2. Alan Moore
DC ComicsLook, we know that Alan Moore is the preeminent comic book sacred cow. And not just because he's a bit of a dopey thing that lives in a field in Northampton, as Moore has written some of the most well-regarded comics the medium has ever produced, including (but by no means limited to) Watchmen, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V For Vendetta, and turns on Swamp Thing and Batman - his Killing Joke often topping lists of the best funnybooks ever to feature the Dark Knight. He's also a writer we could do with never reading anything by again. Like Miller, it's been a diminishing returns type of deal with Moore. In recent years each new stories connected with the famously eccentric scribe have grown to be met with sighs and snorts of derision, rather than the palpable excitement that used the herald each announcement of an Alan Moore comic, as if he was Moses come down from the mountain with stone tablets telling us where sequential art will go in the future. These days you're more likely to see Moore slagging off the state of superhero comics, which he has suddenly become incredibly superior to, or bad mouthing innocent journalists, or simply stating that he's going to do another series about a beloved childhood character having sex. Little Nemo In Slumberland is his next target. We're also just getting a bit tired of Alan Moore's shtick. When you thumb through his greatest hits, as we did at the top of this entry, it implies a sort of impressive eclecticism, a hopping from genre to genre that would've made Stanley Kubrick jealous. In reality, Moore's stories are all pretty much the same - at least his famous ones are. In each one he "deconstructs" a well known genre or facet of popular culture, whether it be superheroes or Victorian literature, and then expects you to be impressed by how clever he is. He actually is pretty clever, but that's not really enough to make a good story. So often the actual content of an Alan Moore comic is lost to the sands of time, because not a lot actually happens in them. And you have to put up with that smug feeling without, as if he's sat in the room with you eagerly awaiting your fawning praise. For being a broken record and making us all feel like idiots for reading comic in the first place, we are done with you, Mr Moore.