horse. next Men was interesting, at the start; but, after a while, I started to question if he really had a destination in mind, as it never seemed to be moving towards an alluded conclusion. That was the best, though, apart from the sheer fun of The Torch of Liberty. Danger Unlimited was just the Fantastic Four in indie drag and Babe was neither funny nor subversive enough to rise to being a She Hulk copy. meanwhile, he is slagging off Image for doing pastiches of their Marvel work. Mr Pot, meet Mr Kettle! I preferred Legend to Image; but, Mike Mignola was the creator who was using the opportunity to do something different and original (relatively speaking) while Art Adams was mostly having fun, when he could produce any work. Byrne was rehashing old work, in a lesser form and Miller was swiping from much better crime writers and turning into a reactionary. .... On the whole, I have pretty good instincts for things that I know will either fall flat with me or just p@#$ me off and I just avoid them. Byrne... I loved his 70s work up until his mid 80s stuff, really enjoying his art. The big impetus for change seemed to come in 1983... Marvel started paying bonuses based on sales, and if you did the writing, pencilling and inking you could make a pretty penny. Alpha Flight #1 apparently bagged him a $30,000 bonus, which is a lot now and was a hell of a lot back then. He worked hard to make the absolute most he could in that period, and his artwork started to decline, especially when inking himself on interiors. Most male faces started looking the same, as did most female faces. The same few expressions were used over and over. Background detail diminished. Inks weren't always carefully done. I still enjoyed his FF work, but the end of the run didn't look as good as the start. The only time I've been impressed by his art after FF was when he did the Superman re-launch a few months later. He tightened things up a lot for a little while. I think he lost the fire in his belly to do his best artistic work after this. I still enjoyed his stories for a few more years, and thought he still scripted well on X-Men titles and Hellboy, even though he wasn't plotting those. I bought a few of his 90s comics, like when his was on Spiderman near the end of the decade, but it had no wow factor any more, though it wasn't terrible. If a finisher was allowed to touch up the art and draw better faces, it would be much more palatable. I can't even name a comic he's written or drawn since 1999, which is sad. For his first decade he was one of the absolute brightest lights in comics, second only to Frank Miller, just edging out George Perez by a whisker. Even now I look back and am impressed by his covers! Sadly, like most from that era, his art doesn't look good with modern reprints, with the garish unsympathetic colouring. Looking back now at re-prints of Uncanny I wondered why I liked his art so much before- until I look at the originals again! I think as I've got older I've also generated a sense of what I might not like. I still wasn't prepared for the likes of Wanted being that damn bad. That comic was bad to the point that I'd doubt the validity of the opinions of people that actually did like it. 😂😂😂 |
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Post by commond on Sept 12, 2024 4:58:38 GMT -5
I don't know about hate, but I get bored reading certain books. Promethea is the most recent book to test my patience.
For the record, I also disliked Enemy of the State and couldn't understand the hype.
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Post by rich on Sept 12, 2024 5:02:26 GMT -5
I don't know about hate, but I get bored reading certain books. Promethea is the most recent book to test my patience. For the record, I also disliked Enemy of the State and couldn't understand the hype. I agree about Promethea- it looked really great, but it didn't engage me like a number of the other Alan Moore ABC comics. Patience testing is correct. |
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Post by commond on Sept 12, 2024 5:06:01 GMT -5
Any sort of prose bothers me. I generally skip it if I can. It used to bother me immensely whenever a book I liked slipped into entire pages of prose.
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Post by driver1980 on Sept 12, 2024 5:10:26 GMT -5
Any sort of prose bothers me. I generally skip it if I can. It used to bother me immensely whenever a book I liked slipped into entire pages of prose. Didn’t one of the modern X-Men books do a lot of that? |
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Post by commond on Sept 12, 2024 5:53:17 GMT -5
Any sort of prose bothers me. I generally skip it if I can. It used to bother me immensely whenever a book I liked slipped into entire pages of prose. Didn’t one of the modern X-Men books do a lot of that? Dunno, Astonishing X-Men is modern X-Men to me! |
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