What is the worst xmen story arc in your opinion or which stories or runs do you hate the most?

Worst Story Arc - Deadly Genesis

Run I hate the most - Probably anything by Bendis or Fraction. I just can't stand the way they write dialogue and have the characters interact.

Worst run is Latour. He's got the worst X-Men anything...ever.

@cattlebattle: I have not read Fraction but I thought Bendis was ok. I stopped reading xmen after Morrison and came back to it at Marvel now.

I liked the early parts of Bendis's run. The end was bad though.

I can honestly say.....you didn't miss much.

I just hate Bendis's dialogue structure. The snark that appears to try to imitate Whedons work, the way they waste dialogue balloons by characters repeating themselves. It didn't feel like any scenario had any stakes or realism because everyone just making jokes all the time.

I honestly have never seen what the big deal was about Bendis. His work on Ultimate Spider-Man way back when.....it was ok, his work on Daredevil with Maleev was okay, I think Maleevs artwork was what made it enjoyable, and as for something like ALIAS.....never much of a fan. I have no clue why Marvel basically gave him the keys to the kingdom....

Pretty much all of Bendis' run

The Chuck Austin bullshit that ruined Nightcrawler and Mystique.

• X-Men by Chuck Austin
• Wolverine and the X-Men by Jason Aaron
• Uncanny X-Men by Matt Fraction
• Ultimate X-Men by Aron Eli Coleite
• Wolverine Origins by Daniel Way
• The first dozen issues of X-Force by Rob Liefield
• X-Factor by Bob Layton

@cattlebattle: I honestly don't even think his spiderman was that good. It was mostly the same shock value and weak 5 minute crisis plots that he had on X-Men. Little to no real character stories...just "Oh look this person is really a clone....did I say clone? I meant FEMALE CLONE!!! WHAT A TWIST???" and "What's this? Kitty Pride is DATING Spiderman? But she's in the X-Men!" Really it's like it's written by a 14 year old instead of FOR the supposedly 14r year old readers. The guy is a hack who is way above his station..

@koays: jean grey dying the second time.....rather see cyclops and jean file for divorce :P

Oh god where to start?...

I'll just cop out and go for the easy target of Onslaught

@hopesummersforthefuture: Nah...I think I disliked the 3rd death more. You know "I'm Teen Jean from the future, Fear me Booga Booga "Kaboom""

Whats wrong with it?

@mutant_god: Don't ask such questions. The answers are too painful.

I know but I like Azazel and feel hes such an underrated villain, readers still think hes a demon.

Well, I meant it was good for its time. I remember the retelling of the origin story was well paced and interesting.....but yeah, as I am thinking more about it now, it wasn't that good....

The Fraction/Gillen/Bendis eras were the most craptastic.

@thunderbolt30: Lol I don't know what Fraction and Gillen did to get dragged down to Bendis land...I mean they have their flaws. Fraction especially....but Bendis' plots are like doing acid. "Dude Dark Beast is sending futuristic Robots to kill Cyclops!" "Why? They don't even know eachother." "Dude, evil future X-Men came back in time and fought the X-Men to send the O5 back home!" "But that sounds like the smart thing to do. And if they need to send them back why are did Xorna try to blow everyone up?" "Dude Malloy was the world's strongest Mutant and Tempest had to go back in time to erase his birth!" "Yeah but...why is she mad at Cyclops about that? All he did was try to talk to the guy about control before they got blown up by shield. And what was the point of any of this if it's been erased from history..." "Dude..."

@cattlebattle lol idk, maybe it's because I went into it looking for the evidence of him "being great on spider-man" and am looking at it wrong. But it is a really bad title.

@koays: I wrote the first half of this last night, but then my brother came over with two bottles of Jameson. Now my hangover has finally died down enough for me to finish it.

Nah, I disagree. Bendis was legitimately a good writer between 2000 and 2005. Coincidentally the critiques that you pointed out came after 2005, but I think his Spider-Man remained solid up until 2008, although it did fall in quality some after 2005.

The early story-arcs were full of charecter development. The stuff with Gween losing her father, the relationship with Pete and MJ and her PTSD, the established relationship between Pete and Ben, and May learning Pete was Spider-Man was written very well. There was also that thing with May seeing a psychiatrist. Just about every story in the early days would have at least one issue where there would be nothing but dialog, essentially devoting it to nothing but charecter development.

