Dethroning Moment of Suck (Darth Wiki)/Comic Books

"And That's Terrible" doesn't even begin to describe these moments. Nor does the amount of Ret Conning, Discontinuity, or Running the Asylum it will take to dilute the bad memories.

Keep in mind:

• Sign your entries
• One moment per work to a troper, if multiple entries are signed to the same troper the more recent one will be cut.
• Moments only, no "just everything he said," or "This entire comic," or "This entire series" entries.
• No contesting entries. This is subjective, the entry is their opinion.
• No natter. As above, anything contesting an entry will be cut, and anything that's just contributing more can be made its own entry.
• Explain why it's a Dethroning Moment of Suck.
• No Real Life examples, including Executive Meddling. That is just asking for trouble.
• No ASSCAPS, no bold, and no italics unless it's the title of a work. We are not yelling the DMoSs out loud.

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• Lord TNK: Spider-Man's moment used to be the Clone Saga, but then came One More Day, basically because it's one man forcing his Fan Fiction on readers as something official. Executive Meddling and Running the Asylum covers more specifically why it's crap.
  • LL Smooth J: Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse! Enter "One Moment In Time," in which the reason why Spider-Man missed his wedding was revealed. A fat thug fell on him. Seriously, Quesada? You couldn't think of a better reason why? Talk about anti-climatic!
    • A Black Raptor: While that does suck, my DMOS for OMIT comes from what happens with Eddie the fat thug so Quesada can make MJ break up with Peter: He beats the shit out of her. Ok, to a lot of people, that's not that bad and it would excuse someone to break up, but its the fact that it happened to Mary Jane. MJ is probably my favourite character in Spider-Man besides Peter himself, and one of the things I love about her is that she doesn't just sit around or run away, she's a fighter. So much so, its CANON that she owns, and knows how to use, a gun, that she has been able to fight off thugs much tougher than this 'Eddie' (she beat the SHIT out of Chameleon for god's sake, and he's a much more competent villain than the villainous Fixer Sue Quesada made), and that she has recieved combat training from Captain America himself. MJ is, for all intents and purposes, a Badass Normal, Eddie is, for all intents and purposes, a fat guy. MJ not only got beat up by him, but was so traumatized by it she blamed Peter. While OMIT is a character assassination for MJ as a whole, this is for me the moment the bullet hit.
  • Chris Lang: For me, the Dethroning Moment for the 616 Spider-Man came nearly ten years earlier, with The Gathering of Five and The Final Chapter in 1998. In some ways, it paved the way for One More Day. The Green Goblin comes up with a scheme that's ludicrously out of character for him (since WHEN has Norman Osborn wanted to de-evolve humanity into primal clay to reshape in his image?), Spider-Man comes across as a total idiot, and Mary Jane does nothing but act stupid. Oh, and Aunt May, who three years earlier passed away in a beautifully-written Tear Jerker, is brought Back From the Dead with a truly outrageous Voodoo Shark explanation. It was basically the writers and editors screaming at the fans "We don't care if our stories make ANY sense, or if the characters are in character or not, as long as we get what we want.". One More Day more or less had the same mindset.
• Triassicranger: A The Bash Street Kids annual from the late 90s features 'Erbert in a strip on his own getting a conker from his dad (which he mistakes to be a puppet. He is very short sighted, you see). He goes out to play with the conker/puppet until a bully challeneges him and smashes 'Erbert's conker. That's not the worst bit however, enraged at this, 'Erbert picks a fight with the bully and the final panel has him covered in rubbish and says "And that teaches you". The bully, who has got away scot-free says "What a wierdo". And that was meant to be funny?
• Cannotrememberpasswords: Robin #150. No amount of editorial mandate can justify its, and its followers', spontaneous transformation of Cassandra Cain, who once dodged bullets at point-blank range for fun, and preached the value of not killing while bleeding to death, into a stereotypical sociopathic Dragon Lady who was basically her mother minus all the competence (she gets beaten by random punching and kicking from one of the weaker martial artists in the Bat-family). Also, she somehow knew Navajo code, one of the hardest languages on the entire planet, despite last having been struggling with English. Even if it was Ret Conned into being mind-control drugs, the damage to the character's entire personality proved nearly fatal.
