Record: Scott Lobdell

Some may know writer Scott Lobdell for his writing assignments on the X-Men franchise in the 1990s, though he hasn't had much to do with it in a quarter century, if at all. Lobdell began his career at Marvel in the late 1980s, with one of his first stories published in the 1988-95 Marvel Comics Presents anthology, and the most significant contribution he made to the X-franchise was the 1994-2001 Generation X series. In the late 2000s/early 2010s, he wrote for DC, long past a time it could've mattered. Some of his stories are in very questionable taste, and what's really troubling since was the discovery he'd committed sexual harrassment against an artist named MariNaomi at a Prism Comics panel at the Long Beach Comicon, and isn't that odd indeed he'd do that at a panel dedicated to LGBT propaganda?!? Well anyway, here's at least a handful of examples from his stories of the past near-4 decades that might even explain what's wrong with his stances on women.

• If we take the Rogue/Gambit relationship in X-Men as an example, there were at least a few parts in the X-Men where Rogue was shunning Gambit's advances because she didn't want guilt on her conscience of injuring somebody with her siphoning powers. That she'd be scared of causing hurt and injury in itself may be an understandable position, but under Lobdell, any story he wrote where that could occur may be looked upon now somewhat differently, as the guy could be portrayed running the gauntlet of sexual harrassment and intimidation of the lady.
• As some may know, Lobdell wrote several issues of Alpha Flight, the superhero series set in Canada, and the story in issue #106 where Northstar was first telling vocally that he's homosexual. But perhaps lesser known is that traces of Lobdell's regrettable contempt for women may have appeared in said 1983-94 series too, as under Lobdell's pen, Northstar's sister, Aurora, was reverted back to her odd split personality depiction from early in the series, conceived by her creator John Byrne. There was even a story by Lobdell in issue #105 where Aurora and the other team women got arrested for getting drunk and causing damage in a male strip bar while battling the crooked Pink Pearl. Lobdell's characterization of Northstar - and the guest character Major Maple Leaf - was alarmingly heavy-handed, and simultaneously, his characterization of Aurora was too. It was certainly very poor. Lobdell wrote at least 7 issues, and in the long run, none of which did Alpha Flight any favors.
• Years later, when Lobdell was assigned to write Red Hood and the Outlaws, which came at a time when DC pointlessly tried to retcon away prior continuity under the awful Dan DiDio's shoddy management, Lobdell portrayed Starfire as some kind of absurd airhead, who asks Roy Harper/Arsenal (changed to Red Arrow at the time, IIRC) if he'd like to have sex with her, and when Roy asks if there's anything to know about why Tamaraneans like her are interested in sex, she replies that "just that love has nothing to do with it". It was embarrassingly bad and atrocious how a lady who was depicted being as intelligent as she was sexy was reduced to a brainless lemming who seemed to be trying to absurdly submit to almost any man she meets for his sake, but not hers. For all we know, Lobdell may have to shoulder some of the blame for how DC watered down Starfire's sex appeal for the sake of a woke agenda in the 2010s. And he probably doesn't give a damn at this point.

Since the turn of the decade, Lobdell's been mostly retired from comics writing. He may not have been the worst of his kind when it comes to personality and/or behavior, but he certainly alienated quite a few women years back with his rude attitude. Did he support LGBT ideology as much as he did years back to serve as a cover for his downside with the fairer sex? Questions like those are what some undoubtably are asking now.

If Lobdell's retired from comics writing for good, it's surely for the best at this point. From what's listed on his IMDB page, he might still have worked a bit in the film industry, and even contributed to one of the Batman productions of recent on TV. Whatever, his past resume, which includes at least a few horror-themed films, does nothing to improve perceptions of his mindset. It's obviously a shame he had to be as crude as he was in the past, and lead to a situation where one would have to separate the art from the artist, with his work on the aforementioned Generation X being one of the few comics he wrote that had any value to it. We can only hope he's learned some lessons by now, and that perhaps he'll be willing to practice being more of a gentleman, and show more serious remorse for his past mistakes involving women. But only time will truly tell.

Record: Tom Brevoort

Tom Brevoort began working as an editor for Marvel as far back as 1989, and later oversaw titles and series like the Avengers and some of the solo superhero books whose stars appeared in the Earth's Mightiest Heroes series. But since the early 2000s, whatever talent he may have offered as an editor went straight downhill, as he proceeded to subject the comics he oversaw to some of the worst misuse possible, and here's a few examples of what occurred when he was editor for Avengers-related titles post-2002:

• In Geoff Johns' run on Avengers, there was a scene where Whirlwind licked the face of the Wasp, in one of the grimiest, creepiest and most repellent moments from Johns' writing portfolio. And Brevoort actually allowed that? Shameful.
• During Avengers: Disassembled, which was written by the overrated Brian Michael Bendis, Hawkeye was written telling Hank Pym, "don't you have a wife to beat?" It was bad enough that a storyline as questionable as what the late Jim Shooter produced in 1981 - where the 1st Ant-Man slugged Wasp to get her to stop protesting at a scheme he was trying to get back in the good graces of his costumed colleagues - had to remain canon for many years. But what Bendis wrote and Brevoort allowed was repulsive, and throughly ignored how it's never a fictional character's fault for how or what he/she was depicted doing in a fictional story. It's the writer's fault. And that includes Bendis. And arguably, even the editors and artists have some accountability to shoulder there. Including Brevoort.
• Making matters worse was how Scarlet Witch, in what's already become the most notorious part of Disassembled, turned out to be the culprit in weird attacks occurring to Avengers, including apparently Jack of Hearts, who was depicted blown to smithereens in the loathsome story.
• Later, in the House of M crossover, the misuse of Wanda continued as she was depicted as draining mutants of almost all their powers, topped off by saying "no more mutants", in what was a contrived notion for how to eliminate an allegedly too-large-list of mutants in the Marvel universe.
• There was a storyline in Bendis' "New" Avengers where Tigra was assaulted by a villain called The Hood, in another example of the editor allowing a repellent direction to go ahead with another notable lady.
• It's also worth noting that Brevoort's had at least a few projects in his editorial career where he depicted heroes fighting each other far more than battling villains. And that's pretty telling too. Not a very creative editor at all.

Brevoort, for all we know, is one of the most pretentious editors ever employed by Marvel. He may not have been the worst contributor when he originally began his career there, but post-2000, he certainly proved he'd worn out his welcome. And the resulting damage to Marvel's cohesion and morale has been pretty apparent since.

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.

Update: I hadn't paid enough attention of recent, but I wrote another, similar post about Straczynski 16 years ago, and didn't notice, apparently because I'd misspelled the post at the time. Still, for as long as I'm still writing here, I guess it could be worth writing an extra post about some of the subjects, if not all.

