Worst New Series of 2007

Doom DeLuise says: Mighty Avengers!

I think this is new this year. Either way, I hate it. I got tired of the thought bubbles right away, and the way the characters interact bores the hell out of me. I think I lasted all of three issues before I got tired of that hot naked Ultron villain (forgive me if I forgot all of the details) and super giant sized goo monsters. Yawn. I’m not sure how Ultron ties into Annihilation: Conquest, if it does at all, but if you want to see how to make Ultron a fairly badass villain, look no furthr than that expertly crafted miniseries. Putting him in charge of the Phallanx operation is just super cool and damn scary. Oh, and before I forget, I also really hated the Avengers: Initiative series. So much so that I gave up on anything with the word “Avengers” in the title. I knew that was gonna happen! I even gave up reading New Avengers, which I was enjoying, since it had a couple boring issues, and I didn’t have any motivation to get onboard with all that silly symbiote overrunning New York nonsense.

Jim Doom says: Avengers Classic!

I wrote this when it came out: “Avengers Classic – according to the inside back cover editors’ notes – was inspired by the Classic X-Men series. You see, that series included stories from the Claremont days of Uncanny X-Men with backup stories by other creative teams that took place in roughly the same timeline. This series, however, is apparently going to have stories from the beginning of the Avengers series with backup stories that will be all ironic and sarcastic and just plain cute.

I think you can see the problem here. For every person that says Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were geniuses, there is probably at least one person who forgets how much comic books in the 1960s were really awful. Sure, they may have transformed a genre, and maybe their work is a step up from the other brands of awful that were the norm at the time, but I think comics from the 1960s are best left as fond memories and not dug up for all the kids to see just how full of crap the 50 year olds at the comic store really are.

Now, if the double-backup cutesiness was just a special thing for this first issue, I could maybe see this thing going somewhere. But it already lacks two out of the two things that Classic X-Men had going for it, and that eventually got canceled in an era when reprints weren’t readily available and the internet wasn’t really accessible. Probably not a bright future for this comic. What a bummer of a first issue.”

Fin Fang Doom says: Countdown!

Y’know this should really be a hard category to judge. Most of the time, if a book sucks, you’d just stop buying it, right? So how are you supposed to figure out if the book you bought one issue of in February was worse than the book you bought one issue of in September? Was The Vinyl Underground actually worse than Sub-Mariner, or does it just seem that way since it’s been longer since I read Sub-Mariner?

Thankfully, or perhaps unfortunately, that wasn’t the case in 2007. I started buying a crappy series back in May, and I’m still buying that crappy series to this day. Why, you ask? I have no earthly idea.

Countdown sucks. It’s gotten to the point that Doom DeLuise can’t even bring himself to review it on a weekly basis. I won’t try to stick up for the title, come up with excuses for its vast array of negative qualities, or hail the good moments that are very few and very far between. Yet I still buy the thing, and it’s rarely crossed my mind that I should stop doing so.

Hey! Check out what we had to say about this category in 2006 and 2005!