• Puff Puff: Civil Goddamn War. There were event examples of Character Derailment and Writer Revolt before in Marvel, but never to the scale of this company-wide clusterfuck. Everyone involved was either catapulted off the slope, while some authors simultaneously tried to claim that they were the ones in the right (Pro-Reg), or handed Idiot Balls the size of the Trump Hotel Globe to lug around in order to make them look like the ones in the wrong (Anti-Reg). It was a classic case of BrokenAesops everywhere, managed to drop all the wrong anvils, ended in the most haphazard manner ever, and along with the equally awful House of M/Decimation, set the tone for the entire Marvelverse for several years to come and ruined several major characters for those years as well (See: Iron Man and Strawman Political ). And even now that writers are attempting to sweep it under the rug and start over, they're doing so in such unsatisfactory manners that the people who hated it originally only hate it more.
• Daddy Mulk: from the Italian comic book Rat-Man, the moment that showed this series has jumped the shark. Chuck Norris shows up and kills Rat-Man's enemy. No, it's not bad because it's another example of lame Chuck Norris Facts, it's bad because it killed any seriousness and credibility not only the story, but the entire narrative arc had up to that point. You see, the robot Rat-Man was going to face was presented as a credible threat, and Rat-Man was so terrified of it that, to avoid confrontation (the robot was programmed to kill any superhero he'd meet) he dropped for the first time in the series his costume and decided he no longer was a hero. Sure, it was another example of the Brick Joke (ab)used by author Leo Ortolani (in an earlier story it shows as a gag that, every time Rat-Man picks up a book, he can't read it because Chuck Norris asks him to fight bad guys), but you can't ruin the mood of three issues just for the sake of a lame sight gag. Way to go, Leo.
• Crazyrabbits: In a series that has seen some of the best comic book plots in history, Uncanny X-Men featured an arc called "Holy War", written by (you guessed it) Chuck Austen, infamously known for another arc called "The Draco". "Holy War" mixes together confusing biblical quotes that have little relevance to the panels, character regression and one of the most ludicrous villain plots ever for a perfect storm of ineptitude. It also features a number of notable tropes within its pages. After finding a number of X-Men, including Jubilee, dead and crucified, the team exposes a sinister plot within an organization called the Church of Humanity. That plan involves installing Nightcrawler, a mid-twenties mutant with demonic looks, as the Pope. Then, they would force a Rapture by feeding people exploding Communion wafers. Truly one of the worst comic books made in the past decade, if not the past century.
  • Pumbelo: These biblical quotes are not only irrelevant, but the sources given don't even match. Even the names of biblical books are wrong, like the book of "Revelations". The entire comic is epic case of Did Not Do the Research (not just with religion, it refers to Wolverine's claws as being 100 inches long!)
  • The Dog Sage: That would make each claw roughly 8'4" long. Where would he keep them when not using them?
  • Zark: Actually, it's worse than that. Jubilee was the sole survivor. Her former teammate Skin is still dead. What a waste.
• Crazyrabbits: Ultimate Requiem: X-Men: After the events of the Ultimatum series, the surviving X-Men bury their fallen comrades and destroy the X-Mansion using Iceman's power. So...how do you think Marvel memorialized the deaths of half the X-Men? Did they do it respectfully? Did they have the mutants' families show up to grieve with them? Did they openly cry and console each other after the weight of what happened finally hit them? (If you thought so, you're not Jeph Loeb.) Simple: have Sabretooth, Mystique and a minor mutant named Assemble show up, claiming to pay their respects, then have Jean Grey go crazy and start a fight right next to the corpses, then have Captain America show up and decapitate Assemble while explaining that he also came to pay his respects - all on the very next page. That's how Ultimate X-Men ends: not with a bang (or anything resembling closure), but with a whimper. It doesn't even read like a finale, but as another issue of the series.
