Marvel has abused a reboot beyond that standout competition. At the time, reboots were actually quite rare. Creative Run was long, and even when new creators appeared in the book, they didn’t throw away all of the developments that came before them. This method of storytelling disappeared, especially in the 21st century. These days, everyone is all about bringing toys back to the toy box for the next team, which has made reboots the norm rather than an exception. Sometimes these reboots are very good and you get books like the Immortal Hulk. Otherwise they’re awful and get a restart of this list.
Bad reboots take a variety of shapes and sizes. But their main problem is that the ideas set up usually don’t work at all, and fans either lose interest or decide to burn the planet to Marvel and the creators. These 10 reboots are the worst and worst, rubbing the bottom of the barrel and making the fans extremely angry.
Wolverine died in Wolverine’s death in 2014, and readers had to do it without Logan until 2018 (though they tentatively acquired old men Logan and Laura as Wolverine). The return of Wolverine was a major return of everyone’s favorite mutants as it was revealed that he had been revived by a shadowy evil organization called Soteira. Wolverine suddenly has “hot nails”, where he loses the healing factor and becomes the anger of Berserker, but his nails will be red hot. It wasn’t that many reboots, but it was still intended to change the status quo of Wolverine and give him new power to deal with his new enemy. However, the book wasn’t exactly good, and most fans laughed at “hot nails.” Marvel basically wiped out this reboot under the rug, but no one has mentioned hot nails since.
The “from the Ashes” era of the X-Men has been ongoing since 2024 and has not been accurately successful in fans. When it began, sales went through the roof, but readers quickly lost something interesting in almost every title except Uncanny X-Men and X-Men (even Wolverine, a solid top 25 seller, fell). The “From the Ashes” problem is simple. There’s no good idea behind it. In fact, the only idea behind it is to remind people of other eras of the X-Men. Most of the books released on the line have been cancelled, and the new books aren’t being sold as X-Men did in the previous era of Krakoa. “From the Ashes” isn’t completely awful and has fans, but it basically torpedoes the X-Men line.
After the failed Inhumans Push tried to deepen the six, Marvel Studios backed up the characters that could be used in the film, Marvel placed the X-Men book on “Resurrexion.” Starting with X-Men Prime (Vol. 2) #1, the publisher launched X-Men Gold, X-Men Blue, the incredible X-Men, Generation X, and various solo titles. X-Men tried to return to work with the war that allowed them to live on Earth again with the inhumans. But that was a terrible run in the X-Men book. X-Men Gold was another example of why Charles Saul is far from mutants when artist Ardian Seadif placed anti-Semitism images on books (and writing the book was never something to write at home). A really good book in the lot is Generation X, which is cancelled. “Resurrexion” would have just jumped out for better talent, it wouldn’t have been special yet, it would have just not been bad.
The Kracoa era made the X-Men great again after years of years of marginalizing mutants because Marvel didn’t own the rights to the franchise’s films. Marvel had been kicking the X-Men out of the spotlight since the mid-00s, but after Secret Wars (2015), it really got worse. In 2013, Infinity released a black bolt into the Earth’s atmosphere. The X-Men is forced to leave Earth, and takes the mutant to Limbo, and at one point Cyclops dies and commits terrorist acts against the inhumans. I’m an extraordinary X-Men fan personally, but it’s a deeply flawed book, but the current situation with Terrigen Mist is the worst thing about X-Men. Plus, while the X-Men is marginalized, Marvel attempts to push in inhuman people there, leading to a mediocre book that even inhuman fans don’t enjoy much. It was a terrible reboot for X-Men and Inhumans.
All the best Hulk stories these days are horror stories, and the Immortal Hulk has been praised as one of the best Marvel series of all time. After the end of the Immortal Hulk, Marvel placed white hot author Donnie Cates and invincible co-creator Ryan Ottley on the new volume of Hulk. Fans were very excited about the run, but the excitement quickly disappeared. Cates essentially ignored the immortal end, and Banner and Hulk returned in conflict. Banner treated the Hulk like a spaceship and used it to deal with space and the multiverse. The art was amazing and the ideas were novel, but not what the fans wanted. That got worse when a car accident forced Kate to quit all the titles he was working on. Spaceship Hulk’s current state of affairs ended before it barely proceeded.
Captain America is an American icon, but that changed in 2016. Steve Rogers’ super soldier serum was given to him, he was reduced to the elderly, and Sam Wilson was taken over as the cap. However, a chance encounter with Kovik, a space cubic group that was once a red skull space cube, made him younger again. However, the order of the red skulls exchanged the history of Earth 616 with another Earth. It all led to the Secret Empire, a malicious Marvel event. The sad part about that is that Steve Rogers: Captain America has a lot of potential and wasted it all to make the story of the event work.
The 90s were a great time if you were a fan of the X-Men, but it wasn’t the rest of the Marvel universe. The Avengers, Captain America and the Fantastic Four were unpopular and Marvel never brought more readers. So they went to the nuke and won Jim Lee and Rob Leefeld. Lee won the Fantastic Four, while Iron Man and Leefeld won the Avengers and Captain America. What followed was a well-selling manga, but no one liked it. Lee’s two books were fine, but Liefeld was bad with a laugh. The Heroes were reborn for only a year, and Liefeld and Extreme Studios kicked off the book six months later. It was a complete, complete failure, not even interesting.
Before the Heroes were reborn, Marvel tried to inject the Avengers with a ‘Cross’ attitude in “Crossing.” Kang went back in time to make Iron Man’s servant and used him today against the Avengers. This led the team to go back in time before Iron Man turned when he was a teenager, grabbing teenage Tony Stark and fighting the adult version. The Avengers defeated Kang and Iron Man, and the young Tony stayed around. It was a mysterious story, and the reboot was essentially dead upon arrival.
The incredible Spider-Man has been one of the most malicious and bestselling books in the comic industry for many years. Author Nick Spencer joined the book and did what fans actually wanted. He couldn’t get “one more day,” but he removed “sin from the past” and brought Spider-Man and Mary Jane back together as a couple. Zebwells then took over. Suddenly, it was six months in the future, everyone hated Spider-Man for what he did, he worked with Norman Osborne, and he and Mary Jane parted ways. In fact, Mary Jane had remarried to a mysterious man named Paul. This was a terrible reboot, angering readers from the jump, and the answers that came to the mystery box at the start of the run were all mediocre. The incredible Spider-Man has fallen from the top of the sales chart for the first time in years, but the book has not recovered yet.
The Clone Saga was one of the worst things about Spider-Man comics, and when it was over, fans sighed at Ah Relief. Little did they know that worse things hadn’t come yet. Marvel was reboot specialist John Byrne (he was considered a reboot specialist for Superman at the time, but at this point in the ’90s he was alone as Wonder Woman’s reboot didn’t work). He became an astounding Spider-Man artist while writing and drawing Spider-Man: Chapter 1, a series that recreates the origins of Spider-Man. All the ideas for this reboot were bad and fans left Spider-Man’s book in a fuss. The whole thing was a huge failure, and Spider-Man’s book entering 2000 was a pretty much lost cause.
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