Record: J. Michael Straczynski

No doubt, it's not every writer who's as polarizing a figure as J. Michael Straczynski, the writer who's worked in both comics and films since the mid-to-late 1980s, and has credits in animation in some form too, along with at least one Marvel Cinematic Universe entry, for Thor. But seriously, he's one of the most overrated writers of his era, particularly since the turn of the century, and his work on Spider-Man stands out as some of his worst, most pretentious assignments in comicdom. And the way he treated some of the women in his work was nothing short of despicable. That editorial interference may have played a part in his writings is no excuse either.

So now, here's the best possible list of examples of what he did wrong as a writer in his career.

• When Straczynski got the writing job for Spider-Man, he went along with Joe Quesada's mandate that initially did not allow Mary Jane Watson to reunite with Peter Parker. And JMS even made hilariously absurd claims he was trying to "get inside Peter's head" in his writings, as though that's possible with a fictional character who doesn't exist. And when Peter and MJ were subsequently reunited in the 50th issue of the relaunch of Spidey's series at the time around 2003, the story was ruined by a plotline that was sympathetic to Doctor Doom, who was apparently portrayed as a stand-in for Saddam Hussein.
• Even before that, JMS' special interruption of his run for the sake of a September 11, 2001 issue of Spidey, in issue 36, became a left-wing diatribe that blamed the victims. That was simply reprehensible, though what much else could you expect from such a boilerplate leftist from Hollywood?
• And about a year after Peter and MJ were reunited, JMS continued to make things horrific with the Sins Past storyline in late 2004, where Gwen Stacy was implausibly made to look like she'd been cheating on Peter with...Norman Osborn?!? And had 2 children with him? And MJ was made to look like a liar when she was depicted as having kept a secret from Peter all those years. The whole storyline was so embarrassingly bad, gave sex a bad name, and only made clear why it would've been better if Marvel had closed down in the early 2000s. Did I mention how the story was not verbatim to the original 1973 storyline where Gwen was unconscious, if not completely dead, when the Green Goblin knocked her off the George Washington Bridge in NYC? Whatever justifications JMS had for altering the history in such contrived and forced manners was utterly stupid.
• When the One More Day embarrassment came about, and Peter "sold" his marriage with MJ to Mephisto for the sake of reversing Aunt May's injury from a mobster's bullet, JMS basically went along with the Quesada mandate that dictated the story being told.
• During his brief Thor run, he depicted Loki causing Sif to be put in the body of a geriatric woman, and women's roles in the story were minimal. It was only at about the end of the run that Sif was finally put back in her own regular form.
• I could even add that his Superman storyline where the Man of Steel went on some kind of "walking tour" was pretty lazy to boot, and didn't amount to much of anything. He left the writing assignment pretty early too.

From what I can tell about JMS' career, it doesn't seem like he has much talent for how to portray women in his writings, and not many of his other writing assignments for ongoing series seemed to last long. He's little more than the kind of leftist who's gotten as far as he did based on his leftist politics alone, and today, while he unfortunately still continues to get occasional jobs with Marvel/DC, he is more or less a has-been, and I decidedly won't finance his creator-owned projects either like Rising Stars.