Wasn’t that simply because the editors didn’t want Spiderman to be pushing 30 anymore, and wanted to go back to his being a high school senior or a college freshman?
Well yes, because they didn’t believe readers cared about marriage enough to sustain interest in a married Spiderman. But I think his issue was that the narrative justification was unearned.
One thing I’ve learned from being adjacent to an avid comic reader is that a lot of the narrative decisions really have nothing whatever to do with what serves the story, it’s just whatever they think is gonna sell, and it fucks over all the artists and writers involved who were trying to do something cool. In this case, it was exactly as stupid as, “men don’t want to read about marriage.”
Well, i agree with the first part- weird twists just to sell more comics.
But Marriage has always been a bad idea in popular media. People like to do fan romances, “shippers” etc, and once married, all the possibility of other romances fall away.
Look how many superheroes are single- most of them. Sure Tony and Pepper finally got married and Hawkeye is, but no one else-
Firefly- the one married couple has the husband killed off.
Blue Bloods- Three men are widowers, one is married. Erin is divorced. etc.
Marriage has always been poison in popular film media. and it is also women who like possible romances vs solidly happily married.
I believe that media tycoons believe this. I do not necessarily think it’s true, any more than it was true that men wouldn’t watch movies with female leads. I would even venture to say that the world could do with more solidly partnered up characters.
I’ve been married for 19 years, there’s been plenty of compelling story material, I guarantee it!
For my husband, I don’t think his problem is with the relationship ending, but with how callously it was ended in the name of expedience. But I’m not fighting his fight for him.
I was thinking to myself that “Moonlighting” would have been pretty much the same show if Maddie Hayes and David Adison had got married in the pilot. Sort of like … “I Love Lucy”
That is certainly possible. The Media bosses have their own prejudices of course, and listening to Focus groups doesnt alway show a true range of opinions.
But they really do think that.
That bomb with the timer and a red wire or a green wire to cut in 30 seconds. Cut the green one. I’ve seen it a hundred times.
But wait until the timer gets down to 1 or 2 seconds before cutting it.
This is turned on its head very neatly in Interior Chinatown, when (slight spoiler) the bomb reaches zero, but doesn’t detonate. And Turner realizes things aren’t what they seem.
With a dash of “The readership doesn’t age.” This has been a comic book truism for a long time, in spite of the fact that the comics themselves have made a deliberate effort to hang onto readers into adulthood, and have been refining this since the 1990s, when they were superb at appealing to people in their 20s & early 30s.
If they now are appealing to people into middle age, but still behaving like they need a reboot every so often, because the readership is perpetually 9 - 16, they are losing a lot of money.
That was already Hart to Hart.
My impression was also that American comic book readers have been aging for decades (the subscription model doesn’t help, though I understand why it happened) and it’s more a case of the “the readership does age, and we don’t want it to” with them trying to appeal to younger readers as you said.
I can understand them losing money by trying to appeal to kids if kids don’t like them (though I think they more favor 12+ than the younger readers) when older read them, but with the subscription model and on-going stories and convoluted continuity, they are not very accessible to new readers, and that means in the long term they can expect readership to die off (or drop off because of kids and other responsibilities and the like).
Now, let me be clear that I love good, strong, continuity (though that’s hard to maintain over long time frames and with a lot of writers), but what’s best for me and my enjoyment isn’t necessarily what’s best for the comic book industry. The reboots to appeal to new readers have some logic to them - the problem seems to be that they can’t keep the new readers they get and can’t keep getting new readers without more reboots and they oftentimes alienate the older readers since nothing lasts and stories get interrupted and continuity is a mess, and frankly you see the same character arcs repeated multiple times (if you read for 20 years) because they can’t ever really progress past a certain point or the story ends. That or else they get completely remade/drop their supporting cast and everything you liked about them is lost.
There are certainly advantages to a rotating readership instead of a long-term one and that, IMO, works better with a younger audience. But that can’t really be achieved, IMO, with the current format. People can’t pick up an issue in Wal-Mart, an issue doesn’t tell a complete story, the stories themselves don’t have notes explaining who characters are or the references to past events like they once did, etc.
Nick and Nora Charles would like a word with you. Also, Mac & Sally McMillian and the Harts.
And as noted, Moonlighting wouldn’t really have been different if they were married. It still would have started to suck at about the same point, and Dippytoes and Booger would still be fucking annoying.
Comics aren’t really written for youths anymore. We laugh at the hokeyness of Golden and Silver Age comics while forgetting that that’s what a 9-year old reader could identify with.
How do you know they aren’t?
Or prisons– although Bart Simpson explained it well:
I’m sure their ghosts are probably in hell
Can’t say I get angry over it anymore, but I did drop Marvel over it. Not solely because of that, though the couple were a major favorite of mine - I’d already originally chosen to read Marvel comics over DC because they didn’t do reboots (though, of course, retcons existed), so it made reading seem pointless if all of history could be erased at any time. Plus the reason I even started reading comics was when I learned that they weren’t all like the superhero movies I’d seen to that point - when everything went back to status quo at the end of the story. Heck, the reason I watched the X-Men cartoon (predating comic-reading) was because I saw “previously on” where Scott and Jean got engaged. But that does tie in to appealing to an older age bracket - as a younger child, I had no problem with all my cartoons where the status quo never changed.
Yeah, but that didn’t even happen in the show, but in the movie, so the future wasn’t so much an issue. And he wasn’t even the only main character to die then.
True, but the only married main character.
Lois and Clark
Cmiiw, but wasn’t the “Elongated Man” one of the first married superheroes? Or was he really a superhero? He seemed to be a lame Plastic Man copy.