Sharkjumper

Spider-Man: Somewhere around the wedding, though it took a few years for me to figger that out (all the Carnage / Venom / clone nonsense finally wore me down). He's jumped back since, though.
Wolverine: Around the 47th time he mentioned he's the best there is at what he does, and hey how about my natty skeleton? He's jumped back somewhat since (thanks, GM & GR).

I'm very forgiving, though, so I see character trajectories as a series of shark jumps and shark takebacks, depending.

X-Men: Flirting with Jaws right after JR JR left, then fully airborne somwhere around the Fall of the Mutants (Siege Perilous oink), but smooth sailing with Jim Lee's arrival, then back over another shark when Claremont left (the 1st time), then a BIGGER shark when the Image posse bailed & the Nicieza / Lobdell monster took over, & then it's like a perfectly thrown skipping stone (excepting a nice bit of skiing around the time of Grant Morrison's run, duh). Now, I think they're waiting for someone to move the ramp back for a super duper jump.

Also -
Superman: MULLET MULLET MULLET MULLET MULLET

(Batman jumped the shark in the 40s, or early 50s at the very latest, but that shark had to have died before the greatness that was to come, and then it ran some shark hurdles for most of the last 20 years, etc.)

Deadpool: jumped when Priest left. I know, a lot of people think he jumped before that.

The Defenders: essentially a long, serialized, meandering consideration of the shark.

xxpst

(well, okay, more like going from 'mediocre' to 'pretty decent' and back)

(Stuff for which this is not true: The Crow, Gaiman's Endless, Howard the Duck.)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: jumped around the time of the movie, probably, and certainly had jumped before Kevin Eastman was able to buy the Batmobile. Has it retracted its jump since?

Punisher: Risks becoming shark bait any time multi-colored spandex (or magical zombie powers?!?!) enters the picture. Or when he gets all Bruce Wayney about his family getting offed.

Up until recently (4-6 months), there were two TMNT titles - one by Peter Laird (published by Mirage, of course), and one written by Peter David for Dreamwave. The PAD title got canned, however.

Did the PAD title get canned because they weren't the original turtles but actually lizards who were imbued with turtle ability and had a whole complicated setting and story and mythos worked out that had nothing to do with the original TMNT, even if it was arguably just fine on its own merits? Because I could've seen that coming.

When I saw this thread title, I thought it was the name of a new supervillain: "You may defeat me, Superman, but trust me - you will never be the same again!"

New Mutants: After Fall of the Mutants. No more Douglock = no more funny fun. And then with the Inferno shenanigans, and THEN all the Cable / "I'm your son" / "No, wait, my bad" garbage...

Shark-jumping in comics is completely and utterly reversible, for a lot of reasons pointed out above. Just that some comics choose not to get out of shark-jumped status, and some wholly embrace it (Doom Patrol by John Byrne, fer instance.)

X-Factor -- I realize that the sheer wonder-level of "what the hell is happening with this?" during the mysterious discovery of the black pod in Avengers/FF, which is soon revealed to be -- bum bum BUM! -- Jean Grey, is much more interesting than the stories which follow.

Avengers -- Roger Stern leaves. Reed and Sue join, despite leaving the FF to have more time as a family. Inferno crossover.

West Coast Avengers -- Exit Englehart. Enter John Howdy Motherfucker Byrne.

Fantastic Four -- I accept that there will never be a good explanation for why Sharon Ventura/Ms Marvel/She-Thing looks exactly like Tarianna from Battleworld, and that if such an explanation eventually comes round, it probably won't be interesting.

(I realize it sounds like I stopped reading all comics at the same time. Actually, this might be when I started reading Vertigo?)

Swamp Thing -- Either around the time of Lady Jane's arrival in the bayous, or when Nancy Collins left and Morrison & Millar came on board. I realize I'm one of the few people who thinks Collins's run was excellent, but there you have it.

