The 10 Worst Comics You Didn't Know Existed

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Look, there are a lot of bad comics out there in the world. A LOT. But some are so bad that the comic book industry as a whole seems to have willfully forgotten they existed. True, there are some bad comics we ALL know about, but those are no fun to discuss. Like, come on, do you REALLY want to see me trash One More Day for the hundredth time? Or Youngblood? Or the Clone Saga? Ok, maybe some of you do, but that's not fun for me, so instead I present you with the trash that is so misery inducing, we all collectively agreed that it never happened. Some of these stories you may remember, but I guarantee you haven't thought about them in a long, long while.

photobucket

                                                      Source: photobucket.com

10. Batman: Fortunate Son

This is the story about how much Batman hates rock and roll music.

If you didn’t know that existed or was a thing, you are welcome. The story starts when Kurt Cobain-esque rock star Izaak Crowe (What? You say this came out in the late nineties? Why, I had no idea!) starts hallucinating Elvis and disappears into a psychotic breakdown. As Batman and Robin try to find him, we find out that Batman hates Rock n' Roll like he's a parent in a "˜50s PSA.

Why? Oh, because the night his parents were killed, Thomas Wayne yelled at young Bruce for listening to that darn devil music, and I guess Bats seriously internalized that, somehow.

Also, Arkham has a ward specifically for people who think they're Elvis. Huh. And we learn that Two-Face is an ABBA fan. So he's cool with me. But while I could talk about this comic book literally all day, I'll close on the most famous quote from it. When asked about his opinions, Batman responds: "Punk is nothing but death, and crime, and the rage of a beast."

Not a Clash fan, I take it?

thegreengoblinshideout

                                           Source: thegreengoblinshideout.com

9. Spider-Man: Sins Past

As I mentioned, One More Day is too obvious an entry for this list, but Sins Past needs to be addressed.

Sins Past opens with Peter Parker being attacked by two mysterious assassins, one of whom looks shockingly like Gwen Stacy. He also receives a long lost letter from Gwen, sent before her death. Turns out that, in the months before, Gwen became pregnant with twins and gave birth to them in secret.

But before you start freaking out that these are Peter's kids, don't worry! They aren't! No, no"¦they're Norman Osborn's kids. Much worse. Yeah, turns out that college age Gwen Stacy was having an affair with drawn-like-he's-fifty Norman Osborn. Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Oh and Mary Jane knew about this the whole time. Yep! This comic was almost instantaneously forgotten and has been wiped wholesale from continuity, but holy hell, is it a bad read. It hurts me to look at it. So gross.

ifanboy

                                                          Source: ifanboy.com

8. Justice League: The Rise of Arsenal

Any Young Justice fans in the house?

Any of you got a thing for that ultimate bad boy Roy Harper, aka Speedy, aka Arsenal, aka Red Arrow? Well, I'm about to ruin all of that for you. In the early seventies, as part of the socially conscious Green Lantern/Green Arrow run, it was revealed that good ol' Roy had a serious heroin addiction. I'll wait while you make your "Speedy" jokes now. Good? Cool.

So Roy kicked the addiction and eventually went on to become a founding member of the Titans before upgrading to honest to goodness Justice Leaguer. But after all that, someone for some reason decided they wanted to drag him back down. And that is how we got Rise of Arsenal, a story in which Roy relapses into heroin, has a drug trip freakout, appears to beat a group of drug dealers into submission with a dead cat, and suffers from erectile dysfunction. Also, at one point, Batman roundhouses him in the jaw and shouts "I'm your friend!" which I'll concede is a pretty great page.

Sleep tight, Roy Harper fans!

comicsalliance

                                                   Source: comicsalliance.com

7. Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose

Well, this one is going to be really difficult to talk about. Not because it's confusing, but because when your job becomes "come up with a humorous paragraph of internet comedy about literal pornography" you have to take some time and re-evaluate the choices that brought you to this point.

