Stupidest Comic Book Storylines

[Scarlett Johansson]

I was thinking about comic books with storylines so controversial, stories full of tard cum, etc. Here are some of mine.

Amazons Attack - A 2007 miniseries which saw the Amazons of Themyscira suddenly decide to attack the White House in DC for....reasons. This includes the brutally savage murder of a father and son, and also the infamous "Bees...my god" quote from Batman. Turns out the entire thing was a brainwashing scheme by Circe....because........she was bored? Readers were actually mailing their copies back. It was that bad.

Alll Star Batman and Robin - Not really sure what Frank was on but this was originally hyped to be one of the best stories. Instead we got Bruce fucking Black Canary, Robin bound, gagged, and eating rats, Wonder Woman calling people sperm bags, and Green Lantern uttering the damn lemonade line. Also Robin is 12. Did you know he was 12? Its literally mentioned a lot.

This is where the "I'm the goddamn Batman" line came from

Chuck Austen's run on Uncanny X-Men - Two mutants have sex in the air in front of one of their moms, rednecks in robot suits fight mutants, and fake Rapture via disintegrating communion wafers. Yes really.

Devin Grayson's run on Nightwing - Nightwing is raped by Tarantula. This is never brought up again.

Identity Crisis - In which Sue Dibny is raped by Doctor Light and later murdered, and also where Doctor Light and Batman are mind wiped by Zatanna.


Secret Empire - Captain America is a real honest to god nazi! Also Black Widow fake dies.


There's so much to choose from: One More Day, Avengers #200, Ultimatum, Cry For Justice, etc.

 

[Sexy Senior Citizen]

Whatever happened to punching Riddler in the face and calling it a day?

 

[Water-T]

Who could forget this classic?

 

[Creep3r]

The one where Green Lantern spends the weekend trying to convince all his friends and co-workers that he's not a pedophile.

 

[Wish I knew]

From what I’ve heard Marville. Which apparently had shitty politisperging, had wolverine evolve from an otter among other bad jokes and had some sperging about Jesus

 

[Chaos Theorist]

Clone saga

 

[CheezzyMach]

A guy I know swears up and down DC bringing Jason Todd back was a stupid idea.

 

[Detrogen]

A guy I know swears up and down DC bringing Jason Todd back was a stupid idea.

I didn’t think so until I found out that they retconned a chunk of the Hush storyline to do it.

 

[Tor Lugosi]

The way Jason Todd was brought back was pretty stupid. From what I remember, Superboy Prime punched reality really hard, creating cracks in it that changed stuff, like Jason Todd being dead.

I'm kinda meh on Jason Todd as a whole. He often seems to be a 13 year old nerd's wet dream, "like bro, what if- what if Batman USED GUNS!" or a 30 year old man-child's deep thunks about "bro if you think about it, all the Robins are just CHILD SOLDIERS!"

 

[Hatoful Dandy]

-Retconning a romance between Norman Osborne and Gwen Stacy and the subsequent twins.
-Chuck Austen forcing a relationship between Havok and his nurse Annie Ghazikhanian (who was an insert of Austen's wife) which made his gf Polaris go crazy.
-Civil War 2 aka "let's make Captain Marvel the face of the company at the expense of everyone else and you'll like it"

 

[Tor Lugosi]

That reminds me: One More Day. In yet another attempt to do a soft reboot for Spider-Man (they'd already tried twice by this point) they had Peter sell his marriage to the devil to save Aunt May. Pretty much all the stupid plots (Peter revealing his secret identity to the world, Aunt May getting shot) after that Osborn story were because they'd already decided to reboot the character. It all happened entirely because Joe Quesada, the chief editor at the time, hated the Peter & MJ marriage.

I remember Erik Larsen (famous for Savage Dragon, though he worked on Spider-Man before) predicated that it'd have a domino effect on the rest of the industry due to Spider-Man being the backbone of a lot of comic fans' collections. Sure enough, from what I remember of that era, comic sales dropped across the board. It's definitely where I stopped collecting modern comics.

 

[Water-T]

Retconning a romance between Norman Osborne and Gwen Stacy and the subsequent twins.

HOLY SHIT. That storyline was hot garbage. Originally, the writer wanted Peter to be the father of Gwen's super-bastards, until Marvel though that it would be a MUCH BETTER IDEA for a man in his 40s/50s to knock up a girl barely out of her teens. Norman Osbourne's O-Face will haunt me forever.

 

[Shield Breaker]

Wouldn't it be faster to name the good comic book stories in the last fifteen years?

 

[Y2K Baby]

White people.

 

[Captain Communism]

Comic Books you say?

Well it's "The Hitchhikers Guide to Encyclopedia Dramatica"

It's keeps going on and on without any coherent sense of what is being said in the comic...

 

[The Littlest Shitlord]

That reminds me: One More Day. In yet another attempt to do a soft reboot for Spider-Man (they'd already tried twice by this point) they had Peter sell his marriage to the devil to save Aunt May. Pretty much all the stupid plots (Peter revealing his secret identity to the world, Aunt May getting shot) after that Osborn story were because they'd already decided to reboot the character. It all happened entirely because Joe Quesada, the chief editor at the time, hated the Peter & MJ marriage.

