Man that Sucked...(the lame comics thread)

[Eternal Padawan]

Does anybody remember a bunch of comics that Marvel put out with a religious slant? Like religious super heroes, but with a little harder wdge? I'm not saying they were lame or not, because I never read 'em, but I remember seeing the ads in my other Marvel books all the time.

Speaking of lame Spidey storylines, one time Spidey went down to Alabamba or someplace in Spectacular and fought some creepy inbred hillbillies for an issue of two. They all had big bug eyes and bumpkin hillbilly overall outfits. Man, I couldn't WAIT for that story arc to be done.

[dr_evazan22]

I know a lot of people don't like the Clone storyline from Spidey, but I dug it for the most part. What ruined it for me was the hundreds or thousands of Spidey's that were running around at the finale. That, plus I think that they should have left May dead. I thought it was so well done and Peter had MJ to take care of him. I liked how May said she had known for a long time.


As for Gnort, that's too bad. He was kind of funny.

Going back to Spidey.... The storylines where Spidey was fighting Hobby and trying to find his secret ID were some of the best modern Spidey tales, IMO, esp. ish's 248 - 250. I love reading those!

[Dr Zoltar]

So how did Marvel manage to bring May back from the dead? I have the issue where she died, but I had no idea they brought her back.

[El Chuxter]

EP brought up Valiant comics in another thread (and Deathmate already popped up), and they produced some books that definitely belong here. Most of their pre-Unity stuff was pretty good, but shortly after (possibly due to the firing of Jim Shooter?), the emphasis went from story to art and then to (ugh) variant covers. Early issues of Rai, Archer and Armstrong, and XO Manowar were awesome, but Bloodshot, Turok, and Hard Corps sucked hard. Even in Valiant's heyday, they never could disguise the fact that Harbinger was a second-rate X-Men knockoff.

And the intentional underproduction to drive up demand was a no-no. Plus I never got the second issue of Unity because it was one of those stupid dealer exclusive "freebies," and it vanished before I could get to the comic shop.

Then Shooter started up Defiant. Remember that? The first comic they did was Warriors of Plasm #0. Which was sold as trading cards that, when placed in nine-card pages, formed the issue. Of course, to get a few pages of the story, you had to buy the official Plasm binder. And every single issue of every comic they did referred back to this incredibly expensive, difficult to complete issue that they never reprinted in normal comic form!

Not to mention that every book hit shelves in completely different form from what had been solicited (which normally sounded more interesting). What was the longest run of any Defiant title? Five issues? Six?

Poor Jim Shooter. He went from being an in-joke in the first issue of GIJoe to boozing it up in an alley with David Faustino and Rhea Pearlman.

[Eternal Padawan]

Wait...wait. let me check...YES!! I have Warriors of Plasm 1-5!!! I am officially lame!

Valiant got its start being the Nintendo comics company, so they had Mario Bros comics and crap like that.

Here's one: Impact! DC ressurected the old Red Circle(?) comics line under a new banner. The Fly. The Shield. The Comet. The Black Hood. This mini universe started out cool, but quickly disintegrated after constant artist and writer shuffling. I think it ended with a mini-series a few years later where everybody went into the future and died.

[El Chuxter]

Yeah, the mini-series was about the Black Hood having to kill the Comet because he was going to destroy the universe. I actually bought a couple of Chuck Wotjkiewicz's (and I'm 100% sure I misspelled that) pages from that series dirt cheap at a convention years ago. (He's one of those who I can't figure out why he didn't hit it big.)

Impact (or was it technically "!mpact"?) definitely started out cool, but it died fast and hard. A shame.

[Eternal Padawan]

Except for The Web. Which was lame from the get-go. What was that final mini series titled?

[El Chuxter]

Ooh, yeah, Web was kinda bad from the start. I'd forgotten that one.

I want to say the mini-series was called Crucible: The Final !mpact. Does that sound right?

[El Chuxter]

Does anyone remember the period in the early '90s when there were several Marvel UK titles that weren't really Marvel UK titles but normal bad Marvel comics done by British folks?

The first was Death's Head II. I always had a soft spot for the first Death's Head (maybe it was the Furman/Senior/Transformers connection), and this killed him off in the first issue, replacing him with a stupid Cable/Punisher/Ghost Rider/Terminator clone. Gone was the witty banter, replaced by big guns.

Then there was Motormouth: a punky British girl and total foul-mouthed knockoff of Jubilation who happened upon a pair of sneakers. The catch? Inside the sneakers had been hidden an interdimensional transportation device. (Because that's the logical place to put such things.) This book became even better after she suddenly and with no explanation teamed up with a big assassin sent to kill her and the book was retitled "Motormouth and Killpower."

Dark Angel I don't remember too well. It was going to be called Hell's Angel, but the biker gang sued or threatened to sue or something.

I recall there were more, but don't know what they were.

And every single issue of every Marvel [pseuedo-] UK comic featured Wolverine or the entire X-Men team. I recall one of them had the absolute worst X-Men art and characterization of all time.

[Eternal Padawan]

Heh. I have tons of those issues. At some point, there was a guy called Die-Cut introduced solely so they could have die-cut covers and be clever...

There was a team of interdimensional jumpers ( forgot their names) and 80% of them would die each issue. Kinda tough to get fan favorite characters going.

Then there was Pendragon, which was reincarnations of Aurthur and his knights in spandex and Captain Britain joined them (so the covers would have a recognizable character on them, I think).

What the hell was Annex? I think it was a Spider-man spin off. I have it and don't know what the hell it is...

Who decided Prowler should get his own series? Marvel was scraping the barrel for awhile wasn't it? His powers derived from pneumatics. PNEUMATICS, people. People have been shot for less.

Ego, the living planet is just a lame concept. Period.