Hangover: Rob’s Biggest Comic Disappointments of 2012

It is New Year’s Day, and thanks to about fifteen glasses alternating between Milwaukee’s and Lynchburg, Tennessee’s finest products last night, it feels like my brain has been taken over and occupied by Doctor Octopus. Or at least part of Doctor Octopus. Part of Doctor Octopus after a meal of bad sushi and piss-warm Chango. And to add insult to injury, I flipped on the TV this morning to be subjected to Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, which, as comic book movies go, certainly is one (man, Stringer Bell and Sailor Ripley sure have let themselves go).

Chuck on top of that steaming mess that there are no new comics until tomorrow, and nothing whatsoever apparently going on in the world of comics, and what we have is a new year that, so far, is… disappointing. And with that feeling in mind, and 2012 at our backs, it seems like as good an opportunity as any to revisit the biggest disappointments in comics and geek culture that occurred in 2012.

And given that the memory is so fresh, we might as well start with (although this list is in no particular order):

America’s Got Rising Stars: America’s Got Powers #1 Review

America’s Got Powers is a book that is based on a simple and brilliant idea. That idea is J. Michael Straczynski’s Rising Stars.

Writer Jonathan Ross is a well-known BBC television host who has dabbled in writing comics (he wrote Turf for Image Comics last year), and who has gone on record for saying that he loves comics more than masturbation. Which is a bold statement; I personally buy about 30 comic books a week and spend more on them than I used to spend on my two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, but compared to the Happy Slappy? A distant second, my friend… although I must admit I sometimes read my comics with my left hand so it feels like a stranger’s reading them. But I digress.

Ross is writing about American popular culture from the point of view of a European, which means that he sees us from the lowest possible common demominator view: a sporting event and television-obsessed unthinking angry mob, who would not only happily watch and / or attend an event where people are beaten to unholy and crippled pulps, but would bring their children and buy them cheap plastic souveniers of the savagery. Note that I am not saying that Ross is wrong about us. However, it is a little insulting to hear that kind of broad generalization from a lime-sucking buck-toothed rampant practitioner of pubic school buggery. But I’m getting off point again.