So Bad It's Horrible/Comic Books

""I hate this comic. I hate everything about this comic! I never want to see it ever again! I don't want to remember that it exists! Joe Quesada... You! Are! A! HACK!!!""

- Linkara, explaining why he didn't want to review One More Day.

Certain comic book storylines get written off as So Bad Its Horrible, especially if the fans complain loud enough. Maybe the writers were having a bad day... or perhaps they failed an Author's Saving Throw. Nevertheless, these things have been condemned by a vocal portion of the fanbase.

In some cases, they're so bad that their creators refuse to acknowledge them, preferring to Retcon their mistakes out of existence. Those are the lucky ones.

Important Note: Merely being offensive in its subject matter is not enough to justify a work as So Bad It's Horrible. Hard as it is to imagine at times, there is a market for all types of deviancy (no matter how small a niche it is). It has to fail to appeal even to that niche to qualify as this.

Second Important Note: It is not a Horrible comic just because Linkara or any other Caustic Critic reviewed it. There needs to be independent evidence to list it. (Though once it is listed, they can provide the detailed review.)

DC Comics

 * The miniseries Amazons Attack was thrown together last-minute to cover delays in Wonder Woman, and was nothing more than Character Derailment for the entire Amazon people, turning them either into Straw Feminists or complete morons by way of Idiot Plot. The initial attack is because Wonder Woman was tortured; later, it's stated that they decided to do it because they hate men. The reason Wonder Woman was tortured was to learn the Amazon secret technology; later, the heroes figure out that the Amazons aren't behind a certain attack because it's high-tech. Please note that this is a miniseries which isn't getting its facts straight. Wonder Woman herself is presented as absolutely helpless throughout; she confronts her clearly-brainwashed mother at least thrice without thinking to use her lasso, which has previously been shown in-canon as able to break brainwashing. The US Army is challenged by spears and bows and arrows — an arrow pierces a cockpit at one point; Air Force One is chased down by women on flying horses. Also, unless you read the tie-ins, the characters who are Amazons (Wonder Woman and Donna Troy) or affiliated with the Amazons (Wonder Girl and Super Girl) barely appear for the first half of the series. Icing on the cake? Those tie-ins, where most of the big plot points happen, got left out of the trade paperback collection. It's obvious that the creators didn't research the characters' past or the history of The DCU Amazons at all. Oh, and the Amazons' secret weapon is bees. My God. To make matters worse, the entire series was a lead-in to Countdown...which is at least as reviled as Amazons Attack.
 * Linkara has reviewed the entire miniseries as well.
 * Bruce Jones' run on the once-spectacular Checkmate. He knew the title was going to be canned when he took it, so he felt free to go insane. How bad was this? He took a gritty, realistic spy thriller and made it about a morphing, amnesiac animal man fighting giant porcupines.
 * Cry for Justice, a DC miniseries by James Robinson that featured Hal Jordan trying to create a proactive Justice League (because that always ends well). Nicknamed "Gay for Justice" by readers, thanks to some unfortunate lettering styles. The series features gratuitous gore and violence, characters being dismembered, horrible writing and gross characterization, and everyone constantly shouting "For justice!" Put it this way — when the author directly and explicitly apologizes to the fans over the quality of the work, twice, before the series has finished, then you know you're dealing with something awful. It was pointlessly Darker and Edgier, even killing off Lian Harper last-minute for no real reason, and that was just one among a great almighty fuckload of senseless deaths. Robinson got himself under all manner of fire for its release, despite the fact that he fought tooth-and-nail against the editors, who wanted much, much more in the pointless death and destruction departments. Not two years later, it and both of its follow-ups were retconned in full. It got featured on Atop the Fourth Wall, if you're interested.
 * DC Comics' weekly series Countdown to Final Crisis, by most accounts. Bad Writing, bad art, bad characterization, three different names (it started as Countdown, then Countdown to Final Crisis, and the final issue was titled DC Universe Zero), three alternate Earths destroyed to prop up villains fans don't like, tie-in mini-series that explain key plot points that are equally horrible, and an ending that completely contradicted the events that it was created to build up. Shortly after 52 was finished, Dan Didio asked Grant Morrison to give some of his (work in progress) scripts of the first several issues of Final Crisis; other than that, it was pretty much controlled by Didio. It also pulled away advertising from the infinitely better Sinestro Corps War story that was going on at the same time. The whole thing was declared Canon Discontinuity the minute it was finished, but it still didn't erase the horrible taste it left in readers' mouths. It was so bad that the intended final issue, DC Universe #0, written by Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns, essentially replaced Countdown as the real lead-up to Final Crisis (the only thing that was acknowledged from Countdown was Darkseid's death, fall, and reincarnation into a human body as seen in Seven Soldiers). It was built up to be the spine of the DCU, but quickly became the colon.
