Fallen Creator/Comic Books


 * Frank Miller was an icon of comics in the 1980s, with his work on Daredevil and Batman, with The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One redefining the character in the eyes of the mass media. But during the 90s, Miller's creative owned work Sin City led to a massive change in his art style and his tone (already heavily inspired by Film Noir) became overt with an added helping dose of misogyny with the vast number of high profile Sin City stories that involved hookers or strippers. His later Batman work (The Dark Knight Strikes Again and All-Star Batman and Robin The Boy Wonder) were widely decried for bad writing, as Miller quickly tried to pass off his bad writing by claiming to be parodying his own earlier Dark Age inspiring Batman work.
 * Then came Holy Terror, the result of his "Batman Vs Al-Qaeda" book being "retooled" that promptly sunk the "self-satirizing" angle along with whatever remaining goodwill he might've had from his collaboration with filmmaker Zack Snyder. Even if one had never known that it began as a Batman story it's obvious Miller barely did anything to change the fact that the Fixer is Batman, the Cat-Burgler is Catwoman, and the policeman is Commissioner Gordon. Holy Terror can be described as a vehement anti-Muslim Author Tract-filled political cartoon, similar to the others which were created in the first frantic year after 9/11. Any doubts about his recent writing style (as of ASBAR) being self parody are dispelled as Miller's "patriotism" and xenophobia are presented completely seriously. The whole book is a message that Muslims need to be stopped as they could become terrorists at any point. Just when you thought Frank Miller couldn't sink any lower...
 * ...his reputation was hurt even more by his vitriolic attack on the Occupy Wall Street movement whom he referred to as "Thieves, rapists and pond scum" and managed to fit even more attacks on Islam. One would think Frankie boy was reading comments about him online and thinking, "How can I make myself even worse than they think I am?"
 * Artist Joe Madureira was once considered the golden boy of American comic artists. He had an acclaimed run on Uncanny X-Men, brought the Japanese manga style into mainstream American comics, and later went on to create Battle Chasers for Image Comics' Cliffhanger imprint. He never finished Battle Chasers, tried his hand at creating video games with catastrophic results (Darksiders is the only game he designed that didn't become vaporware or a total flop), and now works comics once in a blue moon to lukewarm critical reception at best (especially The Ultimates 3, hoooo boy). He's pretty much bundled with other early-mid 90's comic book artists that are now considered past their prime at best and industry jokes at worst.
 * Brian Michael Bendis was once a hotshot rising star in the comic industry. Then he took over Avengers and gave the team the "scorched earth" treatment in the infamous Avengers Disassembled story and replaced the roster with his pet characters, for stories that were widely reviled at worst, and at best showcased his failings as a writer - Bendis was considered good on street-level solo books with normal mob-themed bad guys, but proved absolutely horrible on team books and super-villains. Once the face of the future, he's now considered the face of everything wrong with Marvel Comics.
 * Like Miller, Jeph Loeb came to fame off of his work on Batman; along with Tim Sales, he produced a series of Batman Halloween specials and the critically acclaimed The Long Halloween series. Unfortunately, when he took over writing Superman (and later, the team-up book "Superman/Batman"), Loeb's writing began to slip as he began losing confidence in his ability to let his writing speak for itself. He began recruiting big name artists to draw his work (which led to massive delays in the case of his most recent Hulk run) and tailoring his scripts to match what his artists wanted to draw. Further complicating things was his son's death from cancer, which caused Loeb's writing to take a depressing tone (Ultimatium, Fallen Son, Ultimates 3) with death and grief as a major element of his writing.

