Terrible Comic Writers
 

So, we bat this topic around often enough, but can somebody set me straight once and for all?

How do the likes of Dan Didio, Frank Miller, and Scott Lobdell continue to keep their jobs and ruin characters we've all loved for so long? Do they have blackmail material to keep their jobs? Are they sleeping with the higher-ups? Related to the higher-ups?

Feel free to add your own anathema headliners to this list.

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I will never understand how a man who wrote so few and everyone a fail in Didio and Miller is the most overrated comic book writer of all-time.

Also, Bruce Jones. He has the honor of writing the only comic I ever threw in the trash. His Nightwing run brought the term god-aweful to a while new level. Hev wrote a comic where I had to reread it to determine who was my favorite ( Dick Grayson) and my least favorite Jason Todd). There are a few others I suppose, but those three how they got to the level they are I will never comprehend after so much crap produced by them.

Here are my least favorites
-Frank Miller (horrible after TDK)
-Bendis (Can be ok, but tells drawn out stories)
-Jonathan Hickman (Or as I like to call him, Hackman)
-F*cking Dan Slott (Ruined Spidey)


Edit- forgot Lobdell

Personally, I really dislike the ultimate marvel writers. And pretty much whoever took over writing in the marval comics around 2001.

Chuck Austen's run on Action Comics is one of the absolute dirt-worst Superman stories I have EVER read. I've only seen little bits of his other stuff here and there, but enough to know he's the drizzling sh*ts.

Bendis is awful on team and event books, but has better success with solo hero runs, as I've enjoyed Ultimate Spider-Man, Daredevil, and most recently Iron Man. His decompressed style and wilful abandonment of continuity is particularly annoying though as you can spend ages reading an issue where they talk about waffles and nothing else.

Jeph Loeb was this at one point. Previously one of the best writers of the 2000s, this is the man who single-handidly murdered the Ultimate Universe...hired by Marvel mere months after the death of his son and was objectively in no shape mentally to be writing books of any sort. His "Fallen Son" series aside, it was'nt a pleasant couple of years. He's bounced back lately with Captain America: White, though it has a creepy Steve/Bucky yaoi vibe to it.

Prior to Dan Slott, Howard Mackie was the worst writer on Spider-Man at the time of the 1999 relaunch. He was a pretty decent writer before then, but burn-out (he worked two books) and developing cancer seemed to embitter him. He redeemed himself in 2009 with a Clone Saga remake co-written by DeFalco.

I'll toss in whoever it was that wrote Mar-Vell as well.

These days I'm a trade waiter for everything except Turtles, Ghostbusters and Walking Dead, so I really don't run into much awful writing since I know what I'm getting into before I buy that $15-20 book.

I remember hating everything Jake Black put out for Mirage, this was back in the Tales vol. 2 era.

Steve Murphy is one of those guys who can write a story that makes you say "Wow! This mother fuc*er GETS Turtles". And then turn out another that makes you wonder if he's literally out of his mind.

Lord knows I've read some garbage Star Wars stuff from the Dark Horse days. But I don't own them anymore and can't remember the names of any creative teams though.

Oh yeah, Steve Murphy. :tlol: That guy... he's like the Two-Face of TMNT comic writers.

I don't get the hate for Bendis, honestly. I like most of his run on New Avengers/Dark/Mighty Avengers series at least up to the Secret Invasion and just after, and his work on Ultimate Spidey, while not always my cup of tea, was decent. I don't have any particular writers I loathe, other than the one who is on the new "Ms. Marvel" book. Can't stand her writing; it's full of gawds-awful tropes, clichés, stereotypes, and fanboy-isms, and the characters are so one-note it's just pathetic. Utter trash, that book. Aside from that, I have a strong dislike for Joe Quesada, though more as a meddling editor than for writing. (Though what I've seen of his writing, it's about the same- personally-biased fan-wank garbage.)

Scott Snyder !!!

i have NO IDEA how this guy gets the praise that he does???

Geoff Johns writing lately is stinky too!!!

and i didn't enjoy the short stint i read of Dan Slott's Amazing Spider-Man.

