Audience Alienating Premises in comic books.
- Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld:
- A Magical Girl maxiseries created during the early '80s didn't stand a chance, so DC Comics killed the series by making the main character evil and blowing up her homeworld. If they had the foresight to allow the property to live until the '90s, they could have had a hot product on their hands.
- Relaunched in 2012 as the lead feature of Sword Of Sorcery, written by Christy Marx, the woman behind Jem. The comic again failed to find an audience and was cancelled with Issue #8 in early 2013. While the relaunch had some potential going for it, it also ran into a number of the same roadblocks — for a comic that was being promoted with kid-friendly shorts on Cartoon Network's DC Nation, it went for more of a "Game of Thrones with magical gem powers" vibe and featured an attempted gang rape
in its first issue. - Amethyst had a sort of crossover in the second series. Cue very surprised looks from readers wondering why a character from a "comic for little girls" was in the pages of Dr. Fate. (Turns out Amy is a Lord of Order. Yes, you read that right.)
- The 2020 miniseries, after two prior failed runs, decided the approach to sell the character was... a complex and often boring political thriller. Cue low sales as readership asks if it's the fault of the writers, or editors who simply don't know how to market and present a Magical Girl Warrior.
- Angel Love series folded after eight issues and a special. Its cute cartoonish artwork and style of writing clashed with the subjects it was dealing with: drug use, abortion, critical illnesses, and incest.
- Avengers Arena: Taking cult favorite teenage heroes (including members of Runaways and Avengers Academy) and putting them in a The Hunger Games/Battle Royale scenario played completely straight, so as to prop up Smug Snake gimmick villain Arcade as a legitimate threat (twenty years too late), by having a lot of teenagers die. The amount of vitriol it generated before and during its release is rather amazing. The sequel, by the same writer, had the surviving kids infiltrating the Masters of Evil with the book's premise being that one of them will turn evil. It sold so poorly that it was cancelled after 10 issues (the story was planned for at least 12).
- Despite coming out in a period where Marvel was going from strength to strength, Champions (1975) was an infamously poor performer. Starting life as a pitch for a book starring Iceman and Angel in the aftermath of the newfound popularity of X-Men, Executive Meddling demanded the addition of Black Widow, The Incredible Hercules, and Ghost Rider to beef up the lineup. As it turned out, none of those characters have anything to do with each other, nor did they have enough star power or strong villains to support a team book. It didn't so much have an Audience-Alienating Premise as an Audience-Alienating Lack of Premise, as even at the time, readers noticed that the book seemed to have no purpose other than featuring characters Marvel wasn't using. What premises the book did try out came off as incredibly artificial—the team was supposed to be the heroes of Los Angeles, yet none of them were actually from there, they were supposed to be the heroes of the common man, but mostly just fought regular supervillains—and the characters struggled to build any kind of rapport. Even within the pages of the book, the characters were acknowledging that they had no reason to continue being together, and when their book was cancelled after only seventeen issues, their headquarters collapsed and they separated for good, with any future acknowledgement of the book's events being generally rueful. The name resurfaced for later books in the 2010s, but that was all that did.
- The Crossing was hated right out of the gate for what it did to Iron Man: retconning that Tony was made into a Brainwashed and Crazy Manchurian Agent for Kang the Conqueror since the Avengers first fought him. That, along with showing Mantis undergoing a Face–Heel Turn and joining Kang as well, the Wasp being muated into a wasp-like creature, and finally Tony dying and a teenaged version of him from an alternate universe taking over as Iron Man. Naturally, fans didn't like what it didn't to beloved characters, especially given Iron Man (and the Wasp) were founding members of the Avengers. This status quo only lasted months before Onslaught and Heroes Reborn undid most of it by backing back the classic Tony Stark and normal Wasp, and it carried over to the Avengers' return to the normal universe Heroes Return with Avengers Forever and Avengers Annual 2001 do further damage control.note
- The Hasbro Comic Universe largely ended up as a Stillborn Franchise for this reason. Though some level of interconnectivity between various Hasbro properties had been going on since the mid-80s, it was one thing to simply acknowledge that Transformers and G.I. Joe existed in the same universe, and another entirely to have them actively teaming up on a regular basis. What was more, the staff quickly discovered that the list of popular Hasbro properties that could easily exist in their shared universe was a lot shorter than they imagined, and so things ended up clogged with second-tier properties like M.A.S.K., Visionaries, Micronauts, and Rom: Spaceknight. Transformers was the franchise from which all this sprouted, and therefore its fans saw all these other properties as attempts to piggyback off something more popular. G.I. Joe fans, the second largest faction, were against the Joes existing in the resulting Fantasy Kitchen Sink and going on wacky adventures with giant robots, especially when a much more traditional run by Larry Hama was happening at the same time. Meanwhile, the smaller fanbases were irritated at the fact that the first new material featuring their characters in years was essentially a Transformers spinoff, not to mention this new material being a major Continuity Reboot from the original stories.
