So Bad It's Horrible/Comic Books: Difference between revisions

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Certain comic book storylines get written off as [[So Bad It's Horrible (Darth Wiki)|So Bad Its Horrible]], especially if the fans complain loud enough. Maybe the writers were [[Creator Breakdown|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.

'''''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.

 

{{examples|Examples (more-or-less in alphabetical order):}}

 

== 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 Feminist]]s 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 [[Plot Hole|isn't getting its facts straight]]. Wonder Woman herself is presented as [[Faux Action Girl|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 [[Rock Beats Laser|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 [[Bee-Bee Gun|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''.

* 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.

* 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 ''[[Fifty Two|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 Dis Continuity]] 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''.

* ''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.

* ''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.

* ''[[Superman At Earths 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 [[You Cloned Hitler|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).

 

 

* ''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.<ref>[[Wolverine]] evolved from an otter (because that's how that works) and, through some reason or another, either becomes immortal or gets a long line of [[Identical Grandson]]s (the comic can't pick one). In the same issue, Jesus Christ is called "the first superhero".</ref> 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 [http://atopfourthwall.blogspot.com/2012/01/marville-1.html here].

** 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.

** 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 [[Broken Base|debatable]], at that three and a half decades would've included nearly every infamously-awful ''[[Spider-Man (Comic Book)|Spider-Man]]'' story ever told, such as the [[Clone Saga]] and ''[[Character Derailment|Sins]] [[Squick|Past]]'', which remained in-continuity in the story that ended up being told.

* [[Jeph Loeb]]'s ''[[The Ultimates]] 3'' is accused of having exceptionally-poor writing and [[Flanderization]] ''en masse''. Many critics argue that Loeb [[Did Not Do the Research|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 Hole]]s, [[Wall Banger (Darth Wiki)|WallBangers]], and stupid, ''stupid'' writing mistakes.

 

 

== 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 [[Ludd Was Right|humans should destroy everything and go back to being hunter-gatherers]].

** ''[http://tfwiki.net/wiki/The_Beast_Within 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 [http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20070710211127/transformers/images/thumb/1/10/Butwhy.gif/413px-Butwhy.gif this] was its canon appearance came off as a slap in the face.

** [http://tfwiki.net/wiki/The_Transformers_Continuum:_The_Definitive_Chronology 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 [[Old Shame|regrets the book]], was [[Never Live It Down|never allowed to forget it]].

* The [[Valiant Comics]]-[[Image Comics]] [[Intercontinuity Crossover|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]] [[Rob Liefeld|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." [[Old Shame|Really says something about what the people who worked on it thought of it.]]

* 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 [[In Name Only|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 [[Creator's Pet|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''.

** Just in case you need any more convincing, 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 (Comic Book)|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.

 

 

 

== Newspaper Comics ==

* ''[http://comics.com/reply_all/ Reply All]'' doesn't even have the saving grace of a passable artist — it looks like a 5th-Grader's [[MS Paint]] webcomic. Pupils are seen well outside the actual eye, characters' hairstyles make them seem balding, blatant copy-pasting makes the characters appear superimposed upon the backgrounds. Even the jokes are so flatly delivered they become hard to identify. Honestly, do the editors even care?

* ''[http://comics.com/working_it_out/ Working It Out]'' is a comic so violently unfunny that it might accidentally get a pity laugh out of the reader. Most of the [[In Name Only|"jokes"]] consist of [[Incredibly Lame Pun|really, really, really BAD puns]]. Boring, unfunny office "humor" everyone's heard a million time before, and things that kinda seem like they're supposed to be jokes, but aren't. One example is a comic where the boss character is playing with his cell phone with the caption informing us that he likes to fire employees through text messages (and this "joke" was used ''twice'').