Creator Backlash / Comic Books

• Mark Millar went on record saying he hates Trouble (Marvel Comics) and considers it his worst work. Might apply to The Unfunnies as well, since his official website doesn't seem to acknowledge its existence.
• Robert Crumb:
  • He's come to hate Fritz the Cat, especially after the movie came out and he felt it ruined his work forever, so in a follow up comic he killed Fritz off and discontinued the books.
  • His single most hated work is the "Keep on Truckin'" comic; mainly because of how well-known and overused it became, how closely identified he became with it, and the fact that no one else realized it was supposed to be a satire. In a live appearance, he spoke about how much money other people have made off of that one work, screening it onto posters, shirts, the works, none of which he ever saw a dime from. He advised the audience to never ever ever ever so much as mention the words "Keep On Truckin" to him.
  • He's indicated that he resents the cover of Big Brother and the Holding Company's album Cheap Thrills because of his hatred of "hippie music" and the fact he was never paid for it.
• Pierre "Peyo" Culliford hated The Smurfs, but continued to work on it because it was a Cash-Cow Franchise. He had a lot of pressure from his publishing company, from the team that did the cartoon version, from some French TV animators (for those of you who remember French TV in the '90s: Dorothee), and from kids.
• James O'Barr came to hate The Crow because it glorified revenge (though the fact that the comic's popularity and success indirectly resulted in Brandon Lee's death probably didn't help either). All royalties he received from the movie were donated to charity. However, the Special Edition released in 2011 shows that O'Barr has come to terms with the work, seeing it as about true love and the importance of self-forgiveness. This is thanks in no small part to Brandon Lee's fiancée Eliza Hutton, with whom O'Barr became close.
• Mark Waid has said he regrets his Deadpool mini-series from the '90s, and would not have agreed to write it had he known what a "creep" the character was. He's not a fan of '90s Anti-Heroes.
• Warren Ellis grew to despise Planetary and its fans after they constantly sent him e-mails asking when the new issue was coming out. However, the situation came to a boil after the death of Ellis's father. When he asked his fans not to contact him while he was in mourning, they kept e-mailing him anyway. There's probably a good reason the later issues were so slow to come out. Though the backlash never seems to extend to the work itself, which never wavers in quality. He even wrote a final issue years after the series was thought to have been finished.
• Cerebus the Aardvark:
  • Dave Sim, the creator, gradually began to regret the female characters he created in the series, feeling they were idealistic and unrealistic depictions of women. Though this may not say much considering Sim's expressed views on women...
  • Sim's collaborator Gerhard really doesn't enjoy looking at his background art from Church and State and has flat-out stated that he didn't like the writing in the later story arcs, saying that by that point, Sim had lost him as a reader.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic the Comic writer Nigel Kitching expressed dislike for Amy Rose's development in the comic (which was actually the result of Executive Meddling insisting on having a more suitable female role model), resenting not having the freedom to develop her and leaving her somewhat flat compared to her more interesting and flawed male comrades.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
    • Artist Jon Gray has said he'll always regret drawing the scene where Sonic is slapped by Sally, stating in his own personal commentary on the page that the scene "single-handedly encapsulates what was wrong with the Sonic comic both verbally, artistically and editorially" at the time. He has expressed similar resentment towards the "Sonic's Angels" story, a story which infamously depicts what can only be described as borderline Torture Porn being performed on poor Bunnie.
    • Writer Ian Flynn later admitted his attempt to revert Charmy to his game counterpart persona ^note  a 6 year old, less than half the age of his comic counterpart via an injury from the Egg Grapes was a case where he didn't think it through, and was left unable to do anything with the character without inflicting an unsettling undertone due to the implication of brain damage.
    • Ian started the book wanting to undo the damage caused to Sonic and Sally's relationship and get them back together, which he did. By the time of the soft reboot, he was sick of the shipping wars and made them just friends.
    • Even he seems disappointed with the Sonic 30 Years Later arc.
