8 Times Good Comic Book Creators Went Bad!

8. Joe Casey - Uncanny X-Men

The X-Men was Marvel's flagship title during the late '80s and into the '90s. A constantly rotating creative team, increasingly ludicrous soap opera-like stories and never-ending plot threads had seen readers all but abandon it by the turn of the century. When he took over at Marvel, one of Joe Quesada's top priorities was to fix the X-line, and to that end, he hired Grant Morrison and Joe Casey.

Casey was coming fresh from a critically acclaimed run on Wildcats; a title where he had taken the X-Men clones and turned them into an examination of the superhero as a corporate entity. Instead of battling mutants, aliens or killer robots, these heroes would turn their attention to solving real-world problems like the energy crisis or child labour exploitations in the Far East.

Unfortunately, Casey's X-Men book was in trouble almost as soon as it hit the stands, from the editorially mandated "Gypsy switch" cover featuring the long-awaited Wolverine and Jean Grey kiss, to Iain Churchill walking off the book after four issues. The title would limp along for over a year with Casey's "dangerous" new direction floundering under editorial infantilization and having to live in the shadow of Morrison's era-defining run.

Alternative Recommendation: Wildcats V3.0