Examples of Condemned by History in Comic Books.
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Creators
- For decades, Bob Kane was viewed as one of the founding fathers of DC Comics, being widely recognized as the original creator of Batman, and enjoying a long career as a writer on the book up until his departure from the company in 1966, with his name so synonymous with the franchise that entire characters were named in reference to him. However, it was always an open secret in the industry that Kane was reliant on ghost-writers, and after his death it became widely known that he in fact had a far smaller role in the creation of Batman than previously believed; having only coined the name and pencilling the comic, and virtually everything people recognized from the character came from the then-uncredited Bill Finger. Kane would draw, and Finger would write; while it was only Kane who would show Batman to publishers and receive the praise.
Kane had continually denied and downplayed the involvement of Finger well past the latter's death in 1974, only coming clean in the late-80s before his own death in 1998, and this was the case also for the many other creators he used under his name over the decades. What's more, additional research discovered that what little actual writing Kane had done himself — as well as some of his artwork — was in fact heavily plagiarized from contemporary pulp media of the time; and that he had gone so far as to throw Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster under the bus when they tried to secure a better contract with DC, then lied about his own age just to get a favorable contract of his own. While Kane's name is still listed in the credits of all Batman media for legal reasons, he is also viewed as the man who for-all-intents-and-purposes stole the credit for creating Batman while leaving everyone else — especially Bill Finger — in the dust, and creating very little of artistic merit by his own hand. And as of 2015, Finger's name has been added to the aforementioned credits, in spite of him never having been listed as such in the original work. - Rob Liefeld was considered one of the most successful writers/artists, despite never being a critical favorite, during The Dark Age of Comic Books. He created several famous characters, such as Deadpool and Cable. He also helped start Image Comics and was influential through his work on Youngblood (Image Comics). However, after the Dark Age ended, he became a laughingstock for being a Lazy Artist (not drawing feet or eyes properly, creating unrealistic and generic character designs, not caring about perspective or how the human body works, and overusing pouches), and for plagiarizing concepts from other people. For example, Deadpool started off as an Expy of Deathstroke. Today Youngblood is usually seen as So Bad, It's Good and a poor ripoff of Teen Titans. Cable and Deadpool are still popular, but that's mostly thanks to other writers who developed them in different ways than Liefeld. What little goodwill Liefeld still had by the 2000s dried up after a much-publicized feud with Peter David, over him making Shatterstar, one of his creations, bisexual (although Atop the Fourth Wall's numerous reviews of his comics didn't help much). Nowadays, the only times you hear about Liefeld is mockery of his art style (his own creation, Deadpool, noted in Deadpool 2 that he was "an artist who probably couldn't even draw feet") or of his lackluster characters. Comic book fans consider him to be the ultimate embodiment of everything wrong with '90s comics.
- Dave Sim first came to prominence with the debut of Cerebus the Aardvark, which started life as a silly Funny Animal spoof of Sword and Sorcery tales; however, 25 issues in, it began an ambitious story of Cerebus entering local politics which demonstrated a vast increase in the complexity of storytelling, with layered characters, intricate, knotty intrigue, breathtaking art (aided immeasurably by his longtime collaborator Gerhard) and exponentially detailed worldbuilding, at the same time keeping the comedic/satiric edge the comic had started with. It was around this time that Sim announced that Cerebus would continue through 300 issues and tell a complete story. For a while he was hailed as indie comics' resident genius; however, as Cerebus progressed, some felt that Sim's storytelling was growing too bloated and self-indulgent, along with developing a seeming strain of misanthropy that appeared to grow as the comics progressed. It all came to a head with the "Reads" storyline, each issue of which contained several long prose passages in the midst of the comic, many of which contained extended angry diatribes against feminism and women in general. Debate raged for some time whether these were Sim's actual views or some kind of critique, but it wasn't long before Sim was writing equally long dissertations in the Cerebus letter columns with similar attacks on feminism as well as other controversial views. Around this time, Sim's bizarre public behavior began to alienate fans as well, including engaging in a long-running feud with Comics Journal publisher Gary Groth over a drawing of Sim as a Nazi guard in Auschwitz, threatening to punch colleague and Bone creator Jeff Smith in the face, airing strange conspiracy theories about cancer and AIDS among other subjects, etc. At the same time Cerebus abandoned a lot of its complex worldbuilding and got caught up in repetitive storylines regarding Cerebus' bad luck with women and alcohol. By the time the comic limped to its designated conclusion at issue #300, large portions of Sim's fanbase had drifted away, and the best of his work is hard to discuss without the controversies and ugly views that have become inextricably bound up with his creations.