  • For the Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW) series, Ian Flynn has made clear his frustration with Sega’s particularly heavy mandates regarding Shadow, which Flynn finds so restrictive and contrary to his understanding of Shadow's character that it’s made him want to keep Shadow Out of Focus until they loosen up.
• Alan Moore seems to loathe all of his old works because of their hand in creating The Dark Age of Comic Books (although many have said that he gives himself too credit).
  • It gets to an extent where he really has it in for DC. He has compared his relationship with the company to having a child you love, then having them kidnapped by gypsies in the night and every once in awhile they send you photographs of the kid working as a prostitute.
  • The perfect storm of the above points is Watchmen, where the original contract would have reverted the rights to Watchmen to Moore if it went out of print, but then they reprinted it, created a prequel, and then finally integrated it into the main DC universe, effectively "kidnapping" the comic.
  • A more specific example of this trope is Barbara Gordon getting crippled in The Killing Joke; Moore deeply regrets including it (he feels like it was pointless since he didn't put any focus on how it affected Barbara). He has gone on record as saying that The Killing Joke is one of his worst stories—though he has nothing but praise for Brian Bolland's artwork, he thinks the story overall is too dark and doesn't say anything of value for it.
  • He also has an imperfect relationship with Neonomicon, his take on the Cthulhu Mythos. While he overall insists it's a good story even with its intentionally dark and uncomfortable themes, he's admitted to have perhaps "gone too far" regarding its horrific and ugly approach to sex, including the infamous "fish rape".
  • He didn't really care much about giving Marvel's main universe the designation of "Earth-616" with his son-in-law, John Reppion, admitting on an online forum in 2005 that Moore arbitrarily chose the number and that it was a just a random number of no significance, chosen because people always seemed to be talking about 'Earth-2' or 'Earth-4' but never any higher numbers.
• At conventions, Kurt Busiek accompanies his signature on copies of Spider-Man/X-Factor: Shadowgames with the refrain, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry..."
• Although Joe Quesada was the true diabolical mastermind behind Spider-Man: One More Day, it was written by J. Michael Straczynski, who absolutely hated it even as he was being paid to write it. He had asked that his name not be put on the infamous final issue (a request that was ignored) and tells people at conventions where to find Quesada as his own personal vengeance. Even Quesada himself, while defending the decision to end the marriage as the correct move from a corporate standpoint, has never really defended the story on artistic grounds.
  • JMS also hoped he could use OMD to undo Sins Past, another story he wrote under protest (in his version the Goblin Twins were Peter and Gwen's kids; Quesada didn't like the idea of two teenagers having sex, and proposed the baffling idea of one teenager having sex with the middle-aged Norman Osborn). He was told he couldn't^note Sins Past would later be retconned in a more convoluted manner by Nick Spencer.
  • It was also rendered a little more complicated by the fact that, per some of his colleagues, JMS also apparently wanted to undo more or less everything back to the death of Gwen Stacy and was told he couldn't. What everyone does agree on, however, is that the end result is Quesada's fault.
• Suske en Wiske: Willy Vandersteen also suffered from this, but with all his comic strip series. He usually started a new series, but after a handful of albums he became bored with them and passed them on to his assistants, while he started a new project. In the final two decades of his life he was just a creative advisor to most of the series he started.
• Piet Pienter en Bert Bibber: Creator Pom refused to be interviewed about his comic strip throughout most of his life. He despised that period of his life and could not be humoured about it.
• Nero: Creator Marc Sleen never quite understood why so many of his fans prefer the old, crudely drawn black-and-white albums to his later, better drawn albums in color.
• De Kiekeboes: Creator Merho sees his oldest albums as an Old Shame, with a lot of naïve and childish ideas and jokes that don't resemble the comic strip as it is today at all.
• James Stokoe, creator of Orc Stain, has decided to cut himself off from Sullivan Sluggers comics he did to Mark Andrew Smith's script, made it clear he doesn't want to get involved with the book anymore and asked for his name to be removed from it.
