It's time! It's finally time for Ten Comic Book Characters You Hate Day. So without further ado, I brings yez:


I couldn't think of ten

My original criteria for determining these dishonorable entries was based on the fact that I was a HUGE fan of team-up books when I was a kid. I read Marvel Team-Up, Marvel Two-In-One* and DC Comics Presents regularly, plus World's Finest and the occasional Brave and the Bold, but really only when the guest star was an Earth-2 dude, Superman Family member, or a stretchable superhero.

*Marvel's premier gangbang-centric title

My premise for judging was going to be "What guest-star would make me turn my nose up at a team-up comic," thinking that someone who could stink up the pages of Marvel Two-In-One had to be a particularly onerous roster-wrecker from either universe. Thing is, as I got to think about it, those team-up books were almost universally horrible. With rare exceptions - DCCP and MTIO both had a great Starlin cosmic arc, as well as some excellent multi-parters, while MTU enjoyed a surprisingly good Byrne-era run - those comics almost ALWAYS sucked. They could have turned the Watchmen into the Freedom Fighters with nary a flick of the wrist.

So, rather than rely on the above little device, I ended up having to review IN MY MIND volumes of retarded comic book trivia, plus my runs of OHOTMU** and DC's Who's Who. A clear trend began to develop as I forged ahead, and namely it was "Characters who are almost universally used for the wrong reasons, and whose appearances impede rather than improve a story. I also had to limit it to characters who were bound to pop up in stories, because some guy who only ever appeared once isn't a big issue to me, really.

**Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, readable if only for Eliot R.Brown's technical schematics of goofy superhero shit.

So now here we go:

1.Spider Jerusalem
And all his tortuous ilk
This actually applies to all of Warren Ellis' smirking, chain-smoking, interchangeable (usually) British smartasses from any number of his books. Jack Hawksmoor, meet Peter Wisdom, meet whatever, I don't even fucking care. Has there ever been a writer who more obviously inserted idealized versions of himself into his stories? Well, yes, and his name is Howard Chaykin, but at least he never wrote himself banging the hymen outta Kitty Pryde. PETER WISDOM - KNOWN SUPERHUMAN POWERS AND ABILITIES: DEFLOWERED SHADOWCAT AND IF YOU DON'T THINK THAT'S A SUPERPOWER YOU TRY IT!

The big straw man gangbang known as Transmetropolitan was Warren Ellis' Atlas Shrugged, and if you live in a world where you think the guy who wrote Doom 2099 needs an objectivist soapbox of his very own, you're probably already signed up on his forum. What Spider Jerusalem contributed to anyone except paranoid shut-ins, naifs who hadn't yet considered the possibility that corporations may not value the individual and disassociated twenty-somethings who were looking for JUST the right retarded tattoo to regret in four years, I'll never know.

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2.Tim Hunter
If Vertigo had a Super Friends, Tim Hunter would be their Aquaman.
Crammed down out throats since his first insufferable appearance in the otherwise excellent Books of Magic miniseries, Tim Hunter had me rooting for Mister E to strand him at the end of time. The logic with this character seems to have been, since the word "go," to pair him up with much more likable, charismatic characters, and watch him suffer by comparison.

Here's the thing, this Tim Hunter cat's eventually going to grow up into the world's most powerful sorcerer ever. Which they told us, like, first time we ever saw him. And then it turns out all his friends and enemies knew too, and he knows it now as well, and ... well, think we can pull off a series where the big mystery is who his mom is? I ... sure, why not. Because there sure ain't a lot of mystery left in his life. OH WAIT MAYBE HE'LL TURN EVIL. He'll still be boring. Evil and boring.

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3.Shadowhawk
Havin' AIDS and breakin' backs, the ultimate super-hero icon
Jim Valentino apologists explain away Shadowhawk by calling him a satire of the work his fellow "Image Seven" were producing at the time - ultra-violent, tastelessly timely and hacked out by meaningless cross-hatching from pointy silver head to black stockinged toe. But folks forget there's a middle ground between "Doing it for real" and "doing it for larfs," and that is "Trying to cash in on someone else's successful formula."

Shadowhawk had AIDS, it's fit to remember, and he got it the way most folks did: His gangland enemies injected him with it. Understandably, this led him to go around breaking people's backs. A nation of crippled criminals. Valentino's quite the fucking hippy, man.

Later on, Valentino got a mad-on for Grendel-izing/Eternal Champion-izing Shadowhawk, as was kind of a fad back then, so that there were multiple Shadowhawks throughout history. If the idea was that a crippled criminal was a message to other criminals, it was clearly a terrible message, because Shadowhawks had been doing that since the time of the Pharaohs and we still had criminals today.

Plus, seriously, Touch of Silver was horrible. Apropos of nothing, it just really was.

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4.Northstar
Because I hate the homos.
No, wait, that's wrong, I'm a friend to birds AND homos, and I was hating on Northstar since way before he came exploding out of the closet as sub-light speeds. Although his 'revelation' hasn't made him any easier to handle, as the whole reason he ever makes an appearance in a comic now is to have some surly confrontation with a homophobe from some other super-hero's supporting cast or to get hit on by some other hero's resident supporting cast queer. ROBUST!

Nah, I hated him back in the day for no other reason than he was just some Quebecois Quicksilver, a Maximoff knockoff, if you will. Arrogant super-speedster with an unhealthy fixation on his sister, plus what the hell, he even LOOKS like Quicksilver in a black wig. Meh.

