Vindicated By History / Comic Books

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• Jack Kirby's New Gods titles sold poorly (though there is some controversy about just how good or bad the sales figures were at the time, and how much of that was due to a line-wide price hike and format change). Since then, Kirby's work on New Gods, Mister Miracle and The Forever People has become widely acclaimed as among his very best, with characters who have been used again and again, in multiple media (e.g. Super Friends, Justice League, and Smallville).
• Gotham Central sold poorly during its monthly releases, possibly due to it being a Batman book that rarely featured Batman himself. Towards the end of its run and after, however, it found popularity through good word-of-mouth and critical acclaim for its intriguing Lower-Deck Episode nature, strong writing, fun characters, and being an Innocuously Important Episode that heavily impacted later beloved stories like 52. Following its conclusion, it sells very well in collected edition and tends to regularly make lists of best Batman stories of all time.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: Carl Barks worked anonymously during his active years for Disney. Though his comics were always lucrative, he only received recognition after retiring. Comic book fans noticed that certain Donald Duck comics were better than others, so they tracked him down and discovered who had made all those masterful comic books over the years. Luckily, Barks would live long enough to see this recognition during his lifetime.
• Spider-Man
  • The Maximum Carnage and The Clone Saga story arcs have been reappraised as good, despite being initially being panned. Part of this is due to the stories working slightly better when read all at once in a trade collectible, rather than one at a time over a period of months/years. Many of these were written before writing for trades became a thing. Also helping this is that the Critical Backlash to many modern Spidey comics such as Sins Past, One More Day, and especially the Zeb Wells-Nick Lowe Spider-Man run all of which have managed to eclipse even The Clone Saga when it comes to controversy and fan-disownment. While nobody is likely to claim Maximum Carnage or The Clone Saga are the best Spider-Man arcs, they at the very least don’t give extreme Character Derailment to the cast for the sake of Status Quo Is God, No Such Thing as Bad Publicity and to keep Peter being The Chew Toy like the said comics do.
  • Superior Spider-Man (2013) spent much of its time as a massively controversial gimmick book and overly-edgy mess, perceived by many as the Jumping the Shark moment for the Dan Slott run on Spider-Man and a lame attempt at No Such Thing as Bad Publicity. In the years following it's end, however, many fans have reappraised it and come to regard it as something of a hidden gem, featuring some of Slott's best writing, an intriguing take on a more morally-ambiguous/horror-oriented Spider-Man, compelling discussion of supervillain redemption arcs, and a lot of genuinely cool arcs that made a real effort to push a badly-stagnating series into bold new territory. At the very least, it is considered infinitely better than the remainder of Slott's run and the Zeb-Lowe run that followed it, both of which are hugely hated, and one reason the well-liked Nick Spencer run tends to be praised is that it's the only one of those three that feels like a logical progression from where Superior left off. On the whole, Superior has seen it's reputation with the fandom go rather impressively from "one of the worst Spider-Man stories ever" to "an interesting idea that could've been executed even better".
• Both Countdown to Final Crisis and Civil War (2006) were given huge boosts while Sinestro Corps War and World War Hulk were largely treated as filler events. However, both Sinestro Corps and World War Hulk are now considered to be classics, whereas Countdown and Civil War are seen as two of the worst big events of the 00s.
• At the same time the Civil War (2006) series was running and had all of the Marvel publicity machine behind it, a small Crisis Crossover event called Annihilation was being published. It was largely ignored by Marvel and by readers, due to the lack of involvement from big name characters. The event also led to short-lived books for Nova and the Guardians of the Galaxy, which were both cancelled due to low sales. Their plots were finished out via The Thanos Imperative, and they were all lumped together as the DnA Marvel Cosmic era (after it's two primary writers, Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning). An era that has since come to be highly well-regarded. While readers ignored these books initially, those who did check them out universally loved them, and in time word-of-mouth helped them bloom into a Cult Classic regarded as one of Marvel's best works of the 2000s. Then they really hit the jackpot when they were used as a huge influence on the mega hit movie adaptation of Guardians, leading to a major Newbie Boom that catapulted many of Marvel's cosmic heroes to the A-List and saw the DnA run come to further be regarded as one of the great Marvel epics. The series became much easier to obtain as Marvel caught onto the new popularity and reprinted much of their Cosmic stuff, including the DnA run, which did in fact find sales success.
• Final Crisis was incredibly hard to follow back when it was released, due to the series' "channel flipping" method of storytelling, the Schedule Slip that affected the essential tie-in Superman Beyond 3D, and significant Executive Meddling (particularly in regards to Countdown to Final Crisis). Now that the series has been collected properly and the readership has had time to properly digest its contents, it's much more well regarded. A number of readers consider it a modern classic. It is still regarded as divisive, just not reviled.
