This is actually a name I myself am attributing to a recent event in the
comics industry. I must admit, it is a fairly
editorial name. It will probably only seem appropriate if you think the general
comic book fare of people with crazy
powers wearing
tights, or if you just happen to have something against Marvel.
For a while now, Warren Ellis has been trying to convince his friends in the industry, as well as his fan base, that comics need to move away from superhero comics (he likens their domination of the medium to going to a bookstore and finding nothing but nurse novels) and towards other types of stories, preferably ones short enough to allow readers to follow the complete run. For a while, it looked like this was the course of a large part of the industry, as big name brits like Garth Ennis and Grant Morrison worked almost exclusively on non-superhero and somewhat non-conventional comic book fare in DC's adult-oriented Vertigo line.
However, on August 30, 2000, Marvel made Joe Quesada its new editor-in-chief. Somehow, over the course of 2000 and 2001, he convinced Garth Ennis, Grant Morrison, Brian Michael Bendis, and Brian Azzarello (and a few others I can't remember off the top of my head) -- all artists noted for making halfway intelligent non-superhero comics -- to work on Marvel products. Grant Morrison is writing The New X-Men -- one of three or four concurrent X-Men series. Brian Michael Bendis is writing Ultimate Spider Man (a Marvel scheme to justify a fourth or fifth concurrent Spiderman series) and Elektra (who's already died at least three times, I'm pretty sure). Garth Ennis, whose only other work for Marvel was Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe, a big f*ck-you to Marvel that they published themselves, doing the monthly Punisher series.
While these writers continue to write good comics, they're writing good SUPERHERO comics, which is something the comics industry is already glutted with. When future comics readers look back on it, they will say that it set comics back years by preventing more original, more interesting, and more adult storylines from becoming as mainstream as they could have become. They'll say that some of the best writers in comics opted to gorge their egos and wallets by writing popular Marvel titles rather than help comics progress. They'll call it the great whoring.