The exact moment when Loeb became a Fallen Creator isn't clear cut, but here are the popular ones:
 * Superman V2 #166, which infamously attempted to retcon Post-Crisis version of Krypton back to the Silver Age version, was the first crack in the wall. Loeb (and Joe Kelly) promoted the issue and the retcon as their attempt to bring back the "real" Superman of the Silver Age, while avoiding being blacklisted like Mark Waid and Mark Millar when they attempted to outright restore the Silver Age Superman status quo. Jeph even outright stated that if he could get away with it, that he would bring back the infamous "Love Triangle" and abolish the Superman marriage, pissing off fans in the process.
 * Hush: Loeb scored success with The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, but his third attempt at a "run the gauntlet" Batman story flopped horribly as far as critical response went. Was it trading Tim Sales in for Jim Lee? The fact that Hush was a lame-ass villain people only cared for during the single issue in which Clayface posed as Jason Todd, while in the "Hush" uniform? Or was it the fact that Loeb didn't seem to even try to write a good storyline, opting to instead coast off of the huge sales boost that his storyline would get by way of having Jim Lee draw Batman for the first time?

Giving credence to Hush being the tipping point, most positive critical praise for Hush is usually limited to people gushing over Jim Lee's artwork. Talk about the actual story, and you'll find that even people who liked the plot were turned off by how incredibly lame Hush's motivations were, and that Hush as a character wouldn't be acknowledged as a "proper" Batman villain until Paul Dini got his hands on him. This story would be the point at which Loeb discovered that he could phone in his writing and have it sell huge numbers, so long as his subpar scripts were drawn by a big name artist who fans love.
 * Superman/Batman: Public Enemies: After building up Lex Luthor as the evil President and him successfully forcing the Daily Planet to fire Clark when Lois and Clark discovered proof of Lex's evil misuse of office, Loeb abandoned everything for a contrived storyline involving Lex trying to frame Superman for a meteor about to hit Earth and exposing Metallo as the murderer of Batman's parents.
 * His Wolverine arc had: a "subrace" of mutants that evolved from wolves, including an immortal overlord of said race who went by the name of "Romulus"; retconning Sasquatch, who got his powers from the native gods of the North, into one of these mutants; and the reveal that the reason Wolverine and Sabertooth were eternally at each other's throats was because there was a "genetic prophecy" about the eternal fight between a fair-haired wolf mutant and a dark-haired wolf mutant. Oh, and Wolverine killed Sabertooth with a magic sword. It's little wonder none of this seems to have been acknowledged down the line.
 * Ultimates 3 and Ultimatium: wiping out a good chunk of the Ultimate Marvel Universe angered a lot of people, especially as Loeb pretty much didn't care one iota about what Bendis and other writers had been doing with the Ultimate Marvel characters. Loeb's run on Ultimates Flanderized the already-Flanderized versions that Mark Millar had used in Ultimates 1 and Ultimates 2, making them barely one-dimensional.
 * The final straw would be his Hulk run, which came off the critically acclaimed Greg Pak run and pretty much dismantled all of the major work Pak had done to set up a new status quo for the Hulk, which included changing his his standing in the Marvel Universe via Planet Hulk and World War Hulk. Adding to the mix was that the run revolved almost completely around Loeb's Villain Stu, the Red Hulk, and the never-ending mystery of who he was.
 * Chris Claremont suffers this, as much of his writing style (Talking Is a Free Action, overly-complex storylines that go on and on and on, and plots that routinely revolve around mind control and BDSM) haven't aged well at all since the 1980s. Granted, most of this is also due to the fact that Claremont's writing style has been aped and homaged upon by so many writers since his first run on the X-Men.
 * Artist Rob Liefeld revived the struggling New Mutants comic, which transferred into the top selling X-Force when Liefeld was given full creative control over the book in 1991. But royalty issues led to him abandoning the book after nearly a year and he went on to found Image Comics. There he launched the equally popular creator-owned series, Youngblood, and inspired a slew of copycats as artists began aping his insanely popular style.

But it all quickly evaporated for Rob; the Hype Backlash against him began with several high-profile cases of books he was drawing shipping late. He alienated his fellow Image colleagues and split from the company and formed Awesome Comics, which folded after a couple of years of publication. Also, it became clear that he didn't have many more ideas than what was done with New Mutants, and many of his characters were ripoffs of other characters or rehashes of his own, and his art work left something to be desired, to the point that "Liefeldian" has become a term comic fans use when artwork when it stinks to high heaven. Many of his popular characters are considered to have grown the beard once in other hands.

