Rant Post: What Event/Retcon/Whatever Pissed You Off the Most?

[punishermax]

This is an extension of the Identity Crisis conversation that is sort of derailing the discussion of costume choices and Robin asses in a post below this.

Essentially, this is a general hate thread. It can be an event, character, moment, retcon, or other annoyance that makes you annoyed or want to smack a passerby.

Let's get it started (on a saturday night, everybody's waitin for me to arrive-)



"Hi I'm Superboy Prime. I could have been an interesting character. I could have represented the eventual death and decay of a more innocent time and become a very powerful and interesting villain. But motherfucker I do not roll that way. I like to spend my days being a whiny prick who spouts off dialogue that you'd find in a Naruto/Harry Potter fanfic. I like long walks on the beach, being a dickbag, and annoying every single reader by being ultra powerful AND astonishingly badly written. Oh, and I'm also in your dimension! I live in my basement trolling comics forums. Hell yeah bitches, I'm so. fucking. Bad. Ass."




Let's just get it out of the way. One More Day and Brand New Day were bad ideas. Very bad ideas. They have turned out waves of people who hate Spider-Man and everything associated with him. They were badly written, badly thought out and are just generally the worst thing to happen to Spider-Man since Joe Quesada realized he hated that dang MJ lady.


Also Identity Crisis isn't that bad.

Comments

[juliet316]

*snerks at the Gobblly Gooker and the text on the cut.

[punishermax]

For those who don't know: Katie Vick was a terrible wrestling storyline where the wrestler Kane was given a back story wherein he had a girlfriend named Katie Vick.

The bad guy HHH decided to mess with him by reminding him of her and making reference to Kane bring the one to kill her ( she died in a car wreck).

It was fucking boring and awful and culminated in the single worst moment in wrestling history.

HHH showed a video on Raw. The video consisted of him, dressed as Kane, going to a funeral wake. He goes to a coffin that he claims is occupied by Katie, gets in, and proceeds to HAVE SEX WITH A CORPSE.

It's beyond words. It actually silenced the entire assembled arena crowd and the commentators by the sheer horror.

The scene ends with HHH reaching into the coffin, retrieving a handful of what looks like oatmeal and saying (I swear to God I am not making this up)

"I did it. I actually SCREWED YOUR BRAINS OUT!" and throws it at the camera.

Ladies and Gentlemen: Wrestling.

[hyperactivator]

I want to hate sectret invasion but it is spared by the God Squad.

I do hate the fact that Mayday Parker was retconed out of 616.

[seriousfic]

I feel more like 616 was retconned out of Spider-Girl.

[perletwo]

You've hit the biggies, so let me just add some runners-up.

CRY for JUSTIIIIIIIIICCCCCCCCCCEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!! and the subsequent deconstruction of Roy Harper.

And the similar deconstruction of Jason Todd from antihero to out-and-out psychobaddie on the Szasz scale - especially with the fillip that he's been a closet ginger all along (?!?).

[punishermax]

Roy Harper's entire fall from grace really since it involved him having creepy rape sex with Jade or whoever after he beat her with a stapler and then him becoming some boring ass Punisher hybrid.

[okkult3000]

"Also Identity Crisis isn't that bad."

You're right. It was worse.

[punishermax]

I've said it before: I'm looking through rose tinted glasses most likely because it was my reintroduction to comics, but I really enjoyed it as a mystery story and character driven arc.

I liked the idea of a dark secret that tarnishes the old and wonderful JLA past. I liked the entire mindwipe idea. I just really liked the whole thing except for the asspull ending.

[fifthie]

Identity Crisis, a terrible comic that initated an entire era of terrible comics. A collection of bad ideas, badly written, with everything subsequently derived from them being exactly as terrible as they should have been.

[fifthie]

It was barely even a story, it was a series of editorial dictates "We need a rape, Tim Drakes dad needs to die, make Deathstroke look badazz, make the heroes do something really stupid and out of character so they can all hate each other, etc etc etc" tied together by nothing much aside from its crushingly self-important WE ARE BEING SOMBER AND SERIOUS BECAUSE THIS ARE A SERIOUS COMICS STORY tone.

[freezer]

I have two choices: For Crisis Crossover-type events: M-Day. Not only for what it did to Wanda or any number of B-list mutants, but because it killed the whole "mutant subculture" meta-plot in the X-Books. And that helped reignite the long-past-played out "Mutant Hysteria" angle.

For single character WTF: The Wasp's short-lived Insectoid form, which was mercifully wiped out by Heroes Reborn. I wish I could find some scans of that. The pain stupid needs to be shared.

