7. Chris Claremont
Marvel ComicsLook, we all love the X-Men*. Of course we do! What kind of geeks would be if we didn't have a soft spot for Marvel's merry band of mutants, especially in a year when the comics have reached a new high and Bryan Singer reminded us that the movie adaptations don't all have to be hot garbage? It wasn't always so, however, as nary a decade after their creation the X-Men comic was on the verge of being cancelled. It was the work of one team that single-handedly rescued them from obscurity, produced some of the most iconic stories ever and hurtled them back into the collective consciousness however: they were artists John Byrne and Dave Cockrum, and writer Chris Claremont. Days Of Future Past and The Dark Phoenix Saga both came from the mind of Claremont, the British-born and American-raised writer who has since become synonymous with the mutants. There's no denying his legacy, or the fact that he made the X-Men who they are today. There's not a lot said about what a truly awful writer he is, however. Not in terms of his plotting or ideas (mostly), but in what he actually chooses to put down on paper. At times it seems Claremont actively hates his artist, as he endeavours to cover up as much of the page with dialogue and text boxes. Oh, the text boxes. Never have you seen such exercises in florid hyperbole, as Claremont shirks the "show don't tell" rule that's even more true for a narrative form that relies as much on images as text, perhaps best illustrated by a page in a seventies X-Men book where the omniscient narrator actually has a go at Cyclops and works him up into a right tantrum. Claremont had a lot of good ideas, but nowadays his writing style is pretty embarrassing to behold. *Except Gambit.