Record: Justiniano

There used to be an artist working in comicdom who went by the pen name of Justiniano, but whose real name was Josue Rivera. He was arrested around 2011 and convicted for possession of child pornography, similar to how the disgraced Gerard Jones was later arrested and jailed for the same offenses. And Justiniano also had at least a few stories and illustrations in his comics portfolio that were either demeaning to women, or they were forms of virtue-signaling that were likely drawn as virtue-signaling, in an attempt to conceal what a wolf in sheep's clothing he really was. Here's a few of the shoddy details from Justiniano's resume:

• In 2000, he drew a Beast Boy miniseries (written by Geoff Johns and Ben Raab) where Flamebird/Bette Kane was a co-star, and not only was she made to look like a bimbo, towards the end of the miniseries, she was depicted donning a more modest looking costume and sporting a shorter hairstyle in what was apparently the artist and writers' idea of how she should be a "serious" crimefighter, not to mention a form of virtue-signaling. If this had been done today, chances are high Justiniano would've taken a more woke path than what he did here in how to illustrate her. The loathsome design also appeared in the Titans Annual for 2000, also illustrated by Justiniano.
• In that same story, towards the end, Gar Logan noticeably hits a woman. It may have been a crook (supposedly a daughter of Madame Rouge from Doom Patrol, even though there's nothing in past DC history to make it plausible), but the way it was drawn was so alarming, it's clear it was meant to be some kind of reprehensible "justification" for wallowing in shock value.
• In 2005, Justiniano drew all 6 issues of Day of Vengeance, a miniseries written as a followup to Identity Crisis and a lead-in to Infinite Crisis, where Jean Loring becomes a female version of Eclipso, and the way it was written (by Bill Willingham) also made it look like one side of a conversation where a woman's being sexually harassed. This was easily one of the most loathsome moments from Justiniano's undeserved career.
• Towards the end of his worthless career, he drew some issues of a Spirit series (written by Michael Uslan), based on Will Eisner's famous Golden Age adventure series (1940-52), where a villainess insults Ellen Dolan by calling her a "fat ass".

At least a few stories illustrated by Justiniano at the time had traces of contempt for women, and one could wonder if that had anything to do with his taking the assignments. It's a good thing he was caught and jailed, and now his worthless career's been over for nearly 15 years. But who knows how many more artists like him will turn out to be terrible felons?

Record: Jonathan Peterson

There was once an editor who worked in comicdom from the mid-80s to the early 2000s by the name of Jonathan Peterson. And what I found out about this man, from an old interview reprinted from one of the history guides for DC's Titans, was hugely disappointing, based on his attitude towards Terry Long, once the husband of Donna Troy in the late 80s-early 90s, and even what Peterson thought of Jericho. Some points as follows, based on what's told in the interview:

• When it comes to Terry Long, Peterson said, 'I had plans for Nightwing. Donna Troy [was] another one I wanted to see stay, though I was mad Marv had married her off. I wanted Terry Long to go. Personally, I thought he was a whiner. He needed to be upgraded or tossed out, so he was always on the block. [laughs] Month to month we kept running a vote saying “Should we kill him now? He’s really annoying me this month!”' It's bad enough he thought killing off characters casually as though it's an inherently acceptable idea was somehow entertaining. But to think he'd fail to distinguish between real life and fiction, and act like fictional characters are literally real people, that was going much too far, angering and insulting to the intellect.
• Peterson's take on Jericho was no better. What Peterson said was, "Jericho we decided was sort of expendable. So if Jericho was to die, I think Marv was the one that decided to make it symmetrical. Let’s have Deathstroke be the one to do it; then we have the whole pathos of Deathstroke killing his own son. I mean, it was just too perfect. So by process of elimination, we all agreed he could go. Especially since, much like Terry Long, I thought Jericho was a bit too soft-edged. I mean, I know he has his fans and all, I just wasn’t one of them. [laughs]" So he actually even thought it was funny to insult fictional characters as though they're literally real people, and worse, to just chuck them into the grave like used tissue paper? Sick.

It may not have turned out the way Peterson wanted. Not with Terry, anyway. But no doubt, people like him precipitated the severe damage superhero comics went on to suffer for many years on end. Peterson's approach is exactly what led to Identity Crisis, and his contempt for DC fans speaks volumes. He may have long left comics publishing, but the scars he left on the industry still reverberate till this day.

Record: Neil Gaiman

The UK native Neil Gaiman, who began his career writing short stories, was once known in comicdom as writer of the 1989-96 Sandman series, and has several other comics to his credits. He also went on to write various novels, and even co-authored a few with scribes like the late Sir Terry Pratchett. And then, Gaiman went on to work in TV shows and at least a handful of films, mainly in the late 2010s until recently.

But in June 2024, his fame turned to notoriety as it was reported he'd been accused of sexual assault by several women in the past 4 decades (also that same month, the Canadian literary author Alice Munro was accused of siding with her 2nd husband, Gerald Fremlin, after it was discovered he'd sexually assaulted her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner). Since that time, Gaiman's career has taken a downfall, as you could expect, and deservedly so. And now, in this post, I'll list a number of troubling moments from his comics writings that should be pondered, because what he did for comicdom in past years only did more harm than good, what with how he passed himself off as a "male feminist", and that's just for starters. In quite a few of his writings, including - but not limited to - the Sandman series, there's allusions to sexual violence that, in light of the new discoveries, only give his work a whole new meaning.

