It’s been over 50 years since Marvel effectively began the Silver
Age of comics, and while the company has had its ups and downs, their output
cannot be denied: Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four, the Avengers — their
contributions to pop culture have been enormous. But not every comic Marvel
published was a masterpiece — in fact, some aren’t even good. And some are so
bad that Marvel would like to pretend never existed at all. Here are 10 of
them.
1) U.S. #1
It only took five years after the success of the
cross-country truckin’ movie Smokey and
the Bandit for Marvel to capitalize on the hit movie by introducing Ulysses
S. Archer to the Marvel universe.
I assume most of that time was spent trying to figure out a way to
seamlessly add a super-powered truck driver alongside Spider-Man and Captain
America, until they just said “fuck it” and gave him a metal head that picked
up C.B. radio waves. Oh, and his brother was an evil trucker who called himself
the Highwayman, was given powers by aliens, and ended up crashing his truck
into the moon. Here’s how fondly Marvel loves U.S. #1: The Highwayman actually made an appearance in Ghost Rider a few years ago, while the
comic’s title character doesn’t even have an official bio page.
2) Avataars: Covenant
of the Shield
The Shaper of Worlds, the Living Tribunal, and a few other
Marvel divinities were bored one day when they decided to basically play Dungeons
& Dragons. Rather than pull out a bag of d20s, they created Eurth, a
fantasy version of Marvel Earth, where Captain Avalon and the Champions of the
Realm (a.k.a. the Avengers) ran around fighting bad medieval guys. This is the
sort of ridiculous idea that can either be great or terrible; since Avataars was planned to be a 12-issue
series and petered out at three, I assume you know how it ended up. It didn’t
help that when Marvel published it in 2000, it was already preposterously
broke. They shouldn’t have spent all that money putting an extra “A” in
“Avatars.”
3) Onyx: Fight
Was there any musical group more popular in the ’90s than
Onyx? Yes. There were many of them, actually. And yet Marvel chose to draw a
comic about the post-apocalyptic adventures of rappers Sticky Fingaz, Fredro
Starr and Sonsee as they fight aliens and bad guys in the ruins of New York
City, hang with “The Gurlz,” and rap, amidst a bevy of ebonics-laden narration
boxes. Against all odds, somehow Onyx’s fight lasted only a single issue.
4) Trouble
This 2005 comic is so aptly named it’s almost unfair. Marvel
tried to do two things with Trouble:
1) bring back romance comics, which hadn’t been popular since the ’50s, and 2)
re-jigger Spider-Man’s origin for… for some reason, I guess. They failed on
both counts, despite hiring noted romantic and purveyor of beauty Mark Millar
as writer. The comic was about Peter Parker’s parents, as well as Aunt May and
Uncle Ben, as teenagers who fucked a lot. Despite completely cornering the
“people who want to read about Aunt May having sex” market, the comic ended
after five issues.
5) Daydreamers
More like “Feverdreamers.” That’s the only way anyone would
think to team up Reed and Sue’s super-mutant son Franklin Richards, Howard the
Duck, Artie the mutant that talks in images, and Man-Thing together. The comic
took place after Onslaught basically killed most of Marvel’s heroes, including
Franklin’s parents; then he was sent to Xavier’s School for gifted children,
met up with this motley crew, and basically ended up in a virtual reality
created by Franklin’s mind (power-wise, Franklin makes Phoenix look like U.S.
#1), full of terrible, Marvel-esque parodies or The Wizard of Oz, Dr. Seuss, and more. It’s all an attempt by
Franklin’s head to accept his parents’ death, personified by a “Dark Hunter”
that keeps trying to kill everybody. Marvel thought they had a hit on their
hands when the Daydreamers came together in Generation
X, and gave the scamps their own series, which was immediately canceled
after issue #3.
6) NFL Superpro
Man, Marvel must have thought they’d hit a goldmine in 1991 when
they teamed up with the NFL to collaborate on a new football-themed superhero.
Kids loved superheroes. Tons of people loved pro football. How could NFL Superpro
not be a success? Because people who like football generally don’t give a shit
about comics, and vice versa, I suppose. It didn’t help that writer Fabian
Nicieza didn’t give a shit about the series either, fully admitting later that
he created the series solely to score free football tickets. Hilariously, the comics
market in 1991 was still so ridiculously strong that NFL Superpro made it 12 full issues before he was sacked, never to
return.
7) Marville
In 2002, Peter David and Bill Jemas had a bet to see which
of their series was more popular — David’s Captain
Marvel series, or Jemas’ comic industry parody series Marville. Eventually, new president Joe Quesada got in on the
action, championing new writer Ron Zimmerman’s Ultimate Adventures, but more on
that in a sec. Marvel put it to the fans with their “U-Decide” campaign, which
left the choice of which comic would survive in their hands. I assume they
thought the fans would vote for which comic would stay, but the fans actually
decided to take out the middleman and simply refused to buy Marville. Trying to summarize Marville
is trying to summarize shooting heroin directly into your adrenal gland;
suffice it to say it starred Kal-AOL Turner, son of media mogul Ted, Rush
Limbaugh, some odd thoughts on religion, Greg Horn’s preposterously terrible cheesecake covers (none worse than the one at the top of the page), and, most inexplicably, the
submissions guide to Marvel’s former creator-owned label, Epic. It is also about
500% less interesting than I’m making it sound.
8) Ultimate
Adventures
The sole Ultimate comic series that was not a reimagining
of regular Marvel characters, Ultimate
Adventures was the brainchild of Howard Stern writer Ron Zimmerman, who
took the chance to write about a Batman and Robin parody, where Batman was even
more psychotic than usual and Robin was unbearably obnoxious. It’s not the
world’s most clever idea, but it could be good if handled correctly; Zimmerman
didn’t, taking almost a year and a half to release six issues of the mediocre
comedy. Given that Zimmerman may have already been the most hated man in comics
at that point for his unpopular Spider-Man story about Kraven the Hunter’s son
being a Hollywood big-shot and his willingness to argue with fans on the
internet, Quesada’s championing of Zimmerman was basically just a huge fiasco
for him during his early days as EiC.
9) The Swimsuit
Issues
I don’t know for sure that Marvel is ashamed of the four different
“swimsuit issues” they published in the ’90s, but I feel they should be. I know drawing Jean Grey,
She-Hulk, Storm and the rest of Marvel’s superheroines in tiny swimsuits and
even more physically impossible sexy poses that they’re normally put in made
them some serious bank, but at what cost to their souls? I assume someone there
knew it was sketchy, because 1) they stopped making them in 1995, and 2)
they’ve never collected them. About the best thing you could say about them was
that the male superheroes also wore equally tiny, revealing, ridiculous
swimsuits. But if Marvel doesn’t feel ashamed of the swimsuits issues in general, then they still definitely need to be ashamed of the picture above.
10) Billy Ray Cyrus
In the ’90s, Marvel experimented with publishing comics of
popular musicians with their Marvel Music imprint. Most with reasonably
biographical, and then some were more out there, like the aforementioned Onyx: Fight. But nothing was more
ridiculous than the 48-page masterpiece of madness simply titled Billy Ray
Cyrus, which featured the country music star and future terrible father
traveling through time to fight ghosts, dragons, and evil knights, with nothing
but the greatest mullet that has ever been featured in the comics medium. I
assume Marvel is less than enthused to have written a comic where a country
music star meets Merlin and drags a random couple into basically doing a
frontier life LARP with him, but frankly, this comic should be celebrated for
the mullet’s sake, if nothing else.
