Hall of Shame: Marvel’s three worst series.xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

By the Ace of Knaves

Astute readers may notice that I’m skipping Brian Bendass’ Avengers. That’s because it’s off the charts. Don’t get me wrong: Bendis is a great writer and he’s got a lot of talent. A lot of people don’t like his style, but that doesn’t bother me at all. I just do not want to read the stories he wants to tell! There’s nothing wrong with them, they just do not interest me enough to read, let alone pay for. Now that that’s cleared up; here we go!

3) Fantastic Four by Mark Millar. Millar is well on his way to joining Bendis and Loeb on my Blacklist. His FF just doesn’t have it for me: I’ve already lamented at length about the woefully bad “death of the invisible woman” so I’m not going there again, but the all-too-miraculous romance of the Thing also felt stale and forced. The main reason it’s on #3 in my hall of shame is that his run is nearly over (I think and hope) after one last shitty “masters of Doom” arc. BULLSHIT! This just detracts from Doom as a character. It’s canon that he got to be Doom all by himself. Retconning some new super-mega-villain-mentor into his origin does not enhance the character at all. I really hate that kind of shit, especially the “let’s prove the credibility of our shitty new menace by having him out-bad an existing and super-cool bad guy). Ah well… at least the art is good…

2) Ms. Marvel by Brian Reed. A real disappointment because this started out as a great series. Did you see the Greg Horn covers? They were so great that the cover alone warranted buying the issue! Poster-size? Yes please! But the latest arc just sucks, thanks to the inevitable tie-in with Secret Inversion and Dork Reign. Getting some tales about plain old Carol Danvers in her spook days is a really good concept, but the retconning of high tech stuff (portable hard disks in the 70’s?) screwed it up for me. I know the time compression between real-time and comic-time is difficult, but this was way too much for purist old me. So it gets to #2 because it should have been great, but it got screwed completely.

1) New Thunderbolts. I’ll be diddled if I read any more crap from Diggle. Thunderbolts is supposed to be about B-list bad-guys trying to reform, but ever since the disappearance of Zemo at the end of Nicieza’s stellar run it’s been found badly wanting. Mac Gargan as Venom is one of the lamest ideas ever, screwing up two perfectly good characters (Venom and Scorpion). And now Osborn claiming to be a good guy and not Green Goblin? Puke-arissimo! Maximo Puke-arissimo! I could have imagined that stunt working on Dubja, but now they’re just insulting the new president! What’s the matter Diggle! Are you a republican? I’m just reading until the Deadpool crossover is past (Go Deadpool!) and then I’m not going to waste my money on it anymore.