Marvel has abused the reboot more than its distinguished competition. Back in the day, reboots were actually pretty rare; creative runs were longer and even when new creators came on books, they didn’t throw away all of the development made that came before them. This storytelling method has disappeared, especially in the 21st century. Nowadays, everyone is all about putting the toys back in the toy box for the next team, and this has led to reboots becoming the norm rather than the exception. Sometimes, these reboots are very good and we get books like The Immortal Hulk. Other times, they’re terrible and we get the reboots on this list.
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Bad reboots take a variety of shapes and sizes. However, the main problem with them is usually that the ideas set up just don’t work at all, and fans either lose interest or decide to go scorched earth against Marvel and the creators. These ten reboots are the worst of the worst, scraping the bottom of the barrel and angering fans immensely.
10) Return of Wolverine
Wolverine died in 2014’s Death of Wolverine, and readers had to do without Logan until 2018 (although they did get Old Man Logan and Laura as Wolverine in the interim). Return of Wolverine was the big return of everyone’s favorite mutant, as it was revealed that he had been resurrected by the shadowy evil organization called Soteira. Wolverine suddenly had “hot claws”, where he would lose his healing factor and go into a berserker rage but his claws would be red hot. While it’s not that much of a reboot, it still was meant to change Wolverine’s status quo, giving him a new power to deal with, as well as a new enemy. However, the book wasn’t exactly good, and most fans mocked the “hot claws”. Marvel basically swept this reboot under the rug, and no one has mentioned the hot claws since.
9) “From the Ashes” X-Men
The “From the Ashes” era of the X-Men has been ongoing since 2024, and it’s not exactly been successful with fans. When it began, sales were through the roof, but readers soon lost interesting in nearly every title except Uncanny X-Men and X-Men (even Wolverine, a solid top 25 seller, has fallen). The problem with “From the Ashes” is simple — there are no good ideas behind it. In fact, the only idea behind it is to remind people of other eras of the X-Men. A large portion of the books that launched with the line have all been cancelled, and new books don’t sell nearly as well as X-Men did during the previous Krakoa Era. “From the Ashes” isn’t completely terrible and has its fans, but its basically torpedoed the X-Men line.
8) “ResurreXion” X-Men
After the failed Inhumans push tried to deep six the X-Men in favor of characters that Marvel Studios could use in their movies, Marvel put the X-Men books through a “ResurreXion”. Starting with X-Men Prime (Vol. 2) #1, the publisher launched X-Men Gold, X-Men Blue, Astonishing X-Men, Generation X, and various solo titles. With the war with the Inhumans over and mutants able to live on Earth again, the X-Men tried to get back to work. However, it was just a terrible run of X-Men books. X-Men Gold was marred by controversy when artist Ardian Sayif placed anti-Semitic imagery in the book (and the book’s writing was never anything to write home about), Astonishing X-Men was yet another example of why Charles Soule should stay far away from mutants, and X-Men Blue was more of the timelost O5 X-Men who should have went back to their time years before. The only actually good book in the lot was Generation X, and that one get cancelled. “ResurreXion” would have been better served if Marvel had sprang for better talent, but even then, it still wouldn’t have been special, it just wouldn’t have been bad.
7) The Terrigen Mist Status Quo X-Men
The Krakoa Era made the X-Men great again, after years of Marvel marginalizing the mutants because they didn’t own the film rights to the franchise. Marvel had been pushing the X-Men out of the spotlight since the mid ’00s, but it got really bad after Secret Wars (2015). In 2013, Infinity saw Black Bolt release the Terrigen Mists into the Earths’s atmosphere, which eventually became toxic to mutants after Secret Wars. The X-Men were forced to leave the Earth, bringing mutants to Limbo, and at some point Cyclops had died committing a terrorist act against Inhumans. I’m personally a fan of Extraordinary X-Men, although it’s a deeply flawed book, but the Terrigen Mist status quo is easily the worst thing to happen to the X-Men. On top of that, while the X-Men were being marginalized, Marvel tried to push the Inhumans in their place, leading to a bunch of mediocre books that even Inhuman fans didn’t really enjoy. It was a terrible reboot for the X-Men and the Inhumans.
