So Bad It's Good/Comic Books

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"And really, is there anything more awesome than seeing Bruce Campbell taking out zombie superheroes? Well, okay, yes, but it's hard to top Robo-Bear versus Cyber-Gorilla."

"This comic sucks...but it's SO much fun in its stupidity!"
—Linkara, on Marvel Zombies vs Army of Darkness and the Game Boy comics


Comic book series and storylines that border on the ridiculous, but can be strangely compelling in spite of themselves.

  • Marvel Team Up #74 featuring Spider-Man teaming up with the old cast of Saturday Night Live to defeat Silver Samurai. The cover is hilarious - it has John Belushi, in character as Samurai Fatuba, having a samurai swordfight with Silver Samurai.
    • There was a similar comic with Jay Leno. The plot being Spider-Man and Leno team up to film a General Motors commercial, then get attacked by ninjas, and a 52-year-old Jay Leno practicing kung fu on a ninja-defeating level. It also has a promising Brokeback Mountain-style subtext.
    • Similarly, Marvel Team-Up #137. May Parker is given a portion of world-devourer Galactus' powers, and becomes his herald, "The Golden Oldie". Thank god it was a What If story and a case of Stylistic Suck.
  • The Doom comic. How bad is it? REAL BAD! It's a 12.0 on the 10.0 scale of badness!
  • Back in 1959, there was a Martian Manhunter story in which J'onn J'onzz goes up against a foe called the Human Flame... who was a schlub named Mike who built a "crime suit" that shot electric bolts and fire out of little spouts on the chest. That's right: Flaming Shock-Nipples of Crime! He dropped off the face of the earth for 50 years and was eventually brought back as an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain in Final Crisis.
  • Frank Miller's All-Star Batman & Robin (a.k.a. "ASSBAR", "The God-Damn Batman!"). Home to lines like "What are you, dense? Are you retarded or something? Who the hell do you think I am? I'm the goddamn Batman." and "Out of my way, sperm bank."
    • For the initiated, ASSBAR is an attempt at retelling Batman's earliest adventures with Robin...except Miller writes Batman as a complete and total lunatic whose actions make no sense. Meanwhile, the Joker is humorless, Robin eats rats, Superman is a bumbling idiot, and Wonder Woman is a feminist extremist who advocates castrating all men.
      • And Green Lantern gets to deliver the immortal line "Damn you AND your lemonade!"
    • Also, Frankie would like to remind you that 12-year-old Dick Grayson, age 12, Batman's 12-year-old sidekick, the 12-year-old Robin, age 12, is in fact 12 years old. He reminds you of this every time 12 year old Dick's name appears in print. Vicariously witness it in all its glory.
  • Superman vs. Muhammed Ali. 'Nuff said. (Though to be fair, the art is genuinely good, crossing into gorgeous for the recolored deluxe reissue.)
  • Speaking of Superman, the comic Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen was always a goldmine of "so bad it's good" - well, the comic was responsible for The New Gods, so it wasn't all bad.
    • So was Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane, except without the New Gods.
  • The "Adventures of Kool-Aid Man" comic from the early 80's. Featuring the Kool-Aid Man as a super hero on call 24/7 who battles villains like the sun-shaped Thirsties and Scorch IN SPACE and frequently bursts through walls exclaiming OH YEAAHH!!!
  • According to the Invincible Super-Blog, the one glimmer of awesomeness in Tarot #53 (or the entire series) is: "You have to get out of here. Your vagina is haunted."
  • The DCU series "New Guardians", which only lasted for 12 issues. Six superheroes (all of whom are captain ethnics) are "chosen" to be the next level of human evolution, and are sent on the "glorious mission" to spread their genes by banging as many people as possible. (The problem with this is that the male half is almost completely exempt from this. One of them is Camp Gay, another is a cyborg with computer powers that probably can't be passed down genetically, and this just leaves the half man/half plant.) The only thing in the way of their glorious mission is the fact that a South African Neo-Nazi sends a vampire with AIDS to infect them. They also fight Snowflame, a supervillain who gets super powers from sniffing cocaine and runs a cocaine cult in Colombia. Ironically enough, he has since developed another kind of cult following.
    • The Crypto-fascist subtext in their mission of eugenics, and the way they out and out call themselves "superior beings" or the fact that their personalities combine all the campiness of Silver Age Heroes, with all the Egotism of Nineties Anti Heroes.
    • Plus, not only is sex their mission, it seems to be all they ever think about. In an attempt at giving the comic a "mature" feel, the characters drop sex into nearly EVERY conversation. On several occasions, they'll be discussing something unrelated, and someone will say "you know that reminds me: I have sex all the time!" and no one will find that weird.
  • While he is commonly considered the best Transformers comic writer, Simon Furman is known for his purple prose and frequently-recycled dialogue ("IT NEVER ENDS!", "Never did want to live forever", "...like some vast, predatory bird!", and "...the worst case of indigestion it's ever had!" are some frequently-repeated offenders). A decent-sized chunk of the fandom and Furman himself actually embrace these flaws, as they give his work a distinctive charm.
  • What about that issue of Doom Patrol where the super villain with the robotic penis is beaten by the transsexual hooker in a frog mask who gained powers by servicing a radioactive Hermaphrodite? Proof.
