Comic Booked Awards – Worst of 2013

Another year has come and gone, my first here with Comic Booked, and it was a year full of great stuff. Ever since I started collecting comics back in the mid 1980’s, I have seen the comic book industry move in waves, ups and downs that marked major changes in the way that the world saw comics and in the way that comics impacted the world. This year was definitely one of the highest points I have experienced in comics. So many small press publishers have been able to get their comics out there through the internet. So many new artists and writers entered the comics world. And so many changes to the what those comic book worlds look like.

One of our other writers is tackling the best things from this year, and I leave him to it. We don’t need the Good. Bring on the Bad and the Ugly!

I wanted to spotlight what we saw as some of the low points of this last year, since we can’t have you leaving 2013 all happy and joyous about the state of the comics world. I asked each of our writers to contribute their “Bottom 5 Lists”, sort of the opposite of a David Letterman show, but shorter and hopefully funnier. So, without further adieu, Comic Booked Awards for the Worst of 2013.

Julien Loeper

Jeff Hill

Bottom 5 Writers of 2013:

1. John Layman
2. John Layman
3. John Layman
4. John Layman
5. John Layman

Bottom 5 Books of 2013:

1. Detective Comics
2. Chew
3. John Layman’s Twitter Feed
4. John Layman’s Facebook Page
5. John Layman’s Personal Emails/Threats

I sensed a little bitterness here, and after further research, I found this all stemmed from fallout over a review of the now infamous Dark Knight 23.3 during the “Forever Evil” launch with Clayface being the focus of the book.

Scorpio Moon

Most disappointing new series: Amazing X-Men – Jason Aaron had a chance to launch an exciting new series, and basically just created a clone of Wolverine and The X-Men, with less focus on the students. Pirate ships in heaven, is that really what you’re going with?

Most confusing visual art choice: to the team on X-Men: Legacy #17 – Usually an all around great book, but why go into beefcake mode for the fight? You know Cyclops’ nickname is “slim” right? Plus, you kind of made him look like Strong Bad here!

Hardest to follow publisher: DC – You’ve got Batman in Year Zero, the Justice League in 3000, and then your books become all about the villains. Couldn’t the New 52 reboot just have started at the beginning and actually made things easier on everyone?

Aaron Clutter

Through all of this I really just realized that I don’t read stuff I don’t like and if I don’t like it, I just stop buying it. There have been some failures this year, as with any year. New numbering from Marvel and Zero issues and Years from DC continue to make things irritating and hard to follow. I will say for books that I was disappointed in, Savage Wolverine ranked very high on that list. I loved the art, but the story was just so sad, I dropped it after just a few issues. I love Wolverine, but you only have like 3-4 issues to keep me in a series. This one failed.

As for other events, I found Infinity from Marvel a bit rushed and anticlimactic. Sort of like the whole Avengers Vs. X-men thing from last year, this crossover event just seemed like a way to get the Terrigen mists out and set things up for the next big event, “Inhumanity.” Even Age of Ultron was a flash in the pan series that really just served as a setup. “Oops, too much time travel, how do we fix this?”

That’s all the griping and complaining from us here at Comic Booked for this year. Believe me, stick around in the coming year and I am sure you will hear more. Please take this article in the spirit of fun and sarcasm with which it was written and have a happy New Year.