• In the Sandman series, when Morpheus confronts Dr. Destiny after he uses the enchanted gem to force several people at a diner to kill themselves in graphic and gory fashion, the "hero" doesn't deliver any serious punishment to the villain after defeating him, which is troubling, considering how heinous Destiny's deeds were. Morpheus just takes Destiny quietly back to Arkham like nothing ever happened, and the victims of Destiny's crimes are otherwise forgotten. That particular storyline is never mentioned again.
• Also, two more moments in the Sandman series stick out as alarmingly horrific and defeatist - issues 14 and 17. In the former, the focus is on a convention for serial killers/rapists at a hotel complex(!), and a girl nearly falls victim to a giant, obese child rapist before Morpheus stops him. But, once again, a lenient approach to sexual violence occurs in the script - the giant rapist starts dreaming that his victims forgive him for his crimes and party with him, and Morpheus just delivers a lecture to the offenders who're attending the contrived scenario of a convention, and lets them all slip away without ensuring the police will arrest them. In the latter, when the writer Richard Madoc repeatedly rapes Calliope after buying her as a sex slave from Erasmus Fry for the sake thinking up ideas for books, Morpheus' idea of punishment - and how to free the lady from Madoc's clutches - is again very weak. He merely clogs the creep's mind with an avalanche of ideas for literary writing "in abundance", causing Madoc at one point to get a scratch on his face from desperation and frustration in memorizing, and Morpheus never calls the police to arrest Madoc for sexual violence and false imprisonment. Madoc just whines in the end that, with Calliope no longer in his clutches, he can't think of anything else to write. Most bizarre is how Madoc is written describing himself as a "feminist writer" at one point, and nobody thought at the time this was hurtful to the feminist cause? Gee whiz.
• In the 20th issue, the only point seems to be to getting rid of Metamorpho's female counterpart, Element Girl/Urania Blackwell. And the way Death of the Endless acts like it's fun and amusing to see Element Girl perish was sickening.
• Gaiman's mistreatment of Lyta Hall/Fury, to say nothing of her husband Hector Hall/Silver Scarab (neither the latter's codename nor Infinity Inc. receive any mention in the Sandman series), was nothing short of insulting too. Under Gaiman's writing, we're told the anthropomorphs Brute and Glob had Hector resurrected as a semi-ghost so they could come up with their own substitute Sandman while Morpheus was MIA, and after Morpheus makes the two monsters disappear, he causes Hector to disintegrate in a very cold, uncaring manner, and doesn't give a damn if this upsets Lyta, who believes Morpheus killed Hector. In all the time I've known about that storyline in issue 12, I've been shaking my head in disbelief at how anybody, no matter their standings on Roy Thomas' creations, could ignore that or not be disappointed at the cold way Gaiman deals with Lyta and Hector. And the son, Daniel? Well the way that's dealt with - Morpheus wanting the little guy to be heir to his throne in the Dreaming, and the 1994 storyline where the series' takes on Loki and Robin Goodfellow apparently burn the poor little guy to death in order to transfer him to the Dreaming - was nothing short of repulsive too. Oh, did I mention Lyta also falls victim to sexual misconduct in later issues like 59? A story which does a terrible disfavor to Black men as well.
• In the 38th Sandman issue, a girl complains about sexism, and here Gaiman turned out to be even worse in real life.
• In Books of Magic - the original 4-part prestige-format miniseries from 1990 - when Zatanna puts on her original costume with fishnet stockings and a top hat similar to her father Zatara's, Tim Hunter and a cabbie look at her like she's nuts. Which must've been Gaiman's way of trying to conceal his contempt for women by playing "moralist" on the issue of sexy outfits, when in real life he behaved terribly to the fairer sex. And towards the end of the storyline with Zatanna in it, when a crowd of monsters at a convention threaten her and Tim, John Constantine merely cuts in and puts an end to everything without a fight. Which unfortunately results in an underwhelming portrayal of Zatanna that doesn't give the reader a chance to see how effectively she can be written as a lady combatant. In light of the discoveries about Gaiman, of course, such a cop-out takes on a whole new meaning.
• In a 1994 miniseries titled Alice Cooper's Last Temptation, which Gaiman wrote as part of a short-lived imprint called Marvel Music, there's a panel that's set up so it makes it look like the young protagonist of the story is being threatened by a child rapist, which in the story is a form of zombie. The scene is so repellent because it looks like a sex assault scene hidden in plain sight. It also reeks of coded dialogue.
• In the 2007 Eternals miniseries Gaiman wrote, Sprite, the member of the group who's meant to resemble an 11-year-old, tells how he wishes he could have sexual relations with Sersi, who, according to Gaiman's script, has done it with almost all other male Eternals. As though it weren't bad enough that near the beginning of the miniseries, Gaiman depicts Sersi blabbering that a homosexual man she knows told her he likes her because she "looks like a cross-dresser"! That too was offensive based on how it's demeaning to women by saying she looks like a man(!), but even worse is the scene near the end where Sprite, when confronted by Zuras over the former's misdeeds (Sprite all but erased the Eternals' memories), threatened to tell authorities that Zuras tried to assault him sexually, a scene which minimizes the seriousness of sexual abuse by making it look like children not only lie about being sexually assaulted, but that such lies are routine (Identity Crisis has a similar problem in the epilogue with Animal Man dismissing a newspaper headline about Jean Loring being assaulted in prison). And then, adding insult to injury, Zuras broke Sprite's neck towards the shoddy tale's end.
• In Secret Origins Special, a woman implies she's uncomfortable with the thought Batman could be peering through her bedroom window while she's asleep. When Gaiman did worse. And the topic of infidelity comes up in the tale, something Gaiman did too. And, in Secret Origins 36, Poison Ivy's reading a book titled "Feminist Trash". Could that have been Gaiman's way of hinting what he really thought of feminists too?

I'm sure even Gaiman's novels have some fishy stuff, but that's something best left for literary experts to examine. For now, it's atrocious how Gaiman exploited the comics medium for the sake of turning out quite a few tales that, contrary to what ultra-leftist news sources may have claimed way back when, feel just so...empty. Sort of like a dream, or more precisely, a nightmare. I'm not sorry his career's taken a downfall in the year since his bad deeds came to light. What is sad is how many women were victimized by yet another ideologue posing as a "femnist ally", which is worse than fictional characters being abused for the sake of a pointless exercise in phony Shakespearean dramas.

The Gaiman Sandman series will hopefully be going out of print after this scandal, and let's hope DC's archivists will be willing, for a change, to concentrate on reprinting the original Golden Age Sandman stories featuring Wesley Dodds (and also Sandy Hawkins). Those great stories nearly a century ago from 1939-46 are what people should really be reading, not some shoddy modern-age mishmash like what Gaiman turned out.

Record: Scott Lobdell

One of the most pretentious writers Marvel employed in the 1990s to script the X-Men, Scott Lobdell most unfortunately has some bad moments in his record that served to sully what was once an effective series. I'll try to list here some of his bad efforts here.

• As one of the writers in charge of stories spotlighting Rogue and Gambit, he did a poor, tiresome job depicting their ostensible relationship with the lady's siphoning power posing such an obstacle, it only led under his unimpressive writing to a lot of agonizing and frustration. Not to mention that in at least a few scenes where the "Ragin' Cajun" would try to come on to Rogue with physical contact, she'd jump away in fear of causing injury. The irritating long term effect of such scenes would be that it'd look like he was a sex predator, however unintentional. And at the same time, it made Rogue look absurdly scared.
• In Uncanny X-Men #328, he scripted a tale where Sabretooth gutted Psylocke after she tried warding off his threats to Boomer/Tabitha Smith (not shown in graphic detail, thankfully). All for the sake of conceiving a tale where the formula to heal her injury would result in a dagger-shaped tattoo across her left eye.
• In his last story for X-Men prior to Grant Morrison taking over for 3 years in the early 2000s, Lobdell's "Eve of Destruction" made Jean Grey look like a mindless robot, who wouldn't even demand Northstar stop assaulting a cardboard panel of a character named Paulie Provenzano over a pointless quarrel for the sake of filling panels. It was utterly awful.
• When Lobdell was writing Red Hood and the Outlaws during DC's New 52 era in the early 2010s, there was trivial criticism vented over Starfire's skimpy costume. This almost obscured a much more valid complaint - she was made to sound like a brainless vagrant who was willing to have sex for the sake of almost any man she came upon, and told Roy Harper "love has nothing to do with it." This had the effect of making her come off as a subservient tool for men instead of working as her own agency and thinking for herself. It also made Tamaranians (the alien race she came from) look bad, if that matters.