Found one! (Reposting!)

[freezer]

Behold the new and improved Janet Van Dyne:

[halialkers]

Countdown.

[perletwo]

I felt that way about Countdown at the time. I had no idea then that the one or two moments of sublime crack, like Jokester and Black Mary THWAPping Donna with Kyle, I'd eventually as wee oases of wacky in comparison to unrelievedly grim Events like Final Crisis and Cry for Justice. By the time the shit went down in Star City, I was longing for the good ole days of Countdown.

[kd_the_movie]

Flash FUCKING REBIRTH.

Dan Didio and Geoff Johns fuck up the Flash franchise and try to fix it by bringing back the one predecessor that no one missed and was sanctified by having the most heroic death in comics (plus Barry IMO became the poster boy for the Silver Age and the "old days").

Wally was pretty much universally liked, his run sold well and, during said run, The Flash franchise and characters actually became solid pillars in the DCU. It's in my opinion that Wally has the best coming of age storyline in all of comics. And all that thrown away when they sidelined Wally.

But wait it gets better! Not only is Wally is reduced to 2nd Banana, but apparently Barry is THE FUCKING GREATEST SUPERHERO OF ALL GODDAMN TIME AND the generator of a extradimensional energy source that powers all speeders that have and will ever exist. And he and his wife don't look a day over 26.

[kd_the_movie]

Oh yeah FORGOT: "Y'know all those cool characters introduced during Wally's run like Savitar, Zoom, Boomer? Yeah well they're not BARRY'S ROGUES so fuck them with a ten foot pole, they're being killed/sidelined/character assassinated."


And to add to events I hated: Secret Invasion sucked balls. God Squad (to paraphrase a poster from SD 1.0, "AFAIC Secret Invasion ended when Herc killed Kly'bn" )Thor: Secret Invasion, War Machine, and Secret Invasion: Inhumans were the only gthings to come out of it.

Hated Final Crisis as well. Legion of 3 Worlds and Rogue's Revenge are cool in my book ('cept hunter getting fucked over). Morrison wrote a story only he could intially decipher appreciate, hence why it got ignored by the rest of DC.

House of M was a bunch of standing around with decent Oliver Coipel art.

OK. Done. Had to get that all of my chest.

[big_daddy_d]

Also Identity Crisis isn't that bad.

I will partially concur..it's just..what happened to Sue Dibny...she was already dead..we didn't need rape nor was it necessary and it especially didn't need to be shown on panel. That story made me uncomfortable when it came to Dr. Light on a scale that I feared for any woman that shared a panel with him in a book. The whole mind wipe thing could've easily been down without it. I mean in the book they mention how there was a time when the Secret society of Villains switched bodies with the JLAers and learned their secret identities by simply looking in a mirror and removing the masks. THERE! That's all that was needed. But they just had to take that extra step. So it's that one thing that ruins the book, let alone to actually enjoy it.

[big_daddy_d]

*done. Damn typo.

[kirayoshi]

Since OMD/OMIT/SSDD was already taken, I'd go with the second most screwed up way of writing off a marriage in comic book history; undoing Johnny Storm's marriage to Alicia Masters by revealing that she was a Skrull all along! Why was this stupid? Let me count the ways!

1) Johnny and Alicia, IMO, made a believable couple. John Byrne recognized that Alicia's releationship with Ben Grimm was reaching a dead end, so he tried something different and it worked. Later writers undoing it in such a ham-handed way was just painful.

2) It's been done before. Remember when Colossal Boy married Shrinking Violet in Legion of Super Heroes, only to find out that she was a Durlan? And he decided to let the marriage stand? And Vi herself became a badass after her liberation? The whole thing was done before and better years ago.

3) This story began the long hard decline for the Fantastic Four. After this came Sue's peek-a-boo top, Reed's "death"(he got better), Ben getting his face carved up by Wolverine, and a slue of other 90s-era "fixes" that just made long-time FF fans see red. It took Mark Waid to pull them out of it.

4) Thanks to this story, Alicia Masters, once the most prominent supporting player in FF, is all but a non-entity in the MU these days. She did a cameo post-Secret Invasion, but seriously, what have they done for her lately?

[cleome45]

Yup. It's kind of sad when you're sitting there thinking, "Couldn't one of them just have been caught cheating with a super-villain or something, followed by divorce and maybe a big fistfight over Reno during rush hour? That would've been much more tasteful."