 * As with many others of the comics listed here, Linkara reviewed it. His review was on four parts, but only two of them were dedicated to the comic itself, because in his opinion the plot was so thin that he could chuck half of the comic's run in 20 minutes and his public wouldn't lose nothing of importance. The other two parts were a prologue to explain the background, conception and characters involved in the disaster, and a countdown of the 15 most awful moments of the comic.
 * DC Challenge was an interesting concept — a 12-issue miniseries in which teams of people who normally did not work together would take turns doing stories which could not prominently feature characters they normally worked on, each issue setting up a Cliff Hanger that the next team would have to solve in the next issue. Unfortunately, Round Robin stories are hard enough to manage as fanwork. Doing this professionally would've been difficult, so it wasn't. This quickly degenerated into a confusing mess. By the end, major plot threads had been dropped completely and nobody was quite sure what was going on — not even the editors at DC.
 * Devin Grayson's run on Nightwing, particularly her attempt to re-enact the plot of Born Again on the least suitable character in the entire DCU. The sheer amount of characters that would need to be retconned from the DCU (assuming they didn't detach Dick Grayson completely from it) should have kept this from passing the concept phase, but that's just one issue; other gems from this include the rape scene courtesy of Tarantula—which she tried to defend as being "nonconsensual" rather than rape—and Richard's inexplicable Face Heel Turn and poorly-explained alliance with Deathstroke, the result of a failed attempt to manufacture a "hero from the ashes" storyline (Infinite Crisis got in the way) by pointlessly giving Nightwing hell.
 * To very briefly sum up the suitability issue for non-readers -- the plot of Born Again (one of the most famous Daredevil arcs ever written) requires the hero to have so few allies that they could potentially turn to in a time of crisis that they could successfully be prevented from reaching them, or simply despair at contacting, that they are forced to struggle through the entire arc alone. Nightwing's list of close allies includes the entire Bat-Family (of which he is a founding member), Superman, and the entire lineup of every incarnation of the Teen Titans or the Titans (which is dozens of people). And that's just his close allies, the ones who are like family. At the time of Devin Grayson's run, Dick Grayson's list of friends encompassed literally 95% of every superhero then published by DC, excepting only ones in alternate continuities/time zones such as Vertigo or the Legion of Super-Heroes. Entire plot arcs have been based on the premise that Dick Grayson is the single most well-networked superhero in comics. It would be easier to make Captain America into a friendless abandoned loner than Nightwing, and yet, they tried to make us believe it could happen. To this day, despite now being Canon Discontinuity, it is still one of the most infamous stinkburgers in Bat-Comics.
 * Bruce Jones' run of Nightwing, which followed Grayson's, made her run look like Shakespeare. Nightwing became a male model who slept with his boss, and she just happened to have superpowers. Then Jason Todd showed up and started fighting Dick on a model runway; and then Jason Todd was turned into a tentacle monster.
 * Rise Of Arsenal is the spiritual sequel to Cry for Justice, which ought to warn readers off. The story is jarringly offensive and bad, attempts at gaining emotion from the reader feel forced and manipulative, Roy Harper is massively out of character (even after considering that he's a grieving father), and the art is often inconsistent. To sum up how bad this book can be: there's a moment where Roy beats up a bunch of thugs in an alley to protect a dead cat that he thinks is his dead daughter while strung out on heroin... yes, that does happen. Oh, and they solve the plot point of Roy's grief by retconning Lian out of existence, so his grief disappear because he never was a father in the first place!
 * Superman: At Earth's End is a truly failed attempt to make Superman fit in The Dark Age of Comic Books. From turning the Man of Steel into a gun-toting, incoherent, moronic Santa Claus lookalike, to the overall stupidity of the plot (the main villains are clones of Hitler — such a plot could be effective in a comic that didn't take itself seriously, but here it comes across as lazy), it truly comes as a complete mess of Executive Meddling gone wrong.
 * At least two good things came out of it: "I AM A MAN!" and "Of course! Don't you know anything about science?"

