Random Most Hated Marvel Comic Arcs (14 items)

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  (#4) Ultimatum

  When Marvel brought superstar writer Jeph Loeb together with popular artist David Finch to put together a major 2009 crossover in the fan-favorite Ultimate Marvel imprint, all signs indicated an inevitable success on the horizon. This did not come to pass. What readers did get was a mess of a series with a truly convoluted plot surrounding Magneto wanting to end the entire world after the passing of his children. If you want to see character after character after character perish, then Ultimatum is for you.

  In his review, IGN's Jesse Schedeen stated, "Ultimatum is one of the worst comics I have ever read. The industry was supposed to have moved beyond flashy, soulless material like this years ago." Comics Alliance's Chris Sims said the writing is akin to "terrible fanfiction" and that it's the "kind of story written by a teenager that wants to sound like a grownup." Ultimatum ended up being all style and no substance and signaled the nail in the coffin for the Ultimate Marvel imprint that would officially be put to bed in 2015 with Secret Wars. 
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  (#10) Secret Empire

  It turns out when you alter the fundamental nature of one of pop culture's biggest icons, people take notice. When it came out in the lead up to 2017's Secret Empire that Captain America was an undercover Hydra agent - meaning he was pretty darn evil, you guys - the mainstream media had a field day. With major media outlets like The Washington Post and Time Magazine covering Cap's apparent heel-turn, the anticipation for Secret Empire was building but a lot of people weren't on board with turning Cap evil, even if it was for a small amount of time.

  Many felt that turning Steve Rogers into a facist was just plain wrong and Secret Empire scribe Nick Spencer turned the dial up to 11 when he repeatedly responded to critics on Twitter, stoking the flames of artist/fan conflict. The war of words got so hot, Vulture's Abraham Riesman wrote an article entitled "That Time Captain America Said ‘Hail Hydra’ and Geekdom Imploded," which laid the dispute out in fascinating detail. Combine the overblown controversy with middling review scores and a lack of changes to spur from the massive event (Captain America is a good guy again, unsurprisingly), and you get a storyline that left readers wondering just what the point of it all was.
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  (#6) Heroes Reborn

  Years before Disney bought Marvel and the duo conquered the box office, turning former C-list heroes like Iron Man and Captain America into full-fledged icons in the process, Marvel ran into some truly dire financial straits in the 1990s. After the comics bubble burst and the company was spiraling toward bankruptcy, they reached out to popular creators who had left the company to come back and reimagine some of the House of Ideas' biggest names for a reimagining known as "Heroes Reborn" in order to drum up sales.

  Getting industry superstars Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld certainly seemed like a homerun idea at the time, but fans rejected the reboot and "Heroes Reborn" became the relaunch that Marvel wishes everyone would just forget already. The whole idea was such a disaster that Marvel quickly reversed course and launched the status quo-restoring "Heroes Return" not long after. Marvel's reticence for line-wide relaunches, an aversion that continues to this very day, stems from the complete flop of "Heroes Reborn." DC is cool with actually changing things up every now and then (hello New 52 and DC Rebirth), but Marvel can't seem to forget this disaster of a relaunch.
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  (#2) Avengers: The Crossing

  Nowadays, the Iron Man/Avengers 1995 crossover storyline "The Crossing" is mostly (if not completely) ignored in continuity as it certainly seems to be something Marvel would rather consider non-canon without acknowledging it at all. The plot essentially boils down to this: the Tony Stark fans had been reading for three decades had actually been acting as an undercover agent for Kang the Conquerer for years. Hijinks ensue, the Avengers go back in time, and a teenage Tony Stark is brought back to the present to take over the reigns of Iron Man which would effectively reboot the character. 

  Unsurpringly, this reboot did not stick because, well, no one was asking for a teenage Iron Man. Taking one of the original Avengers and turning him into a traitor in order to relaunch the character with a younger version failed to bring on new readers and only served to alienate those who loved the character in the first place. When an omnibus of the storyline was released in 2011, Bleeding Cool's Rich Johnston compared the arc to "the uncle that no one talks about after he featured on To Catch A Predator." Yikes.
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  (#3) The Clone Saga

  If we're talking overkill, there's no more infamous Marvel storyline than Spider-Man's "Clone Saga," which ran for well over a hundred issues in multiple Marvel titles from 1994 to 1996. It isn't even possible to succinctly summarize the twists and turns taken in this roller coaster of a tale. Imagine being a rabid comic book fan in the age before widespread internet, and you're confronted with a convoluted story that took more than two years to come to an end while it moved from title to title like it was playing a cruel game of hopscotch. Even if there were interesting ideas strewn throughout the story arc - and there are - wouldn't you feel a little hard done by?

  Meant to mimic the strong sales of DC events like "The Death of Superman" and "Batman: Knightfall," the "Clone Saga" was meant to end Peter Parker's marriage to Mary Jane and return him to a more simple version of the character, but it ended up spiraling entirely out of control. Den of Geek's CJ Wheeler put it thusly, "Instead of returning Spider-Man to his easygoing, simple beginnings the character became more muddled than ever because of the cloning fiasco."
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  (#5) Marville

  Now here is a storyline Marvel wishes they could erase from the minds of the general public. This series is not on Marvel Unlimited. This series is not on any digital storefront. You could shell out the money for physical copies, but you should really save your money. Written in 2002 by then Marvel president Bill Jemas, Marville is one of the most critically derided comic books ever released. It follows the adventures of Kal-AOL Turner, and if that pun about America Online and Superman's birth name doesn't make you laugh, then the rest of the series has nothing else to offer - unless you really like the scantily clad redhead that puzzlingly appears on the cover of each issue for no reason.

  In a 2015 look back at the satire series, The A.V. Club's Nathin Rabin stated, "Marville continually changes what kind of a terrible comic book it is. It begins as a deeply misguided goof on comic books then it becomes a trippy meditation on the nature of existence." You Don't Read Comics's Brandon Masters exclaimed, "In all of Marvel’s published works, no matter how good or bad, it’s hard to find a worse book than Marville. It is petty, misguided, wrongheaded, and just plain badly written."

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