Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Comic Books >

What's the worst comic you ever read?

Page: (1)2 3

The Damned Yankee

00:08 / 23.01.02

Bad art, lousy dialogue, idiotic layouts, poorly conceived characters, and absurd plots. All of these and more can ruin any comic. But when, dear 'lithers, did all of these factors converge for you, thereby creating the absolutely AWFULEST, MIND-NUMBINGEST, WORSTEST piece of drivel that ever sat in front of your eyeballs?

(Not counting the previous sentence, of course

)

For me it was Mort the Dead Teenager, a Marvel effort from the ugliest period of the early 90's, sort of a Gen-X combination of Casper and Archie, only not quite as witty as either.

Anybody else?

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

00:14 / 23.01.02

Those Crazy Peckers from Solson comics.

A TMNT rip off about insane talking super-powered chickens. By the same company that gave you Reagan's Radiers...Ran by Rich Buckler who oddly hasn't been able to find much work anywhere since.

And they went out of business owing me a couple of grand. They also gave Jim Lee his first comics job.

The Damned Yankee

00:19 / 23.01.02

Ah yes. The "We Wish We Were TMNT" school of bad comics. Great is the pain of remembrance.

00:34 / 23.01.02

The last issue of Generation X was quite mindblowingly awful. A friend of mine wanted to burn it as soon as he finished it.

01:14 / 23.01.02

"Quantum Leap," but I saved it anyway 'cuz I really loved the show back in the day.

HORRIBLE. IN kind of a wonderful way, however.

01:43 / 23.01.02

This isn't going to degenerate into some sort of "it's so bad, it's good" thread is it? Because once people start putting down giant apes or disembodied brains, I'm gone.

I've read more bad comics than you can imagine. My roommates, and their tastes, took care of that. One in particular desrves special mention.

Floyd. It was about three hoodlums. The handsome, well-built title character, his lanky Quebecois sidekick, and their nerdish computer friend. Together they decide to rob a warehouse or something, but not until after a night of macking on ladies with the most improbable anatomy seen in comics (and yes, I have read some Image titles). They stumble upon a Nazi conspiracy, and Floyd has his good looks marred by some hooks and fishing line. The nazis take over and it looks like the only hope for a panicked Toronto is Floyd, his friends, and a series of tanks badly rendered by computer. All in either profile or face forward poses.

I'd normally cut a first time, self-published comic some slack, but the author has an editorial in the back where he rails against the banks for not loaning him 50 grand for all the computer equipment he needs for his venture. And all because he doesn't have any collateral, a job, and lives at home.

And the sketch for the next issue's villain is of a guy with a crossbow for a head! Bonus!

The Natural Way

06:44 / 23.01.02

I'm not just saying this:

SPAWN

It is so shit. That anusleader cannot write. HE. CANNOT. WRITE.

Please, someone just agree w/ me. It's easy.

06:49 / 23.01.02

I was thinking about this last night, before I saw the thread this morning (obviously).

One of the worst worst worst comics I can ever remember was a highly ill-conceived attempt by Marvel to, I suppose, target the trucker market (!) in the early 1980s.

Anyone remember US1? It was about the orphaned son of a couple of truckers who lived in a diner with some nice homely types and who fought evil corporate baddies from his truck. He'd had an accident (possibly the same one which killed his parents, and which was probably engineered by the bad guys) and as a result he had a metal skull, which enabled him to pick up CB transmissions directly into his brain whenever he clamped his fillings over a piece of foil from a gum wrapper.

So awful it was... awful, actually.

08:52 / 23.01.02

Hack and Slash was a horrible comic. It had ninjas on the cover so I bought it. When I got home I found out the only ninjas in the comic were on the movie screen and the title characters were two kids who watched movies and read comics. If I wanted to see anything like that I would have just watched a Beavis and Butthead episode

Haus about we all give each other a big lovely huggle?

08:52 / 23.01.02

Norm Breyfogle's "Metaphysique".

That is all.

08:52 / 23.01.02

NFL Superpro.

'Nuff said.

The Damned Yankee

11:16 / 23.01.02

Just for the record, my intent here is not to showcase comics that are "so bad that they're good", but rather "so bad that they're awful".

And US1 definitely fits that latter category. Ugh.

12:46 / 23.01.02

Spawn did suck, though cast your mind back to the Marvel new Universe. An entire universe of comic book characters who had the super skill to:

Smell like a pile of steaming poo.

