Worst Runs You've Ever Read

Exactly What It Says on the Tin. I know we sometimes talk about the best runs you've ever read, but what about the worst? What are the absolute worst or at least unpleasant runs from any comic you have ever read? Though if there's just one particular issue or two you want to talk about, that's fine too.

Now, I don't actually have a lot of runs that would really fit into this if only because I tend to stay away from those, but I've got a few. First off is Mark Guggenheim's Young X-Men. God was that bad. It was so bad I barely remember it aside from just leaving me with nothing but sheer hate and loathing for the next half hour or so, that's how bad it is. The characters were either bland or went against everything they had been up to that point, the New Mutants didn't really need to be on the team at all, and the entire run (all twelve issues,) just feels soulless and uninspired while also being rage-inducing. It's just... bad.

Next up is Byrne's West Coast Avengers. The run wasn't horrible persay. It did have some decent enough moments and at the end of the day, there's been far worse. But it wasn't very good either, and it still left me wanting to rip apart the trades like tissue paper. The problem with them is that they take two of the Avengers' most longstanding members, Vision and Scarlet Witch, and completely assinate them. Vision suffers from it the worst, having everything interesting about him stripped away before being turned into a soulless automation, but Scarlet Witch isn't handled much better. While she wasn't rendered completely radioactive in that story, it still set the stage for Bendis to come in and tear everything apart years down the line. And it also got rid of both Wanda and Vision's kids and their marriage, because no-one gets a happy ending in comics. Just... bleh.

That said, WCA still isn't the biggest slap in the face I've ever seen from a comic. That would be Bill Mantlo's Alpha Flight. Alpha Flight as written by Byrne benefited from having one of the most diverse casts in comics at the time and still today in some respects. By the end of Byrne's run, you had two First People's, a little person, a closet gay, a woman suffering from SPD, an obese cripple, an alien, and a God. Mantlo took all that and threw it into the nearest incinerator. The little person was reduced to doing nothing but whining about Heather 'couldn't love a dwarf' before being turned into a Magical Midjet (TM) and then a tall dude, both First People's were written out of the books, the woman with SPD was cured of her SPD, the obese cripple was turned into a buff dude who could walk and was also insane before being mutated into an abomination and killed off, the God was straight up murdered, the alien was killed off in another book, and the gay dude was made into a fairy. A literal fairy. And only because Mantlo couldn't give him AIDS and kill him off too. And they replaced them all with a teenage girl, a young man in a relationship with said teenage girl, some little goblin creature, and an autistic black girl. Who was later cured of her autism. Because fuck it. Oh, and the dialgoue sucke balls. Because of course it did.

That's all I've got for now, though I'm sure I'll think of other shit later. Anyone else got anything they want to share?

Chuck Austen's X-Men run is the biggest kick in the balls I've ever seen. Idiot Plot and Purity Sue characterizations are rampant as Author Tract takes the place of good stories. Arcs like "Holy War" and "The Draco" disregard so much sanity that it can't even be considered So Bad, It's Good. I found the run boring at best and garbage at worst.

Then there is New 52 Teen Titans, something I can't even bother to bring myself to care about. First off, Harvest is a terrible villain and thus as an awful dynamic with the team who are already full of Jerkass. Eight Deadly Words at its finest.