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.