In the early 2000's Bendis was actually good at writing teenagers. Peter, Gwen, and MJ all seemed like real people. Now days in X-Men and Ultimate End his dialog for teenagers was cringe worthy. In Spider-Man he had a few cringe worthy moments, but they would usually come far in-between the good moments. I don't care for most modern Spider-Man comics, but I thought Bendis' first run was actually up there with Roger Stern, Peter David, and Tom DeFalco. Bendis' second run became kind of silly, and his dialog started becoming weaker, but I also think that Death of Spider-Man may be the last good story-arc that he wrote. I haven't read any of his Spider-Man since then, though.

Anyway, some of your critiques don't make since to me.

I'm not following how this was done for shock value. It was established that Pryde had a crush on Spider-Man all the way back in Mark Millar's X-Men run. It just seemed like two people who lived simular lives were hooking up.

I don't get this one either. A female version of Spider-Man shows up in a story-arc call "Clone Saga," it was kind of obvious what it was. The culprit being revealed to be Doc Ock, Peter's dad turning out to be a clone, and Kitty walking up on Peter while he was kissing MJ at the end was legitimately shocking, though. But this story-arc also contained some of the best charecter development between Peter and May in the series. It was where she discovers that he was Spider-Man. It also had some good charecter development with MJ.

I actually think that now days Bendis gets some of the same bad rep as Frank Miller. People read his new comics which are bad and then they go into the older, good comics with already a negative opinion about the writer. Bendis was no Frank Miller, though.

Hmmm.... I don't really see how that is really any different from a lot of other crazy shit that has happened in the X-Men franchise since the 1970s. Not trying to defend Bendis or anything, but, a lot of writers seem to look back at Claremonts tenure on X-Men and think that crazy, fantastical crap happening all the time is what made it great and then try somewhat to replicate that kind of stuff. That's actually a reason I was never a fan of Nicieza in the 90s.

I am talking about the first Ultimate Spider-Man series he did in 2000. I first proclaimed that it was OK but after thinking about it....nah. There was a lot of the usual Bendis snark that I despise and he made a lot of great, wacky villains boring for the sake of "realism" as the Ultimate Universe tended to do.

@immolation: Well on your last point I'll agree. Because as I already said I went into his Ultimate Spiderman purposely looking for the "good" that everyone kept saying whenever they talked about him in non team books.

That said here's where we disagree. His writing style in early issues isn't much of a problem. He's competent enough to exploit the easy story potential in introducing and building Alternate Universe versions of a character.

However as the run continues on you see Bendis slowly lose the ability to balance multiple character arcs and progress the story at the same time. At first this seems ok. You watch him tell a story with Mary Jane or Aunt May and he stretches it out 4 or 5 issues before switching back to the character issue. But it eventually devolves and a lot of characters and plot points that he establishes as cool possibilities get benched for a long time and never brought up again or are never given the focus and explanation that it seemed like it could've gotten.

But then we move to his Miles Morales run and the flaws in his old work becomes far more evident as he has settled into his style and pulls writing and plot points out of his bag of tricks seemingly because they worked before.

The most recent and blatant example would be the introduction of the Spiderman twins..which were alluded as twin clones of Peter or something. It mimics the introduction of his first clone saga and plays with the idea (for the 3rd time in the run) that Peter Parker is alive..and is then neatly resolved and never spoken of again.

Which introspect makes me think that the quick resolution of the initial clone story is another weakness. Because while I grew to like the Jessica Drew character..her initial intro basically follows the Bendis formula of 1)Hint that something is out there many issues before. 2)Run into that something issues later 3)immediately after running into that thing resolve the plot quickly in the second of 3 issues then move onto something else.

Perhaps it's not something I would've noticed if I hadn't found the Dark Beast reveal so strangely written but that's a very bad style of arc writing for a monthly title to have IMO. It's not a continuing narrative...it's 3 or 5 issues arcs with character moments as bookmarks. So someone has an attitude in issue 1 and the last scene in issue 5 is them crying..you think you've got story progress when they tell you at the end of the next 3 issue arc that they've got something screwed up going on in their life.

Then we go into the shock value writing. As I have said the fact that he had his own universe and no limits on how to establish or introduce a character allowed him to excell early on. But he progressively begins to do things more and more to get the same type of "Oh that's different" reactions from the readers. So maybe I'm being harsh when I say it was all for shock value...but the legit shock value moments, (Things like Carnage and Gwen and about 80% of everything Norman Osborne does) are pretty hard to seperate from the "different for difference sake" approach he ends up taking by the time Peter dies.