What If? -- Volume 2, I think. The first series had its clunkers, but was often brilliant; later series seemed to be aimed more at the shock/nonsense value, or to skew towards "what if this big huge crossover event had been resolved radically differently, and in only 22 pages?!!!"

Ranma 1/2 -- Turns out Girl Ranma and Akane aren't gonna lez it up with Shampoo after all.

Fantastic Four - sometime in the middle of John Byrne's run. Can't remember the specifics.

X-Factor - After Walt Simonson and his art left. Bummer.

Swamp Thing - After DC screwed Rick Veitch and binned his "Swampy Meets Jesus" storyline. A host of not so great writers followed, sadly. Never stuck around for Nancy Collins' arc.

X-Men - sometime around issue #200, but like a mook, I held out hope for improvement. For waaaay too long.

Sandman - The Kindly Ones was one arc too many.

Marvel pretty much jumped the shark wholesale in the 90s. Most impressive.

Hellboy, for the record, has yet to even see the shark in the distance. Same with the Goon.

More leaps of faith:

Thor - THUNDERSTRIKE (or: when Ron Frenz decided to ape Jack Kirby in the dullest, thickest fashion possible).

FF - I can pinpoint exactly when the Byrne run lost its sparkle for me; issue #260, w/ a guest appearance by Silver Surfer, & Doom getting incinerated (only to, y'know, swap souls with some schmuck). After that (excepting 2 issues w/ Joe Sinnott on inks), blah blah blah blah. Boring intergalactic drama & Terminus & a really drab extended Psycho Man story & that time travel hoohah. And what followed Byrne = more blah blah blah blah.

Batman - Year Two. Following Miller & Mazzuchelli w/ Wolfman & Broderick = GONG. And then following that w/ some story about a KGBeast knockoff... Yeah, I'm a snobby bastard. (Wow - KGBeast is an awful nickname.)

Avengers - when they got matching jackets. Tho, really, that was the stuck landing dotting the i on the steep decline (mixed metaphors, anyone) that followed the Stern / Buscema / Palmer era. (I am partial to Walt Simonson's 10 issue run, though, just because it was so messed up - the team disbanding, Reed & Sue joining, GILGAMESH joining, Marrina (sic?) turning into a leviathan, AND the totally incongruous Inferno crossover? Hot damn!)

The Byrne WCA ... geez. It started out all right. The sharkjump doesn't really come right with his taking over -- I like the Human Torch stuff even if I'm skeptical of its necessity (that was what bothered me in interviews, Byrne talking about the logical need to redo the Vision's origin, instead of just saying "I had this idea..."). But the further you got into it ... and was he the one who brought John Walker in? I don't remember.

Oh God, the matching jackets Avengers! God, now that's a 90s moment.

Simonson's run, in another context -- had he not been coming in to take over for an abruptly departing longtime writer, had things been set up better for him, had Inferno not been going on -- could have been great. Thunder-Frog is still one of my favorite Marvel stories ever, and his Thor in general was great. Gilgamesh would've been a perfectly good character for Simonson to use. BUT. It just didn't work out that way. (I kept reading up until #305 or so, granted.)

There never should have been a Batman: Year Two, so for me, that sharkjump takes place as soon as it was proposed. That's something that never should have been franchised that way. They should have gone the way they went eventually, and done Year Ones for other characters instead.

xpost; the Englehart Avengers is indeed one of the world's great superhero runs. Have the Essential collections gotten that far yet?

Now it gets personal:
Bone - when Jeff Smith decided to take a break. Or, in between when Thorn wants to quit and when she finds her backbone, and then when Jeff didn't feel like drawing, you know, a BACKGROUND for "Ghost Circles." But the "Treasure Hunters" made a saving throw!

Batgirl (Cassandra Cain) - after the Puckett/Damian Scott team gave way to whomever it is now.

I liked it, but I'd give it up if it meant not dealing with all its would-be successors (not just in terms of X-mega-arcs, but the way the Psylocke-vs-Sabertooth story got turned into an archetype, too).