Marvel

 * The Crossing, an insane Avengers Bat Family Crossover supposedly about Kang trying to take over the world. The plot makes no sense and is so convoluted that it's hard to tell where it begins. It also features the Face Heel Turn and death of Tony Stark and his replacement by his alternate dimension younger counterpart, "Teen Tony". Eventually, in Avengers Forever, Kurt Busiek said that pretty much everyone involved was a Space Phantom and it was a plot by Immortus, pretending to be Kang (his younger self), to troll the Avengers so that they didn't leave Earth for a while.
 * Marville, written by Bill Jemas, was created on a bet between him and Peter David to see who could write a better selling comic. The problem here is that at the time he worked for Marvel, Jemas was an editor. And boy, does it show. The book is filled with terrible jokes that feel like they were stolen from a rejected Seltzer and Friedberg script, ham-fisted political commentary, characters from the mainline Marvel universe showing up just to act out of character and do unfunny things, and tons of mean-spirited digs at DC while Marvel got off Scott-free. Eventually, this fell in favor of what read like a Chick Tract... as adapted à la Shoggoth on the Roof by a schizophrenic primary-schooler. The last two issues were a recap of the series and a guide on how to submit scripts to a now-defunct comic line. Bonus points for increasingly desperate cover art featuring a red-haired woman (who appeared nowhere in the comic) in various states of undress when Jemas was certain he'd lose. (He did.) Watch Linkara rip it apart in six very, very funny parts.
 * Let's not forget the issue that didn't have word balloons. Oh, it had dialog, just not word balloons. Apparently, the artist couldn't be bothered to actually put in the word balloons, leaving them putting the terrible dialog (in script form) in a corner of the panel.
 * The worst part is that apparently Bill Jemas does believe everything he put in this comic. Meaning that every crazy theory, all the scientific inaccuracies, and every philosophical nonsense in this thing? All those are his sincere beliefs.
 * The Spider-Man storyline One More Day is perhaps the most hated case of Executive Meddling since the Sixth Doctor. Decades of continuity and characterization were Diabolus Ex Machina'd out of existence because some guy didn't like the direction the character was having. The writer hated every minute of it and tried hard to get himself disassociated with it. It goes like this—Spider Man's aunt May takes a bullet and is about to die. Somehow, nobody in the Marvel Universe can do anything to change that. So, in a move wholly detached from reality and maturity, he makes a Deal with the Devil to save Aunt May's life (against her wishes, by the way)... in exchange for his marriage. It was contrived to the point of stupidity, worse in that Quesada claimed having them just plain divorce would piss people off and made only the flimsiest attempts to justify his actions (he was even accused of wholly disregarding any impact this would have on anything). It essentially created its own Continuity Snarl by re-introducing elements that were never relevant in the first place, was full of Voodoo Sharks, retcons (the biggest of all being Spidey's public unmasking, which they expressly stated would not be undone) and overall stupidity on the part of all involved.
 * To twist the knife even more, came the "sequel", Brand New Day where we are informed that it was Mary Jane the one who strongarmed the above mentioned deal with the devil and that she was on board on it all the time. This, despite having previously shown as objecting all the way. Because it wasn't enough to retcon away her marriage, they had to demonize her too.
 * It should probably be noted that the reason Straczynski objected to the story to the degree that he did was not actually due to the story's quality and more to do with the fact that his original proposal for it had been turned down, a proposal that would've jettisoned three and a half decades of continuity (as opposed to the two that that final product did away with). Whether this would've been better or worse than what we got is debatable, at that three and a half decades would've included nearly every infamously-awful Spider-Man story ever told, such as the Clone Saga and Sins Past, which remained in-continuity in the story that ended up being told.
 * Linkara really didn't want to review this because of the utter hate he had for this storyline (as quoted above), but eventually relented and reviewed it for his 200th episode.
 * Sins Past (and its sequel Sins Remembered) is the other contender for most infamous Spiderman storyline of the Oughthies, and until One More Day, it was considered the actual worst. It gets like this: apparently Gwen Stacy secretly got pregnant and gave birth to twin children, that were raised and artificially aged up by Norman Osborn to get back at Peter Parker, whom the kids believe are their father and mama's killer. Except that the real father of the twins was Osborn himself, and they were conceived under unclear and probably rapey circumstances. No, this isn't a Crack Fic written for the Marvel Kink Meme, this was an actual story that got published. This was so out of character for every character involved, the fans intermediately declared this out of canon and the rest of Marvel hadn't actually mentioned its events since.
 * It says something when the writer of this crack fest, J. Michael Straczynski, complained about the Executive Meddling received while writing it, which turned out to be Joe Quesada overruling Straczynski's original choice for the twins father, Spidey himself, despite being way more logical, on the amount that "it would age the character too much". Note that this book came before One More Day, where Straczynski and Quesada also worked.
 * Jeph Loeb's The Ultimates 3 is accused of having exceptionally-poor writing and Flanderization en masse. Many critics argue that Loeb doesn't seem to have bothered reading any of the other books in the Ultimate Universe or familiarizing himself with their characters, and has merely made the characters caricatures of their counterparts in Earth-616 regardless of whether this is appropriate. It was loaded with Plot Holes, WallBangers, and stupid, stupid writing mistakes.
 * And then there's Ultimatum, a Crisis Crossover which is filled to the brim with meaningless and cruel deaths, pretentious dialogue, the same characterization flaws as Ultimates 3, Artistic License Physics, and all kinds of violent, gory deaths that served no purpose other than to apparently "wipe the slate clean." Once again, watch Linkara rip it to shreds, here, here, and here.
 * Kirkman's run on Ultimate X-Men ended with him retconning almost every major change he had made. Still, sadly, not enough to wipe the long, dragging "Magician" arc from readers' memories. Kurt Wagner going batshit from his time in the Weapon X program could've been done as Character Development; coupled with his sudden off-the-wall homophobia and super-creepy Annie Wilkes-like behavior towards Dazzler, it just wound up being the final Wall Banger.

