5 Worst Movie and TV Tie-In Comics

When a movie or television show is popular enough, there’s usually a tie-in comic, but those comics can be tricky things. When they’re done right — solid creative team, good story, timed correctly — they truly add something to the movie and television experience by expanding the on-screen world in ways that may not otherwise be possible. But if things aren’t quite right, you end up with a comic that at best doesn’t add anything to the IP it’s meant to support and, in some cases, you end up with a bad comic, too.

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Here are five of the worst movie and television tie-in comics ever made. Some simply made no sense in terms of why the tie-in was being done in the first place while others just weren’t very good and missed its mark entirely and, in one case, a there’s a tie-in that is not terrible, but is really more of an adaptation rather than offering anything new for fans at all.

5) ALF

ALF was very popular during the NBC series’ run from 1986 to 1990 and the character has remained something of a pop culture icon ever since — there have been various attempts at an ALF reboot over the years, the most recent being in 2023, though none have come to fruition. That said, it might still come as a surprise that there was an ALF tie-in comic series. Published by Marvel Comics under the Star Comics banner, the series debuted in 1988 and ran for 50 issues and 3 annuals over the course of around 4 years.

But while the ALF comic had a surprisingly long run, that doesn’t mean it was good. The series captured the aesthetic of the show (which itself felt very comic book-y if we’re being honest,) the series took some weird turns and got more than just a little strange at time. While ALF as a show worked well with its fish-out-of-water/found family concept, the series didn’t really match that vibe.

4) Batman & Robin: The Official Comic Adaptation

Batman & Robin might be the most maligned of the initial Batman live-action movies with the film’s poor box office performance leading to the end of the franchise and live-action Batman movies until Christopher Nolan gave us Batman Begins, but it got a comic book adaptation. And it is not great. Generally speaking, the comic book adaptation is pretty much a very basic adaptation of the movie. It hits the main important sequences of the film and takes out the worst of the dialogue and such. It has that going for it.

The issue here is that it doesn’t really do much beyond that. The things it does change aren’t changes for the better. The comic basically just captures the movie and puts it on the page and considering that the movie didn’t go over very well in the first place, that was probably not needed. You’re honestly better off just watching the movie.

3) Mad Max: Fury Road

Mad Max: Fury Road is considered by many to be one of the best movies of the 2010s and it’s also a movie where there was certainly room for its story to be expanded upon which is where the comics come in. A series of four issues published by Vertigo starting in May 2015, the books each follow different characters from the film and their lives at various points before the events of the movie. Not all of the issues are bad; the Mad Max issue centering on Max Rockatansky is solid, but the issue centered around Imperator Furiosa is very, very problematic.

That issue in particular tries to give some context to the abuse that Furiosa and the Five Wives endured that lead up to the events of the movie, but the way the characters are written don’t line up with how they are portrayed in the film at all. It also is just not done well at all. The series on the whole is fairly poorly executed as it is and really just does not work well as a tie-in.

2) Ghost Whisperer

Ghost Whisperer was a really popular television series for CBS in the mid-2000s, following a woman with the ability to see and communicate with ghosts who uses this ability to help them resolve their issue so they can cross over into the spirit world and, for some reason, that popularity led to the series getting its own tie-in comic from IDW. To be specific, it actually got two miniseries, Ghost Whisperer: The Haunted which ran for five issues in 2008 and Ghost Whisperer: The Muse which ran for four issues in 2009.

The tie-ins were largely a case of solid creative team (writers Becca Smith, Carrie Smith, and Barbara Randall Kessel along with artists Elena Casagrande and Adriano Loyola) but a story that really didn’t add anything to the series it’s tied to. The books were just additional, in-universe stories that somewhat gave additional looks at Melinda’s abilities but didn’t really add anything to the show’s lore.

1) Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp Prelude

While the Marvel Cinematic Universe is based on characters from Marvel Comics, the movies aren’t directly taken from comics so it’s not unusual to get a tie-in book or a prelude when a new movie comes out. Some of them are pretty good, though most are just average but when it comes to the Ant-Man and the Wasp prelude comic, it was both weird and not good.

The miniseries is essentially just a brief recap of the first Ant-Man movie — it even has verbatim dialogue — and offers nothing new. That’s it. If you had somehow skipped the first Ant-Man movie and had no plans to see it before seeing the second, the comic was probably useful, but in terms of being something meant to get you excited for the new movie, it missed the mark horribly.

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