How Low Can You Go? – Amanda’s Picks For The Comic Book Low Points Of 2012

2012 is firmly at our backs. Congratulations, everyone. We made it.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but we had some real time encounters with abject, stinking failure in 2012 that make me all the more grateful to move on and away from it. From the weird decision to fire and then almost immediately rehire Gail Simone, to the baffling continued employment of Greg Land, to the need for some high profile comics creators to make odd and unnecessary comments about Batman’s sexuality because they can’t seem to stop giving Playboy interviews while in the thrall of a mescaline bender, there was plenty to color the comics enjoyment experience last year. And, after all the dust settled from the complaints of former employees about creator rights and other assorted Twitter bitching, sometimes, just sometimes, there were the comics themselves that were the problem.

Here are my picks for the top five comic book disappointments of 2012, after the jump.

Up first, Anthony Bourdain’s Get Jiro. Bourdain turns in an over-hyped graphic novel that borrows liberally from A Fistful Of Dollars. The artwork by Langdon Foss is vivid and full of interesting little pieces of side business, but appears to borrow heavily from Geof Darrow and Darick Robertson style wise. Ultimately, the story, which tries to convey the need to appreciate good food, well prepared, gets bogged down too heavily in Bourdain’s need to shit on food tourists, who he feels are unappreciative boors. Tony, these food tourists are the same poor souls who packed your SDCC panel to listen to you tell them that the best place to eat in San Diego was…Mexico. Don’t shit where you eat, man.

As Rob pointed out back in March, with issues 6 through 10 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 9 Andrew Chambliss had a really excellent opportunity to explore the ramifications of Buffy going through with either a pregnancy or an abortion – big, real world issues that many young, unmarried women, some of whom read the comic, go through every day. Instead, he decided in issue #7 that it’d be easier to cop out and have it turn out that Buffy was really a lookalike robot of same. Way to go Chambliss – you get to have the bot pick abortion, but also get to have the luxury of telling those disappointed with your choice that it wasn’t the real Buffy, so it didn’t count. Really brave storytelling there. This arc undermined what had been a promising relaunch in Season 9, in which stories had been returning to more personal and universal themes. At this time, the series still hasn’t quite yet recovered its footing.

Back in September, I titled my review of Catwoman #0, “Ann Nocenti, Are You Fucking Kidding Me?” – and that pretty much says it all. After the piss poor treatment that Selina Kyle had suffered at the hands of Judd Winick, my hopes were high that the woman who’d created Typhoid Mary for the Daredevil franchise could work her magic to overhaul the Batman slash fic into which Catwoman had descended. No such luck. Instead, readers were treated to a lukewarm story that ends with a liberal lifting of the “feral cats lick Selina back to life” foolishness from Batman Returns. Readers are left insulted and $2.99 poorer for their effort to read the book.

Speaking of lukewarm, Wolverine #310, as well as follow-up issue #311, are spoiled good wrapped up in pretty paper. Simone Bianchi turns in some beautiful artwork in this tale of Sabretooth’s return to the Marvel Universe. It’s too bad that Jeph Loeb’s accompanying story lacked any surprises or emotional impact. Wolverine teams up with a hot red head ninja babe to investigate, yet again, the Weapon X facility in Canada. Oh, is it Tuesday again? These issues also see the return of villain Romulus, he of the fake claws and even more fake hair. Positing the idea that Wolverine himself might have been the mastermind behind the Weapon X experiments, the story lacked originality and took itself entirely too seriously.

Finally, topping my list for 2012 – comic book event fatigue. While both DC and Marvel are guilty parties here, Marvel feels like the bigger offender, primarily for finding excuses to drag out events and milk them for all they are worth before storylines then roll right into the next event and the one after that. While it’s certainly not anything new, by about this past February, I really found myself just numb past the point of caring as Fear Itself, which had already come entirely too quickly on their heels of Dark Reign (and Secret Invasion and Civil War before that even), morphed for no particular reason into The Fearless, which, seemed to have no kind of purpose to propel storylines forward that couldn’t have been explored by individual writers in their own titles, as deemed necessary or appropriate by the creative teams. I found it telling in July when very few writers showed up at panels for Avengers Vs. X-Men. Instead, these panels primarily served to let Joe Quesada and Arune Singh cheer lead for their “summer blockbusters” and left what plot explanation there was up to editors. If a primary complaint from those writers leaving DC and Marvel these days is editorial interference, one had to look no further than the Marvel panels in July to see it in action – all the more reason to maybe take a break from the Big Two and check out some small press instead.

So, there you have it – my disappointments for 2012. Will 2013 offer any solutions? Who knows. AVX rolled on into Avengers Vs. X-Men: Consequences. I couldn’t bring myself to read it. I have yet to crack a binding on any of the Marvel Now! books, save the new Deadpool (which was a great story when I saw it as a Scooby Doo episode in the 70s). Even with DC, for every Death Of The Family there’s some other event that could all too easily morph into Final Crisis or Flashpoint. I expect all the titles I follow will have their moments over the course of the next year, both good and bad. That’s to be expected. But, I’m numb to sweeping events and editorial story gimmicks at this stage of my readership. If Marvel and DC don’t want my money, I’ll find other publishers and creators who do in 2013.