Other Comics

 * The artist of Minimum Security (see below) collaborated with another author to make As the World Burns, a graphic novel starring the characters from Minimum Security, who rant about how terrible modern society is. The graphic novel ends with a speech about how humans should destroy everything and go back to being hunter-gatherers.
 * Transformers fans disagree on just about everything, often violently. But nobody has managed to find a fan who would dispute listing these works:
 * The Beast Within is poorly drawn, incoherent, badly written, and completely independent of any known canon. Not even Hasbro acknowledges it. Special mention goes to the Beast, a Dinobots combiner. Fans had been pondering what one would look like for years—the fact that this was its canon appearance came off as a slap in the face.
 * Continuum, a typo-riddled, poorly-organized "definitive chronology" of IDW's Transformers stories up to the present, is jam-packed with erroneous facts, skipped-over plotlines, and events out of chronological order...and it gets even more sickening when you realize it was written by one of IDW's two Transformers editors. It was meant to let people know their official stand on TF continuity, but it was absolutely useless as a resource. Its writer, Andy Schmidt, while he regrets the book, was never allowed to forget it.
 * The Beast Wars Sourcebook is also pretty infamous. Terrible layout and ordering, wildly varying art quality (with Frank Milkovich's take on Silverbolt being especially infamous), boring writing that reads more like a plot summary of the Beast Wars cartoon than a description of the character and purge any non-Waspinator related humor, strange and arbitrary change to the personality of the Japanese characters, and a whole lot of typos and other editing errors. Even more disappointing, considering that the Generation 1 and Armada sourcebooks from the otherwise reviled Dreamwave era are generally considered to be excellent.
 * Chronos Carnival in terms of writing is widely considered to be the worst strip ever run in 2000 AD. Featuring a travelling carnival in space its embittered Handicapped Badass protagonist raised a few Unfortunate Implications that were only gotten away with because the artist who drew it was handicapped himself.
 * The Valiant Comics-Image Comics crossover Death Mate helped destroy Valiant Comics and was one the contributing factors that led to The Great Comics Crash of 1996. The writing was horrible; [[media:DeathMate.jpg|the art]], Liefeldian; the concept was flawed, and Image released its contributions years late.
 * The original Family Guy comics from Devil's Due Publishing. Nothing good can happen when you take a show that mostly derives its humor from delivery, timing, and voice acting and adapt it into a medium that has none of that. There is zero attempt to make this in any way comic-like. The panels are just rows of boxes, composed into a vaguely comic-like simulacrum. A joke or conversation will start in the third-to-last panel on one page and end halfway into the next. Everything looks stiff, like someone just took a screen cap of the show. The comic is almost always at 3/4 view, and the artwork is full of blatant cutting and pasting, facial - expressions, poses, even entire panels are copied wholesale. The book only lasted three issues, all three were collected into a TPB lovingly named "The Family Guy Big Book of Crap." Really says something about what the people who worked on it thought of it.
 * Holy Terror is the comic that made people realize that Frank Miller has lost the genius he once had. The plot is that two blatant expies of Batman and Catwoman have a very long and boring fight until some Islamic terrorists make an attack on their city, at which point the couple of former freenemies team up to caught and torture the terrorists in very gruesome ways. Besides the incredible amount of anti-Muslim racism featured in the comic (which Miller tried to pass off as a throwback to propaganda comics from the World War II), the writing itself was very thin, and the art is probably his worst to date. Linkara reviewed it for his 300th episode, and declared it the worst comic he has even read, even worse that One More Day. This review on io9 says its all: "isn't just a bad comic — it's a bad propaganda comic".