6) Starship Hulk
The best recent Hulk stories are all horror stories, with The Immortal Hulk getting praise as one of the best Marvel series ever. After the end of The Immortal Hulk, Marvel put white hot writer Donny Cates and Invincible co-creator Ryan Ottley on a new volume of Hulk. Fans were very excited for this run, but that excitement soon went away. Cates basically ignored the ending of Immortal, with Banner and Hulk back at odds. Banner was treating the Hulk like a spaceship, using it to travel space and the multiverse. The art was great and the idea was novel, but it wasn’t at all what fans wanted. It was made worse when an automobile accident forced Cates to quit every title he was working on. The Spaceship Hulk status quo made Hulk fans angry, and it ended before it barely get going.
5) Hydra Captain America
Captain America is the symbol of America, but that changed in 2016. Steve Rogers’ super soldier serum had gave out on him and he was reduced to an old man, with Sam Wilson taking over as Cap. However, a chance encounter with Kobik, a Cosmic Cube entity who was once Red Skull’s Cosmic Cube, made him young again. However, by the order of the Red Skull, it also swapped the history of Earth-616 with another Earth, one where Steve Rogers was raised as a child of Hydra. It all led to Secret Empire, a maligned Marvel event. The sad part about it is that Steve Rogers: Captain America had a lot of potential, and it squandered all of it to make the event story work.
4) Heroes Reborn
The ’90s were a great time if you were an X-Men fan, but not so much the rest of the Marvel Universe. The Avengers, Captain America, and the Fantastic Four weren’t popular, and nothing Marvel tried brought in more readers. So, they went nuclear and got Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld, who had left Marvel to found Image Comics, to come back and take over the books. Lee got Fantastic Four and Iron Man and Liefeld got Avengers and Captain America. What followed were comics that sold well, but no one liked. Lee’s two books were okay, but Liefeld’s were laughably bad. Heroes Reborn only lasted a year, with Liefeld and Extreme Studios kicked off their books after six months. It was a complete and total failure, and not even an interesting one.
3) “The Crossing”
Before Heroes Reborn, Marvel tried to inject the Avengers with some ’90s attitude with “The Crossing”. Kang went back in time, made a servant of Iron Man, and used him against the Avengers in the present day. This led the team to going back in time before Iron Man was turned, when he was a teenager, and grabbing a teenage Tony Stark to fight the adult version. The Avengers defeated Kang and Iron Man, and young Tony stayed around. It was a mystifying story, and the reboot was basically dead on arrival, a stop gap measure until Heroes Reborn started.
2) Zeb Wells’ Spider-Man
The Amazing Spider-Man has been one of the most maligned bestselling books in the comic industry for years now. Writer Nick Spencer joined the book, and actually did things fans wanted. While he wasn’t able to retcon “One More Day”, he got rid of “Sins Past” and put Spider-Man and Mary Jane back together as a couple. Then, Zeb Wells took over. Suddenly, it was six months in the future, everyone hated Spider-Man for something he had done, he was working with Norman Osborn, and he and Mary Jane had broken up. In fact, Mary Jane had remarried to a mysterious man named Paul. This was a terrible reboot, angering readers right from the jump, and the answers we got to the mystery box at the beginning of the run were all mediocre. The Amazing Spider-Man fell from the tops of the sales charts for the first time in years, and the book still hasn’t recovered.
1) John Byrne’s Spider-Man
The Clone Saga was one of the worst things to happen to the Spider-Man comics, and when it ended, fans breathed a sigh of relief. Little did they know that worse was yet to come. Marvel got reboot specialist John Byrne (he was thought of as a reboot specialist back then because of Superman, but at this point in the ’90s, he was one for one, as his Wonder Woman reboot didn’t work) to “fix” Spider-Man. He became artist on The Amazing Spider-Man, all while writing and drawing Spider-Man: Chapter One, a series that redid the origin of Spider-Man. Every idea in this reboot was bad, and fans left the Spider-Man books in droves. The whole thing was a fiasco and the Spider-Man books going into the year 2000 were almost a lost cause.
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