- Their Rom series especially had this problem. The main reason Rom has fans is because of the Marvel Comics Rom: Spaceknight series. However, Marvel's contract stated Marvel got to keep the rights to anything they invented. As such, the vast majority of Rom's lore and concepts couldn't be used for the new series, forcing the creator to make up new lore, which caused many people to dismiss the series out of hand.
- Keith Giffen and Jeff Lemire's 2019 Inferior Five mini. Named after the obscure superhero parody team from the Silver Age, and being a sequel to Invasion!, a fairly unknown crisis event from 1988. Unsurprisingly, it failed to sell well and was shortened to 6 issues from its intended 12.
- Robert Kirkman's The Irredeemable Ant-Man: according to Kirkman, the idea was to have the protagonist start out as a cowardly jerk and evolve into a real hero over time. Unfortunately, the comic put extremely heavy emphasis on how much of a jerk the new Ant-Man was while failing to play up his Hidden Heart of Gold; Marvel's advertising didn't help, selling the comic with the tagline "The World's Most Unlikable Superhero". Non-fans of Ant-Man were driven away, while Ant-Man fans left out of disgust at the thought of such a douche taking over the title. Consequently, despite doing fairly well critically, it was a terrible sales performer and didn't make it long. Evangeline Lilly read the series as research for the Ant-Man movie and publicly dismissed it as "crap".
- In the 2000s, there was a manga adaptation of Josie and the Pussycats, but it didn't last very long. It was not popular among readers due to the Pussycats' backstory being completely retconned, and some of them preferred the traditional art style and didn't find the new one very appealing. Not to mention that some of the new characters introduced in the series (such as Alan's little sister Alison and the Pussycats' rival group The Vixens) didn't appear in any of the original comics. Needless to say, complaints from the fans caused the manga adaptation to be canceled and the story ended on a cliffhanger.
- This may have been part of the reason Gail Simone's The Movement didn't last very long despite good reviews. A comic series about a group of morally dodgy protagonists becoming vigilantes, who are also completely new characters note and thus don't have previously built audience love to carry them. It was also very politicized which is a frequent turn-off for some comic readers. Simone herself has commented that, in hindsight, the book was a very difficult concept to sell and was lucky to get as far as it did.
- The first arc of the Terry Moore-led reboot of Runaways didn't seem to know who to aim for. The extremely cartoonish art by Humberto Ramos suggested that it was aimed at younger teens, which repelled longtime fans, but the not-so-kid-friendly storyline — involving Karolina being accused of complicity in the destruction of Majesdane, and ending with Xavin impersonating her and handing themselves over to her accusers — didn't really bring in many younger readers, and may have helped lead to the series' cancellation a year later.
- The Saga of White Will is an underground comic created by a Neo-Nazi, with some explicit white nationalist, pro-segregation and anti-Semitic messages. This trope is probably a large part of the reason it only had one issue.
- The second volume of Secret Avengers ended up as something like this. The premise is that SHIELD forms its own team of Avengers, but to keep them from revealing their secrets, they undergo a mindwipe after their missions, which was off-putting due to the grey morality of such a tactic and apparent attempts to amp the feel of the MCU with the book's promotional material. Still, the series found a small audience thanks to the fact it explored the moral implications of the concept, had a quirky sense of humor, used underused-though-well liked characters War Machine, Quake, Mockingbird, and Taskmaster, and had generally good writing. The series ended after 16 issues so the writer could move onto Avengers World. The third volume dropped these characters, with the art and tone of the comic shifting to what seemed to be a lazy ripoff of Matt Fraction's Hawkeye (2012). Many fans dropped the book, and it was cancelled after 15 issues.