What don't you like about him?

his run on Swamp thing was GAWDAWFUL!!!!

tried Wyches, and thought it was pretty blah.

i like his 'Batman' comics, but i do notice that i don't really enjoy them when they aren't drawn by Greg Capullo.

Ah, okay. I haven't read anything by him except Wytches and Batman, and while Batman is INCREDIBLE (or at worst, pretty good to great), but I never really got into Wytches... read the first story arc or so, up till the dad died, and then never really got back into it. It was okay, but not enough to keep me reading.

What was bad about Swamp Thing?

against my better judgement i stayed reading Swamp thing for Snyder's entire run and even an issue after he left.

the story dragged and dragged and dragged, the writing was very random and unmotivated, and went absolutely nowhere.

it really felt like a 6 issue story (at best) that got spread across #0 through #18 issues, an entire Annual as well as Two Cross-over issues of 'Animal-Man'.

the original character of Swamp Thing is a scientist who becomes deformed due to Lab Accident.
him and his wife are attacked by gangsters, she is killed, and he gets lit on fire by the chemicals of his experiment, and puts out the flames in the swamp becoming the Swamp Thing.

in Snyder's story the Swamp Thing is a unwilling guardian avatar of the forest, and has to battle the entity of death that wants to take over the entire planet.
but the focus jumps around TOO much for no real reason.

i'd like to add Geoff Johns to this list!

His body of work still has far too much good-to-great in it for that to hold water. It's only the recent editorially-driven nonsense from DiDio that he has to make somehow "work" in story form that's dragging down his career average. You really can't go wrong with anything pre-2009 that he did, especially his Green Lantern, Flash and JSA stuff, which is far and away among the best work anyone's ever produced with those characters.

Nobody can really judge any DC writer by their post-Final Crisis output. That was officially when DiDio went into full-on Sales Panic mode and started flinging anything and everything at the wall to see what stuck. You could have Hemingway writing the books and they'd all still be awful, the ideas coming from up top are pathetic. That's hardly Geoff's fault. Like, Dan Jurgens is the greatest Superman writer to ever hold a pen, but his New 52 Superman run was awful. I ain't holding that against him, the man's hands were tied.

Anyone who's a big fan of Archie's version of Sonic the Hedgehog has to least heard the name Ken Penders and the s**t he's done on the comic as well as the lawsuit that led the comic to get rebooted. Don't even get me started on his Lara-Su Chronicles graphic novel. If you ever wanted to see something so putrid and unholy in terms of both art and writing, look no further than what he's finished so far.

i can agree that editorial does poison the creativity well, but Johns is one of the higher ups.
i imagine he has some say as well?

his earlier writing is much much better, but the stuff he's been churning out has been pretty bad!

i imagine all this mumbo jumbo from editorial might be why Scott Snyder has stepped away from writing the main Batman book?

Yeah, editorial also caused the quality of Batman Inc to suffer, and Morrison (imo) went out on a major whimper because of it.

i couldn't agree more!

and that was a huge shame because he was on such an incredible roll before that whole cruddy 2011 re-launch interference!

Geoff has pull but somehow I doubt he throws much weight around. To this day, he still comes across to me like a big kid who still kind of can't believe he lucked into his dream job and doesn't want to rock the boat too much. Like if you ever see him speak about DC and their characters, he still has this wide-eyed "Gee Whiz!" kind of way about him. I could be way off base but I'm usually pretty decent at reading people. I just figure, ten years ago he was "just" a writer who specialized in working on stuff that other writers thought was too hard, and making it work beautifully. Now he gets to be more "Up Top", but at the same time, still remembers how it wasn't all that long ago that only hardcores knew his name and still feels like more of an employee than a "higher-up". I'm sure he absolutely contributes but also don't think he tries to go against the grain very much, more just make the best of what he's given. I mean, I could be totally wrong, that's just how it seems to me. Especially given how DiDio is so much of a "F*ck that, we're doing THIS" kind of person, and he's the boss and decision-maker.