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5.The Eradicator
The name that just drips off your tongue.
One of the four pathetic also-ran abortions from the Death of Superman series, they just won't let this guy die. Ostensibly, he's supposed to be something like this dead cop whose body got merged with this Kryptonian artifact of almost limitless power or something, he's really just the Punisher with laser hands and no convincing backstory. Why was he a super-hero/vigilante? His wife and kid were alive, I seem to remember, and what . . . alla sudden DC doesn't kill loved ones no more?

Bringing this guy back with an Ed McGuiness design doesn't do anything for anyone, he's still some super-schmuck with a muddy moral compass who would've been an enemy of Superman's, rather than valued family member, back in the good old days. That he can now fight side by side with the Man of Steel rather than toe-to-toe does nothing but underline the erosion of the Superman character over the last twenty years. A morally relativist Superman who makes concessions in his never-ending battle is a compromised Superman.

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6.Gambit
Something something les good times roulez, chere!
This guy's basically Wolverine without the baggage, but he was created by Chris Claremont so he ended getting almost as much baggage within three issues of his first appearance. I mean, that's it, right? He's a rebel without the claws. Boom

Gambit's also the perfect example of Jim Lee's horrible costume design skills. Here's how it works: You give your superhero or supervillain neck-to-toe covering, lots of piping and padding and thick fabrics and muddy, sedate colors. What you have at this point is not only a very serviceable super-hero costume, but a stylish one which stands out against the bright spandex. Okay, and now? Now put an overcoat on it. Every fucking time. Jesus, this fucking guy.

And if you're a laydee superhero, prepare to have your thighs and midriff bare. Because criminals are cowardly and superstitious lot, and there's no greater symbol of bad luck than naked female flesh. Joseph Campbell said so.

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7.Hook Hand Aquaman
The A on his belt stands for ARRRRRRRRRRR
At some point in the revampin' nineties - and has one nineties revamp stuck around? What a disposable era - DC decided, and rightly so, that Aquaman was a critically mishandled character and something needed to be done to keep the franchise vital. So they gave it to Peter David, possibly because they were very very high.

David did wisely decide that, for once, Aquaman needed to stop being the underwater Batman. It wasn't getting him anywhere, aping this other hero under the sea. But why he decided that he needed to be not only the undersea Superman - almost every issue was "See, Aquaman can beat THIS superhero!" - but also a neurotic beardo with a crippling deformity is beyond me. Man, that fucking hook hand. It's been ten years since they revamped the guy, and that hook hand has been pretty much one of everything - cyber hook, regular hook, liquid metal, now it's magic water and I don't even know.

Funniest thing about Hook Hand Aquaman was how hard hard hard they pushed to make that the new look for Aquaman in their merchandising, but licensors would buy the orange-shirt Aquaman over hook hand in a heartbeat - even the Animated Series went classic with him. Now the hook hand is FINALLY the merchandising/animation Aquaman of choice, and they just put him back in the shirt in the comics. BOOM.

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8.Venom
I associate long, dangling tongues with retarded dogs, not vicious super-monsters.
What makes Venom so distasteful - besides that tongue, let's just get that retarded tongue thing out of the way - is that he STARTED OFF like a really great villain. He was fully and wholly capable of making Peter Parker's life a living hell, in every capacity, and that makes for a good villain. Thing is, Marvel apparently realized that Venom was incredibly popular with the fans, and decided to make him higher profile - which for a villain means a face turn.

Like Punisher and Wolverine (C'mon, Wolvy was ostensibly a villain when he appeared in the Hulk), Marvel saw a bad guy they could turn into another franchise player. The difference between those guys and Venom was that those guys were good guys by their own standards. Wolverine was a government agent, Punisher was a vigilante, and Venom was a fucking maniac. So all the subsequent miniseries where Venom is going to end up protecting someone or fighting criminals falls really flat. That's why you get Carnage, you know, you had to introduce a NEW more vicious symbiote dude to make Venom look good.

Add to that the lame attempt at spazz-out humor - god, no one writes more immature gags than the forty year old retards in comic books - and this is possibly the single most groaner villain of all time, definitely so of Marvel's multitude of bad-guys-gone-good. The only good thing about him is that he's never appeared in Daredevil, the only Marvel comic I've been reading consistently since I was a little kid.

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9. Aunt May
WHY WON'T SHE DIE ALREADY??
In Spider-Man, there are basically two kinds of antagonists: There's the retards in the funny costumes who play the role of bad guy because they're stealing things or killing people or whatever, and then there's the antagonists whose role it is to keep Peter Parker down. Flash Thompson, Ned Leeds, J.Jonah Jameson, occasionally Harry Osborne and Mary Jane, depending on the story line. Even Peter Parker and Spider-Man theyselfs fit this role, each of them adopting responsibilities which keep Peter from living up to his full potential.

Aunt May's role was to guilt Peter into feeling more responsibility than he could bear to live up to. She was frail and defenseless, the knowledge of Peter's secret identity would kill her, and she was a constant reminder that Peter had failed to prevent his uncle's murder.

Well, nowadays, May is robust and healthy, she knows about and is perfectly okay with Peter's double life, and she's come to grips with Ben's death. So. SO SHE IS USELESS. And I hear she's banging Jarvis now, which means Avenger's Mansion now echoes with the sound of squeaking bedsprings and what sounds like bologna being scraped across sandpaper. Goddamn, Aunt May must go!

Cross-posted from Calamity Jon's Ape-BLawg