Okay, I'm updating this entry with my own Top Ten Characters I Hate list, since Greg mentioned he thought you'd be interested. They're going to be behind the cut.
So, I was participating in Top Ten Comic Book Characters I Hate day over on SeeBelow, an LJ community I frequent from time to time, when it occured to me: I usually hate the work of a creator much more than I hate individual comic book characters. I don't usually hate them as people... I don't much care one way or another about Rob Liefeld, for example, and as far as I'm concerned he'll live a happy and wealthy life continuing to suck all the joy and fun out of comic books with his dreadful writing and worse art... but I usually do find myself just hating absolutely everything they churn out. Sometimes, however, it's not the work I despise so much as the persona the creator adopts to 'sell' it: this would be the Warren Ellis/Mark Millar/Brian Bendis coterie of creators. (Okay, so I'm not fond of their work, either. But I don't think it's the insanely putrescent garbage of MacFarlane or Jim Balent.) Sometimes I hate a creator's work for how far it seems to have fallen or the negative impact it seems to have on others: Chris Claremont, I'm looking right at you here. John Byrne? Let us not even begin to go there, please. He actually manages to be more obnoxious than Rob Liefeld, Mark Millar and Dave Sim all by himself: that's some kind of talent, I admit.
I was just going to list a bunch of creators and go on about why I hated their work or their public persona (I don't pretend to know any of these guys well enough to hate them personally) but then I figured, well, why not open the floor? It's more interesting to see who you all cringe at. Whose name on a book makes your stomach turn? Who can turn the world off with their words? Does seeing the name Cary Bates on a book make you run away? (Not me, I love that guy, he was nuts.) I think we can see some of my biases here, what are yours?
And now, for the ten characters I hate.
Spawn
Has there ever been a shittier conception married to shittier writing and more tortured, overblown art in the history of comic books? Well, yes. We'll be getting to Rob Liefeld in a bit, I promise you. Anyway, Spawn. A former mercenary for the US Government who died and made a deal with the devil to come back to earth, only to find out that now he's a hamburger faced corpse in a magic costume with a weird odometer of power and when he uses it all up he goes back to hell and becomes a soldier in Hell's army. Oh, and angels with big tits are out to kill him. Yeah. This is the means by which Todd MacFarlane first stretched his black claw of sadomasochistic toy designs upon the world. I'm not kidding: that's the MacFarlane toys version of Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, and it's awful entirely because it's so goddamn boring, just like everything else to come out of the house that Spawn built. A character with, honestly, one of the more labored designs in comics, what really pisses me off about Spawn is, not only doesn't his creator bother to draw him anymore, I can't honestly think of anyone who can even remember reading the book in the last five years, and yet, there's still ten shitty Spawn toys coming out every year. It's like some kind of comic book VD at this point. "Oh, crap, my Spawn is flaring up again." Seriously, Todd? Let it die or get off your ass and draw it again. There's nothing less charming in all the universe than a comic book artist who stops drawing his comic to milk it for every last merchandising dollar, except when Warner Brothers forces it on you. (Yes, I'm talking about Siegel and Shuster here. No, Todd, Spawn still sucks.)
Batman
Actually, I like Batman. What I hate is the over the top Frank Miller parody that some writers turn in as Batman. Batman Year One? Awesome. A great story. Stop fucking copying it, you make Batman look like a psychotic asshole. I'm so glad Englehart and Rogers are back.
Cable
Well, I wanted to just slag off on Rob Liefeld in general, but this is Ten Comic Book Characters I hate day, not Dear God Why Do They Keep Letting Him Come Back day. While I could slag off on almost any character Rob ever created (Badrock? Shatterstar? Shaft? Avengelyne? Shaft? He actually named a white guy who's a rip off of Hawkeye and the Green Arrow after Richard Roundtree's groundbreaking character?) Cable seems to be the ne plus ultra of Rob's ouvre: a horrible, idiotic mishmash of cyborg parts and convoluted origin that makes the head hurt and the palms sweat, a literal walking avatar of bad ideas amalgamated in some sort of Frankensteinean collection of horror. From his painful origin (the time-displaced son of Cyclops and an evil clone of Jean Grey infected with a techno-organic virus by an immortal egyptian who wants to conquer the world, sent into the future to be taught how to control his powers by a time-spanning sect of psychics headed by his half-sister from an alternate timeline and returned to our time older than his own father, using a big gun to shoot things instead of his inherent psionic abilities for no readily apparent reason aside from it being cool to shoot things) to his Albert Pyun inspired character design... I mean, seriously, Cable is the gateway drug that draws you deeper into the madness of Youngblood, Agent America, the various big tit no spine comics he did... it all began with this cipher.
