Biggest Disappointment of 2007
Jim Doom says: The Fall of the Super-Writers
I don’t know I’ve ever seen so many big-shot writers get exposed at the same time as in 2007.
While I definitely enjoyed Fallen Son, Jeph Loeb’s run on Wolverine was absolutely awful, and the first issue of Ultimates 3 was so bad that it immediately killed off all of the goodwill built by the first two series.
Not only did Brad Meltzer fail to even remotely live up to expectations on Justice League of America, Dwayne McDuffie managed to turn it into one of the stupidest comic books in regular publication. Whether it was Meltzer’s obsession with analyzing polaroids of potential recruits or McDuffie’s insistence on having a dozen superheroes and supervillains surprise each other by standing confidently in silence in the same room around 8 times per issue, this series became a horrible Groundhog Day that cost $2.99 (or more) each month.
The bloom came off Darwyn Cooke’s rose with the plummet of The Spirit and the fizzled sizzle of Superman Confidential, but perhaps no godlike writer cranked out a steady stream of four-color feces than Paul Dini.
His issues of Detective Comics went from being a highlight of 2006 to completely skippable in 2007, and there’s the 52-week elephant in the room known as Countdown. What a damning thing to have on your resume.
Honorable mention: The way Green Arrow was treated in 2007.
Not only did his series get cancelled (and it was really good)…not only did he have his origin retold horribly in one of the worst miniseries of the year…not only did his wedding get told and retold in a different way in at least three different comics…but his new series with wife Black Canary sucks. Green Arrow went from being one of my favorite characters to someone who I now read nothing about in the span of about a month.
Doominator says: X-Men!
Mike Carey’s X-Men was just difficult for me to get into. Maybe it’s that Bachalo and I are on bad terms when he’s not drawing something Neil Gaiman related, but I was unable to bring myself to finish it after a few issues. I was even going to try to make it all the way to 200 (which would put me at all of the issues of X-Men Vol. 2.) I failed to do so.
Fin Fang Doom says: Endangered Species!
It had been a while since there had been a major X-Men crossover. It had been even longer since there had been a good one. But without the seemigly yearly crossovers that were all the rage in the nineties, the X-Men books had actually gotten pretty good.
X-Factor was consitently one of the best series in comics. Uncanny X-Men had been able to tell a great year-log story free from the shackles of Civil War. X-Men was the best it had ever been without “New” in the title, and that was with a team roster I didn’t give two craps about. Peter David, Ed Brubaker and especially Mike Carey had really impressed me by turning the X-books into series I looked forward to reading every month.
With writers of this caliber, it really seemed like a great time to do a crossover. Even better, it’d be a crossover where I’d be buying 75% of the books involved regardless. And it’d be an additional FREE 8-page story in every comic. What could go wrong? Well, now we know.
Endangered Species was just bad. The story was practically non-existent, and in the end it didn’t even end up having much to do with Messiah Complex. Marvel would have been better off saving the 8 sheets of paper and giving me the cash value for all the good Endangered Species did to get me excited for the actual crossover that began afterward.
Doom DeLuise says: Countdown!
Countdown, and everything related to it. 52 was awesome, really. I was quite disappointed with World War III, but I had high hopes for Countdown, and it hasn’t delivered on a single thing as of the first of this year. It’s SHIT.
Hey! Check out what we had to say about this category in 2006 and 2005!