• As Matt Wagner's long-running Grendel mythos has progressed, so has the original 20th-century Grendel, Hunter Rose, descended from his original Byronic Hero characterisation to simply a hateful, arrogant, murderous git. Wagner has been quoted as saying that every time he writes about Hunter, he likes him a little less.
• The collected edition of Evan Dorkin's The Eltingville Club comics (a dark satire on stereotypical Fanboys) states that Dorkin stopped writing the comic when exposure to the internet revealed to him that the Fan Dumb he was satirising was far more common and infinitely worse than he imagined.
• David Mazzucchelli, the artist of Batman: Year One, has expressed distaste and regret, in an afterword to later collected editions of the story, for its controversial Post-Crisis origin for Catwoman as a former sex worker. He now considers that it adds unduly sleazy and adolescent content to a genre essentially aimed at children. (Although this is a bit ahistorical, as Catwoman was created in the Golden Age at a time when superhero comics were intended for both a child and adult audience and often contained quite a bit of sex and violence, and she was Exiled from Continuity for much of the Silver Age precisely because she was considered too sexualised for children.)
• Matt Furie originally created Pepe the Frog as a character in his comic Boy's Club, which turned into a popular meme by 4chan. Although this started off fairly innocently, it eventually began to be associated with the "Alt-Right" movement and Neo-Nazis, to the point where the Anti-Defamation League officially, and hilariously, declared it a hate symbol. Unsurprisingly, Furie wasn't particularly happy about this, and drew a comic about it before eventually killing off the character in 2017's free comic book day.
• While John Byrne himself doesn't seem to regret The Supergirl Saga, Dan Jurgens, who along with his The Death of Superman cohorts, took over from Byrne (and even did material built off its ending, including Superman: Exile) hated how the story ended with Superman executing General Zod, Zaora, and Quex-Ul after depowering them—though less for the idea of Superman killing itself and more out of the belief that if Superman were to kill, it'd be more in-character for him to do it while protecting people from an immediate threat as opposed to outright executing someone who was already beaten. He subsequently considers how Man of Steel handled Superman killing Zod (to save a family Zod was actively threatening) an improvement.
• Len Kaminski left Iron Man before The Crossing, which was hated by fans for many reasons, chief among them being it tried to retcon that Tony was a Manchurian Agent for Kang the Conqueror — and in fact that's exactly why Kaminski left, as it was a mandate from the editors and like the fans, Kaminski wasn't fond of that plot point, either, so he chose to leave rather than be Mis-blamed for it.
• Roger Langridge, writer and illustrator of The Muppet Show Comic Book, made it clear on his blog that he did not approve of the preview issue, which re-purposed material he originally made for Disney Adventures until the magazine was cancelled, revising the story with Sweetums so that the character would sing a parody of James Blunt's "You're Beautiful" near the end.
• Matt Fraction wrote that the number one thing writing X-Men taught him is "don't write X-Men".
• Grant Morrison acknowledged in their autobiography that New X-Men's take on Magneto was way out of line, portraying him as an utterly unsympathetic psychopath mostly in the vein of his pre-Character Development days. Morrison wasn't comfortable with writing a character in the early 2000s who was essentially a terrorist, which had colored their viewpoint on him unfairly.
• Though Louise Simonson didn't create the character Madelyne Pryor, she was the editor of Uncanny X-Men when the character debuted and married Cyclops. In interviews and any X-Men comics she scripts, Louise makes abundantly clear her utter contempt of the character and unceasingly declares that Pryor and her entire history before 1989 should be permanently ignored and erased. But Chris Claremont, however, does not seem to agree with that.
• Phil Jimenez, the main artist on the Infinite Crisis, has stated in interviews he is not happy with the book's legacy on Wonder Woman and the role he believes it had in turning the character away from their All-Loving Hero roots.
• Quick and Flupke: Some episodes in which Quick and Flupke playfully imitate Hitler and Mussolini were never reprinted. During the 1930s it was just meant as an innocent joke, but after World War II these gags were suddenly not that funny anymore.
• Tintin creator Hergé has a couple.