Specific Works & Storylines
- Gen¹³ was a massive hit for WildStorm back in the late nineties, being part of their holy trinity with Stormwatch and Wild C.A.T.s. It was also one of the first American comics to feature a lesbian character in a major role, in the form of Rainmaker. At its height, it spawned two spin-offs (DV8 and Bootleg) and a number of crossovers and miniseries. Unfortunately, following the departure of co-creators Brandon Choi and J. Scott Campbell, the series was taken over by a succession of other creative teams who strayed far from the series' original lighthearted tone. The series hit its nadir when Chris Claremont took over. He forced his predecessor to kill off the original team, and replaced them with a new team made up of ethnic stereotypes. At the same time, Wildstorm itself was moving towards more adult-oriented work like The Authority, and thus no longer saw its teen heroes as a priority. By the time Wildstorm rebooted itself with Worldstorm, the "Genies" had fallen so far out of the company's esteem that Gail Simone was largely left to her own devices to reboot the franchise, resulting in a series that bore little connection to the rest of Worldstorm. Nowadays, the franchise is remembered mainly for the Values Dissonance-laden Fanservice involving its teenage female characters and its lesbophobic treatment of Rainmaker, as despite her lesbian status, she often dated male characters and would likely be classified as bisexual in today's world. Wildstorm's old properties eventually came under the control of Warren Ellis, who is not known to be fond of the series. It is unlikely to see another revival at this point.
- Identity Crisis (2004), upon release, was seen as a book that singlehandedly shifted eyes towards DC. Its heavy Cerebus Retcon of many events from past history swung the pendulum away from DC's image as the company of lighthearted fluff, and it proved a massive seller, with every single issue breaking the 100k mark and being in the top three of its month. Its focus on personal drama in a Crisis Crossover was seen as fresh and new, and the rather dark storytelling drew heavy attention, with the culprit being speculated all the way to the end. Though it was never lacking in detractors, as all big comic events were, it was still highly regarded. Many believed that its effects on DC would be felt for years to come.
Unfortunately, these claims proved right, just not in a good way, as Identity Crisis ended up being damaging in the long run. Many of its immediate effects, such as its attempt to make Doctor Light a viable threat or killing Tim Drake's father, completely backfired, while its treatment of other characters ended up having to be retconned or ignored due to it making those characters unlikable. What was more, separated from the hype, people began picking apart Identity Crisis more critically and noticed its many issues, such as implausible plot points, continuity mishaps, and the main story being a Clueless Mystery with a barely-present antagonist. Its gratuitous use of Rape as Drama (which itself had a rather ugly origin, being an editorial mandate), though shocking at the time, became the public face of DC's poor handling of mature themes and female characters.
The true culprit, though, was DC's attempts to emulate its success — piling on one Cerebus Retcon after another, murdering characters en masse and pushing the universe in the direction of being a Darker and Edgier version of its Bronze Age status quo. This led to many reviled stories, such as Countdown to Final Crisis, Amazons Attack!, and Justice League: Cry for Justice, all of which attempted similar blood-soaked revisionism of classic characters and proved far less successful. The likely nail in the coffin to Identity Crisis's legacy was Heroes in Crisis, which was a rather obvious attempt to fully recapture the original's success, and unlike Identity Crisis, it was derided and loathed immediately upon release, receiving mixed reviews from critics, underperforming in sales, and outright bombing with fans.