But here we go. Tarot is about a witch. It is also the absolute pinnacle of male-gaze female objectifying garbage that is absolutely hilarious to read. Look, any comic book that contains the line "Your vagina is haunted" is worth reading, just to confirm that it is, in fact, real. But it is also, in fact, terrible.

Despite Tarot's proportions being that of an overused Stretch Armstrong, she still has the ability to do magic and be repetitively kidnapped, so good on her. The main series revolves around weird creepy sexy-times stuff and spooky, spooky ghosts. It is pretty much just weird fetish porn but, like, published by a company.

But yeah, if you want to read some so-bad-it's-good trash, this is for you.

bengarry.wordpress

                                               Source: bengarry.wordpress.com

6. Countdown

The book is so boring and muddled that you forget it as you read it. Like some sort of printed version of the neutralizer from Men in Black, Countdown was DC's attempt to follow up on 52, the well-liked and pretty great weekly series. Countdown brought in a new team of (usually pretty great) writers, but seemed to be forcibly editorial in terms of its driving forces.

The series is a mess. Like the kind of disaster that would warrant a FEMA evacuation.

Countdown's numerous plotlines barely tie together; interviews from the beginning of the series do not match the eventual product; and Grant Morrison, whose series Final Crisis Countdown was supposed to lead into, not only ignored the events of the series, but felt actively hindered by them. It is the fear of the worst a weekly series could be: directionless, plodding, rerouted to tie into forgettable event comics, and altogether unwieldy.

Like a trip taken with a malfunctioning GPS, Countdown doesn't wind up where it was supposed to and took too many unnecessary detours even for that destination. If you haven't, check out the oral history of Countdown, linked HERE. Paints a good picture of a four-color trainwreck.

Northwestcomicsgames

                                               Source: Norwestcomicsgames.com

5. Trouble

Oh, God, why am I making myself do this? Most of the books on this list are funny-bad, but this one is painfully bad.

Have you ever wanted to read an "˜80s sex comedy starring Uncle Ben, Aunt May, and Richard and Mary Parker? Yeah, I also said no to that question. But it exists!

One summer in UNDISCLOSED DECADE, brothers Richard and Ben Parker go away to work at a resort, where they meet best friends May and Mary. And then they screw around a lot. This is a weird, weird, comic book that confuses me with its existence. And it makes me vastly uncomfortable. But if it were just weird and not psychotically tone deaf and misguided, it wouldn't be on this list, so let's just get this one out of the way.

At the end of the story, May sleeps with Richard and gets pregnant. She contemplates getting an abortion in one of the LEAST SENSITIVE DEPICTIONS OF THAT PARTICULAR COMPLICATED ISSUE OF ALL TIME, but decides against it. She eventually is convinced to let Mary and Richard raise the child as their own: a boy named Peter. Yes, that's right, Aunt May is secretly Peter Parker's mom, or she would be, if this hadn't been immediately forgotten about and never made canon. Ugh.

peter-bonnell.blogspot

                                          Source: peter-bonnell.wordpress.com

4. Ultimatum

Oh hang on, we're talking about the Ultimate Universe now, so you might want to turn up your monitor brightness, because it's about to get unnecessarily dark and grim in here.

I love Ultimate Spider-Man like a childhood friend, but the rest of the line never really found its footing. And Ultimatum, its attempt to branch out in a new direction, did in fact accomplish its goal. Unfortunately, the new direction it headed in was a downhill slide into unreadability.

Essentially, the premise is that there's a big disaster and the heroes have to find out how to stop it and who's causing it. Sorry, that's a lie. That's the "story", the premise seems to be that it’s a challenge to see how many characters they can violently kill off in five issues. Wasp gets eaten, Doom's head is crushed, Wolverine is ripped apart, Magneto is decapitated, Daredevil drowns, Doctor Strange has his skull popped like a gusher…the list drags on and on. Wikipedia officially lists 35 deaths in the five-issue series.

