Comments on: Brand New Year

By: Jonathan Nolan

Jonathan Nolan — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 22:55:54 +0000

Re: previous horrible writing having been recovered from, um no it wasn’t. Sales overall have declined steadily for two decades, and one of the main reasons is this awful sophomoric level of craft.

OMD provoked a reaction from the comicbook addicts, it didn’t provoke outrage in anyone else because no one else is still reading.

By: mutuelles

mutuelles — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 09:38:31 +0000

On the subject of “What’s supposed to happen”… don’t you think that 5 years ago people would have said Scott Summers and Jean Grey were supposed to be together? Regardless of this, there are a LOT of people who like Scott and Emma now, and I think this shows there is potential for change. Although Scott isn’t as big a character, he and Jean have arguably been a couple as long as MJ and Peter, if you count separation….

By: Mary Warner

Mary Warner — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 05:23:11 +0000

The simple fact is that Spider-Man was in horrible shape before One More Day happened. The new powers with the mystical connections, the organic webs, and worst of all, the public identity– all that should’ve had the fans more up-in-arms than One More Day. Strazcynski (and maybe some others, I’m not sure) had twisted the series into something unrecognisable. Peter didn’t even act like himself anymore, and he used to be the one character that nearly every writer could do right.
Some sort of drastic action was absolutely necessary to get Spider-Man back to normal.
But everyone is correct in that One More Day was a lousy way to fix things. And the marriage to Mary Jane wasn’t even one of the problems that needed fixing– that was just Quesadilla’s delusion, I think.
But now that the damage is done, it has to be admitted that the current team has done a great job. It actually feels like a Spider-Man series again, possibly for the first time since the early days of the marriage. And since this blog was written, they’ve done more to straighten out the changes that have occured and to explain things better, although they still haven’t explained everything. They’ve even brought Mary Jane back, though I don’t know for how long.
I’m hoping that sooner or later they will get back to the deal with Mephisto and give Peter a chance to make up for his mistake in some way before Mephisto’s inevitable booby-trap goes off. (Mephisto’s deals always contain boody-traps, after all.) But I hope they have the brains to not tackle Mephisto until they come up with an intelligent way to do it. We don’t want them to compound Quesada’s mistake.

I do think they’ve overused Osborne in the last year, but not as excessively as Marvel in general. (And bringing back Norman Osborne after he died was an even worse mistake than One More Day was. So was the whole clone mess. People should keep those stories in mind when they attack One More Day. Horrible things have happened before, but Spidey recovered eventually.)

By: Joseph Aconite

Joseph Aconite — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 09:35:39 +0000

When you dig a hole for your characters you either try your best to get them out, or like Marvel, dig a sideways pointless tunnel with no light at the end.

By: Jonny K

Jonny K — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 17:38:10 +0000

I do think that hints that it is possible for some couples to change. Though Reed-Sue is going to be there long term.

The thing about comics is that they’re serialised stories, and are supposed to change. There’s not a fixed ending…

By: Mightygodking.com » Post Topic » Bring him to me. I shall wear his head as a crown.

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 20:16:25 +0000

[...] popped up on some forum somewhere and when someone “confronted” him with stuff from this post, he totally called me out for being like a net-nerd or something like that. But they didn’t [...]

By: ZEITGEIST / Random Comics News Story Round-Up

ZEITGEIST / Random Comics News Story Round-Up — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:55:14 +0000

[...] cartoons, but I appreciate its contrariness and challenge to conventional wisdom. * here’s an analysis of Marvel’s Spider-Man back-to-being-single revamp one year in. Acknowledging the sales bump the [...]

By: Gala

Gala — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 04:42:52 +0000

Interesting point of view. I don’t agree with it but still…
Also, noone ever noticed that every single story couldn’t be told with MJ. Because every single issue would have had Peter thinking (at least): I’ve got to go back to my wife. And one issue out of three would have had at least 3/4 pages developing the relationship. Which is boring as hell and breaks the pace.

I don’t know, maybe it’s me but the MJ situations before OMD seemed like Pootchie, the dog from Hitchy and Stratchy cartoons on the Simposns (God, I can’t remember its name).
Every once in a while Peter had to say “Where is Pootchie?”. Foolowed by “Where is my aunt?” Thank god they cut half of this dialogs.

By: Eric Garrison

Eric Garrison — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 23:11:01 +0000

I recently wrote about this on my blog Blog. I also feel betrayed by Marvel on this, and agree with HammerHead. How could they make so many idiotic decisions? Isn't Ultimate Spider-Man supposed to be the revamp? This new Peter Parker is an idiot and a coward.

