Stuck in the past

Hmmm - I thought this would be easier, but I sometimes struggle with what to post next. I thought I had plenty of 'insights' to put on this blog.

It's harder than I thought it would be. I think that, for me, the main problem is that there is so much about the current state of comics that I don't like. So I don't know where to begin. It starts with the convoluted, interrelated, "event" story arcs, moves on to the proliferation of X and Spider-Man books and the fact that current comic book prices are just ridiculous.

I mean, if you collect X-Men books, you could wind up shelling out 45 bucks a month just for that particular genre. And then you have to consider whether or not you want to pick up some of the 5 or so titles dedicated to Batman and Superman.

From what I can gather, it looks like Marvel and DC are always trying to shake things up. In the past, they would go through these one-upsmanship exercises with secondary characters.

Now they are taking on the big guns.

The latest casualty is Spider-Man, and the 'brilliant' idea was having him reveal his identity to the world. This is such a bad idea (in a growing string of bad ideas), that I don't even know how to properly express my disdain for the whole 'concept.'

Normally, I hate it when they renumber a title and start over...but in this case, I'd consider it a favor.

I'd like to see Amazing Spider-Man cancelled and then relaunched. They could call it Amazing Spider-Man 350, and they could cast aside all of the continuity that went after issue 350, and have the first issue of this new book pick up from where the book was as of that issue.

That would mean no Ben Reilly, no Maximum Clonage, no return of the Green Goblin, no Spider-Man in the Avengers (if Stan Lee didn't think it was a good idea, why not stick with that?), no Morlun, no Gwen Stacy's kids and no Spider-Man's identity known to the world.

Of course, that might deprive us of some good Amazing Spider-Man tales, but I'll be hard pressed to figure out what happened after issue 350 that any true Spider-Man fan would want to retain.

No - it's best for Marvel to pull a 'DC' - allow the stories to deteriorate over time, cancel the book and relaunch with a new number 1 issue.

Oh wait - Marvel does this too. It's just that they realized it was a horrible idea and restored most of the books to their original numbering. Remember when they had two numbers on the covers?

But that only goes so far - in a lot of cases, they forgot to give us stories worth reading.

The stories don't need to be 'grim and gritty' or 'realistic' - I'd just like to see them be...good.