The book basically shows the downfall of Bendis as a writer as he repeatedly uses some of his better angles and styles until they become a crutch he can't get from under.

I liked Ult. Peter Parker. One of the reasons I've never critiqued Bendis dialogue,(outside of X-23 and one especially badly written All New X-Men issue) is because he made me want to see Peter interact with all of his cast mates from start to finish. BUT by the time I read up to where Miles Morales is introduced you realize Bendis isn't writing characters anymore...he's giving characters traits and maybe Miles will get a crisis to avert..but these aren't people the way I felt Uncle Ben or Peter were in those early issues. It's just whacky situations to look at..and once Peter's cast begin to slide more to the side you see less of a interesting world with its own issues to pick at and more "I wonder whose gonna be behind that door...ohemgee it's _____! I never would've guessed"

Again your right in this case because my entire purpose of reading was to explore Bendis as a writer...so naturally I'm critical of tricks that I saw him still using today to hurt my favorite series.

But that said..I think every writer has a quirk that you can go back and track. Claremont tends to always over write one character slightly more then others for prolonged periods. Morrison loves to examine the world while deconstructing things, Snyder loves for characters to secretly admire eachother. Geoff John's loves inner conflict. It only becomes a problem when it's the worst part of your story and you keep going back to that well as the main source of material from your run. That'd when you stop making the story about the characters an their world and more about the writing decisions you make and how you effect the book.

@cattlebattle: Dear God this thread is defending Bendis what have we come to?...lol but no.

Really I have no problem with his Uncanny X-Men stories up until the endings. All in all I still think his Uncanny, while uneventful..isn't a bad run. All New is a pile of flaming dog crap that I wouldn't throw at my enemies for fear of it fertilizing the ground and growing even worst garbage...but Uncanny? It's just ok.

His Dark Beast story had potential..it was a very interesting twist. It's just they never once explained or questioned it afterwards. So Dark Beast hates Scott so he attacked him with robots...the end. There's nothing wrong with it that couldn't be picked up later...and argument can be made that not picking up the plots made them worst since the book ultimately did nothing.

The only real problem though is summed up with Cyclops and Tempus and their last conversation. She's telling us that he did a bad thing and everyone he knows and lies dies because of it...but that's not what we see happen with Malloy. And similarly despite the overall theme of the Uncanny team and the X-Men as a whole during the time being "Scott has gone rogue" we never once see him do anything that would constitute him being called a Rogue. He's doing the same thing he always did, and more importantly that the X-Men always did. The only difference being he made a speech thanking those who supported the Mutants. So while the characters are telling us repeatedly "Scott is bad" the story isn't showing us anything even considered controversially "bad".

Eh idk about his Spiderman dialogue...it works for me because my only real exposure outside of his run to the character was Cartoons an a couple movies. So I can't complain about it because it's about the only thing that works.

Really it's everything else that strikes me as a Bendism that hurts my opinion of his run because I feel the whole book gets worse and worse the closer to the present you get. Smh maybe I should check out his avengers just to be clear....but there's something about his writing that utterly bothers me every time I spot him pulling a move that I've seen before.

@koays: I have not read any of the stuff with Miles. Death of Spider-Man just seemed like a good ending to a universe that I no longer gave a shit about. Like I said, his run started going downhill in 2005, so I wouldn't expect anything modern to be good.

I know what you mean about him putting things on the back burner and not touching it for a while. One of the most awkward things in his Spider-Man run that I read was that Freaky Friday bullshit with Wolverine that came right after the death of Gwen. It just didn't fit and completely hurt the pacing of the book.

If I read the book again I might see things like you did, with him doing the same things he did in X-Men. I actually liked his run on Ultimate X-Men. He was only on the book for a year and did two story-arcs, but looking at it in retrospect it was obvious back then that he wasn't good on team books. He essentially told two Wolverine stories while he was there. It probably didn't become noticeable because his run was so short.

My favorite thing that he wrote was actually Daredevil. It might be the only book that he wrote that had continuity where he didn't mess anything up.

I thought this thread was about the "Worst X-Man" story.

Silly me.

lol

@hound_of_war: You should know better. These threads turn into Bendis-talk real fast.

OT, the current Apocalypse Wars is really bad (except, surprisingly, All New story with Kid Apoc. that one is just regular bad)

Chuck Austin was terrible. Some of the stuff from the late 90's was also very bad.