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.