Worst comic book characters

[jjreason]

Jessica Drew as Spider-Woman. What the fuck could she do? Nothing. Stupid costume, stupid hair. Stupid. She-Hulk would also fall into this category. Fuck her, and her stupid propensity for being invited into the FF to replace big pile of Jewish rocks. Thing good, She-Hulk bad.

[Eternal Padawan]

Knight and Fogg. Two really REALLY bad Spider-Man villains made worse by Sal Buscema's atrocious late 80's/early 90's art. BARRRF.

[anarky]

You didn't like Sal Buscema's work?

Seriously?

I loved all the issues of Spectacular I read. Especially "The Child Within" story arc. His style meshes beautifully with the Green Goblin. And that story, damn! That's the sort of stuff I'm talking about when I say "good storytelling." You could use it as an example in a textbook.

[Eternal Padawan]

Sal did an arc of Spectacular Spidey where Spidey goes down south and fights a family of hillbilly inbred mutants or something.

I guess he did do a mean Goblin, but his faces always looked so gaunt and his art was different from the cherubic, visually poppin' style I was digging at the time like Tom Grummett over on Teen Titans. I just didn't go for it. And the longer I read Spec, the more I couldn't stand it.

[anarky]

I just realized this thread is four pages long, and nary a reference to NFL Superpro!

So there's this great football star in the Marvel Universe, and he injures himself and ends his career. But somehow he discovers a scientist who has developed "the football uniform of the future." It looks like a beefed-up, high tech football uniform, with NFL logos instead of team logos. It increases the wearer's strength, speed, and agility, while making them invulnerable. I am not making this horseshit up.

But it gets better. Super-powered terrorists who somehow know about the suit and want to use the only existing prototype for evil attack while the main character is visiting the scientist and kill the scientist. But the terrorists do not know where the suit is hidden, and, as he dies, the scientist begs our hero to use the suit to avenge him. Which, of course, he does.

Is the "stupid level" hurting your head yet? Well, our hero--who no one recognizes despite the fact that his face isn't covered and he's wearing essentially the same football uniform he wore as a pro, albeit in different colors and with mandatory early-90s metal shoulderpads--continues to fight for truth, justice, and good sportsmanship. Until, that is, Marvel finally realizes that no one is reading this shit (or buying it--I got the few copies I have in various lots of 30 comics that was sold at Sam's Club back in the day) and cancel this mess. Even Spidey was ashamed to make his obligatory 3rd issue guest appearance.

Thinking back that far, to memories best left buried, reminds me of the whole failed "Marvel UK" experiment in the early 90s. I put "Marvel UK" in quotes for a reason. The company, Marvel UK, had been around for a while, and had given us a real stinker in Captain Britain. American readers knew of Marvel UK, but actual copies of the comics were notoriously hard to get here.

So an imprint called "Marvel UK" is started by Marvel, geared at the American audience. (It's pretty telling that the prices on the cover were in dollars and not pounds.) But do they reprint Death's Head, Action Force, Captain Britain, the missing issues of Transformers--in short, things we want? No. They come up with a bunch of truly shitty characters, obviously British in origin, written and drawn by third-stringers from the real Marvel UK, trying to force them into American-styled stories and situations.

First, well, I should start with Death's Head. Death's Head had been a time-travelling, dimension-hopping robot bounty hunter who looked like a dude in stylized medieval armor, and he had the odd (but, apparently, damned funny to Brits) quirk of turning everything he said into a question by adding "Yes?" to the end. Death's Head was the creation of one of Marvel UK's (and then regular Marvel's) star writers, Simon Furman. He was clearly Marvel UK's version of Lobo or Judge Dredd--funny, amoral, and violent as hell. And he rocked. Period.

Which brings us to Deaths Head II.

Did Marvel ask Furman (who was, by now, kicking ass writing American comics) to write new adventures of Death's Head? Of course not! How about getting someone else to write new adventures? No, that wouldn't work, either. Despite the fact that Death's Head seemed to score with the few Americans who knew who he was, Marvel (apparently) decided that, since the "Marvel UK" line was all about going after the guys who liked Cable and other big, brainless guys with guns, an all new Death's Head was needed!

The first problem is the design. Death's Head looked goofy, but in a cool way. Death's Head II looked like a Terminator shat out an Uruk-Hai. But the look wasn't nearly as bad as the origin.

You see, a mad scientist was busy tinkering away to build the GREATEST BOUNTY HUNTER ROBOT OF ALL TIME! Why? It's never established! So he builds this big, ugly Uruk-Shit-1000 thing, and what's he do next? He sends it through time and space to kill all the other bounty hunters so it will be the best! (You may ask, "Anarky, if this thing was good enough to kill all the other bounty hunters, why did it have to in order to prove it was the best? Couldn't it just do a kickass job hunting bounties?") So it goes around, killing all the other bounty hunters and assimilating them, since the writer apparently watched too much Star Trek.

And, since we all know that the best way to endear an obvious replacement to existing readers is to have the new character kill the original (again ), this unnamed robot finds Death's Head and kills him in like two panels. But something goes horribly wrong. (For starters, I'd paid money for this shit.) Death's Head's personality is too powerful, and, though it can't take over this robot, it convinces him to change his name and hunt bounties without the scientist's direction! So now we have an utterly humo(u)rless POS robot running around killing people with no underlying story.

And did I mention that Death's Head II looked retarded?