Nowadays, Identity Crisis tends to be regarded as less the modern classic it was once hailed as, and more a mediocre-at-best comic that turned out to be the Patient Zero for some of DC's biggest Audience Alienating Eras. By the end of the decade, critics were openly regarding it as one of DC's worst stories, and decrying its legacy as one that tarnished the reputations of swathes of characters and pushed the DC universe into a miserable place. Even the fonder views of it tend to be very willing to acknowledge its shortcomings. - DC Comics' New 52 was an initiative to relaunch its entire lineup. After entering a bit of a rut in the late 2000s, it was decided in 2011 to reboot DC’s entire continuity to attract more readers and make their comics more accessible to a general audience. At first, the initiative received a positive response from media outlets who praised the decision to modernize and update the lineup, along with simplifying the various stories and featuring a fairly diverse lineup of books (including some books and genres that had been lost for some time), and it saw a major spike in sales for the company. It seemed that it was the lightning-in-a-bottle that DC Comics needed at the start of The New '10s.
Unfortunately, after the initial euphoria settled, it became apparent that the relaunch was running into problems. For starters, due to executive mandates that went higher than DC, the reboot initiative was only announced four months before it actually happened, with the comic Flashpoint serving as the starting point despite largely being only a Flash storyline.note Even DC's writers were blindsided by the decision, and during the initiative, there was extremely poor planning caused by a lack of communication between creators as well as editors, which greatly impacted the quality of various comics.Example And with DC trying to maintain fifty-two books at all times, that meant that a lot of those books, including the more experimental fare, found themselves lost in the churn and cancelled after only one or two arcs, meaning that promising books often failed to last long.
Making matters worse is the fact that many editorial decisions were poorly received. The setting and every major hero was made to be Darker and Edgier than ever before, which fans felt contradicted DC’s reputation for optimistic works; such as Superman being portrayed as a Smug Super Jerkass, or the Amazons being portrayed as pillaging, warrior rapists and slavers. Other decisions greatly alienated fans, most infamously the decision to drastically change or retcon out of existence most legacy heroes for the sake of trying to create a "fresh start", such as the Golden Age heroes and the Justice Society, two of the Batgirls, a sizable number of Teen Titans, and especially the Flash family, which ended up losing all its members apart from Barry Allen, which garnered him a reputation as an editorial pet.
Another matter that DC was criticized for during the initiative was the lack of female creators. The Comic Industry as a whole has long received criticism for the low proportion of women in creative teams; and for DC this issue actually became more pronounced during the New 52, where the number of female creators under their wing dropped from 12% of their staff to 1%. Making this issue worse is the fact that many of the initiative's comics were lambasted for exploitative, and in some cases over-sexualized, portrayals of female characters; such as Catwoman having a contrived one-night stand on a rooftop with Batman at the end of her first issue, or Starfire being portrayed as shallow and sex-obsessed while wearing an even more Stripperiffic outfit than she was already known for (which many readers believed even failed at its intended purpose of being sexy).
And finally, despite ostensibly being a full reboot, the initiative ultimately did not commit to being such, with many comic lines still reliant on prior continuity and backstory, which defeated the purpose of being a jumping-on point. This approach unsurprisingly made continuity even more confusing than ever before, as now hardly anyone (whether readers, writers, or even editors) knew what was or wasn’t canon. It was not helped by the fact that less than one year into the initiative, DC jumped into more convoluted event comics.
As time went on, longtime readers and newcomers alike began losing interest and left; and by 2015, DC Comics’ sales and share in the market was below what it had previously been before the New 52. At this point, DC went for a wide-scale course-correction in the form of the much better received DC Rebirth initiative, which largely won back the fanbase.