:/ [sigh]

[terrykun]

I hate that Owen Mercer was simplified to a kids and women murdering man-child in Blackest Night. >:(

[superfangirl1]

What? Really? :(

[northstarfan]

The Draco. Talk about missing the entire fucking point.

Also, Northstar's homophobic zombie-dad.

And...

You know what? Let's just say Chuck Austen's entire stinkin' run on X-Men, how's that?

[neuhallidae]

Chuck Austen's runs on everything in Marvel. But the exploding communion wafers the most.

[benicio127]

Other than Jason Todd being retconned to have red hair, and C4J, Nightwing Brothers in Blood and Battle for the Cowl were some terrible events, too.

Identity Crisis was ....ugh, I really didn't like it. The rape of Sue Dibny was bad enough, but the part that hurt me the most was Ralph saying "I hope she fought hard." To me, that feels less like "I hope she got a few kicks in" and more like "I hope she didn't just let it happen to her, I hope that she wasn't passive in the whole affair." As a woman who has been sexually assaulted, I find that to be really demeaning and that's really just how I read it. So I really don't know if I can have Identity Crisis on my shelf because of that.

[kd_the_movie]

Ahh Battle For The Cowl or "HEY GUYS DICK!BATMAN NEEDS A NEMESIS!! LETS FUCK OVER JASON TODD!!!"

[leikomgwtfbbq]

Identity Crisis. One More Day and all it has spawned (at this point, anything they do to attempt legitimizing it is just digging themselves deeper...) Cry for Justice. Countdown to Final Crisis. Final Crisis. M-Day.

Sometimes these events seem like interesting ideas (Black Mary Marvel could've been cool as hell) but often turn out sort of terrible in execution.

[jaybee3]

I motto the Superboy-Prime example, he could have been a vilian with pathos and sympathy but no he's just a one-note hateful brat.

For me there are too many to note. Top of the list goes to:

From DC: Identity Crisis - superheroes being douches and lying about it for years, Superman knowing about it but never saying anything and looking the other way, Sue Dibny being retro-actively raped, Batman being retrocactively mind-wiped by his friend, who covered it up and lied about it for years and only admitted it not because they felt actively guilty but because Dr. McRapey Rape showed their mind whammy was being uncovered. And then DC uses it to explain away why they have Batman acting like a dick to everyone.

From Marvel: OMD. Stop. Need I say more. Other people have gone into better rants about making their companies number #1 money maker and most visible hero into someone who makes deals with the devil and then turning into a bedhopping selfish douche all because some people apparently thing marriage "ages" people and divorce would make them look bad (but apparently making deals with the devil doesn't?).

Runners-Up:
1.Rogue sleeping with Sentry (apparently) although it would be 100% out of character and with the fact she lost her virginity (in canon) to Gambit after Sentry was married makes no sense chronologically and if it did would make Rogue look like a terrible hypocrite.

2.Cassandra Cain's behavior explained away simply by handwaving Deathstroke magic evil juice which apparently turns dyslexic near silent characters with a horror of killing into a Asian Dragon Lady stereotype who makes long James Bond villan speeches, enjoys killing and now can speak and write fluent Navajo. I give credit for Johns for trying to explain away Beechan's mess but it was a sloppy job.

3. Sam Lane, goes from a gruff veteran who really loves his daughter to a one-dimensional xenophobic genocidal maniac villain worse than Marvel's Thunderbolt Ross (and apparently now, according to Geoff Johns's new Superman Origins, was apparently that way from the beginning.

4. Speaking of General Ross, Loeb's entire backstory for the Red Hulk business, including new Red She-Hulk Betty. Give me a break.

5. Jason Todd was raised not by Ra's or some Bat-villain but by Superboy-Boy Prime punching a wall, something no one else in the DCU (including Jason) is aware of happening. What's the point then?

[kd_the_movie]

man everytime I think i've remembered every retcon i hate, i get reminded of another one...

yeah i hated the Sam Lane retcon as well. And the "Lex lived in Smallville as a kid!!!" retcon. With. A. Passion. Plus a few minor retcons in Superman: Secret Origin.

[crabby_lioness]

So many choices, so little time....

Jean Grey's rebirth? No.

Carol Danvers' rape and marriage to her rapist? No.

I'll go with John Byrne's destruction of the Scarlett Witch's children, marriage and sanity in the West Coast Avengers, leading to the Avengers wiping her memory of the happiest years of her life. It was handled badly, and so psychologically unbelievable that Avengers Disassembled actually makes sense in comparison. I hated this event so much I stopped reading Marvel comics altogether for OVER FIFTEEN YEARS in protest, until Bendis finally addressed it in a halfway appropriate manner.