Like I said before, both Jurgens and Johns were very talented writers whose new 52 output wasn't well-received, but it's less their fault, and more like, without them contributing the entire thing would have been even worse, so thank god they were even there, y'know? It's like how Jurgens inadvertently helped bring the whole Clone Mess to a close over at Spider-Man; the entire thing as a whole was a wreck, and his own stuff wasn't his best due to what he had to try and sell to readers, but it was better than most of the rest of what was coming out. AND he was the one to finally convince the editors that the entire thing was stupid, spiraling out of control, insulting to readers' intelligence and satisfying to no one at all. That's what made them get rid of Reilly and bring things back to semi-normal; before Jurgens spoke up, the thing was set to go on indefinitely because it was inexplicably selling well despite nobody actually liking it, so although he left the book way before it was resolved, it's because he spoke up that the thing even had a concrete resolution, at all. We might STILL be juggling Peter and Ben and arguing which one was the clone, otherwise.

So again, sometimes a great writer's sh*tty patch is really just a shinier piece of editorially-driven crap than what everyone else is doing, in which case, it's less that they suck at writing and more like nobody could ever make that stuff work and bless 'em for even trying. I actually feel bad for them, honestly.

Given the fact lots of fans pine for Ben Reily's return to this day, that wouldn't be too bad actually. The ending of the 2009 Clone Saga remake kind of closes out with resolving that notion...that Peter and Ben didn't know which one was which, but at the end of the day, the moral of the story was that their lives are their own and they have to act on where they are in the now and not who they were then. They resolve to put the issue to bed and carry on with their lives. Ben moves away while Peter resumes being Spidey only now saddled with being a dad. Life goes on. It's a great message and it left the door fully open for more interactions between the characters in the future...of course nothing came of this series due to low sales (the intention was to possibly do a Ben Reilly series set in this continuity if sales were good), but it was nice while it lasted

The Clone Saga does have it's fans (I'm one of them) and I find reading it, it actually gets better with age where as everything since then (prior to the otherwise excellent JMS era and certainly everything after) gets worse.

Yeah, I'm with Zarius on this one. The Clone Saga get far more hate than it really deserves, and is touted as a "mess", when it really wasn't (much). Complicated? Yes, certainly. Confusing? To some, who might have missed side-stories and minor details, perhaps. But overall, it was an interesting plot, and involved some heavy mind-f**king of both Peter and Ben by Jackal and others. The fact that it ended on such a sour note is more a product of the fact that so many fans got utterly upset by the idea that "their" Spidey might have been an imposter all along! The recent "redux" that Zarius mentioned was pretty good about resolving any remaining issues, and though I only read a few issues of it, it was fairly good compared to other Spidey tales at the time. Certainly better than the likes of M-J's post-BND arc as a successful actress dating- whoever that "heartthrob" was, (the guy Paper Doll was obsessed with), or the stunt driver "villain", or anything involving Screwball. Mr. Negative was possibly the only decent element to come out of all that, and he's been largely forgotten outside of his inadvertent creation of Anti-Venom. (Which was really just a cop-out way to throw a bone to the Brock/Venom fans, IMHO....)

If either of you haven't ever read "The Life of Reilly", I absolutely recommend it if you have a free week to take it all in. I always love hearing what was going on behind-the-scenes as stories are being written. I think I posted the link in another thread but I can find it again if necessary.

I confess that the Clone Saga era was where I abandoned ship with Spider-Man and only ever bought like two dozen issues since, at most. Reading how it was conceived and executed was fascinating, but for whatever fans it has or whatever came of it, I'm never going to fully be able to embrace an entire two year run where things were literally being pulled out of the collective asses of everyone involved on a week-to-week basis. There's a million and one ways the ideas they initially had could have been good, but none of those things actually happened and what did hit the page was just stuff being booked on the fly to keep the whole thing going another week. And that ain't no way to run a railroad.


They should've stuck to their guns and banged the whole thing out in to months, with the original ending. Peter had been acting out of character in the books before that for years, so the fact Ben was originally supposed to be the real Peter Parker made a lot of sense. Everything they did afterwards didn't. Having Ben be the clone and killing him off basically made the entire two-year run pointless. I hate sh*t like that. They should have just let it end at the original planned endpoint, with Peter and MJ moving to Oregon to raise the kid and Ben taking over as Spider-Man. All that stuff like "Lost Years" and "Final Adventure" or whatever it was only happened to build to that; and then almost the next day, "Nevermind, we're doing the exact opposite of everything we've been building to!" Ooof, that's brutal, man.

