The Worst
5. Scott Lobdell
In the early 90s, Jim Lee and Whilce Portacio were providing the stories for Uncanny X-Men and veteran X-Men creator John Byrne contributed scripting. Byrne famously called it one of the worst working situations and he was soon replaced by a new writer named Scott Lobdell. Beginning with issue #289, Lobdell became the sole writer on the book. When people talk about the 90s being a dark time for the X-Men, theyre mostly referring to Lobdells run that went until issue #349. Following Niciezas departure from X-Men, Lobdell also wrote or plotted many of the issues spanning from #46-69. When X-Men, the second core book, was launched, the concept was that both would feature a different squad: X-Men would be the Blue Team led by Cyclops and Uncanny X-Men featured Storms Gold Team. But during the period when Lobdell was writing both books, the two teams bled together and there were something like fifteen different characters being used in both books. This was the era when Cyclops really developed the stigma of being either Jeans husband or Xaviers lapdog, and thats thanks to Lobdells writing. Gambit and Rogues romance, intriguing under Nicieza, became positively irritating under Lobdell (largely thanks to his terrible use of accents). Another story saw Psylocke gutted by Sabretooth, and Wolverine and Archangel retrieved a magical liquid called the Ebon Vein from the Crimson Dawn dimension to save her life. This marked her with a red tattoo over one eye and she gained the ability to teleport through shadows. Because evidently, Psylockes backstory wasnt confusing enough. Cannonball, whod been shown as a capable leader and hero in X-Force, graduated to the X-Men and Lobdell quickly turned him into an aw shucks rookie character. And the new characters were some of the worst. We had Maggott, an Australian who spoke with an overblown accent, whose powers were two large slug-like creatures that consisted of his digestive system. Marrow, a former villain and Wolverine wannabe. And Joseph, who appeared to be Magneto, but de-aged and amnesiac and walking around with long hair (he was later revealed to be a clone after Lobdell left the books). Lobdell had some good moments. His taking a break issues that featured character-oriented stories were generally pretty good, as was his run on the X-Men spin-off title, Generation X. But his plotting was quite bad, enough to earn him a spot on this list.