[timgueugen]

Jean Grey's original rebirth is the prototype for so many of the things mentioned above. It took away the impact of a major X Men storyline. More importantly it set the tone for Cyclops that remains to this day, making him into a selfish and immature jerk who abandoned his wife and child. Marvel then added to the problens by using a gambit common in bad fanfiction, making the "other woman" evil, hence giving a supposed justification for Scott leaving her. Of course this being a superhero comic they made Madelyne Pyror into a clone of Jean's created by Mister Sinister as part of his nefarious plot to breed a Summers baby for his own ends, said clone going crazy and becoming an evil demon woman. (Given how many supposed Summers family members have turned up over the years he didn't need to go to the trouble. All he had to do is wait on the local street corner long enough and one would turn up.)

[starwolf_oakley]

Also Identity Crisis isn't that bad.

Maybe it isn't *that* bad, but it still turned Green Arrow into a character who believes "Doing an immoral thing so a moral person won't have to do it makes me more moral than the moral person." First with Mindwipe Inc., then with killing Prometheus so Roy wouldn't have to.

[ajremix.livejournal.com]

I'm motto-ing the Superboy Prime and Identity Crisis. They COULD have been great ideas, but the execution was just TERRIBLE. With IC, though, I don't think I could ever like it because of what was done to Sue as it came from friggin' NOWHERE and there is no place in previous canon to back it up. I'm also so tempted to add in Max's Face Heel Turn if it weren't for the fact he's become an interesting villain.

Also Cass's character derailment. Just... ugh- so much terrible done to one of my favorite characters it just makes my stomach turn thinking about it.

A pet peeve thing that just really annoys the hell outta me is DC's sudden push to make Barbara Gordon the love of Ted Kord's life. I think those two are adorable, I really do, and if it weren't for Dick and Booster, they would absolutely be my OTP. But the fact is, both Ted and Babs wanted, at the same time, to just be friends and the fact that Ted had a love interest in his own solo series that he wanted to marry kinda makes his not-relationship with Barbara far less serious. But this one-sided love thing that's suddenly cropping up? It diminishes their friendship and Ted's character but essentially making him the loser forever chasing after someone he'll never get. Just... stop ret-conning people's relationships, DC. PERIOD.

[jaybee3]

You're right about the Ted Kord thing. I hadn't thought about it. But not only did ALMOST everyone in the DCU take a crap on him during the Infinite Crisis issue (where no would believe him, help him) and not only was she shot in the head and then his body incinerated into nothing on the orders of someone he trusted but he never got with the "love of his life" (according to Booster) because she was more interested in the hunkier younger man that every other DCU woman also drools over rather than him - aka one of the most brilliant minds in the whole super-hero community and a self-made multi-millionaire?

Could DC done more to make Ted seem like a loser?

[silverzeo]

Wouldn't it be easier to ask about Retcons that people like? IE: Spoiler never really died and her "death" was really staged...

[neuhallidae]

To paraphrase a couple of review lines from Roger Ebert and apply it to Civil War... ::ahem::

I hated this event. Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this event. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it.

And now my part.

This could have made sense. This could have been a good arc. The questions of how much heroes should be held accountable and how far the government should go in regulating it are very interesting.

But this arc was shit. Idiot Balls abounded, no one on the writing staff could get their shit together, none of the comics were cohesive to one another in any remote sense, be it characterization or plot, and the overall effect was a complete load of crap. As I said in another post, the only shining moment in this was Hercules beating the utter tar out of the clone Thor. That's it. There is absolutely nothing else in this arc that I didn't loathe utterly.

[http://www.google.com/profiles/NielJacoby]

I liked the C&D Civil War tiein.

Excellent Idea!

[ian_karkull]

We should have one of these posts every two weeks or so, just to get all the accumulated wank out of everyone's system.

That being said, I'm trying really hard not to get violently annoyed by the harebrained effort of "humanizing" Superman by having him walk around and be a sanctimonius dickhead to literally everyone he meets.
You think Superman needs to be humanized? Dude, you've clearly got no business writing Superman in the first place then. Even if he did, it's not going to happen by you stepping on your soapbox and delivering some thinly-veiled "Here's What's Wrong With People These Days" speeches.
Man, I swear JMS used to be good. I can't have been drunk the entire time in my teenage years, can I? Maybe he was, it would certainly explain the Bizarro-like shift in quality.