Nowadays, the New 52 as a whole is widely considered to be a one of DC Comics’ biggest Audience Alienating Eras. The architects of the era largely regarded it as a mistake, and while a handful of books from the era were well-regarded (such as Scott Snyder's Batman run, Grant Morrison's Action Comics, and Geoff Johns’ Aquaman), they tend to be viewed as succeeding in spite of the initiative rather than because of it. Even creators who worked on the less well-regarded parts of the run tend to get some sympathy these days due to the editorial incompetence and chaos they were laboring under.Dan Didio: ...you just got a jumbled sense of past continuity, new continuity and a mix with half hearted reintroductions that really didn’t work for the story, and didn’t really satisfy the long term fans. That’s the dead zone, where once you fall into that mud, you’re trying to dig yourself out, but you’re just sinking quicker and quicker. It’s pulling you underground. - Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
- The 12-year run of Ken Penders was praised at the time for its expansive world-building and dramatic moments. This was unheard of for a Funny Animal comic or a video game adaptation, with Penders achieving fame as the primary mind behind it. But years down the road, fans took a second look at his work, and the results caused opinion on him to plummet. Penders created a massive cast of original characters, side-lining Sonic in his own book in favor of his pet characters & Knuckles. Also, Penders had a tendency to use bizarre (and at times, offensive) references, such as Martin Niemöller's First They Came — a poem about complacency in the wake of Nazi racial and political purges — being rewritten to be about the comic's furry characters. Penders' refusal to work with other writers resulted in inconsistent writing and clumsy Retcons. His agonizingly-slow pacing regularly spent dozens of issues spinning the plot's wheels over Love Triangles, and villains monologuing about their plans but not acting on them. His reputation reached a nadir with legal conflicts against Sega and Archie, where Penders attempted to claim sole ownership of everything he ever created in the comic. This included characters that were defined by their relationships with canon Sonic the Hedgehog characters (like "Knuckles' father"), as well as concepts like "Sonic existing in a multiverse". This lawsuit resulted in Archie using a Continuity Reboot to effectively wipe out everything Penders had ever done just to get him off their backs. Even so, the comic never recovered from the fallout of the lawsuit, and it would be cancelled four years later; though it’s never been made clear as to exactly what happened, it’s generally agreed that the incompetence of Archie’s legal team in dealing with Penders' frivolous lawsuits led to Sega growing dissatisfied with them and ending their partnership. Penders has largely spent his post-Archie career accusing everyone who works on the Sonic franchise (comics or otherwise) of riding his coattails, and advertising projects based around his original characters that never materialize. Between the critical re-evaluation of his work and the major damage his legal battles have done to the franchise as a whole (including Sega infamously laying out mandates to the games' canon), Penders and his work are regarded as black marks on Sonic, and it's unlikely that he'll ever regain the respect he once had.
- "EndGame", the four-part supposed-to-have-been Grand Finale for the comic, at one time had earned praise for being a Darker and Edgier storyline where the stakes were massively raised, and in which Dr. Robotnik was finally defeated in a spectacular final battle against Sonic. However, with the passage of time and the bad blood garnered towards Ken Penders — who wrote the story — the whole arc became widely lambasted. Princess Sally is pushed off a building and spends the entire arc in a coma, for the sake of a storyline centered around Sonic; Penders intended to kill Sally then and there, with only an editorial mandate saving her. Sonic is framed for Sally's apparent murder, which the entire cast falls for despite Sonic getting framed for a crime he didn't commit being one of Penders' most frequently-used plots. The solution to the mystery is utterly ridiculous; Drago Wolf, a one-dimensional Hate Sink introduced the issue before, convinces Hershey the Cat, his girlfriend who is introduced immediately after Sally's apparent death, to wear a full-body Sonic costume to Robotropolis. The costume's eyepieces make everybody the wearer sees look like Snively. There's no explanation for why Hershey wasn't suspicious of this, what she thought she was doing in Robotropolis dressed as Sonic, or how and why somebody could make eyepieces that make everyone look like someone else. Sonic's innocence is only proven when Dulcy the Dragon hears Sonic insist that he's innocent, and uses her Living Lie Detector power to confirm that he's telling the truth. This ability had never been mentioned before, rarely came up again, and went unexplored as an option before throwing Sonic under the bus. Finally, the ending is resolved through exposition from Dr. Quack (a background character up until that point), and reveals that Snively had reprogrammed the Ultimate Annihilator to target only Robotnik, effectively making all the story's stakes non-existent. These days, EndGame is generally remembered almost exclusively for its gratuitous if not outright misogynistic attempt to kill off Sally, and those who remember the arc itself — even if they don't view it as Penders' worst story — largely regard it as a microcosm of everything wrong with his run on the comic.