Part of it's the wrestler/wrestling fan in me; "booking on the fly" sucks. You make a plan, you leave a little wiggle room to shift if you have to, but otherwise, you stick to the plan. You simply can't tell a good long-form story with zero long-term planning and a bunch of people changing their minds week-to-week about what the story even is.

I've only read less than half the actual Clone Saga issues, but I think reading about it was more fun than reading it would be. I mean, how can I argue with the people who wrote it, when even they say it's rotten? I'll probably read it one day, but I've read enough to know I'm most likely not going to have a much different opinion.

But yeah lemme know if you need that link. S'pretty good. Long but good.

I have. Several times. The fact the whole thing turns out half as decent as it does in spite of all those problems is miraculous.

Actually, Negative's being used a bit more frequently again. He showed up in Gerry Conway's "Spiral" and he's the villain of Slott's current ASM storyline

You have my awe. It took me like three weeks to get through it in a few chunks each day. That thing is goddamn massive. :lol: But fascinating! I absolutely ADORE reading stuff like that. Sometimes I'm more interested in how stories like movies or comics are made than in what the actual story itself ends up being.

And yeah, "miraculous" is totally the appropriate word. :trazz:

Oh man. Life of Reilly was a great read. It's been a long time since I went through it, but now I kind of want to check it out again.

I was about 10 when the Clone Saga kicked off and I followed it throughout. And yeah, in hindsight it was a total train wreck. But Ben was a solid, endearing character that I still like a lot -- from rereading some of that run, Ben shines quite a bit amongst the muck.

To me, it's a shame that they extended that plotline so long that he was considered toxic outright, a sacrificial lamb for the editors' sins. It was very cool for Peter to have a "brother", a walking what-if that went through some seriously hopeless times and was still every bit the hero that Peter is.

Try reading "Fantastic Four: The Great American Novel" sometime. Just as lengthy and a great mix of philosophy, history of the FF and American culture, interviews with comic creators, and one fan's frightfully on-point perspectives regarding an inevitable reboot of the Marvel Universe sooner than you think.

Grant Morrison.

hit or miss maybe? but terrible ....nope.

Fair enough. Personally I find when he "hits", it's serviceable-to-decent. But when he misses, which is far more often, he's one of the worst writers imaginable. Ive read so much of what he's written and I'd say We3 and maybe one fifth of All Star Superman were what I consider decent. You can just see how full of himself he is dripping off the pages.

And he holds my personal vote for the worst trade back I've ever purchased with The Filth.

...and Judd Winnick sucks while we're at it :P

the Filth .... VERY much a miss!!!!

it took me a second read-through to understand Flex Mentallo, but now i really enjoy it a lot despite being overblown with symbolism. it's just a fun ride.

but OHHHHHHHHH the Filth! THAT was a damn chore to get through!!! >.<
giant sperms!!!! WTH???

i absolutely LOVED We3 !!!
guess i'm just a sucker for animals! @u@

but some of those moments STILL get me all misty-eyed when i read them!

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"DEE-COMM-ISH"
the FEELS!!!!! the FEELS!!!!! ;;;;n;;;;;

yeah Judd Winick can lay some real eggs!!!! :D

I just read WE3 this weekend. Amazing stuff... RIP, 3. :tsad:

wasn't it awesome??? :D

but yeah, it'll tear your heart out that story!! :tcry:

It was so much better than I expected. Also way more bloody than I expected. :tlol:

2 is a beast. :tcool:

seeing the first few pages of the preview i knew i was definitely going to enjoy it artistically, but the story really caught me by surprise! :D

yeah! # 2 was a real spitfire!!!

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I loved when 1 attacks 2 and you think he's going to kill the cat, only to see him ripping the suit off the cat. "Suit not us" or whatever he said. :tsad:

i kinda knew where 1 was going with his ripping off 2's robotics.
though i have a feeling 2 was going to take it as something else and try to kill 1? :o

thankfully he shook that goofy cat out of the suit before she even knew what hit her! :D

it was actually pretty awesome how it all turned out!

shame about #3. :cry:
"UH-OH"

"Uh oh" was heartbreaking.

Take out that pitbull sonuvabitch! TAKE HIM OUT!!!