Countdown to 2009: Jim's Top 5 Worst Comic Book Series of 2008

Every weekday of December (except for December 25, that is), Phillyist will be counting down to 2009 with our highlights from the past year and our predictions for the next. If you have a list you'd like to submit, let us know!

5. Star Wars: Legacy
At first I thought this was a decent comic, but after I read a couple more issues I realized the characters are all annoying emo whiners, the stories are clumsy, and the dialogue is melodramatic and overloaded with dorky alien slang. Just terrible.

4. Hulk
Don't get me wrong, I love the Hulk. But this series is written by the awful Jeph Loeb, whose popularity I will never understand. To call his work melodramatic is to give melodrama a bad name. The man ruined one of my favorite comic book characters for me.

3. Last Defenders
In this series, Joe Casey brings back a team nobody cares about and fills out the lineup with characters nobody's ever heard of. Then he puts together a story that's stupid and makes no sense, and has everybody talk in clusmy cliches. This thing is unreadable.

2. Trinity
A weekly comic book series is rarely a good idea. It usually means you're dragging out a story much longer than it should be dragged out, and forcing the writers and artists to throw it all together in much less time than they're used to. Do that and you end up with sloppy work, like this. A title about DC's three biggest, most interesting characters (Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) should theoretically have been a slam dunk, but this thing takes those great characters and runs them into the ground, showing them being defeated by a bunch of second-rate villains that nobody cares about. Kurt Busiek and Fabian Nicieza might want to check in with Grant Morrison for some tips on how to write Batman and Superman. He could have put together a better story than this with his hands tied behind his back.

1. The End League
A painfully angst-laden, melodramatic story about a bunch of squabbling, guilt-ridden, super-powered dumb-asses stumbling around a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The characters are all ridiculous, with stupid names and powers, and their dialogue is so horrible it makes you want to weep. I'm really not sure why this book is still being published. Did it get a lot better as soon as I stopped reading it?

Image via Wikipedia