(though I must admit I have fond memories of DP7)

15:32 / 23.01.02

Anything by Aircel, and pretty much everything by Solson. Was going to mention the New Universe, but:

a) I've been beaten to it, and
b) it pretty much goes without saying.

19:44 / 23.01.02

I've said it before and I'll say it again:
The L.A.W #1from DC Comics.

Worst. Comic. Ever.

08:30 / 24.01.02

' Wild Dog ' from DC comics in the late eighties. Bad enough to have ' The Punisher ' inflicted on the world - remember that in the late 80s the Punisher was played totally straight, no irony at all.

Wild Dog was a big ole Southern states f*ckwit who, for reasons not interesting enough to remember, dressed up in a hockey mask, a hockey top, and combat pants, blowing bad guys away. His best pal was a black policeman - to show that he wasn't a redneck rascist presumably, whilst his every action screamed ' Yes you are'.

' The Mighty Thor ' has pretty much sucked from Day One as well - lovely art from Kirby or Simonson, stupid character. There's a reason these gods aren't worshipped, y'know.

Then there was ' Babe' - the superhero with hooters. And that was it.

10:05 / 24.01.02

Fathom.

And anything else by that artist, or that publishing house, whose name I luckily don't know.

12:49 / 24.01.02

Dave M, I think you’re being a bit unfair on Wild Dog. Sure, it was hardly comics' finest hour, but I don’t recall the racial angle – the main aspect of it, IIRC, was that in a four-issue miniseries, you didn’t know which of the various suspects was the masked titular character unless issue 4. And I seem to recall it was created by Max Allen Collins and Terry Beatty, whose work I’ve never seen accused of racism before. Or since, come to that.

As for the worst comic ever, well… I dunno, really. Loath as I am to suggest something recent – as so many polls do – I think that ‘Rising Stars 7’ (I think that was the issue) was amongst the most frustrating reads (or, rather, attempted reads) I’ve had in a very long time. Aside from rather pedestrian layouts rendering an unclear story nigh-on impossible to follow, few of the characters were introduced in any way – a problem which might not have been emphasised by the fact that they all seemed to look the same, and the book had been coloured in dark tones running the full range from grey to darker grey.

DBC

13:35 / 24.01.02

BAre-knuckle boxing with any who slag New Universe!

Grrrr!

Zoom.

Mister Remington Finn

14:03 / 24.01.02

although there are a lot of comics that are bad due to poor resources (monetary as well inspirational), and I can´t name one movie to comic adatation worth attention whatsoever.....
.....I was very disapointed by JLA´s Divided We Fall. I was lured by Brian Hitch and Paul Neary from their work on Stormwatch/Authority, and thought myself in for a treat....
IT SUCKED!!!! IT SUCKED SO BAAAAD!!!! I WAS TOTALY UNMOVED BY THE STORLINE!!!!...so the combination makes it for me the worst comic ever...

[ 24-01-2002: Message edited by: Mister Remington Finn ]

Lennox The Grey Man

14:08 / 24.01.02

It could probably be... hhmmmmm, lets see...
yeah, definitelly it could be APHRODITE IX... god, it really sucks.
And how come nobody mention THE PITT??? F*ck, its really REALLY HORRIBLE!!!

quote: I'm not just saying this:
SPAWN

It is so shit. That anusleader cannot write. HE. CANNOT. WRITE.

OK, AGREED.

l e n n o x

11:16 / 25.01.02

Dave B - yer probably right, so I withdraw the suggestions of rascism wholeheartedly. Still think it was a lame idea for DC to come up with it's own version of the Punisher, however. I have an aversion to heroes who resort to big guns to dispatch baddies.

11:57 / 25.01.02

[off-topic] "Anusleader"? [/off-topic]

12:39 / 25.01.02

Anything by Rob Liefeld. I haven't seen any of his work in years (does he still work at all?)but if it's anything like Youngblood, Bloodstrike, Brigade, etc. then I'm not interested.
And I hate his artwork.

[ 25-01-2002: Message edited by: Storm of Blue vs. Corporal Clegg ]

A

09:15 / 26.01.02

Primate #1, the first in the Image Introduces... series, was so unbelievably fucking awful that it directly lead me to start exactly the same thread as this a few months back. it's in there somewhere, if you want to go searching.