In addition to the above, Lobdell even admitted he once sexually harassed a lady cartoonist at a convention, which makes it look like his mindless positions got the better of him. None of this reflects well on his resume, though he may have learned his lesson about his misdeed at the convention since. I certainly hope he did, because he still shows signs here and there he probably didn't.

Record: Gerard Jones

You may have heard, since the beginning of 2017, that onetime comics writer Gerard Jones was arrested on charges of storing child pornography in his computer equipment, and is suspected of committing an even worse offense over in Britain. Besides those revolting discoveries, I do believe his record as a comics writer has some items in it worth pondering. What he may have done wrong with any and all of the superhero books he'd written, not the least being the books he wrote for Malibu Comics, and that could be both before and after Marvel bought them out in 1994. So here, I may be able to list at least a few moments in his writing career worthy of attention.

• In the premiere of Green Lantern volume 3, John Stewart's watching a TV news report that includes word of a child kidnapping. In light of the discoveries of Jones' crimes in real life, that's obviously not going to age well.
• In the second issue of the series, Guy Gardner goes to a porn shop (where he finds the Tattooed Man and picks a fight with him all for the sake of making Guy look like a parody of "jingoists"). I think we can all figure out why time won't be kind to that story segment.
• The Guardian named Appa Ali Apsa, first introduced by Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams in the early 1970s as an observer for GL and Green Arrow at the time they were "hard travelin' heroes" was turned insane, deadly and villainous in the beginning story (when it was first reprinted in 2003, the given title was "The Road Back"), becoming the adversary they had to combat, and was finally killed at its end. In retrospect, I don't think this was getting off to a good start, taking a decent character and turning him crazy and murderous (he killed another character, seen in the 2nd issue). Mainly because Hal Jordan didn't seem particularly miserable they had to wipe him out. If anything, it was hardly focusing on the real villains in GL's rogues' gallery, who could've made for just as good a premise. Jones did all this just to set up a story where several colonies of races from across the galaxy would learn to live together, as though that couldn't be done.
• In the 1st Green Lantern Quarterly from 1992, he wrote a story featuring Arisia, where the alien girl who'd boosted herself artificially to a theoretically mature age in 1986 had now reverted mentally to the age of a 13 year old. In light of the charges filed against Jones in 2017, this is why his early 90s story doesn't age well now.
• In the 5th issue of Guy Gardner's 1992-96 solo book, while he's searching for Goldface, he goes to a ranch that had at one point housed a brothel, and a most disgusting joke is made about child sex slavery. This almost singlehandedly destroys the series, and whatever potential Guy once had as a solo star.
• In the 1992-93 GL: Mosaic spinoff, he wrote Ch'p, the chipmunk-like alien, getting killed by a truck on the planet Oa (a whole colony of humans was moved there by Appa ali Apsa). And I'm wondering what was so wrong with the poor little guy that they had to turn him into a sacrifice on the alter of slaying minor characters just because of how supposedly easy that was?
• Although Jones did resurrect Katma Tui in GL: Mosaic, it was otherwise as an energy construct, and I'm not sure it was even in the same way Wonder Man/Simon Williams was. As a result, I'm not sure if Jones ever exonerated Carol Ferris properly. After all, that storyline from Action Comics Weekly in 1988 where Carol slew Katma when she was under the Star Sapphire influence was a very bad step in storytelling, and not reversing it entirely, IMO, did little to help mend a serious mistake.
• In the Martian Manhunter: American Secrets 3-part miniseries from 1992, there's an obscene moment in the 2nd part where a "child pimp" named Skeeter sexually molests a young child actress named Patty Marie, in a scene that stinks of creepy, repellent self-indulgence, and was minimized soon after, as it was never mentioned again. Making it truly awful was that the girl was killed in the 3rd part, and whatever point Jones was supposedly making about communist infiltrators during the 50s collapsed like a mountain of bricks.
• In the first storyline or two from Wonder Man's 1991-94 series, there were some subtle attacks on capitalism, with an inventor who'd become a criminal now wanting to do business with corrupt governments overseas, all because he thought he'd been taken advantage of earlier by domestic corporations.
• The 1st of two annuals in the Wonder Man series features disturbing moments like the actress Ginger Beach's teen brother Spider whacking some other actresses on the rears while wading through the water at an island where Simon and the bunch have gone to do some filming, and later, when Ginger is kidnapped by a Hydra computer system on the island and strapped to a stretcher cart, she says it was groping her as it whisked her off to a chamber on a rocket system where she was kept until Wondy could free her. That scene was really atrocious, right down to Spider calling to get the "pervert machine" off his sister, after what he did several pages before to the actresses, strongly hinting that the character was intended as a Mary Sue by the writer.
• In light of the allegations against Jones, his jokes in Justice League Europe focusing on Power Girl's boobs and cleavage aren't bound to age well. (Nor for that matter is an idiotic joke he made about women sipping diet soda and becoming aggressive as a result.)
• I'd mentioned before that Jones wrote a story starring Shanna the She-Devil in Marvel Comics Presents #70-73 during 1991? There's something else he's left in a broken heap for at least a while, but then, what good is a story that relies on horror elements when somebody like him is doing the scripting?
• Though he never scripted the mainstay MCU's Hulk, he did write Hulk 2099, part of Marvel's mid-90s 2099: World of Tomorrow line, which wasn't very successful, and if he was doing it for the sake of exploring his whole notion of violent entertainment being "good for kids" he sure blew it, because of some hypocritical arguments he made on violence right over there.
• One of the most notable titles in the Malibu line of superhero knockoffs he wrote was Prime, a Captain Marvel clone about a young teen boy gaining powers to turn into an adult superhero, who went after child rapists, including a school instructor. It goes without saying Jones' own arrest for sex felonies will ensure this Malibu product falls flat on its face.
• Towards the end of his official career in superhero comics, he wrote Batman: Fortunate Son in 1999 (the title appears to be inspired by a Bruce Springsteen song), an early-days OGN tale where the Masked Manhunter and Dick Grayson, in his early days as Robin, were investigating the case of a rock star accused of blowing up a studio. The message of the yarn was apparently that rock music makes people insane. Oh, isn't that classic. I don't know what Jones was smoking when he came up with that one, but it's very ridiculous, especially now that he's been arrested for his sexual misconduct felony.

Over the past year since Jones' offenses made headlines, I've had to reevaluate some of the stories I read that he'd scripted, and concluded they weren't so entertaining at all, let alone respectable of past works that came before, and the Ultraverse books will surely wind up under an entirely different perspective now. Recalling that he won an Eisner in 2005 for his history books like Men of Tomorrow, it remains to be seen if the board of directors thought to revoke his prize, which he didn't deserve to win. He belongs in the category of overrated scribes whose personalities can easily ensure their stories wind up becoming more dated that others.

Record: Eddie Berganza

Berganza is one of DC's longtime editors whose career stretches back as far as the early 1990s. Of recent, he was outed as a sexual harasser. Some of the books he's worked on may even have some bizarre irony to go with his newly discovered behavior behind the scenes. I'll try to list at least a few of his serious errors here, some of which relate to his job as the editor in charge of the Superman titles.