• Black Panther:
  • Christopher Priest's run didn't sell well at the time of its original publication. Today, it is regarded as one of the best Marvel books of the 90's. Many fans even argue that Priest has earned creator-defining status over the character at this point. His depiction is often considered to be the definitive take on Black Panther.
  • While it didn't sell very well at the time, Don McGregor's Jungle Action run ended up having a major impact on the character. It was the first series to actually do serious Worldbuilding for Wakanda and to flesh out T'Challa's supporting cast. It also introduced Erik Killmonger, who would later become one of the Panther's most prominent and popular foes. It was also one of the first mainstream comics to have a self-contained, multi-issue arc, with some critics calling the "Panther's Rage" storyline Marvel's first graphic novel.
• De Kiekeboes was considered a mere curiosity in its early run and you had to be a hardcore comic book fan to have even heard about it. After J. Hoste NV (the publisher of the comic book series) crashed the series got owned by De Standaard. They originally did not have a lot of enthusiasm for selling the comic and for a long time it was one of their lowest selling properties (often it would be the very final story in MEGA, their comic book compilation). Its sales however continued rising and rising, to the point that nowadays it may rival Suske en Wiske in popularity.
• Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Jack Kirby, William Moulton Marston, and Stan Lee amongst others are names known in the comics industry and even by a surprising amount of non-readers. Nowadays, they are given proper respect due for the characters they helped bring to life, even if harsh battles are still fought over these characters in terms of rights and royalties. One particular name however has taken a much longer time to get the recognition it deserves: Bill Finger, the co-creator of, and an early writer for Batman. He was the one who many would argue gave the Dark Knight more of his iconic features than his much more famous and outspoken partner, Bob Kane. Starting in 2016, DC Comics finally gave Finger his much overdue credit by having his name appear next to Bob Kane's in any new Batman-related media.
• Superman:
  • In the early 1980s, the books were going through a sales slump that was attributed to the focus on Krypton and to the existence of Silver/Bronze age characters, such as Superboy, Supergirl and Krypto the Superdog, whose comics had been cancelled at the time. It was then decreed that the Krypton stuff had to be excised, banned from continuity and replaced with non-Kryptonian substitutes. Flash-forward fifteen years, and the franchise is going through a slump again. Out of all the one replacements, only Superboy (Kon-El) seemed to have caught on with the fandom and been successfully translated to other media. This situation prompted DC to revoke the "Superman is the only Kryptonian survivor" policy and reintroduce the Pre-Crisis versions of the characters. Since then, those characters have been featured in several successful comic storylines as well as animation, live-action series and games, becoming more popular than ever.
  • The Supergirl From Krypton (1959): Supergirl's origin story (wherein she was born in a floating space city which survived Krypton's destruction thanks to a forcefield dome) was panned for decades as confusing, campy and in need of several tweaks to be workable. When she was killed off and replaced, though, her substitutes' backstories -involving parallel pocket dimensions, artificial lifeforms, Satanists who turn out to be "Earthborn" angels, genetically engineered Brainiac's unwitting pawns who believe to be Superman's daughter...- made Kara Zor-El's origin look positively simple and ridiculously easy to understand. When Kara was brought back, her modern origin storylines tried to do away with the most convoluted elements, but they became quickly dated and subjected to several retcons. Eventually, her first appearance was retconned back into canon (with the addition of some modern tweaks such like Kara being older than Superman) because it was decided it was her simplest and best origin.
  • The Super Dog from Krypton was the story which introduced Krypto, Superman's dog who quickly became a hit. By the 1980s, though, DC regarded it as another instance of convoluted Silver Age silliness which should go. By the early 2000s, though, it was decided to bring the character back, giving him a less contrived origin....which was actually more convoluted (instead of being used by Jor-El to prove his rocket, which was blown off course and took over fifteen years to reach Earth, Krypto was a dog from a false Krypton), so it was retconned out and replaced by the original story shortly after. Superman's 2011 reboot tried to "update" Krypto's origin again (having him to be sucked into the Phantom Zone before Krypton's explosion), but nobody particularly cared about that story, so DC retconned his first appearance back into canon.
  • Legion of Super-Heroes has the Reboot/"Postboot" era. It was the first full-on reboot that the Legion of Super-Heroes received, presenting a new world where the heroes were just starting out. The convoluted backstory of the original Legion was done away with. The characters were now teenagers again, and much of the stories were about characters and their personal drama rather than large space epics (mostly, that would come later). Because of this, some fans decried them as the "Archie Legion". The era gained a reputation for being a teen drama in space until the DnA run, which saw a Darker and Edgier take as the characters faced an invading army. While the DnA stuff is still praised, the "Archie" era has also since been reevaluated due to the pushback against Darker and Edgier storytelling with superheroes. The reboot that followed the Postboot Legion, the "Threeboot", revelled in this in particular and has been reevaluated in a negative light. People became more fond of the character work done with the Legion, and there is a general appreciation for how the reboot updated the characters for the modern age.
