I’ve been looking up a bunch of different comics, as well as skimming through the archives to read some opinions on various runs. One interesting thing I see is when a writer with a good reputation has a bad run. Whether it’s editorial meddling, a mismatch on the writer’s strengths, or they’ve just plain lost their talent, pretty much every writer has that one run that stands above as their worst of all time.The one that got me thinking about this was Larry Hama. The guy who was able to make GI Joe into Marvel’s biggest money maker for a brief time, and wrote a great solo Wolverine before it got pulled into event hell. However, he was put on Generation X following an uncharacteristically great run by Scott Lobdell, and it sounds as though it was legendarily awful.Another one is Roger Stern. I’ve pretty much only heard great things about him, writing quintessential Spider-Man, Avengers and Doctor Strange. I was excited when I saw his name attached to one of the 90s Legion of Super-Heroes books for a long run, since I’ve been enjoying their Silver Age and Bronze Age stories so far. But it seemed to be unanimous opinion that he did a terrible job with them.What are some other runs considered a writer’s worst? Could be great writers fumbling things or shitty writers out-shitting themselves.
>>153968970Speaking of Scott Lobdell, here's a horrendous run he did
>>153968970Larry Hama and Generation X was such a terrible match. Don’t know why editors put him on the title besides Jubilee being Logan’s former sidekick in his title.
>>153968970The only thing Hama's written that's worth a shit is his original GI Joe run. Wolverine isn't particularly great, his Generation X run killed the book, his Venom stuff his complete garbage. The GI Joe run is basically an outlier in his career.
>>153971011Supposedly they took Hama off Wolverine very abruptly because Warren Ellis wanted to write Wolverine, and nobody had actually clarified that Ellis wanted to just write one 4-issue arc then leave. Hama may have been given Generation X by X-Men editorial to make up for taking him off Wolverine but he just wasn't a good fit for that book at all.You'd think he would have been a great fit for Batman but that run didn't really work out either.
>>153970970God, that book is soo badSeriously, what the fuck did they do with Starfire and Blackfire?And the whole Lazarus pits bs
>>153968970I'm not even a huge fan of Johns but this was definitely his worst run anywhere
>>153971725That run was fine, parts of it are good even. You're absolutely that one guy who hates it because you think She-Hulk shouldn't have a human alter-ego.
>>153971772NTA but as a she-hulk fag that not at all what I or anyone else has ever complained about. He just wrote her as an insufferable bitch. But his characterization and team dynamic all around was awful. I say this despite loving and vociferously defending pretty much everything he did for DC before 2011.
>>153968970Does Moore’s cheese pizza comic count?
I don’t remember Stern doing Legion or it being exceptionally bad. The only really rough Legion stuff imo is some in the 70s, post Giffen 5YL, and the end of Threeboot.
>>153971905>But his characterization and team dynamic all around was awful.How so? He maybe put too much focus on Ant-Man and Jack of Hearts, and actual "these guys just don't like each other" character conflict may have been something people who started with the previous run wouldn't want to see in Avengers, but he had a decent handle on most of the team, and a surprisingly sympathetic take on Gyrich. Johns even managed to be the only Avengers writer this century to try to do right by Wanda and Vision, bar a few moments in the last run that went nowhere.The worst that run really has to offer are the edgy takes on villains like Scarecrow and Whirlwind, or the strange Hank/Jan sex scene that starts as a misdirect to make you think Hank was hitting Jan.
>>153968970Pat Mills Third world warEverything after book 1A shame because book 1 is a masterpiece
I like PAD but his Scarlet Spider run sucked ass
>>153971725Eh, not really. I'd say it's a lot better than his late 2000s DC work. I don't really like his Green Lantern stuff all that much either but it's sure as shit better than Blackest Night and Brightest Day.
>>153968970Roy Thomas seems to be pretty good with most heroes, but he really needs to be kept away from Dr. Strange. Neither of his runs were very good at all.
>>153972352It's pretty clear it was a book he was doing for the job and nothing else and the backlash over the costume meant it likely went from something he didn't care about to something he actively hated as he was writing it.
>>153973631Gr8 b8 faggot
>McKeever was a promising up and coming writer, especially with teen characters>Sentinel and SMLMJ are both fairly well liked and well regarded cult books>gets hired by DC to write Teen Titans, this should be a no brainer run>it's so bad it basically kills his name value>later comes out that editorial fucked with it by forcing him to write stories, rewriting his scripts, forcing him to kill characters, complaining that he didn't make Static "act street enough" and shit>literally ruined so much that he was eventually out of the industry and having to work at Target at one point to make ends meetIt's a shame. I've re-read a lot of Marvel's youth series from that time and his stuff holds up and his Nomad stuff after he came back was decent too. Youth In Revolt is also way better than Fear Itself proper because the idea of a bunch of young heroes doing everything they can to not crack under the pressure of trying to maintain order during seeming armageddon is a good story hook. In hindsight he should have stayed at Marvel and he might have ended up better off.