• Samadhir: Due to the rather polarizing nature of Garth Ennis' magnum opus Preacher (Comic Book), most readers seem to have at least one moment or issue in it that they consider the dethroning one. For me, its the spin-off story Tall in the Saddle, about Custer and Tulip's early days as carjackers, and their attempt to stop a ring of horse thiefs from kidnapping young horses and selling their meat to restaurants in Europe. The story isn't interesting, tells us nothing new or meaningful about the characters, and towards the end simply feels like an excuse for Ennis to indulge in his taste for shock value, with 2 consecutive pages devoted to images of horses being graphically slaughtered and cut up, a guy's eyeball popping out of his head after a kick to the jaw and someone's head bursting apart when being kicked by a horse. It ends with Custer taking the leader of the ring, a ridiculously over-the-top stereotypical frenchman named Napoleon Vichy, out into the desert and hanging him from a tree, where we get a loving close-up of him pissing and shitting himself after having asphyxiated. I consider the story to be discontinuity from the rest of Preacher.
• Stele Resolve: The sixth volume of the Knights of the Old Republic comic series completely derailed the characters and the plot that had been building. Not only did it rush the ending and cobble together a half-assed Big Bad with a lame backstory and even lamer motivation, it outright changed the deaths of some of the masters that had been predicted at the very beginning of the series. But the absolute worst moment, the true Dethroning Moment of Suck, was when Gryph explained to Quanilia that the Crowning Moment of Awesome message that Zayne had sent to the masters at the end of the first story arc was, in fact, a complete fabrication, a feint intended to put them on guard and buy him some breathing room. Well done, writers. You turned the character development that finally gave a level in badass to the Jedi Order's Butt Monkey into a complete sham.
• Crazyrabbits: DC Comics' The Rise of Arsenal #3: In what is probably one of the worst cases of character assassination in recent memory, Roy Harper (Green Arrow's former sidekick) goes spiraling downward after the events of the already-hated Cry For Justice (where his arm is lopped off and his daughter killed during an attack on Star City by Prometheus). Trying to cope with his loss, Harper beats up his daughter's supervillain mother (and monologues that it's alright to beat her because "she liked it rough") and attempts to have hate sex with her after he ties her up - which then leads to discovery that Roy is impotent. He then gets hooked on heroin (again) and imagines that a dead cat he found on the street is his daughter. The comic then turns into full-blown Narm when Batman shows up and proceeds to kick the living crap out of Harper while saying, "I'm your friend." Everything after this is practically a relief from the horrible lows portrayed in this issue.
  • Zordboy: "Cry for Justice" itself belongs on this page, being mind-numbingly horrible from start to finish. Between artwork that made it look like DC's major characters bled with sparkly pink confetti, a lettering style that made it look like the series was titled "Gay for Justice", and characterisation that involved Hal Jordan joking around with Green Arrow about a threesome he'd once had with two female superheroes (both of whom would never have anything to do with Hal under normal circumstances) - and that was from page one of issue one. All we can really hope is that, at some point in the future, a Crisis shows up and takes it all away.
    • Getter Kaizer: Well not a threesome per se because it was explained in a Birds of Prey comic that Hal was drunk out of his ass and passed out in front of those two female superheroes. Still does not save the comic from sucking though.
    • Sick Brit Kid: This troper was pissed enough by the entirety of Cry for Justice, but the moment that murdered comics forever for this troper was the death of Lian Harper. Much like Linkara, one of this troper's favorite comic series is the Titans. Lian's presence helped humanize her father, Arsenal, as well as provide a likeable character that had good potential to develop into a good character down the line, herself, much like Roy and Dick Grayson. Her death in Cry For Justice just reeked of Joe Quesada-esque "lets make Roy cool again by getting rid of the stuff that makes him look old" style of writing, removing one of the more interesting dynamics of Roy Harper's character: Being a single father struggling between his life as a superhero as well as being there for his young daughter. There was even a parallel in the fact that after losing Lian, Roy falls back into his old heroin habit before getting his ass kicked by Dick and then proceeding to become a cliche 90sAntiHero, essentially a Darker and Edgier form of how Peter Parker became a womanizing grown man living in his aunt's basement having multiple one-night-stands after One More Day.