  • The first, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1929), is ripped off wholesale from a single book condemning the Communist regime and has extremely primitive art, which was never updated to his later style. Hergé only republished it during the 1970s and solely because many bootleg copies were sold during that time. Still, it was kept in its original black-and-white form, without any alterations, and in an act of Canon Discontinuity kept out of the regular Tintin canon.
  • The second, Tintin in the Congo (1930) contains many old stereotypes of Africans, causing a furor in the UK when it was released to the English reading public in 2005. There was also an unsuccessful private prosecution in Belgium to try to get the book banned as incitement to racism. Tintin's psychotic maiming of wildlife (blowing up a rhinoceros with a drilled hole and a stick of dynamite) is pretty hard to take as well. Hergé recognized this in retrospect and begged for them to be left out of print. Unlike the Soviet adventure, Tintin in The Congo was later redrawn and republished in color and with Hergé's later more polished art style. The rhinoceros was spared in the Nordic edition and the English color edition.
  • A third example is Tintin: The Shooting Star (1941), created during the Nazi occupation of Belgium; it originally featured a stereotyped Jewish-American villain, who in later versions was altered to be of an non-indicated ethnicity. A very antisemitic comedy scene with two rabbis was entirely cut.
  • After World War II, Hergé started a magazine named after his creation. It became a Cash-Cow Franchise, but the stress took his toll on him to the point that he literally fled to another country for a few months to take a rest. He played with the idea of quitting the comic altogether, but he never quite did. Yet new "Tintin" albums became less and less frequent as the decades progressed and most of the work was done by his assistants. A big reason for the delays in later Tintin installments was that Hergé suffered a severe lack of confidence after Tintin in Tibet, believing that he wouldn't be able to surpass what he thought was the best, and most personal, work he had ever done. The later installments were also highly experimental, as Hergé's belief that he would not be able to top Tibet meant he used them as an opportunity to experiment with the characters.
  • Hergé later regretted explicitly showing the alien spaceship at the end of Flight 714, although he also admitted he didn't know how else he would've ended the story.
• Jhonen Vasquez, author of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, Squee, and creator/showrunner of Invader Zim put out a single-issue "throwaway" comic called the Bad Art Collection early in his career, which was exactly what it says on the cover. When someone brought a copy to a signing event at a convention he responded with his usual good grace and humour; and commented, laughingly, "Oh my God, someone actually bought this thing," while signing it. According to Vasquez, the origin of the collection was him writing the cartoons back in school in order to get people to stop bugging him to draw for them. Unsurprisingly, the Bad Art Collection has been out of print for at least a decade.
• Mexican cartoonist Rius published many comic books in the 60-70s. Being a firm believer in Marxism, he dedicated much of his work to socialism/communism and prophesized the fall of capitalism. One of the most famous examples of this is the book he made under orders of the Cuban government about the Cuban Revolution. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, he admitted that he had to eat his own words and that he never drew anything negative about the socialist states of the time because, in his own words, he "didn't want to provide ammunition for Imperialism."
• For a long time, this was the attitude Mark Millar took towards a collection of early strips he wrote for Sonic the Comic in the nineties, insisting that he only wrote them for the money to pay for his wedding. He seems to have softened his stance on them lately, though.
• Even though he hasn't taken it out of publishing, David Herbert would like everyone to forget Warriors of the Night, which is his first graphic novel.
• Andy Schmidt formally admitted that The Transformers Continuum was of poor quality, but thanks to Denton J. Tipton and Carlos Magno making fun of him over it at the IDW offices, he wasn't allowed to forget it.
• Robert Kirkman introduced the character of Freedom Ring during his run on Marvel Team-Up, a gay hero who was touted by Joe Quesada himself as an upstanding example of gay male characters in the Marvel Universe... who was then killed horribly at the end of the three-issue arc. Kirkman apologized for "killing 25% of Marvel's gay population," admitting that he wanted to write a story about a newbie hero making newbie mistakes and dying because of it, while also wanting to write a story about a gay hero, and the two plots intersected in the worst way possible.
• Robert Kirkman very much regrets the early death of Shane in The Walking Dead. He never dreamed that the series would last as long as it has, and thinks he could have done a lot more with the character.
