From Asgard As A Strip-Joint To The Phantom Judas; A Selection Of The Most Misjudged Fresh Starts For Superheroes:

In which the blogger offers up a baker's dozen's worth of ill-judged attempts to significantly reinvigorate best-left-as-they-were comic-book characters. The list isn't in order of any preference, and its contents reflect nothing more considered than the first thirteen examples which came to mind while brain-storming on the back of an envelope in a library coffee shop.

As always, your nominations for those dubious efforts which should've been included would be extremely welcome;

1. Yellowjacket And The Wasp, by Roy Thomas, John Buscema et al (1968)

The two-issue introduction of Yellowjacket in Avengers #59 & 60 makes so little sense that it would've been right at home in many of today's line-leading Event books. None of the Avengers appear to be anything other than intellectually disadvantaged as Henry Pym accidentally poisons himself into super-heroic schizophrenia and sets about the marrying of Janet Van Dyne. If it helped establish Pym as a superhero with a propensity for absurd mental disorders, it also lumbered Van Dyne with the reputation of a woman so obsessed with marrying her man that she'd trap him at the alter while he was quite literally out of his mind. Those who still mock the DC product of the mid-Sixties for its fundamental silliness ought to take another look at what Marvel was churning out in the period. Nobody comes out of the Sixties too well when it comes to common sense, but at least the creators of Yellowjacket had the watertight excuses that (1) there's was work aimed at children, and (2) it was at least as well crafted as it was ridiculous.

         
2. "Grounded" Superman, by J. M. Straczynski et al (2010)

At the time the lamentable "Grounded" appeared, I thought it so inexplicably awful a comic that I tried to create a context that might make sense of its events. It was, it seems, more than Mr Straczynski ever did. The story of a Superman so disillusioned and confused that he feels compelled to walk across America while ignoring all of his various public and private responsibilities, it perfectly fuses nonsensical plots and cloth-eared scripting. A run so irredeemably poor is at least there in print for us to cherish as an example of how not to write the Man Of Steel, and as such,  it's to be regretted that JMS was either, according to his own statements, (1) too ill, or (2) too disappointed by DC Editorial's long term plans to finish off the unmitigated disaster he'd so incompetently set into motion.

             
3. Armoured Daredevil, by D. G. Chister, Scott McDaniels et al (1993)

A relatively harmless - and short lived - example of a poorly conceived reboot, and one that was at least undertaken with enthusiasm along with a fair measure of intelligence and skill. The problem with an armoured Daredevil is - of course - that the very idea undercuts the premise that Matt Murdock is a "man without fear", destroying as it does the air of bravado and even foolhardiness which informs many of the character's best moments. Yes, armour would make a great deal of sense for a modern-era, street-fighting superhero, but a Daredevil who isn't daring enough to fight crime in his tights really isn't Daredevil at all.

4. Phantom "Judas Iscariot" Stranger, by Dan DiDio, Brett Anderson, et al (2012)

The new Phantom Stranger's a reboot so fundamentally ill-judged that it's almost impossible to raise the energy to criticise it. (You might start here with a fair-minded discussion, if you've not come across the conversation before.) There are, of course, superhero comics which have used Christianity in a respectful and even enthralling fashion, such as John Ostrander achieved with the wonderfully heroic figure of priest Richard Craemer in his Spectre stories. But to use a living religion in the sub-genre in this way requires not just a sincere regard, which DiDio's script undoubtedly reflects, but sensitivity, subtlety and the highest level of craft too. The superhero comic has had a regretable tendency to portray Christianity as a deviant if not actively corrupt business, but casting Judas as the Phantom Starnger - with cod-significant dialogue that even Charlton Heston would struggle with - is not in any way part of the answer.

        
5. Penance, the child of a great many parents amongst Marvel's employees of the era, including Paul Jenkins & Ramon Bachs (2007)

But if the new Phantom Stranger has one redeeming feature, it's that it's not quite as dumb an idea as the lamentable Penance. As woefully po-faced and deeply, deeply meaningful as the Phantom Judas, Penance was even worse. In the hands of Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill, this generation-hyperangst dunderhead would have been played as satire of grim'n'gritty comics. But Marvel either chose not to do that, or played the whole business so straight that nobody picked up on the gag. As a result, it was nothing other than bewildering to watch Steve Ditko's Archie-esque Speedball degenerating into the perpetually disordered, self-lacerating, self-pity consumed Penance. If not a joke at the expense of overly-literal, humourless fan-culture, then Penance was a sorry expression of the same. In short, a terribly idea poorly executed,  and there was so much of it all too.

        
6. The New 52 Wonder Woman by Brian Azzarello et al (2011)

There's little if anything I could add to what I wrote here about Mr Azzarello's recasting of the Amazons as naked canoeing, sex-hunting, male-murdering monsters, though I'd like to vent a touch more if there was anything new to say. It's a matter which can still cause the steam to start billowing out from under my collar...