- The Knuckles the Echidna miniseries and ongoing comic were once some of the most celebrated spin-off of the entire comic, thanks to looser restrictions allowing for some unique ideas and characters. These days, people looking back at them often regard it very poorly, criticizing its derivative nature, awkward attempts at grey morality and darker themes, and poor usage of female characters, most glaringly, Julie-Su being little more than a Satellite Love Interest. Tellingly, when Penders left Archie to seek work elsewhere, he made two demands: not to kill off Locke or Julie-Su. It took only fifteen issues for the writers to decide that the former should be disobeyed.
- Tintin in the Congo, the second album in the Tintin series, is one of the most infamous instances in Europe. Back in 1931, it was both a commercial and critical success within Belgium and the rest of Europe, helping to spawn a franchise for decades to come. After World War II, it was widely criticized, even among Tintin fans, for its portrayal of the Congolese people, who are drawn to look like monkeys, and are depicted as stupid and infantile. Knowledge that the Belgian Congo was the scene of rampant atrocities that have since been compared to various historical genocides, and which horrified even other colonial powers of the era, doesn't help. Likewise, the fact that Tintin hunts lots of the local wildlife is hard to stomach now that many species of said wildlife are critically endangered. One scene where Tintin kills a rhino was modified in later editions so it is only scared off instead of being killed. It doesn't help that the story itself is quite crude compared to the intricate plots of later Tintin albums. Hergé himself later came to regard the story with disdain, calling it "bourgeois" and "paternalistic". (He also came to regard its predecessor Tintin in the Land of the Soviets with disdain, but that story can at least have Narm Charm for modern readers, something that can't be said as easily about Tintin in the Congo.) Those who read Tintin in the Congo now do so chiefly for completeness or to see it as a historical relic of the colonial era.
- When Transformers: Generation One was first announced, publisher Dreamwave had the head of the company, 'superstar manga-like artist' Pat Lee, doing all the promotions and a whole lot of the art, something heavily trumpeted in publications like Wizard Magazine. Its books boasted a cast straight from the original series during a period of 80s revival, generating an immense degree of hype. Advertised as a comeback, the original miniseries cracked the top ten in sales charts, with most issues reaching #1, and follow-up Transformers: The War Within became one of the most influential series in the franchise. The success spread to the Transformers: Armada comic as well, making it one of the only non-G1 comics to achieve mainstream success. Packaging art and merchandise of the time switched to a Dreamwave-esque style, and many of Dreamwave's designs (particularly those from War Within) would be incorporated into Transformers: Cybertron.
But even at the height of its popularity, complaints abounded about bad fanfic-like plots, over-favoring the original 1984-85 cast, and a general feel of faux-maturity and mid-2000s edginess. The once-lauded artwork soon became one of the biggest complaints, with "puffyformers" and "Dull Surprise" becoming common fandom terms to describe Pat Lee's artwork (which became mandated as a company house style). These complaints intensified with increasing reports that Pat Lee, aside from critique of his artwork, was an embezzler who refused to pay his employees, forced better artists to ghost for him without credit, and used company profits to buy himself cars. When Dreamwave went bankrupt from a mixture of flagging sales and Lee's practices, public opinion of the company flipped completely into hatred, and the company's creations have since vanished from the eyes of both the fandom and Hasbro (with the only exceptions being the continued use of The Fallen and maybe Sunstorm), with only War Within still maintaining any of its old acclaim (largely due to being a series Lee had relatively little involvement in, with prolific Transformers scribe Simon Furman writing instead). Many of the writers and artists who got their start there openly regard it as a disaster. Even stylistically resembling Dreamwave books (using mostly the '84/'85 cast, quoting The Transformers: The Movie, killing off Puny Humans or GoBots) can get alarm bells going in some circles.
