[ultimate geek nitpick]It’s “Spider-Man” not “Spiderman.” [/ultimate geek nitpick] 
According to Wiki, Quesada made business decisions that helped Marvel recover from the collapse of the collector boom and the near bankruptcy that followed. So basically he is a smart businessman. Now as to the wisdom of the story decisions he is making… :dubious:
Spider-Fans aren’t just out for Quesada’s head, they’re out for his cahjones.
(did I spell that right?)
I’m not a comics guy, so I get to ask a totally idiotic question: What does the Spiderman referred to in this thread have to do with the Spiderman of the comics in my daily paper (one of the worst comics ever, but that’s beside the point)? Sounds like they inhabit totally different universes.
There’s no relation between the two at all.
That’s about ten years ago at this point. They brought her back at the same time they revived Norman “Goblin Glider Spike Through the Heart” Osborn for no good reason.
Quesada said (a) he wanted Peter to be single, not married (he was too boring when married), (b) he wanted to undo the whole unmasking business, and © he didn’t want to kill off any more main cast members (May, MJ); he felt too many had already been killed off over the years.
This is the problem with comics. To make characters interesting, you need some sort of conflict that’s central to their existence. But because the comics never end, you can’t ever resolve that conflict, because then you lose what was making them interesting in the first place. This is why the Marvel and DC universe should both have hard reboots every ten years. None of this “Crisis” or “Mephisto’s magic” crap. Every ten years, you wind up all the plots, put an end to everything, and then start over with fresh origin stories for all your characters.
Just noticed this post.
What’s really maddening about this aspect, to me, is that Quesada’s response to the complaints was ‘If fans really want to see Peter and MJ married, there’s Spider-Girl’. Which is sublimely dumb… Peter and MJ as supporting characters to their daughter really isn’t the same thing at all.
Also, If Spider-Girl sales do go up based on this, I doubt they’ll be sustainable (because, again, not the same thing), and I fear the inevitable crash would end up hurting Spider-Girl’s chances of survival.
I disagree, but they need to learn to live with the consequences of their choices. And recognize that things can and do change.
I can’t side with either. The problem isn’t so much the 10-year (120 issue) period, it is the 25-year period PLUS all the crap picked up from sharing a universe with others. Reboots are needed occasionally (not annually as they seem to like to do). I do agree with you that sometimes permanent change is needed. Comics treat death like an episode of Dragonball Z. Sure, this character died, but give us a year to collect all the balls and we’ll wish him back. It is near impossible to evoke a reaction from a reader by killing someone when the dead don’t die.
Maybe, but not if you were shooting for Spanish. (cojones)
To make them truly interesting, you create a story based on a universe, not specific characters. Characters can live, die and move on, to be replaced by new, equally interesting characters. And the unvierse stays whole.
But people are too addicted to the familar for that to be successful. 
That’s what I’m saying. Think of it like folk stories. There’re hundreds of different stories about King Arthur. They’re all basically the same: everyone knows the beats, but each storyteller brings their own interpretation to it. You can read Le Morte d’Arthur and The Once and Future King, enjoy them both, and not have to worry about trying to force them into perfect congruence with each other.
Supers are our new folk heroes: people want to keep hearing the same stories about them over and over, but because they’re copyrights of large corporations, you don’t get the stories in self-contained narratives, but rather the same characters repeating the same drama over and over in the same reality. You want a big, epic death for Jean Grey, but you also want to keep telling stories about Jean Grey, so you cheat and bring her back. Because you’re doing this in the same continuity as her death, you end up robbing the death scene of most of its power. If there’s regular hard reboots, you don’t have that problem, because each version of the character exists in a seperate narrative. Jean dies in 2007, and she stays dead, forever, in that narrative. When the 2010 reboot comes around, you get to start writing Marvel Girl stories over again, without a ridiculous plot contrivance to bring her back, because it’s not the same character anymore.
Plus, you can limit the damage from the more “ambitious” (read: stupid) plot decisions. If you have a Spidey clone, or an evil Hal Jordan, you don’t have to worry about it screwing up your continuity for the rest of ever. It only lasts until the next reboot, and then you can start fresh and avoid making that same mistake.
Not to mention the Peter and Mj were apart at the start of Straczynski’s run, and it took him, what, a year at least to get them back together. :rolleyes: And they’ve just invalidated Peter unmasking in Civil War, too.
But that happened during Civil War, under his watch. He approved of the unmasking then. Why the change of heart now?
I understand there are advantages to what you are proposing. But I think there are some very valid reasons why they shouldn’t ever be put into practice.
For one, publishers are always touting “perfect jumping on points for new readers”. The unspoken flipside of this is that they never want to have explicitely stated perfect jumping off points for existing readers. Which would be an unintended result of what you are suggesting.
As a publisher, you would never want to declare “That’s it for the Spider-Man story, folks. We hope you enjoyed it. And be back next month when we start telling it all over again.” Because you would have a large number of readers who would like a little extra money in their wallet every month and realize that now that they already own “THE Spider Man story” they wouldn’t appeciate having it re-sold to them.
The only way this makes business sense to me is to create a parallel universe like Marvel already did with it’s Ultimate line. This way you can have your do-over that isn’t cluttered with years of continuity and the writers have the benefit of hindsight to avoid pitfalls and make some more logical connections in the re-telling of the characters and story.
But the key to the Ultimate line is that it is an alternative for those who want it. Anybody who wanted to read the continuing new adventures of the classic spider-man could keep buying the regular marvel titles (or at least they used to be able to.) I really like the concept behind Marvel’s Ultimate Line and I think DC would be wise to launch a line of their own.
What I disagree with most about Joe Q’s OMD reboot is that it killed Spider-man’s ability to ever grow-up and have adult problems. He said he just couldn’t imagine a Spider-man that had gone through a divorce or had to raise a child. And I think it was cowardly to not see what those situations could bring. There are a legion of 30 year old plus comic readers who would identify with his problems. And after all, isn’t the whole point of spider-man’s character that he is the super-hero who has to deal with real-world problems?
Is there any role that Aunt May fills that a child wouldn’t better fit at this point in Peter Parker’s life? They both could be in peril. They both could need medicine, insurance, diapers?
What I’m getting at is that every “classic” story-line was at one time new and innovative. But unfortunately Joe Q. couldn’t look past his childhood nostalgia to making the daring choices Stan Lee at one point might have.
Cake. Eat it, too.
I don’t think so. It’s not really doing anything that comics aren’t already doing, it’s just doing it in a way that avoids constant retcons. Comics are constantly retelling character origins, usually make changes large and small. The same dramas are played out over and over. If people keep coming back for them in the same continuity, why shouldn’t they come back to them in a different continuity?
I think the opposite would tend to happen: the core of readers who buy the comic every month, no matter what, would be largely unchanged. However, readers who had drifted away from the title would be drawn back by the promise of a fresh start, and brand new readers would have a clear entry point to the story, and find themselves on entirely equal footing, story-wise, with long-term fans.
It was the Ultimate universe that gave me the idea in the first place. Specifically, it was the fact that the Ultimate universe already has all the problems it was specifically created to avoid the inspired this. It’s inherent to the open-ended form: any narrative that goes on for too long gets bogged down in its own history. Realistically, you’re right, they’re not going to stop making Detective Comics in favor of this idea. But I think that, implemented properly, readership of the original, long-continuity titles would dwindle to near-zero, as the strengths of shorter-continuity comics draw more and more readers from both the original pool of comic fans, and from the population of non-fans at large.