• In Wonder Woman: Earth One, written by Grant Morrison last year, there's a scene where the book's take on Steve Trevor, changed to African-American, is grabbed in a very inappropriate manner by Diana, while she asks if he's a man. No, it's not shown directly, but it's still very revolting they had to strongly imply it, nevertheless. Not only that, there's apparently a cameo illustration of Berganza himself in the miniseries, which came out around the time the accusations against Berganza resurfaced. Talk about bad timing.
• In May of this year, in the 23rd issue of the sans-adjective Superman volume they've been publishing (let's remember there were at least two other volumes sans-adjective in better days), Lois Lane got her leg sliced off by a laser shot. Worst, it was shown right out in the open, and not even silhouetted, as previous generations of editors would've thought to do.

So there's at least two examples involving books with both a hero and heroine that he served as editor for, and neither of which have particularly tasteful storytelling to offer. And after what Berganza did, it may not be surprising he was willing to associate himself with such lowbrow elements.

Record: Gail Simone

Did I really just say Gail Simone?

Yup, I'm afraid so.

Even the very woman who was one of the architects for the site (Women in Refridgerators) that led me, among other things, to think up this blog, has pulled quite a few very reprehensible stunts that are actually demeaning to women and men alike, whether it's her politics in real life or her own fictional writing, that made me decide finally I'd have to chalk up a special entry with at least a few citations of her grievous errors. So, here's what I can think of:

• When she was writing the "All-New Atom" an early example of "diversity" run amok, long before Marvel went out of their way to do the same, there was one story where Ryan Choi's climbing a ladder in miniaturized form, and accidentally slips and bangs his crotch. I couldn't help think that this bore traces of male-bashing, even as she and the company were going out of their way to pander to a PC crowd.
• She went right along with Dan DiDio's jumbled vision for what should be done with the DCU from the very moment Identity Crisis was published, and had no complaints about what harm this could do to Birds of Prey.
• Why, even when she was writing BoP, there were already signs it would turn out to be as idiotic as Geoff Johns' own writing that was flooded with too much nostalgia, done very tastelessly at that.
• She was the scripter of Villains United, a miniseries connecting with Infinite Crisis, one of many superfluous crossovers in 2006. In this story, the Fiddler, a villain who first appeared in the late 1940s in the Flash, was murdered by Deadshot. You may not think it's as big a deal as it certainly can be when heroes and their co-stars meet similar fates, but even killings of villains can end up being superfluous, and this one was just another pointless shock tactic at a time when DC really went overboard. Making matters worse, Deathstroke was a cast member, as if it weren't bad enough that Identity Crisis made him look like he hadn't reformed at all.
• And then, there's Simone's own politics, which are counterproductive to women: she gave her backing to LGBT advocates demanding that transgenders be allowed to use bathrooms, public or otherwise, of the opposite sex, no matter how much risk it could pose for women, and already has. It was stunning how ignorant and heartless her positions were. At no point in any of the Twitter posts and other notes she wrote backing the position did she show any understanding why denying a woman the right to privacy is morally reprehensible. There was no sign she had any second thoughts or understood why being transgender is no defense for making things unpleasant and dangerous for a lady. All she did was present a picture of somebody who lost her moral compass.
• She further wrote an agenda by emphasizing transgenderism in the Batgirl title she wrote circa 2014, and presenting homosexuality as normal in the process, as if we don't already have plenty of that. Yet no Romanians, Armenians, Chileans or Portuguese anywhere.

This is not something I'm happy to have to bring up. Indeed, it's depressing and I'm writing it with a heavy heart. But the sad reality is that somebody here succumbed to leftism in one of the worst ways possible, and it's made a mockery of what she supposedly complained about early in her career. I think it's fortunate she's not literally the creator of Women in Refridgerators - a lot of the material that got put into its making came from what other people offered as examples, and a few other webmasters were instrumental in writing up the pages, not her.

She hasn't written many comics lately. In retrospect, it's not like she was stratospherically popular either; Birds of Prey only sold 30,000 to 40,000 copies when she was writing it, which is tedious compared to what movies usually sell in tickets. I think DC (and Marvel) wanted to part ways with her no matter how left-wing she was, and the irony is, she was asking for it. I'm sure she'll still be writing comics to some extent down the road, but so long as she sticks with all these bad political leanings and lets it affect her work (and any editors approve of it no matter how alienating), whatever comics she turns out at this point won't be worth the effort. For now, what matters is that she sullied what could've been a respectable reputation, and made an unfunny joke out of her career.

Record: Dave Sim

Now here's an interesting idea for a comics writer whose work we could scrutinize. It doesn't have to be just writers working for mainstream superhero books we could focus on, and the Canadian cartoonist Dave Sim, author of Cerebus, the would-be humor comic about an anthropomorphic aardvark swordfighter that ran during 1977-2004, is somebody whose work was discussed in the past, and having done a little research, I too realized that he's got some viewpoints that are pretty disturbing. So let's see if I can write up the best possible entry here.

• Early in the Cerebus run, Sim came up with a character called Red Sophia, allegedly a parody of Red Sonja, whom Roy Thomas introduced in the Conan series he'd launched/written in the early 70s that drew on a minor guest character from Robert E. Howard's old stories. And the character Sim featured was depicted as easy to defeat and ditzy. Of all the characters from Howard's own stable he could've riffed on, I wonder why it had to be one based on Red Sonja and not Conan himself, or even Kull the Conqueror? Though the spinoffs from Conan at the time had engaging stories in hindsight, the first Red Sonja title didn't last much more than 3-4 years at best, and was cancelled by the end of the 1970s (Kull's didn't fare much better either), so I'm not sure why Sim considered Sonja a perfect target for whatever vision he set out to employ. In any case, what matters is that he was insulting an impressive idea Thomas had for a sword-and-sorcery heroine, and it's bewildering he'd want to make a girl that incompetent.
• In the mid-90s, he indicated that he saw nothing wrong with a Vietnamese family disowning their daughter for getting pregnant. He said in that insanity, "I watched an interview the other night on CBC Prime Time with a nineteen-year-old girl from an old-fashioned (which is to say "principled") Vietnamese family. She had gotten pregnant during her last year of high school. She knew that she had brought "shame" to her father, to her family. "But this is a free country, isn't it?" she asks the camera. "That means you can do whatever you want, doesn't it?" The camera was indulgently mute on the subject. The girl moved on. She felt scared that she was going to be a mother. She felt unhappy that she had been disowned by her father, but she also, you know, felt happy when her mother called to tell her that she would answer any questions that she had about pregnancy. She felt most enthusiastically about her school guidance counsellor because he had, you know, just listened to her "spill her guts" and hadn't tried to, you know, make her feel bad." In other words, he wasn't disappointed that the girl's family was rejecting her when, here, she could be bearing them a grandchild, somebody to love and hopefully raise to do good in the world? How somebody can basically dismiss the positivity of life so cynically is galling.
• He once wrote a crazy essay where he put in a disgusting paragraph that basically implied that it's okay in all instances to use "physical discipline" against women and children. He said, "To me, taking it as a given that reason cannot prevail in any argument with emotion, there must come a point – with women and children – where verbal discipline has to be asserted, and if verbal discipline proves insufficient, that physical discipline be introduced. Women and children have soft, cushy buttocks which are, nonetheless, shot through with reasonably sensitive nerve endings. I believe that those buttocks are there for a very specific purpose intended by their Creator." It's not often I see smut as sick as that happens to be. I can't even begin to describe how his justifications for thrashing make my skin crawl. UGH!