Also, how fucking long are all those Brightest Day shenanigans supposed to be going on exactly? I thought it was just supposed to be some Limited Series but it just keeps going on and on and absolutely. nothing. happens!
Go here. Eat a cheeseburger. Now go there. I'm on a Boat. Here's another half-assed attempt at fixing Hawkman (yet again!). Have a gruseome murder or two, to lighten things up a bit. Now for some more cryptic nonsense involving incedental characters nobody cares about. Let's pause our barely existent plot for a few hours of aimless angsting and pointless brooding. What a masterpiece!
Abe Simpsons senile ramblings have more coherence and significance than this sad excuse for a comic.

Re: Excellent Idea!

[darkblade]

"Man, I swear JMS used to be good. I can't have been drunk the entire time in my teenage years, can I? Maybe he was, it would certainly explain the Bizarro-like shift in quality."

He did do an amazing Thor run shortly before screwing up Wonder Woman and Superman.

I can't recall where I read it (probably here somewhere) but someone said that it seems like JMS has lots of ideas but he can't distinguish between his good ones and his bad ones.

[big_daddy_d]

There's an issue I have with comics, especially today. And that's how they just..throw the word rape around like douchebag online gamers. For what purpose? WHAT?! It's so fucking stupid and wrong. I can enjoy a good dark story, but come on, if you're gonna just..throw it in there, at least be mature about it. Don't throw it in for shock value. And don't peddle afterwords, saying how you drew on an experience or want people to feel something or the other political bullshit answers. No. Stop putting it in! Hell stop with the shock value period if you're not even gonna use it correctly!

Let's run down the list:
Carol Danvers - ...I really don't want to go there but seriously..how the fuck did the Avengers just let that happen?! She should've fuckin laid into them and left the team.

Mockingbird - I'm usually a Hawkeye fan but god...lowest point. People talk about Ollie and Dinah but at least if this were to happen to her, he'd kill the mother fucker (I choose to believe she was just tortured in Long Bow Hunters), he wouldn't fuckin side with the rapist! I mean good god, based on that alone, I question why is she with him now?

Sue Dibny - NOT NEEDED! UNNECESSARY! I went on about this in a comment above, but again, if they wanted to go with the mind wipe angle, they could've easily have gone with the JLA, Secret Society body switch that was brought up. Plus again, when it came to Dr. Light, it makes me uncomfortable when he was with any woman on page and made me fear for them and he was too damn powerful to be a rapist..just..come on DC! Oh and let's not forget when he took the other Dr. Light's power and the convo he had with Green Arrow where he pretty much says "I rape. It's what I do." Glad he's dead and I don't have to worry about the women anymore... I hope.

Black Cat - Now this is something I also found out about...Marvel...wtf?..Really?

Sara Pezzini/Witchblade - I liked First Born but...we all know how she ended up pregnant..I rather they at least did like a virgin mary type deal or something..because..i cringe.

So anyway...you creators..Marvel..DC..whoever. If you read these things....I got a message for you. STOP WITH THE SHOCK! if you're going to put rape in a story, at least be mature enough to handle it with some hint of taste, and not throw it in for the sake of it. Stop darkening up your books for the hell of it. STOP! STOP IT NOW!

[neuhallidae]

She should've fuckin laid into them and left the team.

She did.

[geoffsebesta]

Identity Crisis is well-produced CRAP CRAP CRAP CRAP.

*ahem* In my reasonable opinion that is.

Superboy Prime had some interesting moments but they're all behind us now.

I don't think OMD/BND/OMIT are bad executions, but they sure are bad ideas.

[darkblade]

BND wasn't that badly executed but the very fact that we needed OMIT to explain what happened in OMD shows they weren't well executed.

[stig]

ID Crisis worked tremendously well for mebecause I had a blissfully small knowledge of everything preceding it; I barely knew there WAS an Elongated Man, or Sue Dibny. The plot might have been sub-par, the shocks taken largely from Watchmen (and Kingdom Come - specifically the death of Firestorm), but the character building was excellent and the art-script relationship phenomenal. See also: the 'I've got you' page following Jack Drake's death.

So, yes, I liked it. Because I did not know or care about anything preceding or succeeding it. Nor do I now.

[inexpediency]

It doesn't exactly piss me off, but just because it was the first comic storyline I read that I really didn't like, I'll throw in Bruce Wayne: Fugitive. I just...didn't like it.

Another thing that annoys/disappoints me is the general treatment of Inertia after Mercury Falling. It disappoints me, mostly, because he had the potential to be such an interesting character and then he just...wasn't. I'm actually surprised DC ignored all the angst potential there, since they seem to think angst=instant character development (another thing that annoys me.)