  • Battle Pope. It's the post-rapture Apocalypse, demons are everywhere. The righteous are taken to Heaven and surprise, the Pope's not among them. After being visited by God and Jesus, the Pope becomes a badass demon hunter. "When He's not giving Mass, He's kicking ass!"
  • Although Valiant Comics produced a number of series that where good enough to stand up on their own merits, Bloodshot certainly counts as this. A basic Nineties Anti-Hero Cliché Storm, where the creative staff couldn't decide which direction they wanted to go in, so they went in all of them at once. "He's like Batman! Now he's like The Punisher! Now he's Wolverine!" The result being an experimental super solder created by a Japanese corporation, out of the body of a betrayed Mafia hitman, who wanders the streets of New York in a trench coat. The plots are completely illogical, he gets on a plane, battles assassins and terrorists, falls out, and lands in the jungles of South East Asia, where he goes all Rambo on some random guerrillas. Also random crossovers. A lot of them.
  • The Magog solo series is this. An Affectionate Parody of the classic Nineties Anti-Hero, and a rogues gallery consisting of a silver haired woman who talks like a 1980s valley girl, a crazy homeless dude, and his mother.
  • Promotional comics, when done right but still featuring obvious product placement, are like this in general.
    • The Marvel/Office Max/Teacher Appreciation one where Dr. Doom is defeated thanks to the power of a rubber band ball is a spectacular example. Read about it here.
    • NASA's Aero and Space comic is exactly what you would expect a comic book produced by NASA to be. Long, kinda-boring scenes about administration and getting funding for stuff... and then supercool action. The villain gets some pretty stupid lines, but c'mon, superheroes in battlesuits jumping out of an SR-71 and then launching into orbit!
  • The various Star Trek / X-Men crossovers. Yes, there's more than one.
  • A lot of the Silver Age, especially the comics of the "Superman inexplicably forces Jimmy Olsen to marry a gorilla" variety.
  • Godzilla vs. Charles Barkley. This picture sums it up nicely.
  • Lobo's entire reason for existing is that he's so ridiculously over the top that it's hilarious.
  • The Avengers has a story with a villain called Immortus, whose power is that he can summon up mythical and real historical figures to fight for him, like Merlin, Atilla the Hun, Goliath and....Paul Bunyan. Yes the Executioner vs Paul Bunyan. I am not making this up.
    • Actually, all the early Avenger's stories are like that to one extent or another. It's when the team lineup changes for the first time that things start to actually be good.
    • It really doesn't help that the earliest stories have the team treating it like some kind of secret club, with regularly scheduled meetings and having hissy fits when a member doesn't show up (in one very early issue, Iron Man was even banned from the team for a week because he missed a meeting).
  • Brute Force, a four-issue mini series from Marvel in which a hippie scientist has his cyborg gorilla stolen by a group of mercenary clowns. He then makes a team of cyborg animals consisting of a kangaroo, an eagle, a bear, a dolphin, and a lion to fight the evil corporation behind the kidnapping and the destruction of the rainforest. Yes, seriously. Even Linkara addressed that it's a so bad, it's good comic and that you should try to pick it up, if only for the Robo-Bear Vs. Cyber-Gorilla fight[1], which he considered to be nearly as awesome as Neutro riding on top of a whale. Linkara cited this comic as why he loves comics: no other medium he's seen has moments as bizarrely awesome as clowns taking down a cyborg gorilla.
  • Likewise, fellow Marvel book U.S.-1, a series in which a young trucker, after surviving a crash, has most of his skull replaced by a metal alloy skull that can pick up CB-radio waves. One of his villains is a demonic trucker called the Highwayman, who tries to KILL our hero. There is also a love triangle involving U.S., the blonde truck-stop waitress named 'Mary Mc Grill', and a red-haired female trucker named Taryn, complete with catfight-worthy taunts from the girls!
  • Also likewise, Now Comics' Mister T and the T-Force, with immortal lines like, "It's a crack baby, foo'!"
  • Hulk vs Venom, a 90s one shot where the writer just decided to inject as many Saturday Night Live quotes as he could. The plot features Venom and the Hulk teaming up to stop "Dr. Badvibes" (they even lampshade how stupid the name is) a crazy guy who claims he can cause earthquakes (he can't - the earthquakes are just a coincidence).
  • Batman Odyssey, a 12-issue miniseries drawn by Neal Adams. Unfortunately, it's also written by Neal Adams, leading to OOC dialogue, a nonsensical plot, and general zanyness all around, leading to it becoming an incredibly impressive-looking trainwreck.
  • The original "Mighty Crusaders" series of the mid-1960s is this: Hokey stories, bland attempts by Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel to ape the Stan Lee style, and silly over-exaggeration of the very Marvel-style story concepts that they were aiming for. No wonder that they are continued to be mocked on the web!
  • Steampunk Palin. Sarah Palin. As a cyborg. Powered by Steam. Also, Robot Obama (Robama). The Russians have taken over Alaska with the aid of Al Gore. Al Gore is apparently Cobra Commander.
  • Count Duckula #6 (Marvel) featured a story with a drawn-for-comic rendition of Geraldo Rivera, with the storyline of Duckula appearing on Rivera's trashy talk show of the time. The cover has the cartoon Duckula conversing with a live Rivera.
  1. ↑ Which he set to Nightwish's "Ghost Love Score"
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