• Suske en Wiske: Creator Willy Vandersteen already made comics during the Second World War before he struck gold with Suske & Wiske after the liberation of Belgium. One of the stories he drew was antisemitic cartoons for a Nazi SS magazine. Vandersteen was smart enough to do this under a pseudonym and this secret shame was only revealed in 2010, literally 20 years after his death. Even his relatives claimed he never told them anything about this.
• Asterix: Creator Albert Uderzo has apologized about the very anti-German Asterix and the Goths album. In this story the Goths (Germans) are depicted as being evil and militaristic. He said the story was made just two decades after World War II and anti-German sentiments were still vivid then. In later Asterix stories, Germans are depicted more sympathetically.
• Eric Powell is extremely negative in his attitude to his earliest issues of The Goon. He keeps them available because he understands that people want to see them, and they include some content that is important for later plot developments. However, the TPB is called Rough Stuff, and contains no less than four prefaces apologising for the content, three prose and one in comic format, in which the characters themselves complain about how they were drawn. Powell considers the art to have been very bad and the comedy too broad and silly.
• Jack Chick stood by all of his infamous Chick Tracts, at least enough to reproduce them all on his website. All except one: Lisa. While it follows one of the standard Chick Tract formulas — Bad person has something even worse happen to him, godly friend tells him that at this point it's "Jesus or Hell," person chooses Jesus, all is forgiven^note The other standard formula being "the person rejects Jesus or dies before he can choose, goes to Hell, warning to the reader". — the catch here is that the person in question was raping his own daughter, then is blackmailed into letting a neighbor do the same. And the godly friend blames the whole situation on porn. Really. Even Chick thought that stretched forgiveness too far, hence the exclusion of that tract.
• In a 2018 interview, Frank Miller openly stated he regretted creating Holy Terror.
• Maus features a scene where Art and his father Vladek discuss Art's previous work Prisoner on Hell Planet, a dark and morbid comic he created to deal with the emotional trauma of his mother's suicide. Art is deeply ashamed of the whole thing and wishes his father had never seen it. Vladek, meanwhile, is deeply disturbed by it, but at the same time happy that Art found a healthy and productive way to deal with the trauma.
• Most at Marvel Comics, in particular writer Chris Claremont, deeply regret The Avengers #200, regarding its controversial storyline regarding Carol Danvers giving birth to Marcus, the son of Immortus who had impregnated Ms. Marvel in Limbo with the intent to have himself reborn in the mortal world to claim her heart; said impregnation being the result of Marcus wanting to have intercourse with Ms. Marvel to create a new hybrid race, a feat only accomplished after manipulating her feelings with Immortus' machinations. Infamously dubbed by Carol A. Strickland as "The Rape of Ms. Marvel", its head writer Jim Shooter has disowned the comic and referred to it in one interview as "heinous", as well as noting that he legitimately doesn't remember writing or working on it, but he apologized for somehow signing off on the book in the state that it was published in, something he was entirely baffled by in hindsight considering its glaring problems. Chris Claremont and his team went on to publish "Avengers Annual #10", featuring the return of Ms. Marvel to Earth and scolding the Avengers for not recognizing the harm inflicted upon her.
  • It was so bad that it was once again referenced in a later Avengers series (Volume 3, specifically) during Carol's time as Warbird, where Kang the Conqueror (basically, Immortus' younger self, it's intentionally complicated) also had a son called Marcus (Kang and his various permutations rather like the name for some reason), but this Marcus not only eventually performed a Heel–Face Turn (albeit one that resulted in him getting killed), he was infatuated with Carol, but starting with issue #47 (when they first met), he was respectful towards her and went out of his way to avoid doing what his "brother" did to her, instead trying to earn her trust and affections legitimately - especially since he looked up said "brother" in his father's records after Carol lashed out at him in a fury after understandably mistaking him for her rapist. The whole sub-plot could potentially be seen as an apology from Marvel, or at least a genuine attempt at showing they'd learned from the debacle and could and would do better.
