Best of 2011: Biggest Disappointment

As 2011 comes to a close, it’s safe to say that it has been a banner year for the comics industry and fans alike. Here at Comic Booked, we have always taken our comics pretty seriously, and after a stellar year of new material, we are pleased to present you with our awards for Best of 2011! For this year’s awards we asked each of our team members for their input and nominations to see who they thought were the best of the best in the comic book industry over the past year! After a few weeks of careful thought, consideration and deliberation, we’ve selected these titles as our choices for the best that 2011 had to offer!

Unfortunately, being nominated for or winning this next award isn’t truly the honor that many of our other ‘Best of’ Awards are. Here we have what we considered to be our biggest disappointments over the past year. This category is reserved for titles or industry decisions that either didn’t live up to expectations, or that overall just seem like a bit of a let down. While we love and support all of our publishers, sometimes things just aren’t what we anticipated, and we recognize that here. Here are our nominees for Biggest Disappointment of 2011!

• Legacy characters being demoted- This year we saw characters that spent years earning the right to bare their mantles stripped and demoted for no real reason aside from their formers returning. Dick Grayson went back to Nightwing after being Batman for a few years, James ’Bucky’ Barnes is back to being the Winter Soldier after carrying the Captain America mantle for some time, and Stephanie Brown has returned to her Spoiler persona after spending two years as Batgirl. I understand that with a major universal reboot, DC has a bit more of an excuse here than other publishers might, but as far as I’m concerned this is still a huge step backwards. I personally feel like we grew alongside these characters and watched as they earned their rightful place in these roles, only to have them stripped away for the version ‘that people outside of fans know’. It’s kind of hard to allow people to get to know Stephanie Brown as Batgirl or Bucky as Captain America when they only carry the mantle temporarily. –Jordamus Prime

• The cancellation of Secret Warriors. While I know it was inevitable the cancellation of Secret Warriors was my biggest disappointment in 2011. It was a cool series that followed Nick Fury‘s Black Ops team as they took on Hammer, Hydra and Levethain.- Rob The Wrecker

• The cancellation of multiple Marvel titles. Very upsetting, I was looking forward to a few, including the young Dr. Doom series. – James Halstead

• The direction of Abnett and Lanning’s run on New Mutants. Granted, they had some very big shoes to fill, starting as they did in the aftermath of Zeb Wells’ excellent run on the title, and their run began promisingly enough, but it wasn’t long before the cracks began to show. Since they took over, the team has been gutted, with long term members like Cannonball being replaced by characters that I can only describe as Age of Apocalypse rejects. For whatever reason, this team has never been as modular as the other X-teams, and the last time a writer started swapping out characters (Louise Simonson, during her run on the original volume) the book never recovered.- Nick C

• It’s not the horribleness that is Harley Quinn in the DC relaunch, it’s that people are actually buying that tripe even now that Harley has slept with someone else that isn’t Mr. J. I love DC, I love Batman, and above all I love Harley Quinn. As consumers you have a right to a better product, but you all have to put your feet down and say F@%# that!! And by feet I mean wallets. Plenty of other good New 52 titles out there you could be buying. I know. I’m collecting them as we speak. – Nicole Sixx

• Fear Itself. I just don’t really get why it was even needed. The story was scatter brained and poorly executed and I thought Fraction would have done more with it. – Jason Padua
• Fear Itself. For the first time in 21 years I dropped a major Marvel Event. Two issue in and they were still setting it up with slow storytelling and building no interest.- Skott of Fables

• DC’s digital exclusive with Amazon Kindle. Moreso even than their half-assed relaunch, DC’s deal with Kindle and the resulting B&N backlash really made me think less of DC as a publisher.- Robert LeMoyne

• Bendis on Moon Knight. Though he took the series in an interesting direction, the whole “Marc Spector has the Avengers in his head” thing just fell flat. It was pretty good in the beginning, but I’m completely over it now that the book is basically Moon Knight talking to his imaginary friends. – Michael Wirth

• Flashpoint was a big disappointment. The definition of a filler-event, with titles handed over to creative teams that were inexperienced, or simply had nothing to say, Flashpoint was eventually revealed to be a schedule place-holder set up to give the harried creative teams of the New 52 time to pump out revamped books. A missed opportunity and just a waste of time overall. -Emmet O’Cuana

Winner (?), Comic Booked‘s Biggest Disappointment of 2011-

Fear Itself

I suppose some sort of congratulations (or apologies?) are in order for Fear Itself‘s creative team and publisher for being Comic Booked’s Biggest Disappointment of 2011! Looking to the future, we can only hope to see better efforts in 2012! No hard feelings, right guys?