• User:Jonn: I'm not sure which of the many Take Thats in The Authority was the DMS for me, but I managed to narrow it down to two candidates. One was when the team does a little... international intervention, after which when Hawksmoor blows off President Bill Clinton's concerns about reprisals against the United States of America. His response is that the team isn't actually American, and the bad guys would just have to come after them. Because we all know how logical terrorist groups tend to be about such things. Also note that the team is question is mostly American. In fact, it's slightly lower, proportionately, than the usual lineup of the Justice League of America, which the remark was a Take That at. (Wonder Woman: Greek. Aquaman: Atlantean. Martian Manhunter: Martian. Superman is Kryptonian, though he's basically a naturalized American.) And behind him in the camera pickup at the time is a bunch of people wandering in and out of the party they happen to be having at the time, offscreen, in various states of dress and sobriety.
  • Tork: For this troper, the worst of the Authority is Seth, a very, very mean-spirited Take That at the American South. Seth is essentially every Deep South stereotype distilled into a crazed hillbilly-turned-cyborg-alligator, a borderline retarded psychopath. In particular, he's the product of a gangbang between his mom and her eight brothers. The Authority deals with him by turning him into a chicken and leaving him with his uncle-dads who promptly rape him and all the other chickens.
• Synjo Deonecros: As much as we complain about what a hack Ian Flynn was, nothing he wrote in the Archie Sonic the Hedgehog comics was bad enough to make my mate and I stop reading...until issues #215 and #216. Yes, he's badly derailed characters in the past, but this... He turned Rotor, one of the most lovable, innocent, and woobie-ish characters in the entire series into an incompetent and glory-hungry danger to himself and others - the complete opposite of his personality - solely so he could be a credible traitor to the Freedom Fighters. This, after the debacle of his Word of Gay and his sidelining by Ian with a back injury he continues to exploit to keep the guy out of the action. And worst yet, the events that painted Rotor like this - mainly, building a suit of armor and accidentally almost killing his friends and loved ones in an attempt to take over Sonic's place as the Freedom Fighters' hero - were said to have occurred during a missing year in the series, a year that we can never verify actually happened like that. This is like if, after killing off Lian Harper in "JLA: Cry for Justice", revealing a year later that she had accidentally shot several of her friends to death in an attempt to emulate her dad in order to "justify" her death as karma; not only is it sickening and senseless, but it's a disgrace to the purity of the character.
  • Fox Trax: And then there's "House of Cards". The plot? Sonic criticizes Tails' parents, Merlin and Rosemary, for assembling a protest to turn Knothole into a democracy, because, as we all know, Princess Sally's done such a good job! Eventually, Tails' folks gets thrown in jail, and Sonic just decides to let things handle themselves instead of, you know, helping his best friend and adoptive little brother. Oh, wait. This isn't the superior game series. I forgot. Oh, but it gets worse. After Tails tries to break his parents out, Sonic rushes over to stop him. This leads to a padded-out battle where Tails basically speaks for the entire fanbase while whooping on Sonic's ass. Unfortunately, it's revealed that Tails was motivated to lay the smack-down on Sonic because he stole his love interest from him, even though it was revealed that she was a bad guy! Not only was that one heck of a Wall Banger, but it has nothing to do with anything! God, I hate this series.
  • taylorkerekes: Speaking of which, Sonic the Hedgehog issue 172. Not so much for what Fiona did to Tails, but actually for Sonic being a Kick the Dog target. First, Fiona sets Sonic as her prime example of "not counting on anybody" and when Sonic tries to protest, Scourge takes Sonic into another physical spat along with Fiona telling Sonic to simply "shut up already". Second, and even worse, when Scourge tells Sonic that he (Sonic) would be like him (Scourge) if he (Sonic) had a bad day with Sonic countering that Scourge would be just like him (Sonic) if he (Scourge) showed "a little bit of selflessness" and "a little bit of decency", Scourge is at a loss for words right now, until Fiona abruptly cuts in and kicks Sonic aside claiming that he "had his chance"; she then puts him down by calling him a weakling for "holding back" and that "it's all about survival of the best", and Scourge goes right back to his Jerkassery. What could have been Sonic's chance for giving his enemies a new state of mind abruptly, and epically, ended in a Kick the Dog scenario at its worst for no explainable reason!
