Record: Chuck Austen

Here it is, just the entry we could use, a little listing of some of the worst writing acts of a since forgotten hack writer whom both Marvel and DC had the gall to hire to write some of their most high profile books, how about that! Austen, as far as I know, was an animation producer for King of the Hill in the past decade, and surprisingly enough, he even penciled a few of the issues of the otherwise abortive Elektra series that ran under the now defunct Marvel Knights label. But it’s as a scriptwriter that he really played foul. For example:

• He made Polaris into one of the most annoying characters in Uncanny X-Men. Really irritating dialect, and for a comic book, alarming too.
• He wrote an affair between Archangel and Husk, a very questionable act too, since Husk, if memory serves, is underage (around 16-17 years old), and so, this was really going overboard.
• He was even allowed to write Action Comics, probably the last insult to his record, but still one of the worst, and wrote a sappy rekindled affair between Clark Kent and Lana Lang. He may have even written a few issues under the pen name of “J.D. Finn” to avoid further embarrassment.

Austen is now gone, and if forgotten, it’s probably just as well. As a writer, toiling away with his half-hearted writing between 2002-2004, he was unusually bombastic, and didn’t even try to hide his contempt for the audience. He did at least one interview with Newsarama in which he sunk into victimhood, one of the biggest mistakes for a writer today to make, and he sure won’t be missed.