Callate said:
Anyone else a little leery about a critic regularly telling the audience that they should stop complaining about things?
That's kind of the new face of being a critic, things having gone full circle. If you take a look at other people in the same basic business as Bob, acting as critics of geek culture, you'll notice they all basically hold the same position being more or less pro-casual when it comes to games, and increasingly siding with the interests of the businessmen at the helm in the final equasion, even if they throw out a few slams here and there. Without knowing Bob, or other critics that seem to be following the same formula, it's impossible for me to say how much of this is genuine, and how much of it is simply motivated by the changing nature of the business, needs for a platform to be a critic from, and the control the business side of media has over those platforms.
Speaking for myself, Bob has a point that these kinds of stunts ARE typical for comics, however in recent years I've noticed a general tendency to want to utterly erase comics continuity in the belief that by keeping recognized names but erasing most of the rest of what went with them, they can make the comics more approachable and thus increase sales. The usual arguement is that the Baby Boomers are finally fading, and the belief that the audience wants characters "more like themselves" all the way back to their very audience, but at the same time they don't want to risk throwing in behind entirely new franchises due to their tendency to fizzle compared to the established ones. Not to mention the whole political correctness issue, and again the unwilliness to gamble too often on creating new characters, so they prefer to minoritize existing characters rather than try and create new ones, or simply wait for general interest to produce enough minority writers and creators in it's own time, which will happen if there is the interest for this to be a real issue rather than one simply born of ridicuous white-guilt to begin with.
The problem with some of these events in recent years is that they are intended to bring lasting change to a given franchise for business or political reasons. When you get down to it, the motivation for "One More Day" was arguably to make Spidey "availible" given that he was so heavily being promoted as a romantic interest. The bottom line is that readers of the right type want to be able to sort of insert themselves vicariously into being a potential match for their hero (sort of daydream fan fiction) and if the hero or heroine is permanantly fixed up, this kind of ruins it. Not to mention the simple fact that Hollywood (and Marvel's increasing multi-media base) wants to play fast and loose with who is going to be Spider Man's love interest in the movies. I kind of suspect they found it easier to cast a blonde than a redhead which is why they went with Gwen Stacy in the most recent Spidey movie but I have no way of proving that.
With the recent "Doc Ock" thing it's the kind of storyline that would be cool for a couple of issues, but not as a major event going on for dozens or hundreds of comics. The thing is with some of those "shock" covers and set ups Bob was talking about is that they were relatively self-contained and over with reasonably quickly (though like everything there are exceptions). This entire storyline is pretty much designed to leave a mark on the character indefinatly, long past the actual plot being run out, and Peter inevitably returned to control of his body. A fairly educated reader would look at it from outside the story and start making guesses as to the motivations and how this was intended to work out. Speaking for myself, my guess is that the point is to try and re-introduce Spidey as not only a swinging unmarried bachelor (previously set up) but to now give him a more "extreme" attitude left over from Doc Ock revenue. Sort of like how DC relaunched Superman, minus a lot of the whole "American Way" stuff and a more "edgy" attitude with the intention of it being permanant to better match the current viewpoint and morality rather than acting as the idealistic counterpoint Superman is supposed to represent. How that plays out (or played out) is unknown, but the point is that it's an extreme that has been being worked on for a while (Superman renouncing citizenship), and the formalization of it seems to be similar to what Marvel is trying to do with Spidey.
The thing is fans want comic continuities to move forward, and while re-boots get attention, people don't actually want to see changes to the fundemental nature of characters amount to more than what amounts to a quick "what if". You do see very slow, glaciar-like changes in comic characters, with the basics pretty much always staying the same, and that's pretty much how comics should be and are supposed to be.
At the end of the day the outrage here is more justified than I think Bob gives it credit for. The bottom line is nobody wants to spend the next year reading about a storyline that should have been over with in a few books. People don't want to wait that long to get the character they actually want to read about back. On top of that nobody wants to see the continuity that has kept them reading for all these years pretty much demolished with a wrecking ball. The relatively unchanging nature of comic characters is kind of their appeal.
I'll also say that this kind of garbage is why Marvel has their "Ultimate" universe. Doing it in the main "prime" continuity of course sells better and gets more attention. Besides I'd imagine after they already turned Ultimate Spider man permanantly into a Latino, turning Latino Spider-Man into Doc Ock would have just been "meh" and kind of ignored given that it's the kind of garbage you tend to expect from the Ultimate Universe nowadays. Truthfully just because they wrote themselves into a corner by trying to be "shocking" too often and playing with the characters too much in the universe they created for it, doesn't mean that they should run their experiments in the Prime universe. The fact that the "Ultimate Universe" remained at best a sideline (if a popular one at times) should kind of show exactly why they shouldn't be screwing around too much here.