Venom
"Let's give Spider-Man an enemy with the same powers and one of his old costumes." "Okay, Todd." "And let's make it so he can't be detected by Spider-Sense." "Okay, that could work, makes him more challenging." "And let's make it so he eats brains." "Do you even read this comic?"
Not how it actually went, of course, and Venom didn't go around threatening to eat brains until later, but the seeds were sown the first time Todd realized he could draw a huge, slobbering maw on the character. Man, I hate Venom. First off, Eddie Brock has the stupidest origin in all of villaindom: he was a reporter who wouldn't listen to Spider-Man and Daredevil and rushed to press with a story about the origin of a serial killer called the Sin Eater, only to be embarrassed when they caught the real killer later. So he swore vengeance against Spider-Man. Okay, so it's kind of stupid... I mean, lots of villains had dumber origins, I guess. I kind of hope Dan Rather is out there making a supervillain costume right now, I guess. He and Bobby Fisher. Anyway, so Eddie decides to gain unholy vengeance against Spidey for stopping a serial killer, and begins pumping iron... not sure why, as even an obscenely roided out investigative journalist isn't really the stuff of nightmares for a guy who can pick up a bus... when Jim Shooter and the Secret Wars left us one more present. Namely, an alien symbiote that Spider-Man had been wearing as a costume for a while, found out it was basically eating him slowly, got it off with the help of Reed Richards and really loud noises... look, you know what, if you want this lame-ass characters origin, go look it up yourself. My friend Jon and I disagree on whether or not Venom was ever really a credible villain... I always hated the guy... but we agree that he was even worse once they tried to make him a hero. Just freaking awful.
Morpheus, King of Dreams
I hate him. Some of the stories were good, mind, but the character? Really an insanely arrogant jackass, and don't give me that line about him being one of the Endless: his brother Destiny was ten billion times cooler and all he did was carry a big book around and confuse the hell out of people back in the 70's by making odd appearances in Justice League. I specifically hate Morpheus, and was glad when he died. You go, furies! Daniel I have no beef with, although I do think it's amusing that Hawkman's grandson is the master of dreams and the dreaming. I'd so love to see Thanksgiving at the Hall house: Grandpa's an endlessly reincarnating Egyptian prince, Dad's an absentee father who's holing up in a tower in Salem and getting into weird old magic, Mom's apeshit crazy, and the kid's an albino who rules dreams and talks in a scary bubble, and he has Starro as a necklace.
Hank Henshaw, the Cyborg
First off? Insanely unoriginal name. He's even worse than the Eradicator. Secondly? Mister Fantastic rip-off. Thirdly? His reason for hating Superman is, at best, that Supes didn't figure out to save him from the results of radiation poisoning that transformed him into an energy being and killed off his wife and the rest of the crew of his space shuttle... which is to say, from the perils of his own job. Why not do a story about an eeeeevil firefighter who hates Superman for saving babies from a burning building and thus allow him to get his face singed? We're now hating Superman for this crap? It's times like this that I long for the old days, when villains hated Superman because he accidentally made their hair fall out. When you add in the fact that Henshaw's powers are at best ill-defined (he seems to be able to jump into and control machines, and keeps making bodies with Superman's powers because he took over Superman's birthing matrix once or something, I don't want to remember anymore) and you have a villain who we really never need to see again.
Ninjas
Seriously, just goddamn stop raping Japan. Find another way to train your shadowy assassins. I'm not goddamn kidding here, comics, you've totally fucking ruined ninjas for us. It's impossible to take these guys seriously anymore, when every damn comic book in the universe displays them getting their asses kicked by evey superhero in existence. Yes, even the superheroes who are themselves ninjas. Seriously, let it go. Take some time off from the ninjas, we'll all be happier.