Here's also some video links discussing Sim's justifications of domestic violence. To think that the medium once embraced this man is horrific. On a somewhat related note, some people may know that a certain artist/cartoonist with the initials "C.D" once accused the late DC editor Julius Schwartz of supposedly attacking her sexually in a limousine in article published in The Comics Journal in April 2004. But her associations in the past with Sim are but one reason why I couldn't believe what she alleged, and certainly couldn't take it at face value. I'd written about this some time ago on my main comics blog, and I guess I'll have to add at least one more commentary here as well. How is it possible that all those years before when she was chummy with Sim, she never noticed any of the crap he was spewing out? Why, in fact, how is it possible nobody else in the medium did either? It just simply beggars belief. Are we really supposed to think nobody could've spotted anything of the creepy stuff he'd said from the late 70s to now? I can't buy that. And it goes without saying that the limousine part is just one more contrived-sounding part in this whole bizarre mess. But what really made C.D's allegations come unglued was the failure to present the letter of apology she claimed Schwartz sent to an agent of hers (something else that's ambiguous: unlike movie stars, do cartoonists usually have talent agents? Not that I know of). Ironically, it was Sim and a colleague of his who provided some of the hints just how flaccid her accusations against Schwartz were, even as they acted hypocritically simultaneously.

Another puzzler: when I took a look at an excerpt of the story C.D drew in Cerebus in 1986 that supposedly alluded to her allegation, the way it was set up made it look like it was little more than a case of an ugly quarrel she had with a guy who talked sleazy, but little else. What kind of person who supposedly went through a terrible experience waters it down into a joke? As if that weren't problematic enough, I vaguely recall finding and reading a message she wrote on the old Comicon site in 2001, where, although she admitted Sim once insulted a buddy of hers by bragging about how he thought women looked funny when they're mad, she did anything but condemn him, and as a result, I remain unconvinced she understood the really bad impact of his past commentaries (also, I think I once spotted her conversing with Dan Slott, if that's telling anything). Needless to say, if she really did make a false accusation against Schwartz, that was wrong, mainly because of the harm it can do to actual victims. It's regrettable she'd do that, because I honestly never considered her the worst the medium's got to offer. But, that's life; full of people who just aren't what they could be.

So in the end, it's not that I don't want to believe a man like Schwartz was capable of pulling an offensive act. It's that I can't. Because C.D provided nothing concrete to go by. I don't think Schwartz was a saint, and I'm sure there were still infuriarating things he could've done regardless. But without solid proof, even Sim has no business trying to besmirch the guy's name, and his own writings, in and out of Cerebus, weigh against him very heavily.

Sim's antics started gaining the notoriety they should've had by the late 1990s, and since then, he's been mostly shunned by a lot of other writers and artists. But it's still hard to swallow that nobody within the industry ever spotted any of his atrocious politics years before, and didn't think to distance themselves from him well before.

Record: Devin Grayson

Grayson, who'd been a writer on several DC/Marvel titles from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, is an interesting case, based on her writing for Nightwing and its 93rd issue circa 2004. It was noted at the time that the story involved Nightwing becoming a male victim of a rape by ways of a villainess called Tarantula (the character she featured may not even be the first character to bear that codename). The run was already notorious for getting rid of a few adversaries Chuck Dixon developed as regulars, but the whole Tarantula affair is where it really went overboard.

What made it dreadful and insulting was that the whole scene otherwise made light of a serious issue, much like Brad Meltzer did when he wrote Identity Crisis. And this time, it was a female-vs-male form of sexual assault, taking place on a rooftop where Dick Grayson was sitting in shock at the sight of Tarantula gunning down Blockbuster in issue 93, and then, she basically raped him. It may not have been as visually obnoxious and offensive as the anal rape of Sue Dibny seen in Identity Crisis, but it was still quite disgustingly terrible. It's a prime example of the bad influences of badly written fanfiction encroaching upon superhero comics.

But, most remarkably enough, a decade after the story was published, Grayson, who originally defended the scene as "non-consensual sex", gave an interview to the Bat Universe in 2014 where she turned around and admitted her approach was poor. She said:

I was wrong. I messed that one up and I apologize. My interview comments were uninformed and ignorant and I’m grateful for the chance to revisit the issue.

Rape culture and the mindboggling stupid and insensitive comments some comic creators have recently made about it have been in the news a lot lately and I reject the assertion—put forth in some of those interviews—that as creators we passively reflect society and have no actual influence over it. But I do admit that it can be difficult to filter through cultural currents with the sensitivity and thoughtfulness they deserve. Our work should never be inattentively influenced by our social prejudices, but we, as humans and creators, often are.

I used a literal rape as a metaphorical nadir, and I know better. Or, at least, I should have known better and certainly do now. I was concentrating so hard on other elements of that scene which felt so much more narratively significant to me (Blockbuster’s murder, primarily) that I totally lost sight of the power and non-symbolic consequence of the gesture I was using. By the time I realized the severity of the mistake and how harmful it might have been to actual survivors of sexual abuse and assault (myself included), I had run out of time to make it right. I’m not sure I could have made it right, mind you, but I did at least have the intention of bringing the story back around to it so that the act didn’t exist completely devoid of consequence or analysis. But it does, and I regret that more deeply than I can say. So many factors went into that debacle—including an avalanche of increasingly arbitrary and bizarre crossover demands from upper editorial and the company’s failure to honor previously approved story outlines—but the responsibility for the ineffectiveness and potential harmfulness of that scene lies solely with me.

I would not shy away from tackling the subject of rape again but I would work with it only if I could approach it head on. It’s too charged of an issue to be used to reflect something else. If I could do it over again, I would make very different choices.

While this was written years after she'd stopped working for DC, it's amazing to learn that there's a writer out there who made a mistake but was willing to own up for it. That's a very admirable show of courage to take responsibility for making light of serious issues.

It's also saying a lot more than can be said for Meltzer, who, unlike Grayson, has never admitted his approach in Identity Crisis was distasteful and belittling to victims of sexual abuse. It's had me wondering why a woman can admit to failure, but a man will not.

For now, it's certainly amazing that somebody in comicdom, mainstream or otherwise, is willing to show the courage to admit to error in storytelling development. Grayson's show of guts is something to appreciate.