>>153971725This run blows dogs for quarters. >>153971772It's more than that, This run cements Jen into her "woe is me " mode she's been stuck in for 23 years.
>>153968970Man, Generation X is really that X-Team that stayed dead and was meber brought back.X-Corps was brought back once and so did X-Terminators.
>>153968970>What are some other runs considered a writer’s worst?Grant Morrison has a few. His Nu52 Superman was a flopped attempt to make the character more contemporary and "street", his late Green Lantern run was awful and his WW: Earth One was borderline sabotage on the brand. The latter two happened when he was clearly mentally done with DC and preparing for an exit.
Skottie Young's Deadpool run.
>>153971929You will have to be more specific
>>153974572They did a Generation X book in the 2010s with Christina Strain (the colorist on te original Runaways run) writing it. It was mostly Jubilee, Chamber and some of the shitty Schism era young characters and it was about as bad as you can expect a mid-2010s X-Men book written by a colorist whose work was relevant about a decade prior could be. The only good thing it did was give Jubilee her powers back but it's also the book that canonized Merrcury being bullied by the X-Men into being gay after Bling stalked and harassed her in Wood's X-Men run.
>>153968970everyone who wrote anything concerning krakoa or ripoff name arrakisit's hard to pick the worst of bendis, but i'd guess it's either his daredevil run or uncanny 600
>>153971725Nonsense, it was fine. Johns’s New 52 Justice League was vastly worse.
>>153971725his justice league is worse than his avengers.
>>153974801>WW: Earth OneHe took the fetish roots of the character and cranked it up to 11.
>>153968970
>>153974940There's much worse than his Daredevil, like Civil War 2.
>>153968970What the hell is that cover
Al Ewing's worst and it's not close.
I liked gen x 1-32, I was even disappointed i didn't collect paperbacks, but then again i was there when it came out
Paul Cornell's Wolverine run, both volumes, was a total mismatch, didn't feel right at all.
>>153978426Crazy she is good on Thor but with Venom? Jesus.
>>153978426I wonder if this was intentionally bad for some reason.
>>153968970I just now realized that Generation X was marvel chasing the potential success of Gen 13
>>153979608Common speculation is that he was mad about Cates's run on Hulk following his so he deliberately made a trash Venom run.
>>153978426>>153979595>>153979608>wow MJ really sucks right now, everyone on the Internet thinks the same>I'll repair her!
>>153971929Have you read it? It wasn't particularly bad, more boring than anything for a softcore hebebook.
>>153974572Those characters have all moved on to being written as adults. Putting them back together would be forced.
>>153979775That makes him sound even more retarded.
>>153979633Which was downstream of New Mutants which was downstream of the original X-Men.
>>153977635Pop Art
>>153968970>>153980317I like it when they get weird with the cover art, but Bruce Jones's Hulk is another example of a bad run. The mystery box started out well enough, but then it got really bad when Deodato took over as the interior artist, and the conclusion was stupid nonsense. Peter David took over and immediately revealed that the entire story was a dream induced by Nightmare. Jones had terrible luck with the big two overall. He wrote a terrible Kingpin mini, a supposed origin story where a young unmarried Wilson Fisk briefly interacts with a teenage Spider-Man before aging several decades and getting a wife and adult son by the time of his first appearance. Marvel eventually placed it on an alternate Earth. His Nightwing was also a mess, but that wasn't entirely his fault. DC changed who the main character would be at the last minute when Didio was talked out of having Dick Grayson killed, so he had to put together a different story really quickly. Then there was his Warlord reboot that was so much of a failure that it was cancelled and Mike Grell ignored it when he came back. Jones was better off doing horror comics, no continuity or shared universe stuff to worry about, just his own self-contained stories.
>>153979633What gave you that idea?
>>153972150>the edgy takes on villains like ScarecrowHe toned him way the Hell down from how he was in Ghost Rider.
>>153978426He's never written anything good. Fucking shtty Morrison LARPer.
>>153982555This.Ewing is such a tool.
>>153983099Tries so hard but he's really just another Mark Waid.