By: Journalista - the news weblog of The Comics Journal » Blog Archive » Dec. 1, 2008: I already hate the holiday music

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:59:58 +0000

[...] [Commentary] Spider-Man’s Brand New Day results Link: Christopher Bird [...]

By: Bender

Bender — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 12:56:31 +0000

Eep. Sorry I wasn’t dissing House specifically. I like House too, well except for this season

By: Coren

Coren — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 01:34:31 +0000

It was a decision they made together – but the whole idea took plot induced stupidity to a whole nother level. Hello, the X-Men? Warren Worthington can heal people. Elixir can heal people. Beast is beyond fucking genius. And they don’t give a shit that you’re unregistered – if anyone would be the best resource to turn to, it’s the X-Men. And there’s not even the “I have a secret identity to protect” excuse.

By: Thattitanguy

Thattitanguy — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 01:34:26 +0000

I can’t say that we find the thrice a month shipping Amazing Spider-Man a success at the shop.

First off, we’re selling about half of the average number of copies of the title that we were during JMS’ run. As of the last Previews order we turned in, we’re now ordering Amazing Spider-Man in quantities that are dangerously close to the amounts the previous other two Spider-Man titles sold during that time. Now, I have 3 weak selling Spider-Man titles instead of 2. Plus, the customer pulls have dropped by about a 1/3 and we don’t often have “flagship” titles drop that drastically from our subscriber lists.

Second, the book has wildly fluctuating sales based on the beginning of story arcs and/or creative teams. My Amazing Spider-Man cycle sheets now look like a roller-coaster ride of success and utter failure. It’s proven to be an increasingly frustrating book to order. With the book having rotating teams and shipping so quickly, our ability to do order increases and decreases to adjust our numbers have been hampered to the point that it just makes sense for us to lowball our numbers and relay on re-orders to handle sell-thru issues.

Third and finally, I’ve noticed a trend over the last six months or so. Our back issues for “recent” Amazing Spider-Man issues have slacked off significantly. The traffic from the average non-subscriber has been almost non-existent. These are the people that don’t show up on new comics day and they have no interest in starting a pull. They’d come in after a couple of months and pick up 6 or so issues of Amazing and then leave until the need hit them again. After a couple of conversations, I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re hopelessly lost. They’re just overwhelmed by the shear amount of comics waiting for them when the get around to making the trip to pick them up. Where once they would come in pick up about 15 to 20 bucks of comics they found that they were suddenly paying around $50 to catch up and it just wasn’t something they wanted to do. These were people who didn’t care about the ramifications of OMD or BND or any other story being told; they just wanted to read a Spider-Man story and it’s a damn shame that we’re losing them because in the long run their numbers do add up.

And that’s pretty much indicative of the market right now. I think that Marvel and DC have gotten alienating the casual reader down to a science. With obtuse crossovers and tie-ins, crappy shipping records and mistaken “relaunches/re-invisionings” of flagship characters it’s little wonder that the casual reader is a dying breed.

By: Kyle W.

Kyle W. — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 09:40:25 +0000

Hammerhead: I hear it was MJ who actually sold out the marriage, but I’ve yet to read that particular issue.

Coren/Bender: Related to previous comments, I consider House to be the best one-off-with-running-subplot storytelling since Joe Kelly’s Deadpool run.

By: HammerHeart

HammerHeart — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 20:38:02 +0000

One effect that One More Day had for me was tainting my respect for Peter Parker. The Peter I grew up reading about was always feeling sorry for himself, whining and struggling to do good, but in a likable way. But nowadays I look at him and see a self-pitying whiner who sold out his marriage to the devil because he couldn’t face life without his mother figure.

These days, when Peter feels sorry for himself I no longer share the pity; I’ve simply lost respect for the character.

It makes me sad. And it makes me even sadder to see so many fans who don’t mind. For all his many faults, Tony Stark at least has the strenght of his convictions… post-OMD Parker is just a pitiful loser who deserves all the angst that life throws at him. Pete HAD true love and he threw it all away; as a consequence I’m not interested in his arrested-development emo tears anymore.

But hey, maybe that’s just me. If other Spider-Man readers don’t mind that Spidey sold out to the devil and gave up true love, more power to ‘em. I’ll be over here reading about heroes who I actually respect – like Mitchell Hundred, Invincible and Nova. Comics are currently too expensive for me to waste money on poorly-conceived retro pap.