7. Psychopathic Guardian-Killing, Corps-Slaughtering Hal "Green Lantern" Jordan, by Ron Marz et al (1994)
  

The history of the super-hero comicbook since the mid-Eighties has been in many ways the history of stupid-minded revisionism which has at the very least been rubber-stamped by editors that really ought to know better. That a bad day at the office for Hal Jordan should have resulted in his being transformed into a mass muderer made no sense at all, but it did result in a serious sales boost for the moribund Green Lantern title. That such a rise in the number of readers might have been achieved in a way that didn't involve a hollow parade of ridiculous, boy-thrilling murders obviously wasn't accepted in the halls of DC at the time. In the constant quest for short-term commercial advantage, the industry has succeeded only in alienating all but the most Rumpish of fans, and created an audience which just isn't interested in any Big Two super-book which isn't in some way an expression of Event marketing. There's a long way from the everything-you-know-is-wrong reworking of The Anatomy Lesson to the foolish, flaccid spectacularisms of Emerald Twilight, but it's the latter model rather than the former which has predominated over the past almost 30 years. In that context, it's worth remembering - as it's often not - that Geoff  John's successful rebooting of the GLC in 2004 approached the mutilated franchise with care and respect. I may find the book and its fellows largely unreadable today, but its rebooting was a well-considered affair.

           
8.  The Sexing Up Of Asgard in the Thor issues by J. M. Straczynski et al (2007)

The unmitigated sexism of JMS's Thor reboot was discussed here. What a despicable and thoroughly offensive business it was. Yet it's worth celebrating what Marvel has achieved in recent years with the pathetically blokeish, pornographised Asgard of JMS and his co-conspirators. I've been waiting for the end of Kieron Gillen's run on Journey Into Mystery to discuss the matter, but just as a place-holder, three rousing huzzahs for everyone involved in moving women to the centre of Asgard's affairs and elbowing all that adolescent titillation as they did.

   
9. The Legion Of Super-Heroes Without Superboy, reluctantly undertaken by Paul Levitz & Greg LaRocque (1987)

Comics history tells us that the quasi-fundamentalist zeal of those who reboot shared universes never results in success for anything more than a fraction of the properties involved. So it was for the re-ordering of DC's mutiverse following Crisis On Infinite Earths in 1986. No title suffered more than the Legion Of Super-Heroes, which was gutted of its connection to the Superman mythos and thereby separated from a great deal of its appeal and purpose. With the property fundamentally undermined, if not actually fatally weakened, the Legion has had to be kick-started time and time again, and none of the various efforts could be said to have worked as well as the pre-Crisis versions. Picking and choosing from a variety of takes on characters and situations and combining them into this week's 31st century has simply created an alienating mish-mash of third, fourth and fifth generation versions of once-familiar characters. With the passing of time, the fact that the Legion as well as Superboy were pictured in the sunset on the above cover seems regrettably telling.

10. First Wave by Brian Azzarello et al (2010)

It's possible that the few later additions to DC's First Wave line after Mr Azzarello's introductory issues were much better than his lead-off issues, but I doubt many folks made it through the main course to the deserts. First Wave certainly seemed like an intriguing premise at first, featuring as it did a cast of Pulp and World War Two-era properties, from Doc Savage to the Blackhawks, from a gun-wielding Batman to the Spirit and the Avenger. Yet despite a host of largely able and even gifted creators and a clearly worked-through process of world-building, Azzarello's tales were heartless noir trifles. To read his First Wave was to feel mired in largely humourless unthrillers, all laddly grimness and utterly predictable storytelling. What was the point of all that preparatory work, of all that effort, when the stories themselves had nothing at all to say beyond the growling and brawling of alpha males?

11. Spider-Man: One More Day, by J Michael Straczynski, Joe Quesada et al (2007)

Speaking as one of those who'd always thought the marriage between Peter Parker and Mary-Jane Watson had been a fundamentally bad idea, I'd no objection to the idea of the couple splitting up at all. After all, if the two of them could forget that they'd once had a child, then they could easily stumble out of each other's lives too. The question was, how well would the deed be done, and sadly, as I think most everyone would agree, it was a hubristiclaly incompetent example of how not to write or illustrate a modern-era comic book.

      
12. Before Watchmen, by a host of folks who really shouldn't have, no thank you (2012)

Before Watchmen: an obvious ethical transgression, a few pretty drawings, a couple of barely-mediocre comic books, and a range of absolute stinkers. Regardless of what DC and certain quarters of the industry would have us believe, no-one's coming out well from Before Watchmen except for the folks who didn't take the silver and the company book-keepers who offered it in the first place.

           
13. Teen Tony Iron Man by Marvel Editorial, Andy Lanning, et al (1996)

Not only thick-headed, but craven too, Teen Tony Stark remains perhaps the best example of an industry locked into a cycle of forever chasing what it presumes to be its audience while damning both sense and integrity. With the passing of time, Teen Tony's also a fantastically funny idea, as are of course all the comics associated with the wretched The Crossing, which remains the worst major crossover Event that any American publisher has ever conspired to produce that I can think of. The Marvel of the period couldn't have satirised the Big Two's habit of perpertually shooting themselves in the foot better if it'd've set out to do so.

What other options came to the blogger's mind afterwards? The post-Gerber Howard The Duck, the Mark Millar Robo-Hunter, the New 52's Suicide Squad, the 60's Human Torch series ... There's no shortage of candidates for this particular ballot, I fear.

And, should you have a moment, why not visit TooBusyThinking's Tumblr? For cod-philosophy and choice comic book panels, there's nothing this side of Phantom Judas to beat it.

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