>>153983099He pooly copies Morison style ideas and pulls obscure characters and continuity from wikis to make himself seem knowledgable. His DC work has really exposed him because the DC Wiki is total shit compared to the Marvel Wiki which means his number one tool to get retards to look at him reverentially is gone.
>>153973667It would at least be an ignorable bad run if it wasn't for the absurd lengths he went to in establishing the clone of a clone of a clone of Ben was still the same guy with the same soul, and the retarded precedent it set that other books abused in even worse ways.
>>153979633Gen 13 was originally going to be called "Gen X" as seen in early ads in late 1993 promoting the upcoming book. Marvel acted like they had legal ownership of an entire letter of the alphabet, and Wildstorm renamed the book to Gen 13 rather than face a costly legal battle. I expect Marvel's suits and legal department basically ordered the X-Men office to quickly come up with a book using the name 'Generation X' ASAP so this couldn't happen again.>>153980094'teen superheroes book' isn't inherently derivative of New Mutants or X-Men. Teen Titans and the Legion existed before New Mutants, Marvel even had Young Allies back in the 40s. Gen 13 had powers due to their parents having been exposed to a chemical that gave them powers, not the same thing as Marvel mutants.
>>153979896everyone knows comic writers are retarded, next point
>>153985303>Teen TitansRobin has no powers.>LegionSure, but they're in the far-future, not the present.It was a Jim Lee co-creation, the guy was definitely cribbing from X-Men and not anything-DC.
>>153974801>His Nu52 Superman was a flopped attemptFolks fucking loved his New 52 run. They just hatted everything else New 52 Superman.
>>153985110What are you talking about? All your favorite X-Men are themselves and NOT clones. That's why the X-23 running around in the current X-Men books is a clone created when the original died except she wasn't ever actually dead at all she just got old and both were around and then the old original Laura died and that's why X-23 is not a clone.
>>153986638>Robin has no powers.This is the kind of stupid semantics argument a person would make if he's just arguing for the sake of arguing, while completely missing the point of the conversation.>t was a Jim Lee co-creation, the guy was definitely cribbing from X-Men and not anything-DC.It's a teen superheroes book, the concept of "teen superheroes" is not inherently an X-Men thing, it's been around since before them.It's really tiresome seeing people who only read X-Men insisting that books doing generic superhero tropes are copying X-Men by doing things that weren't new when X-Men did them. At most, a lot of 1990s Image books are just visually giving you a bit of a 1990s X-Men vibe because the characters were designed by the same artists or by artists emulating their style. But if they're not doing the race metaphor angle, they're probably not specifically trying to be an X-Men knockoff. Gen 13 is just a teen book.
>>153987579The X-Men predate the Teen Titans.It's Jim Lee. He was doing X-Men.>Gen 13 had powers due to their parents having been exposed to a chemical that gave them powersYeah, like the X-Men except there it was radioactivity instead of chemicals.
>>153987957And the Young Allies predate the X-Men, and so do the Legion. Gen 13 was not doing a race metaphor thing, you damned X-fag. If a book isn't doing that, it's just a teen superhero book.
>>153988148X-Men wasn't doing a race metaphor most of the time either, especially when Jim Lee was on the books.Went to check directly from the source>>We noticed that the last bunch of teens to star in their own book were the New Mutants, which came out in the early 1980sLike I said, X-Men. Though Choi also mentioned that he personally liked Legionnaires, which debuted in '93, and was inspired a bit by that as well.
What's Kirby's worst run?
>>153980317I still need to read this, weird that it's not brought a lot when talking about Vertigo
>>153989260His '70s Marvel stuff sucks, especially his Captain America run that followed (and ignored) Englehart's. I've heard it said that Marvel staff faked negative letters for that book but I remember reading in I think Marvel: The Untold Story the complete opposite. That staff was printing fake positive laters because the majority were negative.I don't care for his DC stuff either. Basically anything he made without someone like Lee or Simon to refine his ideas. But the post-return Marvel stuff is worse.
>>153990924Aww man that unironically sucks. I wonder if he made anything good thay wasn't under DC or Marvel
At least in the creator-owned stuff.What a way to waste such incredible potential for a sequel.
>>153989260As far as I've read, Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen is horribly boring.
>>153990991At least with the Marvel stuff the Cap readers were pissed going from what Englehart had been doing to a run that ignored all of it to feel like an outdated throwback in the worst way. Eternals was just basically a shittier and more pointless Inhumans, and everything else was even more pointless. I think that's why Kirby worked better in animation after that. He still had decent ideas and could still design characters but the animation process meant those ideas would be filtered. Meanwhile who gives a shit about Silver Star?
>>153991016Young is a good artist and should in no way ever be writing.