• Stele Resolve: I really love Garth Ennis' Punisher comics, particularly the MAX ones. But in the MAX volume Barracuda, Ennis crossed the uncrossable line. The Punisher knowingly, willingly and indisputably killed innocent people who were in the way. The gist of the comic was that a group of CE Os were going to stage a massive power outage across an entire state and somehow use it to make a hell of a lot of money (I don't recall the exact explanation). The Punisher heard about it and decided to get involved--as he said, white collar crime wasn't really his thing, but if it went down people would die, so he was going to put a stop to it. It was a pretty good story until the very end. After a vicious beating from a massive brute of a contract killer, being left in shark infested water and swallowing a hefty amount of seawater while clinging to the boat, Castle was in no position to storm the executives' boat and take them down the hard way. So he blows it up, in shark filled waters, killing everyone: the executives, their friends, girlfriends and wives, investors, even the boats' crew. There is no way that the entire boat crew were part of the plan! It's not much different from gunning down hostages because the criminals are standing behind them, and it was a terrible moment for The Punisher.
• Zeloran: The Transformers comic published by Marvel was not particularly good, but for me the lowest and most stupid moment of the whole run was this: The Decepticons (Megatron and the Combaticons) and the Autobots (Optimus Prime and the Protectobots) engaged in a battle inside a videogame for the possesion of some sort of "super fuel". The catch is that if Prime or Megatron were destroyed in the game, they would be also destroyed in real life. The Protectobots managed to beat the Combaticons and in the end also Megatron. But Megatron, by using a cheat code, managed to resurrect inside the game, shot Prime from behind, was about to finish him, only for Prime to react and send Megatron to his virtual death again. However, Prime declared himself to be the loser of the game. Why? Because in beating Megatron he unwillingly let some of the residents of the virtual game world die. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Prime commited suicide, leaving the Autobots without a leader and allowing the Decepticons to get their hands in a very rare and powerful fuel source thus endangering the Autobots and humanity as well, basically because he killed some video game characters.
• Stele Resolve: Pretty much the Spawn universe became a jumbled pile of messy retcons and conflicting canon not far into the series, but the absolute worst, most unforgivable retcon was when Todd Macfarlane tried to change the identity of Al Simmons' killer. Chapel, the original killer, was not Macfarlane's creation, and due to some legal issues or something he was unable to use him in the film adaptation of Spawn; instead, he was replaced by a woman named Jessica Priest. That's no big deal, it's understandable. What isn't is when he decided, for some reason, to retcon it so that Priest was the killer in the comics as well. So in one of the most half-assed retcons of all time, he tried to make it appear that Spawn's memories had been tampered with to make him seek revenge on the wrong person. First off, why? It didn't suit the Malebolgia's purposes to do so, it would have been utterly pointless. Second, and the biggest issue, Chapel admitted to the murder when Spawn confronted him! You can't say that the revenge seeker was mistaken when the killer confesses to his face about the crime!
• biznizz: Garth Ennis' The Pro. Already a horrible book, the absolute moment that made the book irredemable is when the titular character (Read: a single unwed mother who is a hooker with superpowers) blames thinly veiled expies of the Justice League for not helping make life better. As in "Why do I have to suck cocks to feed my son. you should have done something!" In that moment of stupidity (the reader is supposed to side with the stupid hooker here) that says "Personal responsibility? What's that?!", it implies that superheroes are supposed to improve civilization, even if other, more better stories show that that can lead to a slippery slope of power hungry tyranny. I put that book down, walked away and never read anything written by Garth Ennis again. It also has made me dislike Amanda Conner's work... somehow, and ain't that an achievement.
• Regu: The more and more this troper thinks about it, The death of The Human Bomb in Infinite Crisis becomes one. It was absolutley cruel, as Bizarro just kept bashing his head in. It gets even worse when you consider that he's an old man, being murdered by someone who is essentially a child. Other than that, it was an unsatisfying end to a great man and a great character.