Wolverine
I can't even stop once I get started on how much I hate Wolverine. I actually liked him in his original appearances as a Canadian so crazy he'd fight the Hulk and the Wendigo for no other reason than that it was his job. Since then, we've lacquered on so many different layers of moronic ideas (He's a samurai! He's really old! He has bone claws! He's Sabertooth's son/brother/father/we're not sure! He has implanted memories! He's a crime lord in a country named after a really excellent novel series and we should be ashamed of ourselves for impuginging them! He's hitting on Spider-Man's wife!) that I've gone beyond hating the guy and actually hate the very idea that he might appear in a comic book: just knowing that Wolverine has been attached to a book makes me like that book less. Also, he's a homicidal maniac who stabs people in a grim, humorless, monotonously repetitive way. And man, if I hear that he's the best there is at what he does one more time, I'm going to pray someone jams the ebony blade through his heart and kills him for good. I haven't even mentioned my theory about how Wolverine is Claremont's Mary Sue. Ask me about that sometime.
The Anti-Monitor
Okay, this one's on here because, frankly, the Anti-Monitor is the single most colorless villain ever. He sucks so hard, he gets upstaged by Luthor and Brainiac in his own limited series, and that's even taking into account that the guy has whittled an infinite series of universes down to five. He's just awful: an uninspired design by George Perez, who usually kicks so much ass he should be in a Jet Li film, and Marv Wolfman didn't even bother to give the guy any sort of personality or motivation for eating the universes aside from naked lust for power, which is really boring: even Stan and Jack knew that making Galactus into a viable villain meant giving him some sort of grandeur, and a motivation more complex than because I can, ultimately. (Granted, Galactus' motivation is because I must, but it's still better.) I love Crisis, but it's in spite of the Anti-Monitor, not because of him.
Vartox
He's Sean Connery. From Zardoz. In a Superman comic. I'm not kidding. Now, I'll admit to having a touch of fondness for the big V, the same way I often wonder if Terra-Man was inspired by Cary Bates watching Midnight Cowboy, but every story Vartox appeared in was worse than the last: Vartox gets space senility, Vartox falls in love with Lana Lang but his dead girlfriend tries to kill them both, Vartox puts the moves on Superman (seriously, the dialogue is as laced with homoeroticism as you'd expect from a guy in hot pants and thigh high boots) and what's worse, Dan Jurgens didn't have the sense God gave a lemming with a razor blade and brought Vartox back as a hardass reluctantly serving Braniac. Look, if you're going to bring a ripoff of Sean Connery back, you don't obscure the Zardoz connection, you play it up! So I guess I don't hate the original Vartox, but lord, I hate the retread.
Posted by Matt Rossi at May 20, 2005 4:17 PM
David Michelinie has said for years that he was Venom's sole creator, and that Web of Spider-Man #18, where Peter is shoved on to railroad tracks and his Spider-Sense doesn't pick it up, is the character's first appearance. That said, Michelinie originally intended it to be a woman, and that Jim Salicrup made him change the gender. All the design elements, however, came from McFarlane.
I was reading Spider-Man Visionaries today and while I think Michelinie did a generally good job w/Spidey, Venom comes off as far sillier than I remember (and Spidey's way of taking him down is, well, couldn't he have just grabbed onto a ledge or something instead of shooting webs for Spidey to slice away?). It's saying something that both Daniel Way and Mark Millar have used Eddie Brock as little as possible.
I haven't read those original Venom stories since they came out, but I remember the character being a pretty decent villain. Now, I don't think he's as awesome kewl as some people think -- I certainly don't think he "deserves" to be the villain in the next Spider-Man movie -- but I think he was a pretty good addition to the Spider-Man mythos.
Now, once he became really popular and they started giving him his own spin-off characters (Carnage? You really thought that was a good idea, Marvel?) and trying to make him an anti-hero, the car had clearly gone way off the rails. But as the "anti-Spider-Man?" A great concept.
Does your theory about how Wolverine is Chris Claremont's "Mary Sue" take into account Claremont's deep disgust that Marveldom Assembled didn't clamor for his avatar to be given its own series after its "pivotal" appearance in Man-Thing Vol. 2, #11?
Even Byrne didn't write himself that much into the proceedings of "The Trial of Reed Richards"....
You've touched on most of the big-name, cringe-inducing comic book creators I can think of, though I would quibble about Byrne's inclusion only to say that his latest stuff doesn't inspire me to cringe so much as it does to shrug. That's really a semantic difference, since I'm still not buying Doom Patrol or Generations 996 or whatever other lame-ass project he's doing these days.