He has since rejoined Image Comics and returned home to Marvel Comics, much to the disdain of fans of his characters such as Cable and Deadpool, who have thrived under other writers who fleshed them out and made them into popular characters in spite of being Liefeld creations. And even then, his further involvement with said characters is treated with revulsion from fans, who prefer the way post-Liefeld writers have handled his Marvel creations.
 * A major example of this was the backlash against him over the character Shatterstar. The character was later revealed to be bisexual and had a Relationship Upgrade with a male character, and Liefeld vowed to "undo" this Character Development (which largely kept Shatterstar from being a forgotten footnote in X-Men lore) first chance he got.
 * John Byrne was a famous artist whose work alongside Chris Claremont on the X-Men (see above) made it what it is today. When he left X-Men due to creative differences in 1981, he took over Fantastic Four as writer and artist, producing what is considered to be the second most definitive run on the book, second only to the original Stan Lee/Jack Kirby run. When he jumped ship to DC Comics, things started great, with his Continuity Reboot of Superman effectively modernizing the character and his supporting cast for a new generation of fans.

Then it all kind of went downhill after that. After working on Superman for a little over two years, Byrne went back to Marvel Comics and later back to DC, where he began "improving" characters in ways that actually left them radioactive and damaged beyond all repair. He irreversibly destroyed the marriage of Vision and Scarlet Witch, with Vision and the couple's children suffering horrific Fates Worse Than Death. He stole Donna Troy from the pages of Green Lantern (where she was involved in an insanely popular romance with Kyle Raynor) and invalidated her entire existence, reducing her to being a "magic reflection brought to life" and not only mindwiped her, but forced her to live out thousands of horrific lives before being "rescued". And that's not getting into his Spider-Man and Doom Patrol work, his egomaniacal belief that only he knows how certain characters should be written, or his threat during his run on X-Men The Hidden Years to erase from canon Magneto's status as a Holocaust survivor just to spite former collaborator Chris Claremont!

Having burnt his bridges at both of the Big Two comic companies, he's now reduced to doing license work at IDW, drawing Star Trek and Angel comics. His reputation has gotten so bad that his caricature was, until very recently, the poster image of this wiki's Small Name, Big Ego page; for a sampling of why, see his Wikiquote entry.
 * Dave Sim, creator/artist/author of Cerebus, may well be the most clear-cut Fallen Creator in all of comics. Around the time the "Reads" story arc came out, Sim turned his attention to rambling, batshit-insane misogyny in his comics and in a series of Author Tract essays included as a "bonus" in issues of Cerebus. He shut himself off from friends, family, editors and pretty much everyone else, and on the off-chance that he's mentioned at all by anyone else in the industry today, it's usually with a cringe. Coincidentally, he also wrote an issue of Spawn guest-starring Cerebus in which the entire message was essentially that Spawn was the only comic book character ever whose creator didn't sell him out - except for Cerebus, of course.
 * Joe Casey was another rising star in the late '90s, with a popular run on Cable and a popular fan choice for taking over as writer of the main X-Men books. But just as Casey was about to begin the much anticipated "Cable Vs Apocalypse" storyline that Marvel had been building towards since 1996, Casey was forced to quit the book after Bob Harras, to the horror of X-Men fans everywhere, gave the book to Rob Liefeld to draw and effectively told Casey that Liefeld would be the de facto "writer" and that his job would be to simply produce dialogue/plots for Rob's drawings.

Casey fled to DC, where he became one of the major writers on Superman, but was lured back to Marvel in 2001 when newly hired editor-in-chief Joe Quesada gave him Uncanny X-Men to write. Unfortunately, Quesada also hired Grant Morrison to write the other X-Men book. Realizing Morrison was going to revamp the entire franchise, Casey decided to emulate Grant's legendary drug usage for inspiration and slagged his fanbase, over the fact that many X-Men fans were expecting Casey's X-Men book to be a more mainstream/familiar take on the X-Men while Morrison reinvented the wheel. Casey's X-Men run was a complete flop and by the time he was giving fans normal X-Men stories, such as X-Men vs. Freedom Force, Marvel lost faith in him and forced him off the book to replace him with Chuck Austen.