Next was Motormouth. If you thought I was bullshitting with NFL Superpro, you'll love this one. There's this evil conglomerate, see? And they've made this incredibly powerful device to transport the user through time and space. (Why are these in such demand in the Marvel Universe, anyway, since half the people seem to be able to do that on their own?) Anyway, they have implanted (again) the only existing prototype in a pair of sneakers! to the Nth power. Somehow, these sneakers fall into the hands (or, rather, feet) of a punky British teenaged girl, and they work in the (typically unfunny to all but British folks) running gag of having her saying "&*%$ me!" on every cover.

As goofy as it seems, I could totally see this working in an underground British comic. But this was American, aimed at the people who bought fifteen copies of X-Force #1 to get every possible UPC barcode/trading card combination.

Motormouth finds herself running into the X-Men a lot (since it seemed to be a rule that each "Marvel UK" title had to feature the X-Men on the cover, usually more prominently than the title character) for no reason. And she found herself on the run from the conglomerate's assassin, Killpower. Killpower was obviously also intended as a joke, a spoof of the burly gunmen: he was a typical 5-year old kid in a body with more straps, muscles, scars, and guns than Cable could even dream of. Being a typical kid, he decides it'd be more fun to make friends than to kill, but the editors decide he should be the focus, and the title becomes "Motormouth and KILLPOWER" (later, IIRC, dropping Motormouth altogether).

[Eternal Padawan]

It's scary.

Scary that anarky had that much detailed knowledge of those books. And scary that he triggered my memory of them. i think I have all those issues. Marvel UK. Warheads? Knights of Pendragon? Oh yeah...the best one of all, to cash in on the specialty cover craze, Death's Head II had a viallain called Die-Cut who eventually got his own limited series. (Die Cut!! get it? his first issue was a die-cut cover...)

[Eternal Padawan]

Surely Wolverine's newly created MULLET/MOHAWK wearing son can be added to the list. If only because it is now the year 2007, and he is sporting a mullet/mohawk. The only thing that would make it douchier is if it was PURPLE.

[Eternal Padawan]

As a result of Civil War, Iron Man and his registration forces have created The Initiative wherein each and every one of the 50 United States gets its own Super Team. They've already ceded Thunderbolts to Colorado, and there is a REALLY lame team in Texas with all Texan heroes ( including former villain Armadillo), But Marvel is bringing back

New Warriors
Champions
Defenders

and a whole shitbag list of others. What i want to know is, do you really need a whole team in Wyoming? Wouldn't like TWO heroes just about cover it? And Nebraska, or kansas, or Iowa...now I love Iowa and I'm from there, but what kind of fucking lame super team are those ignorant NY fucks writing Marvel Comics going to come up with for the Hawkeye State? I cringe in anticipation of coming up with FIFTY fucking super teams. FIFTY.

[vynsane]

now I love Iowa and I'm from there, but what kind of fucking lame super team are those ignorant NY fucks writing Marvel Comics going to come up with for the Hawkeye State?

probably whatever those ignorant "security mom" fucks in iowa would want - republican heroes. maybe dick cheney will finally come out and tell everyone that he's really a robot and he can defend iowa.

at least if bendis brings back hawkeye for the millionth time since disassembled, he'd be the leader. and maybe since no one wants to attack iowa, he won't get killed for once.

[Eternal Padawan]

Sadly, Marvel would never waste Hawkeye on Iowa.

[anarky]

Hawkeye. Now there's a dumb fucking hero.

I've been watching Justice League Unlimited on Boomerang a lot lately. I consider the DCAU to be the definitive version of DC, without all the stupid shit. Sure, there's no Hal Jordan, but you can't win them all.

Anyway, there are some majorly fucking stupid characters on there. You've got your senior team (Superman, Batman, Wonder Moron, Flash, Batgirl, and Martian Manhunter), and some damned cool second-stringers (Green Arrow, Question, Black Canary, Captain Atom--okay, they're cool here, even if they blow in the comics). But then some frigging stupid shit. Like there's this Lone Ranger type character (Vigilante?) who runs around with six guns and never shoots anyone! Or this guy who looks like a combination between a medieval knight and Captain Dick Penisheadman. Are these douchebags for real?

[Incognito]

**lowers sunglasses just long enough to read previous post**

[anarky]

You ever look for something else here and find some old gem like this thread?

BTW, Sir Dickheadpenisman is named "Shining Knight." I shit you not. He is an Arthurian knight (who was somehow never mentioned in L'Morte d'Arthur) who was transported into the modern day and became a hero. Never mind that an Arthurian knight would speak either French or some version of Olde English that would be totally incomprehensible today; they just add some "thees" and "thous" to his speech. Also, his version of "heroism" would be very different from ours, and he'd probably have his ass in the slammer within an hour of arriving in the present day. All that chivalry carp was bullshit made up hundreds of years later... sorta like the "samurai do not surrender" bullshit.

I looked this douche up since this was bugging me. Why they didn't intentionally forget this guy after 1965 is beyond me.

[Rollo Tomassi]

DC loves to resurrect old characters and try to wring any last drop of creativity out of them. Golden Age, Silver Age. It doesn't matter.

[anarky]

I'm surprised to not see a topic about this anywhere.

I don't mean characters you think are stupid, worthless, redundant, or overrated. I mean characters who you truly loathe. If you had your way writing a title in their universe, the first thing you'd do is kill that motherfucker in the most brutal, painful, and/or humiliating manner possible.

As for me, I fucking hate Hawkeye. Deadly serious, when he was on West Coast Avengers, I scrimped and saved (and charged) to try to get every Marvel title except WCA. I don't know what it is about him. I think it's that the quota of archers with bright costumes and gimmick arrows was more than filled with Green Arrow. And that he tries to suck Bruce Banner's cock when he's asleep.