 * Incarnate is a comic written and "drawn" by Gene Simmons' son Nick. "Drawn" is written in quotation marks because he allegedly traced and copied most of the art from various manga. In case he gets cleared of that — most of the dialogue is broken and fragmented, and the story is completely incoherent. It's so bad that the company has ceased distribution of the comic because of legal claims from the company that publishes the manga he stole the art from, which, by the way, included Hellsing, Deadman Wonderland, One Piece, Death Note, Bleach, and various Deviant ART pages.
 * Antarctic Press' Robotech Sentinels: Rubicon was an effort by AP at continuing the long-running Sentinels comic that was cancelled when they acquired the Robotech license (and this was after Ben Dunn had said that AP would not continue the Sentinels comic, a Take That aimed at both the fans and the former creative team). The result had nothing to do with anything that had come before (or after); it instead consisted of a largely incoherent story filled with unidentifiable characters and a plot that was largely incomprehensible (the most coherent part consisted of a White Light in space destroying random ships accompanied by an "EEEE" sound effect). The artwork was terrible; the half-arsed computer toning effects vanished after the first issue, and two pages of the second issue consisted of raw pencils. The series was canned after two issues of a planned seven without resolving anything; many fans considered it a mercy killing.
 * The sleazy French spy-action series SAS is already bad; it's like James Bond without the humor. But the Comic Book Adaptation tops itself, with Osama Bin Laden being presented as a Worthy Opponent. Sure, the author probably wanted a Take That against France-bashing post 9/11, but surely there were less stupid ways of doing it.
 * The Silent Hill comics, with the exception of Sinner's Reward and Past Life, were an absolute disgrace to the franchise they were based on. The connections to the games are superficial at best, the storylines read like they were being made up as they went along, the art was murky and cartoonish to the point where it was difficult to tell who was who... but the absolute low point was the introduction of Christabella.
 * The second lowest point was the villain Whateley. He gets a brief mention in Dying Inside, a confusing cameo in The Grinning Man, and a ludicrous connection in Dead/Alive.
 * The Unfunnies by Mark Millar. You know something is wrong when the ads tell you to "leave good taste at the door". The comic tries for Refuge in Audacity and is obviously trying to balance funny with drama, but fails to be funny and thus misses the refuge. The main villain is a Karma Houdini who has more depth than any of the other characters. The comic attempts to mix real life photography and a cartoony style to get a Roger Rabbit Effect, but screws that up massively thanks to Special Effects Failure.
 * Just in case you need any more convincing, according to some family friends, Mark Millar's wife herself read about six pages and tossed the book at his head.
 * Behind the already bad but copied-enough-that-no-one-cares-anymore Rob Liefeld-esque art of the Warrior mini-series lies unheard-of levels of walls and Walls of Text that contain bad grammar and made-up words used to explain "destrucity", a philosophy of former WWE wrestler Ultimate Warrior, which makes no sense to anyone in the world except him. If you manage to figure out what is being said, then it makes less sense than Time Cube. Oh, and then there was the Christmas special consisting entirely of pinups, several of which have violent and disturbing imagery. Spoony and Linkara teamed to tackle it.