Casey went back to DC and continued with Superman, but never had much say in the main plot lines for that franchise. He ultimately pissed off DC Comics years later when he was invited back to do a sequel to Superman: Our Worlds At War as part of a retooling of Superman/Batman (where the book would tell "lost tales" set during big event story lines), but produced a storyline with no connection to the Crisis Crossover, completely fucked up the retool and resulted in him being fired from the book and his scripts for the second half of the storyline dumped and replaced with another writer's script.

While Casey still has fans with Marvel for his retro-Avengers mini-series and mini-series work on Iron Man, as well as for his creator owned/Wildstorm Comic work, he's largely considered a burnt-out druggy who could have been the next big thing had he not screwed up. On the other hand, he co-created the popular cartoon Ben 10, which means that he can probably live on merchandise royalties alone for another two centuries.
 * Mark Millar was a young writer who got work in American comics thanks to the patronage of Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis. Taking over The Authority just as the book began receiving mainstream buzz, he became one of the top writers in the US and his censorship fights with DC Comics over his run made him a cause celebre amongst comic fans. But the fame quickly went to his head, and before you can say "Small Name, Big Ego", Millar became a complete and total douchebag, spewing self-promoting lies and showing complete and total contempt for anyone who didn't worship him as the next big thing. Further hurting was Millar taking a massive jump off the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism.

Nowadays, he produces bloody works such as The Unfunnies, Kick-Ass, The Ultimates, and Wanted, that featured Sociopathic Hero characters and Strawman Political arguments supporting his ultra-conservative views. Others see this more of a combination of heavy Satire, Parody, Pastiche of corrupt elements within western popular culture, and "Well, since this is the type of stuff that sells, and the Eagleland xenophobes just cream themselves from any "Do you think that this A on my forehead stands for France?" I put in there, I might as well get rich on their expense, and use the money to help my brother's work for disabled children." Also, Civil War featured massive Character Derailment, especially of Iron Man. (Some consider the character forever ruined, but that probably is going too far -- by this point, fans are used to writers prioritizing their tug-o-wars over telling a story, and know that soon Iron Man will be in better hands; it's not Tony's "fault.")
 * And on the "censorship" issue; Millar fell in the eyes of a lot of his fans when he shamelessly took Bill Jemas's side in firing Mark Waid from the Fantastic Four, when Waid refused to make the Fantastic Four more of a sitcom-type book for Jemas.
 * It got to the point that film versions of Wanted and Kick-Ass (one co-written by him, the other produced and co-financed by him) had to be heavily rewritten to get rid of the unlikability and strawman views. While the Wanted adaptation got a mixed reception due to this, the Kick-Ass adaptation fared much better among critics and audiences. The later has led Millar to retool the property of Kick-Ass to make it more like the movie, complete with pushing Hit-Girl (the only remotely likable character from the first comic and the only character who wasn't changed for the movie) to the forefront of the sequel series.
 * He also seems to have permanently burned bridges with his former mentor Grant Morrison, especially since Millar's work seems to wallow in the Dark Age tropes that Morrison despises. In a recent interview with Morrison, when Millar was brought up, Morrison stated that if he ever met Mark Millar again, he hoped that he would be going 100 MPH in the opposite direction Millar would be going to.
 * Ken Penders was once (for what it's worth) considered one of the best writers on Archie's Sonic The Hedgehog series. In particular, his Knuckles The Echidna series is still regarded as potentially better than the Sonic comics produced during that time. When you mention him now, though, thoughts will inevitably drift to the... less than stellar works from the end of his time on the comic, especially the infamous "Titan Tails" fiasco. Even after he left the comic and Archie, he managed to make things worse by trying to sue for the rights to his original characters from the Knuckles series, even though everyone in the comic is owned by Sega. Praising any of his works, even his good ones, tends not to go well on many Sonic forums.