I remember Erik Larsen (famous for Savage Dragon, though he worked on Spider-Man before) predicated that it'd have a domino effect on the rest of the industry due to Spider-Man being the backbone of a lot of comic fans' collections. Sure enough, from what I remember of that era, comic sales dropped across the board. It's definitely where I stopped collecting modern comics.

I could never give a shit about mainstream modern superhero comics after that either. And I never will again. It was a sort of 'the mask comes off' moment where you can never look at the genre the same way afterwards. The story was really the end result of the entire concept of having superhero stories set in a recognizable modern world that just go on and on and on. Creating a good character is hard, but you have product coming out every single month without fail, so you can't kill them or permanently change them because you need to re-use them literally forever. This ends up sapping a lot of the dramatic weight of events, when you know that nothing of significance will ever permanently change. Don't like that character X is dead? Just wait a few years, they'll bring him back. Think that character X's new powers and look are stupid (such as electric Superman)? Just wait, it will be reverted. And so on. Spiderman having his marriage undone was just another example of this.

The world is equally static; the genre demands that the world still look like our modern world, but with super-powered characters. So alien invasions, mutant super-geniuses, time travel, etc. can never make any serious impact, which not only undermines the verisimilitude of those setting elements, but again saps the dramatic weight of events because you know that the world will only ever permanently change in sync with events in the real world. It also kneecaps a lot of potential plots; some of the more infamous 'bad comic moments' come when writers forget the cardinal maxim: never make your heroes' real enemy on the other side of the fourth wall (such as the genre conventions), because it is a fight they can never win. And that just lessens the characters. Remember when Reed Richards vowed to cure cancer, only to have the plot dropped like a hot potato? Or the attempt at having superheroes take on al-Qaeda right after 9/11? Either your fake problem-solvers can only fight other equally fake problems, or they can never actually win because those problems are very persistent in the real world. Except they can't even beat said fake problems either, because such fake problems come with characters of their own who also must be preserved; hence, the Joker has killed more people than 9/11 but continues to break out of Arkham Asylum at will, and nobody ever has enough of his shit and just kills him.

It's no accident that the 'classic', acclaimed works like Watchmen and Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? were not part of the ongoing continuity. The straitjackets imposed by the requirement that the nothing ever finally fucking end are incompatible with good storytelling.

The inherent stagnancy of the genre appeals to fans who are very attached to the status quo, who are very removed from reality, who are in a word unusually... autistic. Not all comics fans are like this, but enough are that you have lots of people grow up on these comics and have as their life's goal getting a job in the industry making stories like the ones they enjoyed. A bit too much like. Hence, we have the modern phenomenon of the people like Quesada fucking things up so that their favorite character will be like when they were a kid again. Making an already stagnant genre even more so. It also contributes to the modern problem of "too many reboots" because everyone wants to be the one to do the definitive take on Batman's origin story or whatever, so the same stories get remade again and again. It gets even stupider when their visions conflict, and they fight it out resulting in whipsawing, illogical stories (TVTropes calls it "Armed With Canon") and dumb petty drama that undermines the overall quality of the work at their company because some people just can't be put on the same team together.

One More Day, bad as it was, was just the result of several of these factors coming together at once under an unusually stupid editor-in-chief. Once I started looking at just why it happened to begin with, I knew I could never go back, even if the whole thing was retconned, Marvel formally apologized, refunds paid to everyone who bought Spiderman for years, Quesada fired, and his fields sowed with salt. And this is also why I could never care about DC any more either. Yes, One More Day was so bad, it killed my interest not just in Spiderman, not just in Marvel, but in the entire genre. Marvel's ongoing cultural vandalism by SJWs is thus for me just a source of entertainment, not angst, so I suppose I should thank Joe for that if I ever see him.

 

[DungeonMaster]

Bitch Planet. Every woman who sets a single toe outside of the kitchen is launched off to space Auschwitz. This would be fine in itself, were it not for the imbecile journos likening this to the increased probability of women being harangued online in Trump's America™.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

The one where Green Lantern spends the weekend trying to convince all his friends and co-workers that he's not a pedophile.
View attachment 1190042View attachment 1190049

The curves on the lower panel makes me wonder if the artist was a pedo.

 

[Hatoful Dandy]

The curves on the lower panel makes me wonder if the artist was a pedo.

"Now, now, Arisia's an alien blah blah blah social construct"

 

[DDBCAE CBAADCBE]

I actually like All Star Batman's take on the cape crusader. Call me crazy but I think the way Bruce is depicted in All Star Batman and Robin is more realistic considering that he is millionaire running around in a bat costume of all things while fighting a rogues gallery of insane and wacky characters. Of course Batman is out of his fucking mind! Anyone who would willingly make the choices he does would be. I think Batman writing is at it's best when we can be reminded that the titular character is human and prone to his own flaws and insecurities. Does All Star go too far? Obviously. However I think it was a step in the right direction that was never properly explored.