To me, that’s good news. One of the cool things about the way Spider-Man used to be is that he could be tooling around and run out of web-fluid. A major weapon in his arsenal… gone! That’s drama. Plus, as that author of that giant history of Marvel coffeetable book from a few years ago wrote, the ability to invent web fluid and construct the shooters showed that even before the spider-bite, Peter Parker had skills and talents that were going unappreciated.

The rest of this seems pretty stupid. Like something pre-teens who hate yucky girls would come up with at summer camp as their “ideal Spider-Man story.” Bleahhh…

So here we have just the latest in a years long litany of buffoonish decisions by, possibly the worst EIC at Marvel ever. But nothing will change until the fans hit Marvel where it hurts. The pocket book. Which will never happen.

There’s a reason I only read Marvel Essentials and long for the “good old days”. Days when guys like Marv Wolfman, Gene Conlan, Roy Thomas, and Al Milgrom made Marvel the “House of Ideas”.

Kids also should not have a role model who selfishly makes deal with evil incarnate.

Face it! This is a piece of crap story. People only have two choices:

1. Drop it until its fixed.
2. Keep reading until its fixed.

That corporate attitude toward the character has been around for years to decades, as indicated by comments re marriage over the years. Editor after editor, writer after writer, has disparaged marriage as being bad for the hero and bad for storytelling, with kids being far, far worse (except for FANTASTIC FOUR, which is about a family). Marriage just limits the storyteller’s options and makes entertaining stories too hard to write. If any editor has ever pointed out that marriage can work out very well if the characters complement each other, just as any two characters can complement each other, I’ve never seen it. The Vision and Scarlet Witch duo was a classic case of two characters, each rather weak and incapable of supporting a solo series, complementing each other and creating a strong duo.

Quesada, in focusing intensely on kids as Spider-Man’s core audience and fan base, has just been far more explicit in pushing the “Comics are for kids” message than some of his predecessors have been. Quesada might not be intentionally telling adults not to buy his company’s products, and that they’re stupidly throwing away their money if they do, but that’s the message implicit in his insistence that Spider-Man must be handled as a corporate product, with the story material recycled and the character’s marketability preserved. After all, “kids” don’t care how unoriginal or uninspired the storytelling is; they’ll read what they’re given, just as they’ll watch repeats on “Cartoon Network” endlessly if permitted.

Quesada’s obviously not a professional writer, so any comments he makes about writing generally in the CBR interviews can be discounted or ignored, but he doesn’t make a case for being a strong editor either, except as a recruiter of talent.

SRS

20 years of Marvel continuity has been re-written because of one 4-issue story that was done because the Editor-In-Chief couldn’t see how to write a good Spider-Man story wherein Spider-Man had a wife.

Putz.

http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=141756

I haven’t followed Spider-Man in a long, long, long time, but didn’t they “kill” her off just a few years ago? The only way I know this is from that Spidey mini that Steve Rude drew, where he’s moping around mourning her death.

I love the “cuts spider-man off from the bedrock of spider-man stories” bit. Means they can’t just re-tell the same goddamn stories over and over and might have to (gasp) be inventive as opposed to serving the nostalgia machine.

Reading that interview is great fun though, he’s a master of justification.

The fact he was a smart kid, and determined and driven enough by the guilt he felt over his uncle’s death to take this amazing thing, which most people would have used to limit themselves, taken what they had gained and never push themselves further, he took it further. That daring, and that ingenuity, and that vision of what needed to be done, those are the traits I always felt made him such a great character.

Marriage annulment I poop on, mechanical web shooters hurrah!

I’m sure sales will and have been through the roof, but I don’t see how this is much more than a gimmick either. I feel like a large percentage of the fan base today has only know him married or with Mary Jane, so I don’t see why the longing for the old single Peter. I don’t think most people cared that it was a media stunt. Who cares, as another poster mentioned so was all of Civil War and in particular the unmasking of Spidey. That was a more of a spectacle than him getting married over the course of a few issues will ever be.