The "story" consists of a gorilla who becomes super-intelligent for no discernable reason, then somehow aquires an enormous knife and runs around the city stabbing baddies. That's it.

The "art" is unbearably terrible. Grotesquely over-muscled males, and waiflike females with ridiculously large breasts (and needlessly skimpy outfits.

I'm pretty sure that this comic embodies every single negative stereotype about comics that has ever existed.

It chills me to the bone to think that this may have been the first comic someone ever read.

But I'm not dismissing apes in comics. I'm with Moriarty on this one, apes and disembodied brains are what made comics great.

Robot Man Reformed

09:15 / 26.01.02

The first X-Force featuring a Liefeld copycat. Around 10 I guess. So bad it jumpstarted my schizophrenia.

09:15 / 26.01.02

I seem to remember some stuff. A Vertigo miniseries called "The unseen hand" that was just too bad, both in writing as in drawing. Brainless plot with kinda cartoonish characters.

- Mercury

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

09:15 / 26.01.02

The fun thing about this thread is that everyone is picking books from the last 10 - 15 years, and missing out on such gems as the Entire Archie Heroes line of the 60's, the Gawd Awful Superman and Batman's Super-Sons stuff of the early 70's...or the horrid Filipino DC horror stuff of the late 70's...or even the endless reams of sex and violence crap from Chaos.

And so much of the Image stuff was just product. It didn't make me think "How the holy blue bumblefuck did this get published?"

17:20 / 26.01.02

Rose, I imagine most people on this forum aren't old enough to have encountered too much ancient shite. I mean, if you're going to read an old comic it's likely to be at least historically interesting. I for one haven't got enough distance from the dross of the last ten years to see too far beyond it. And let's not forget that recent comics are more fun to discuss - good inclusive bitching.
Anyway, my vote has to go to Spawn. I can't remember being presented with a more infuriatingly stupid piece of badly written super-crap in my entire life. That fucking McFarlane man has a lot to answer for! Jesus I only wish I owned a copy of his original run so I could quote a chunk.
On second thoughts...

[ 26-01-2002: Message edited by: Hindermate ]

17:29 / 26.01.02

I dunno Rose. I think a lot of that stuff, while ridiculous for many reasons, is enjoyable for its camp value. One of my faves is SPiderman Team-Up with the original SNL cast. Cover is Spidey swinging in yelling "Belushi! NO! That samurai's for real!" as Belushi faces off against the Silver Samurai. Gold.

I think the crap that people are listing here will one day be looked upon for its camp value. Ultra-violent, oddly-drawn camp, but camp nonetheless.

Zoom.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

19:31 / 26.01.02

Camp is OK, I guess.

But some of that stuff is just so bad you cringe. The whole "shitty 50's reprints" craze of Marvel's in the mid 70's to squeeze everyone else off the rack is an example of shitty comics that people actually want now.

It's odd.

And I troll quarter bins for shitty comics all the time....

Warrington Minge

19:55 / 26.01.02

As a child I used to hate anything drawn by Camarine Infantino and when I was a kid he used to draw just about every filler issue going. I look back on it now and its just very stylised seventies penciling but my god he had a real problem with proportion.

Late eighties X-men really irritates me. There was a time when I left it that the speech bubbles were taking over the pages. the issue I always remember is of Magneto standing in the middle of Space during some inter galactic battle, lasers and space ships are buzzing around him and he's quoting from some novel he's written in his mind about the spoils of war. I stopped reading X-men after that. I'd need some pretty hard convincing to go back. Perhaps though Mr Morrison can....

20:22 / 26.01.02

Marvel Two-In-One. The Thing meets The Yancy Street Gang. They wore construction workers' helmets.

'Nuff said.

20:26 / 26.01.02

I've read lots of bad comics, including the usual glot of execrable early Image stuff, but the only comic I can remember being so disgusted with I wasn't able to finish was the recent Green Arrow #2. Huge, annoying hunks of pointless verbiage...SO bored...

08:19 / 28.01.02

This might be a pointless mention because i don't know if anyone else will have seen it, but I recently bought some self - published thing called "more then we seem". Horrible, horrible, 'let's try to be really broody and meaningful while having no prose style or semblance of plot' and rigid, turgid art that looked like Fuzzy Felt pictures drawn by someone trying to conserve ink at all costs. or maybe using a fag end.

Oh, and Street-Poet Ray.

Page: (1)2 3