Record: Dan Slott

Of all the unqualified writers Marvel/DC could hire as part of their closed-shop clique since the mid-2000s, Slott is one of the worst. He's been part of Joe Quesada's mandate to wipe out the Spider-Marriage, and there have been a few more lugubrious steps he's taken in the career he's had this century. I'll list at least 2 examples for now.

• He wrote a story in 2014 where Peter Parker's body was taken over by Doctor Octopus, leading to a tacky series called "The Superior Spider-Man", and a storyline where Otto Octavious, in the body of Peter, makes "love" to Mary Jane Watson. Which is basically rape in disguise, as a women's topics website put it.
• Almost a year later at the Florida Supercon, he went along and justified Joe Quesada/Axel Alonso's opposition to the marriage by saying that Mary Jane is "anti-Marvel", by claiming, "Everyone Peter falls in love with is so classically beautiful, and to me that is anti-Marvel." In other words, he was saying that everything Stan Lee ever thought of conceiving was wrong, while at the same time he implies beautifully structured characters/people are bad ideas. (Next thing you know, he'll be saying Edgar Rice Burroughs and Will Eisner were wrong to make Dejah Thoris and Sheena the Jungle Queen beauties!) And, he completely obscures all the characteristics ever applied to Mary Jane in better days. His defense is superficial at worst, and super-cheap.

Slott is bound to go down in history as one of the worst, most self-important and self-justifying writers, a true embarrassment if there ever was one.

Record: J. Michael Stracynski

A long overrated writer who first got his start mainly film producing and scripting, most notably with Babylon 5, a Star Trek ripoff, his track record with female characters isn't particularly impressive. Here are at least 2 examples of his own mistakes:

• He may have said he was against it, but he went along with whatever rewrites Joe Quesada did to Sins Past, and tarnished the image of Gwen Stacy, making her look more like a mindless slut than a flawed but otherwise decent girl, by implying that she had sex with Norman Osborn and had 2 kids as a result. Even if the resulting atrocity wasn't entirely his fault, the story he had in mind was pretty lame and needless to begin with, so I'm not excusing him so easily.
• He claimed he was against it, to the point of wanting his name removed from the writer's credits, but he went along with One More Day anyway, Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson's sellout to Mephisto, and the erasure of the Spider-Marriage following one of the worst crossover tie-ins to date, Civil War. Given his prominent stature as a Hollywood producer, I've got a hard time believing it was that hard for him to refuse, and save himself a lot of embarrassment.
• When he was writing Thor for at least a year, he had Sif reborn within the body of an elderly woman named Mrs. Chambers who was suffering from cancer, courtesy of Loki's meddling.
  
• His plans for Wonder Woman, changing her timeline and all but reducing the Greek mythology in her background, for 2010's storyline, leave me with even less reason to buy that he's sincere.

As far as I'm concerned, Stracynski is nothing but a big charlatan with little true devotion to what makes Marvel and DC heroes tick, and little interest in real character development or interaction (he didn't use the supporting cast in Spidey much, if at all, nor did he try to come up with any new ones who could be used long-term. If he did though, I fear they would've been more along the lines of political correctness; he is a boilerplate Hollywood liberal, after all). He should not be working in comics, and it's high time already for him to go back to Tinseltown where he belongs.

Record: James Robinson

There isn't much I can think of to say about this once-lauded writer who penned the adventures of the original Starman's son in the 1990s, since it was only recently that he screwed up, big time. But what I have to offer for now is related to the miniseries where he threw all his credibility as a scriptwriter out the window - "Cry for Justice".

• Some people have criticized Kara Zor-El's depiction since 2004 as over-sexualized. In Cry for Justice, such arguments were certainly valid - one of the advertisements for this junk featured her depicted "headless", that is, almost all her body but not the head, which is ridiculous, and the inner story pretty much featured this absurdity at least once more too. Robinson and company even insulted people's intellects with a coverscan that showed Supergirl and Capt. Marvel Jr. kissing, but not only does this not take place in the story, it turns out to be Prometheus in disguise.
• At the end of this abomination, which saw a few characters killed for starters, Star City is destroyed along with close to 100,000 other people, and among the dead is Lian Harper, Roy Harper's daughter with Cheshire. All this in order to send Roy and mentor Ollie Queen down the road to darkness. To make matters worse, when Green Arrow shoots Prometheus to death at the end, in a followup miniseries the Justice League is depicted turning against him, including Barry Allen, sadly enough, because dealing out punishment against a supervillain for a violent crime is apparently illegal. Simply stupefying.

Robinson may have once been well regarded as a writer. But to do a hack job that was superfluous and only furthering the flood of contrived shock tactics and publicity stunts DC has become notorious for this past decade - destroys any notion he's sincere. Some of the worst storytelling effects in the DCU came as a result of their publicity stunts over the years. Robinson is not making things any better by collaborating in all these efforts.

Record: Jeph Loeb

I’ve thought about the works of Loeb for some time now. As far as I know, he may have first worked as an assistant to Steven Spielberg years ago in his former Amblin production company before he began to write comic books beginning in the early to mid-1990s. More recently, he’s been a producer for Heroes on TV, and has even written for Smallville and Lost. But, studying his works of the past decade, I’ve had to come to the conclusion that he’s an awfully overrated writer with very questionable elements featured in his writing, and I’ll try here to list some of them.

• When Loeb first helmed the Superman/Batman team-up series, where the new take on Kara Zor-El first made her modern-day debut, he had her climb out of the spacecraft her father sent her in to escape Krypton’s destruction…naked. She then walked around Gotham, in whose vicinity she’d landed, that way, before getting a drape to over herself in. This had the fairly unpleasant effect of over-sexualizing the Maiden of Might, which ended up becoming a notable problem when her ongoing series began a year afterwards. And while the midriff costume she wears now is fine, the way that they took to oversexualizing her ruined everything, and I certainly did not like the overly sexualized costume she wore when she was captured and brainwashed briefly by Darkseid’s minions.
• In the third chapter of the Supergirl reintro story, a young girl called Harbinger was killed by Darkseid’s minions on Themyscira with very little serious emotion involved. Just when Kara had the chance of finding a friend who could appear in a recurring role.
• In a following story published in Superman/Batman #15, the Man of Steel and the Masked Manhunter enter an alternate universe where Superman breaks the neck of an alternate world version of Wonder Woman with her own lasso. Perfectly awful.
• When Loeb launched the new Supergirl series, he began very sloppily with stories like where Kara ended up fighting Power Girl rather a supervillain, and even an evil duplicate of herself. The start of the series was dreadful, and because of likely editorial edictions that followed even after Loeb left, it lost a lot of audience. Suffice it to say that Supergirl was never given an actual secret ID to date, another big problem with Kara's reintroduction.
  
• In the third issue of the third volume of the Ultimates, Loeb did what Mark Millar may have only hinted at – he openly revealed the Ultimate versions of Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver as having an incestuous relationship, and even wrote Ultimate Tony Stark having a sex-tape scandal. Oh, did I mention the drug abuse and even some of the gore injected into that third issue? Guess I needn’t continue then.

