3. Frank Miller
Dark HorseNow this one is a doozy. Frank Miller is one of, if not the most famous and beloved artists working in comics. He is known not only amongst fanboys but also in the mainstream, as his deconstructions of superheroes in the eighties allowed his work to crossover to more discerning literary types and his Sin City film adaptation with Robert Rodriguez got his work out to film fans who otherwise would have remained unaware of him. That reputation isn't totally unfounded, either, since his run on Daredevil in the eighties certainly did a lot for the medium both in the themes it addressed and in terms of what could be done with art and layouts in superhero books, The Dark Knight Returns and Year One remain high water marks for Batman stories, and the Martha Washington graphic novels are often-overlooked gems. What's he done for us lately, though? Not a whole lot, as it goes. Besides outing himself as the right-wing reactionary we'd always expected with his comments on the Occupy movement, Miller's recent comics have been both politically incorrect and just plain terrible. The Dark Knight Strikes Again, his long-awaited follow up to the Dark Knight Returns, was a complete mess narratively and with its horribly congested art style, suggesting somebody who'd just gotten Photoshop and was much too enthused with the gradient tool. His most recent graphic novel, Holy Terror, is just as illegible, with some casual Islamophobia thrown in for good measure. The thing is, Miller might always have been this terrible. His Daredevil run is hilarious in its humorlessness, something that even
the stony-faced Alan Moore pointed out, The Dark Knight is a cynically "gritty" remake of Batman in the style of Mark Millar, and Sin City is a pretty rubbish do-over of pulp and noir tropes which weren't particularly interesting in the first place. He also has a rather unfortunate preoccupation with Nazis and swastikas, which somehow even made its way into his big-budget film version of the Spirit. Like the opposite of a fine wine, Frank Miller is only getting worse with age - and he wasn't great to begin with - so we could do without him ever making another comic ever, thanks.