  • Superman: Birthright came out at the worst possible time, as DC decided to hype it up as a chaser for Superman: For Tomorrow (a storyline whose sole memorable feature was that Jim Lee was on art duties) and Chuck Austen's run (which was just flat-out bad). Add in the fact that Leinil Francis Yu was on art duties, and many thought it would be yet another attempt to make Superman Darker and Edgier. Mark Waid himself grumbled "I felt like I played at Carnegie Hall and nobody showed up." DC waffled on whether it was even canon for a while, and ended up excising it from continuity only a few years later in favor of Superman: Secret Origin. Nowadays, Birthright seems to be regarded as the best long-form Superman origin story, due to it managing to modernize the origin, giving it a sense of weight and maturity without forgetting its old-school grandeur and optimism. Many consider it a definitive version, due to it working well as a general-purpose origin and bringing back elements lost in the 80s reboot (which is now very dated) and in spite of this, having a distinctive feel and a cohesive plotline, rather than serving as a highlight reel of what came before (a criticism often leveled at Secret Origin). Nowadays, if you find any "Superman Recommended Reading" list, it is very rare that Birthright won't be near the top.
• Green Lantern: In the 90's, the comic wasn't a big seller, and several creatives decided that the franchise needed a shake-up. Such as turning Silver Age "relic" Hal Jordan into a villain in order to replace him with a newer and "cooler" character in the storyline Emerald Twilight. Several years later, Geoff Johns resurrected Hal Jordan in Green Lantern: Rebirth and retconned his descent into evil by explaining that he was possessed by the living embodiment of fear, Parallax. After this storyline, Hal Jordan became the main character of the comic again. Nowadays, most of the controversy surrounding Emerald Twilight has died down, and it's now considered one good storyline just for the sheer amounts of shocking moments.
• Tintin in North America. While the series was held in high regards, it had a very limited run in North America. This resulted in it failing to find an audience, since you had to find it in libraries (where it was placed in the kids section, before Graphic Novel sections became a thing) or pay exorbitant prices on eBay auctions. While the Nelvana adaptation did air in the US, it was originally on HBO — a premium service that focused more on adult shows even in the early 1990s — and then on Nick Jr., mostly at times when most viewers were in school or at work. (It was better in Canada, where it aired on Global Television Network and other broadcast stations at first, with reruns on YTV and other non-premium cable networks.) More people were interested in works that were inspired by it (such as Indiana Jones) than the actual license. However, after The Adventures of Tintin, the comics received a much needed reissue, which allowed it to finally get it a bigger audience.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW): The "Siege of the Crystal Empire" arc was highly divisive among fans when it was first released. As the years passed, more fans have warmed up to it, or at least a specific aspect of it — namely, how it gave King Sombra more depth than he got in the show, where he remained a Generic Doomsday Villain in all of his appearances (with his appearance in the season 9 premiere in particular causing fans to look at his appearances in the comics in a more favorable light). The rest of the comic is still highly contentious, but the focus of the fandom is now on what's considered its best aspect.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics): Ian Flynn's run on the comic was divisive at best. The comic was coming out of Karl Bollers's run (which was widely considered the comic's Audience-Alienating Era) and many still had nostalgia for the Ken Penders run; many were skeptical that Flynn, who was primarily known as a fanfiction writer, could possibly do a good job. His actual writing soon became controversial, as he made sweeping changes to the setting (destroying Knothole and recreating Mobotropolis, turning the Dark Legion into Eggman's minions, killing off most the Echidnas, etc.) that, in many fan's eyes, removed much of the comic's original or SatAM elements in favor of making it similar to the games, while several stories, especially the Iron Dominion arc, were criticized for dragging on way too long. It didn't help that his biggest work prior to becoming an official writer for the comic, Other M, became criticized as a dark and edgy mess with widely Out of Character interpretations of classic characters ^note This last part appears to be the result of genuine confusion rather than bad writing from Flynn, as Other M actually takes place in an alternate universe, or "Other Mobius". However, as a result of legal issues with Penders, Archie would ultimately decide to do an almost complete reboot, removing all remaining original elements in favor of sticking more closely to the games, while still retaining SatAM and Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog characters. Many people believed that, unburdened from previous continuity, that Ian Flynn was able to craft a unique identity for the comic on its own, with several cult favorites, new interpretations of classic characters, and a genuine love for the Sonic franchise in general. Many began looking at Flynn's previous work in a better light, seen as removing several of the worse elements of the previous runs while setting things up for the Post Super Genesis Wave continuity, and creating some of the best stories in the comic's history. These days, with Ken Penders's run being largely Condemned by History, it's not uncommon to cite Ian Flynn as the one of the best writers Sonic's ever had, and while he still has his detractors, they're nowhere near as prevalent as they used to be. When Ian Flynn was brought on board for both the IDW comic and Sonic Frontiers, many fans actively celebrated.

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