I think the Avengers Essentials have gotten as far as the Kree / Skrull War but other folks would know better than me. Marvel does need to step up the production of those things, tho - they are seriously doggin' it. Especially in light of the House of Ideas trying to sneak an oxymoron like Essential Ant-Man past fannies.

I was sure Huck had to be joking about this.

luckily, they quit before they got to CIA-hole and CSISsy.

(Any mention of Brian Bolland reminds me of this.)

Alex Ross. Loved Marvels, still do. Love some of the obnoxiously oversized big whomper comics -- Heaven's Ladder mostly, the JLA one. Love Kingdom Come despite its faults (it reads more like a story Mark Waid should have read than one he should have written, if that makes sense instead of just being pissy and pithy). But for some reason I feel bleh about him now. Maybe it's Earth X's fault.

Sharkthumping (I get knocked down, but I get up again):

Spider-Man. Sometime after the "black costume saga" of ASM #252-259 (remember when sagas were six fucking issues with a one-issue epilogue that was nothing but a conversation, instead of diamond-coded year-long rambles across four titles? okay, I already did this rant) -- possibly when the costume became Venom, which I still think was a stupid idea as anything other than a one-off nonrepeatable event.

Got better again sometime later, with PAD writing, and the Death of Jean DeWolff -- which itself wasn't stellar, but I dug the whole "Daredevil finding out Spidey's secret identity" thing, and that was pretty much the start of the DD-Spidey relationship, wasn't it? I've always seen that as Spidey's adult superhero friendship, as opposed to the Human Torch-Spidey friendship that's very much a teenagers-all-growed-up one.

That friend's mom threw out my Sin-Eater Spideys, too, same reason.

Jumped another shark when the Clone Saga ballooned into the behemoth it became (it could have been a perfectly excellent six-issues-plus-one saga), and Aunt May turned out to be an actress hired by Norman Osborn, and the Parkers had a kid, and split up or something, and MJ like might have been dead, God only knows but doesn't care.

Pretty much came back to the side of good when JMS came on board. I'm not crazy about Ezekiel's revisionist take on Spidey's origin, but I think it works since Peter's not crazy about it either, which is nice. Usually when you have these big earthshattering revelations, they get proven conclusively and the protagonist accepts them.

Death's Head: when Marvel UK, in their infinite wisdom, decided to have him killed by the Minion unit, remove all his personality and have him star with the X-Men every month. Most of the other Marvel UK titles from the same period are just one long shark-jump, although I have a fondness for an issue of Warheads where the Silver Surfer fights MyS-TECH's accountant, Audit.

Transformers: the recent Dreamwave reboot. I know they're not allowed to use Furman's old stories, but it just feels wrong to have a Transformer title set in the past and not having Impactor trashing Decepticon scum while Emirate Xaaron "tsk"ing in the background.

Simone's Deadpool run was really funny, Tep, but not as funny as the first few pages of Priest's Deadpool, when Wade met The Others.

Black Panther: I love Priest. Really; I have all four issues of Triumph (a mini-series so bad that Priest went on a tour of America buying copies back from readers). But I just couldn't get into Black & White. Mind you, at least he didn't really kill Tork…

And no-one's mentioned the Avengers' biggest shark of all: The Crossing! *shudder*

That's the best thing I've ever heard.

I'm reading these now! They're like a mutant mercenary title written by Steve Purcell (IE gene-spliced with Sam & Max)! Is the rest of her work anything like this?

Is the rest of [Gail Simone's] work anything like this?

The only other work I know of hers is Birds of Prey, which has moments of fun, but is often more serious. I don't know about her Oni work, though (Killer Princesses), or the books she did for Marvel featuring some kid (Guz Beezer?) & various superdoods.

Sandman: immediately after Brief Lives.

Battle Angel Alita: after the Motorball story, which was the high point of the series.