• Katsuhagi: Identity Crisis was a mess all around, and the dethroning moment for me wasn't even the one people cite most, the rape of Sue Dibny, but a more subtle one. Mainly, the sight of Sue's charred corpse being held by her weeping husband and the revelation that she'd just discovered she was pregnant. That did it for me, since the story went from dramatic to Trying Too Hard right then, by throwing the fact that she was pregnant onto it it was essentially screaming "Oh, you see this tragedy? Well it's tragic! Now have some more!" It was just too much. Not to mention that it causes a huge moment of Fridge Logic when you know that the Gingold Ralph got his powers from also made him sterile, so who exactly was the father of Sue's baby?
• Time Traveler Jessica: the last page of the New 52's Catwoman #1 has proven to be very controversial, and not just because it depicts Batman and Catwoman going at it in a scene that would look more at home in Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose, but because in the process of undoing Selina knowing Bruce's identity they now have the two of them engaging in semi-anonymous sex with each other without even bothering to take off most their costumes, throwing out years of UST and Character Development. This is a perfect example of giving fans exactly what they wanted, and yet judging by the reactions of many Bruce/Selina shippers, no one wanted it like this. Not to mention Bruce's consent is pretty nebulous.
• InTheGallbladder: Red Hood and the Outlaws #1. Where do we start? I could go on about the retconning of Jason Todd's death (but not Lian Harper's--she doesn't exist in the DCNU, apparently), but I'd have to say they broke me when they turned Starfire, of all characters, into a pre-teen sex fantasy with no further characteristics.
• Kira Blaize: Another one for Spider-Man came around 1999. Venom had been suffering from Villain Decay for a while now, but the absolutely lowest moment came when Spider-Man fought him off with a cigarette lighter. Peter flicked the lighter in his face and the symbiote was so desperate to get away that it was leaving Brock behind.
• The Chain Man – Mortadelo Y Filemon’s Crossover special “¡Bajo el bramido del trueno!" is basically this for pretty much the entire fandom. Aside from the usual current issues like the jokes being forced, predictable, and repetitive beyond the Running Gag status, there's the whole "crossover" part, with El Capitán Trueno if the title didn't make it obvious, for two reasons: The first is the Non Standard Character Design of the Trueno characters caused because, instead of being drawn in Ibañez's own style, they were randomly copy-pasted from Trueno albums. The results are not pretty and ofen look bizarre, with characters that are dancing being passed as pursuiters and others "wonders" like that. Furthermore, there are instances where Ibañez does keep the original images aside but he draws the hands or the face, which looks somewhere between Off-Model and Nightmare Fuel, depending of the image. The second reason is that, for all this is "passed" as a homage to Trueno for its 50 anniversary, it's not much of an homage as an Humiliation Conga for Trueno himself, as he gets repeatedly hit, transmutated, and put in various ridiculous sitations, the worst part perhaps being Mortadelo himself NTRing him by hooking with his girlfriend Sigurd for no reason. All in all, the whole thing goes from merely boring to outright painful to read.
• A Black Raptor: While Spider-Island is otherwise an awesome book, one aspect still stings: Carlie Cooper's still ever present Sueness. But, it doesn't get to a suckish level until she breaks up with Peter because he didn't tell her he was Spider-Man. I've said this elsewhere, I've mentioned it on other pages, but Carlie Cooper gets angry at Peter because she was left out of his secret. I'm actually happy they broke up, but its her reasoning that makes the moment suck. Apparently, she (and as the narritave shows, the writer also) thinks that she had a right to know. Why? They've only known each other for bairly a year if that In-Universe (and only a handful of years out of universe), only been dating for a month at most in Universe (again, only a handful out of universe), not only has he had no chance to tell her, he's had no reason to do so. She hasn't been kidnapped or put in danger by the secret, she hasn't suffered at all because of him being Spider-Man, he had no obligation to tell her. Did she expect him to explain he's Spider-Man the first time they met, or on a date? If she reacted like this after finding out by herself, she'd probably react the same way if he told her after they started dating. She goes on to make a deal about him covering up his secret identity, and accuse him of using is identity as Peter as nothing more than a mask, but in the end thet fact that she seems to have expected such knowledge since day 1 makes her look like an self-entitled bitch. I didn't like her before, infact I quite despised her, but this is the moment that made me consider her the worst character ever written into the books.