- Telos was a six-issue miniseries that spun out of the event Convergence, already a story that underperformed significantly, and promised to tell the story of the character of Telos, a moderately important character in the book who hadn't exactly developed a great following (being seen as a walking plot device with a convoluted backstory and a pretty ugly design). On top of that, rather than coming out in the immediate aftermath of the event, it came out six months later, by which point most people had forgotten about him—and what was more, it came out in a period where several popular or important characters, such as Shazam!, lacked books of their own, causing many to accuse DC of Skewed Priorities. And the book also revealed that Telos was in fact Arak, Son of Thunder, an obscure DC character who hadn't been seen since the original Crisis in 1985, which pissed off the few remaining Arak fans and just confused the heck out of everyone else (since no Arak comics have ever been reprinted and there was no way to learn who the character was supposed to be). The book sold abysmally, debuting at #115 on sales charts and dropping all the way to #231 by its final issue, and it's the last time Telos would ever make a significant appearance.
- Once Thunderbolts was finished, Marvel decided to retool the title akin to X-Statix. Only without both the cast (took four issues to bring a character back, and it was a very secondary one) and the premise, replacing the "villainous team doing heroic things" with underground superhuman Fight Clubbing. Tellingly, it only lasted six issues and one year later the real Thunderbolts returned. As one fan breaking the first two rules ("We don't talk about Fightbolts") summed up:Everything about the book was a bait-and-switch. Thunderbolts fans hated it because it didn’t have Thunderbolts. Sexy lady fans hated it because it couldn’t follow through on the sexy lady promise of the cover. Fight Club fans probably never heard of it, but if they did they probably hated it because it had nothing to do with Fight Club. Spider-Man was in a couple of issues, but so what? He’s already in like five other comics where the story is actually about Spider-Man. In trying to make Fightbolts appeal to everyone, Marvel only succeeded in pleasing no one.
- Trouble got off on a tepid start due to being advertised as Marvel's stab at reviving the long-dormant romance comic genre, but quiet ambivalence rapidly turned into Bile Fascination with the first issue, revealing that 1) it's actually more of a raunchy teen sex comedy, and 2) it's actually a stealth prequel to the Spider-Man comics, following the early sexual antics of a teenage Aunt May, Uncle Ben, and Richard and Mary Parker. Audiences were unreceptive and bewildered as to why Marvel thought this was a story they wanted to see, especially as it went on to introduce a retcon that "Aunt" May was actually Peter Parker's biological mother, and the massive backlash towards the comic was a major contributing factor which led to the newly-revived Epic Comics folding once again, and putting a kibosh on further attempts at romance comics.
- Orson Scott Card's Ultimate Iron Man was an attempt to reinvent the origins of Iron Man for the Ultimate Marvel line, but alienated audiences big time by just how extreme and bizarre of an approach it took: instead of Tony Stark being a rich genius who outwits his enemies, Card's run recharacterizes him as a mutant brain baby with regenerative powers who wears the suit for health purposes, and isn't even a central character until partway through the run, instead focusing on his father and a war between two feuding corporations. This story didn't even make sense as an origin for the Ultimates version of Tony Stark (previous stories never hinted at him being a literal humanoid brain with a Healing Factor), and it was eventually written out of Ultimate Marvel's canon, which turned this story into that of an in-universe anime series and its loose interpretation of Tony's origins.
- Wacky Raceland, the Darker and Edgier reimagining of Hanna-Barbera's Wacky Races. Take a classic light-hearted cartoon about racers with their distinctive motifs running through different rallies around America and turn it into a Mad Max-inspired post-apocalyptic setting where every type of calamity happened and littered with mutants and eldritch abominations. Despite the title trying to ride on Rule of Cool, the concept was never going to be easy to sell and predictably the comic went under after just six issues.
- Yeah! by Peter Bagge and Gilbert Hernandez is a girls' comic about three girls in a rock band who are trying to make it big but can only get fans in outer space, and was intended to resemble the girls' comics of the sixties. It is also to comic book fans what a disco album by Iron Maiden would be to a music fan: it doesn't contain any of the stuff that they like, and it belongs to a genre that's been dead for decades. Despite some good writing and nice artwork, the comic was cancelled after only nine poorly-selling issues.