There may be some more questionable steps that Jeph Loeb took in his writing at other times too, but that’s what I can find for now. And I think that people should really consider that a writer who sinks into that kind of shock tactic writing is really not someone – or something – to crow over. Loeb has succeeded in making me feel more and more disgusted at his writing as the years have gone by, and that until now, he may have succeeded in raking in tons of sales is disturbing. With lurid stuff like the above examples to his record, I don’t see why anyone with common sense should have to waste their time on him. He’s just one of various writers who’ve shown why the comics medium is losing audience and respect these days.

Record: Mark Millar

The errors I can find that Millar made in his own writing career took place in the Ultimate Marvel line during 2001-2003. Here are at least two examples of what this decidedly pretentious writer did:

• In the Ultimates, just 5 issues into the series, he regurgitated the infamous 1981 Avengers story where Hank Pym beat up on Janet Van Dyne. Pure sensationalism. Of all the storylines that could’ve been used as fodder for a new twist, that’s not one we needed to see. Certainly not if Jan was being pegged as the one who’d provoked Hank into being violent towards her (but no, I don’t think I’ll try to describe just what happened).
• He implied that the Ultimate versions of Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver had an incestuous relationship.
  
• In Ultimate X-Men, the Ultimate version of Wolverine leaves Cyclops stranded or for dead in a deep valley, all so that he can then seduce Jean Grey for sex (and she may be underage!). Yet he’s never expelled from the Ultimate X-Men. Supposing your own best friend left you stuck in a valley where you had to survive on rock plants for a week so that he could go and take advantage of your own girl Friday. Would you want him to continue maintaining membership in your own team? Would any of the other members want him to either?

Let’s just say that Millar is by far a crude, pretentious and overrated writer who did little more than to take some once effective cast members of famous team books and turn them into something otherwise unlikable. His work is so ludicrous, and I can’t understand what anyone sees that’s so great about it.

Record: Bill Willingham

A writer whose works strike me as being more than bit overrated, but whose work on a few DC titles has certainly raised my eyebrows in concern. These include the following:

• In Robin, he put in quite a few negative swipes at females. For example, at the beginning, there was a female contract shooter tracking the Teen Wonder. Then, there were two of the mercenary Ravens, featured during the Batman: War Games crossover, all for the sake of it. And then, to hammer things to the very bottom, we had Spoiler being tortured by Black Mask…with a drill. She died later on the operating table in the Batcave, and the Masked Manhunter showed no genuine sorrow over her death.
• The above was made even worse in a subsequent story called War Crimes in Detective Comics where Leslie Thompkins says that she let Spoiler die to teach Batman a lesson about the perils of being a vigilante and superhero. She even invites him to shoot her dead with a firearm because she doesn’t have the courage to do it herself, of all the ludicrous things that could be thought of for a story like this.
• In the Day of Vengeance miniseries, he turned Jean Loring, in a continuation of the villification she underwent in Identity Crisis, into a female version of Eclipso, for the purpose of influencing the Spectre to destroy magic in the DC universe. The worst part about it was that, as told by Columbus Alive, some of the dialect in the beginning part sounded like a woman being sexually harrassed.

A writer who writes crass ideas like that does not deserve to be working in entertainment. And it makes no difference whether the story is for adults, it would be distasteful at any time. Willingham should be ignored as a comics writer.

Record: Brian Michael Bendis

What is so great about Bendis anyway? This hugely overrated writer with an inexplicable following based on his name alone may have first begun his career as a novelist, but certainly came to prominence following his work on Powers for Image Comics. While he may have come up with some effective women in the books he’s written, he’s still pulled some sexist acts, which I’ll try to highlight below.

• In Avengers: Disassembled, we have the notorious case of Scarlet Witch going insane because she failed to have children, a storyline based on one of John Byrne’s worst works from 1990, in Avengers West Coast. She even sends the She-Hulk berserk during this. The worst part is how it invokes the stereotype of women being unable to cope with power.
• Another one of the worst things about Disassembled was how it regurgitated the Hank Pym as abuser stigma: another character, possibly Tony Stark, asks Hank, “don’t you got a wife to beat?” It’s as offensive to Janet as it is to Hank, who does not deserve this kind of character assassination by now.
• In the 26th issue of the current Avengers volume, he wrote a supremely silly story where Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch have a tryst without even trying to solve anything. Problem with this is how it made Wanda seem more like an airhead than anything else. It was a really dumb story that didn’t serve much purpose other than to seemingly assure readers that Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch are okay and little the worse for wear, yet at the same time did not seem to be written out of love for the characters.
• He killed off the Wasp during Secret Invasion, one of the awful crossovers published in 2008.
  

Based on that and how Bendis has basically taken the Avengers and far removed them from the core premise and structure, that’s exactly why I can’t understand what’s so great about him. And I’d be very happy if, just like Joe Quesada, he would just leave Marvel already.

Record: Joe Quesada

Now, here’s a wee bit of serious mistakes made by Marvel’s insular editor-in-chief, Quesada, comic artist and would-be writer who undeservedly ascended to the high position he’s currently got, where he allowed for discrimination to pass as legitimate in a couple items in past years. For example:

• He allowed for J. Michael Straczynski, until recently the writer on Amazing Spider-Man, to tarnish the memory of Gwen Stacy in the abominable “Sins Past”, and even justified all this in a rock-bottom interview with Newsarama in 2004. He said: “Changing some of the Gwen backstory does little to affect the Peter/Spider-Man world outside of watching Peter grow as a character and the cast grow as people. It changes our way of thinking about Gwen, but she's been deader longer than many of our readers have been alive. Also, I think that when the story is finally told it makes her that more human to us and especially to Peter.” No more than this needs to be told, except that it just symbolizes the exceeding dishonesty to which many in comics have sunk to these days.
• He allowed for Brian Bendis to perpetuate the sterotype of Hank Pym as a wife-beater in Avengers: Disassembled when he had Tony Stark, in one of many out-of-character moments, sarcastically ask, “don’t you got a wife to beat?” ECH! That was by far one of the ugliest cracks I’ve seen come down the pike as of recent.
• He allowed for Scarlet Witch to be misused, turned into a lurid plot device in Avengers: Disassembled, all for the sake of Brian Bendis’ personal ideas of how to write a team book, rendering the book unrecognizable from it’s original conception. That she was more or less exonerated of any wrongdoing in the House of M crossover doesn’t excuse what came earlier, nor does it make the story any more readable.
• His defense for using a manga-like cover for Heroes for Hire's 13th issue, which featured three girls tied up while menaced by tentacles was simply lethargic.
  

And there’s at least a handful of some of Quesada’s worst works as an editor. His departure from office is long overdue, though we must remember that this doesn’t mean that a better EIC will come along next. That’s only if we as fans do our part to work towards it.