Most of the second-tier cringe-masters I know of started out okay or even good, but grew steadily worse: Tom DeFalco (I actually liked his fill-ins for Marvel Team-Up and his run on Amazing Spider-Man, but he lost it on Thor; the less said about his run on the FF, the better), J.M. DeMatteis, Jim Starlin (seriously, how many times is he gonna write about some loser becoming God, becoming "cosmically aware" -- or "one with the universe" -- and/or destroying the universe? and praise Hwang-Ti that Starlin didn't keep drawing Master of Kung Fu past #17...), Bill Mantlo from 1982-onwards, Jim Shooter from the Secret Wars onwards, Roy Thomas from his stint on West Coast Avengers onwards, and Ann Nocenti (whose work I never liked, what little of it I read; I mean, what, her big brainstorms were Longshot, subsequently the lamest X-Men member ever -- he makes Gambit and Bishop look like Galactus and Dr. Doom -- and Mephisto's kid, Blackheart, Blackheads, Black Betty, Black Ball Callahan, whatever the hell his name was; Mephisto's kid?!).
I'm not as familiar with DC's bullpen, but I have to say that you'd pretty much have to pay me to read a comic written by Rachel Pollack or Rick Veitch.
To each their own, but Veitch's wrongfully aborted Swamp Thing run is widely regarded as the best the character had after Alan Moore. Moments of that run, especially the time travel arc, rank among the best comics DC put out in the late 80s, and that's saying something.
I highly recommend that everybody run out and buy the latest Swamp Thing trade paperbacks, which have begun reprinting the Veitch issues. Hopefully when they get up to the time travel arc they'll print the original ending; if not, I highly recommend that everybody grab the nearest torch and/or pitchfork and storm the DC offices.
Why not do a story about an eeeeevil firefighter who hates Superman for saving babies from a burning building and thus allow him to get his face singed? We're now hating Superman for this crap?
Matt, the greatest Superman villain ever hated Superman for allowing him to get his head singed...
I haven't even mentioned my theory about how Wolverine is Claremont's Mary Sue.
Closer to Byrne's, from what I've heard.
Differing opinion: Balent may be infamous for swiping Playboy pinups and drawing circular-template breasts larger than his characters' heads, but when he was on Catwoman, I felt that he told the story competently, a skill in a comic book artist that deserves praise for its rarity.
I haven't read any of his more recent, more wankish books, however.
Longshot was incredibly lame in X-Men, but I liked him just fine in his own miniseries.
I am feeling a lot of hate for Hush, mostly because he seems more like a framing device than an actual villain, and yet he's being set up as a master crime lord when he could be making scads more money as a surgeon.
Nothing about him makes sense. His costume is homemade, except for the Nick Fury jumpsuit with the little "H" logo, and it goes with neither his nom de guerre nor his m.o. Speaking of which, there's nothing wrong with his voice and he doesn't use a sound-based motif, so why "Hush" as a name?
His identity as the Master Villain was telegraphed so blatantly I thought it must have been a red herring. He hates Batman because Thomas Wayne couldn't save his mother's life, so his motivation for hating Batman is only marginally better than the Cyborg Superman's. He knows Batman's secret identity and is doing next to nothing to exploit that. He somehow managed to beat up the Joker and emasculate Prometheus, both of which are much cooler villains. This is the guy so big it took Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee to introduce, and so important he's a major player in a regular Bat-book (Gotham Knights)? Ye gods.
The sooner Black Mask takes him out, the better.
Only DC stuff of Rick Veitch I've read is the new Aquaman; I finally bailed around #8 or so.
Can't say I much liked Tom Veitch's work on Animal Man either, though.
For some reason, comics attract the type of writer who overrates their own abilities vastly and is incredibly self important about it; Tom Veitch is one example.
(Others: James Hudnall, John Byrne, Ann Nocenti)
I've interviewed Ann Nocenti, Martin, and she never came off as self-important to me. Of course, I love her work and it meant a lot to me when I was a kid.
Tom Veitch, on the other hand, Geez. His self-important fuck you to the readers in Animal Man #50- did he not realize that more often than not he'd jump around in his story, whipsawing the reader around and seemingly forgetting about one plot line before starting another? That he made all the characters unlikable gits? That Steve Dillon's talents were wasted more often than not? That his parody of the Punisher was limp wristed and out of place?
Tom Peyer's wormy, milquetoast defense of the insults he made about fans that Veitch quoted also put me off his writing forever; not that Peyer's own solo scripting didn't do that already.