Artists, Writers, Editors, etc

 * Just about any writer for Marvel or DC has some fans, but you'll have a very hard time finding any for Chuck Austen during his runs on Uncanny X-Men and The Avengers. He was responsible for the infamous "fake Rapture via disintegrating communion wafers" plot. He also wrote a "tribute to Romeo & Juliet" that ended with "Juliet" dying but "Romeo" living, included rednecks in robot suits, and included a midair public sex scene. You might, however, be able to get away with saying he made Polaris more interesting, so at least that's something.
 * Upon being inexplicably hired by DC immediately thereafter (presumably dodging villagers armed with Torches and Pitchforks on the way across Manhattan), Austen gave an interview where he made very unflattering comments about Lois Lane. His opinions of her influenced the Superman books he wrote, too. This didn't win him any fans; he didn't last long, and the changes he made were ignored or retconned.
 * His work in Avengers depicted Wasp having an affair with Hawkeye due to the time Hank Pym slapped his wife. This actually contradicted a few decades worth of stories involving the mental trauma causing Hank to lash out, the implication that Hank was always abusive (something other writers have been guilty of as well), the fact that Hawkeye has always been good friends with Hank and even refused to date Wasp while they were divorced, and that Hank and Wasp has reconciled in recent years and were happily remarried.
 * Greg Land's recent "art", which mainly consists of tracing off porn, magazine covers, and even his own artwork (which was also traced off porn). Note that we're talking about his mainstream work for Marvel here, not anything advertised as porn. A typical reader response: "LLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNDDDDDDD!!!!!" The worst part of it is that some people have looked up his pre-trace art and found that it was fairly good. Land was a legitimate up-and-coming artist at DC Comics with good runs on both Birds of Prey and Nightwing, but it all went to hell when he got to Marvel.
 * In one of the Wizard drawing books, he explains the use of reference in drawing comics. Thing is, he showed reasonable ways to do it (using a picture of an ice skater for a drawing of a girl flying), and the comic drawings were different enough from the references for it to be considered his drawing. Now, he simply traces his reference pictures, and in later drawing books, he flat-out traces. You can see some of this here.