That's just wasteful. And it's so grimdark, you'd think it was fanfic written by a suburban teenager with his quill pen while listening to 2000s pop punk if it didn't have the Marvel seal on the cover. Dreary, self important, and altogether unnecessary.

legendary

                                                        Source: legendary.com

3. Holy Terror

Oh, Frank Miller, what happened? Batman: Year One is so friggin' excellent and Daredevil: Born Again is wonderful! But, oh, how the mighty have fallen. Actually, less "fallen", more "plummeted".

Holy Terror started off as a Batman project for DC, before either Miller decided it wouldn't work for the character or DC said, "Oh, hell no, we aren't publishing this", depending on whose story you believe. In the story, a scary, angry, murder-Batman named The Fixer decides to go fight Al Qaeda. Unfortunately, this book winds up being less of a screed against Al Qaeda, who are legit horrible, and more a super-angry screamfest against Islam as a whole.

And if that sounds like it'd be really uncomfortable to read, don't worry, it is! It also promotes torture as a thing that works (it doesn't), and paints its hero as being rampantly islamophobic. It's an all-and-all unpleasant book that, instead of lampooning a villainous terrorist group, opts instead to demonize a vast innocent population of religious practitioners who aren't terrorists. Terrible, hateful, painful to read.

Thank God above this wasn't a Batman comic.

wall.alphacoders

                                                 Source: wall.alphacoders.com

2. All-Star Batman and Robin

Unfortunately, this one was.

Oh, boy. Oh, boy oh boy oh boy. THIS friggin' comic book. All-Star Batman and Robin isn't so much a garbage fire as it is a garbage fire hit by a windstorm, and now there's burning trash everywhere and it's setting everything else on fire, too.

The series was intended to be a retelling of Robin's origin and first days with Batman. Unfortunately, Miller's depiction of Batman is"¦uh"¦something, all right. The book is most famous for the ironically funny catch phrase it spawned: "What, are you dense? Are you retarded or something? Who the hell do you think I am? I'm the g*ddamn Batman!" Wow, that sure is a line of dialogue. If you ever wanted to know how to generate an Internet meme through the power of bad writing, here you go. The series itself is full of present-day Miller's trademark inability to write women and his shock value over substance obsession.

But if you wanted to read a book about a legitimate psychopath in a batsuit screaming curses like he stubbed his toe and terrorizing a child, then I guess this is for you? But you can honestly do better.

avclub

                                                           Source: avclub.com

1. Marville

Oh, sweet heaven, why did I write this article? Why am I forcibly reminding myself of the worst comics I've ever read? Why am I dredging up these long repressed night terrors of mine?

So Marville was part of a bet. At-the-time head of Marvel Bill Jemas really hated Peter David's well-crafted, cosmic spanning, character focused, Captain Marvel run, and so he made David a bet. Jemas would write his own comic book, which would be "good", and if this new comic, Marville, sold better, Jemas was allowed to cancel Captain Marvel. Jemas lost this bet so friggin' hard that they say if you listen close enough in the Marvel offices, you can still hear the sound of him being wrong.

Marville is the most dated "humor" comic I've ever read. It stars the son of Ted Turner (look him up yourself), named"¦sigh"¦Kal AOL. Ha. Kal goes back in time and meets an attractive young woman, whose mostly naked body is splayed across the series' covers like she's a human anatomy diagram. What ensues is half a series of blindingly unfunny, nails on a chalkboard humor and half a series of pseudo-intelligent philosophical musings on God and life, for some weird reason.

It is bewilderingly bad. Confusingly bad. Unreadably, unforgivably, unjustifiably bad. And it is THE WORST comic book I could put on this list.

And there you have it, the worst of the forgotten. The bottom of the trash heap upon which the bottom of the barrel sits. Have your own recommendation for this murderer's­ row of wastes of paper? Let me know, maybe I'll put together a sequel column. But, oh, my God, was this one a miserable column to put together. What I need now is a long cry and a GOOD comic book.

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