• Kevin Smith has said he regrets agreeing to do the Orphaned Series Daredevil/Bullseye: The Target, and that he only did it to hold Joe Quesada to his word after he'd promised that Smith would get to write the next encounter between Daredevil and Bullseye.
• Guardians of the Galaxy: Before leaving the title, Jim Valentino disowned two issues brainstormed with Rob Liefeld, Guardians of the Galaxy #28-29, for having a "lackluster script" and "barebones plot", and criticized Annual #2, saying he was unable to look at the art.
• Peter David has said he regrets killing off Betty Ross in The Incredible Hulk, and that the rash decision was the result of the traumatic divorce he was going through at the time.
• Marvel writer Mark Gruenwald originally created the Scourge of the Underworld as a plot device for disposing of villains who were too minor, redundant, or ill-conceived. He eventually conceded that he often expressed some disappointment in what he saw as the short-sightedness in killing so many potentially "fun" villains rather than re-imagining or improving them. Even Turner D. Century has fans due to his humor factor.
• According to this Comic-Con interview, Jim Starlin regrets working on Shang-Chi's first three issues. He worked on the first issue completely ignorant of the source material of Fu Manchu, who was portrayed as Shang-Chi's father. Afterwards, Starlin's friend Larry Hama gave him a Fu Manchu book to read, and he was horrified by the stereotypical Yellow Peril portrayal of the character, leading to him dropping out of the book after the third issue.
• Christopher Priest claims that whenever a fan asks him to sign a copy of the Triumph mini-series he wrote, he apologizes.
  • He's also not a fan of Total Justice, a JLA book created to promote a Batman toy line from Hasbro.
• While they don't regret writing Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld, creators Dan Mishkin and Gary Cohn wince in hindsight at their inclusion of Attempted Rape early in the series, and Cohn says it'd be the first thing to go if he ever had another go at it.
  • Despite this, the short-lived New 52 version of the comic (by Jem and the Holograms creator Christy Marx) also included an attempted rape scene.
• Dan Didio admitted that The New 52's "blank slate" was a mistake since no one knew where to take any of the characters after the controversial five-year Continuity Reboot. Hence why the DC Rebirth series was made as an apology to fans who were pissed off with the New 52, which they consider an Audience-Alienating Era for the publisher.
• Fabian Nicieza considers his New 52 book Legion Lost one of the most miserable creative experiences of his career and asks to not use pictures of him holding copies of it in articles about him.
• Denny O'Neil has said that he is mostly proud of the Wonder Woman Vol 1 mentor character I Ching, but he dearly wishes he'd come up with a less awkward name.
• Heroes in Crisis has been written off by writer Tom King and DC as a whole as an embarrassing mistake, largely based in agreement to the widespread panning it received for its questionable approach to the topics of mental health, overly bleak tone and body count, and mishandling of its characters, namely Wally West. King noted much during its release that his original concept for the story had been heavily altered thanks to Executive Meddling, forcing him to handle characters he had no intention of exploring (including Wally West, a character that then-editor-in-chief Dan Didio notoriously loathed), with him later openly acknowledging how "if you write 50 12-issue series, one of them is going to be the 50th best, and we all know that it's Heroes in Crisis." DC editorial has also introduced major efforts to overrule many of the most criticized elements of the series (helped by how DiDio left the company shortly after the series concluded), with The Flash (2016) and The Flash (Infinite Frontier) introducing many major retcons to rectify the damage it caused to the canon of various characters, allowing Heroes in Crisis to be more ignorable.
• John Byrne wishes he could go back in time and erase his Superman run because of perceived hassle from DC's editors and other writers.
• Devin Grayson understandably caught a lot of flack for her poorly conceived storyline where Nightwing was raped by Catalina Flores, the new Tarantula, and her initial response of it "Not being consensual but not being rape." Years later, Grayson formally admitted that she had fucked up pretty badly with that story (especially considering she handled the topic of sexual abuse much more decently in Titans (1999) with Damage) and now regrets both it and the way she addressed the criticism.

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