John Byrne vs Dan Slott...

To be clear, I am not against change. But change that is adaptive, organic. Not change just for the sake of having something be different, or worse, momentary shock value.

I liked the idea of Peter becoming a teacher and Mary Jane trying to parley her five minutes of fame as a model into a career as a struggling actress. If felt natural, organic(much more organic than MJ as a supermodel ever did), It was character growth, but it felt true to who they are. MJ running a nightclub and Peter as pseudo-Stark is crap, and it's pretty clear from interviews the reason for a lot of that is to let Miles be THE street-level Spider-Man. Like with a billion superheroes running around New York, they couldn't handle two Spider-Men who have very different costumes and lead different lives? DC's had multiple Flashes, sometimes operating out of the same city, and a shit-ton of Green Lanterns, but New York can't handle two Spider-Men?

The stuff with Thor and Cap is actually some of the least screwed up stuff Marvel is doing, it's just caught so much of the attention because they went on The View and made a big deal about it. That actually hurt them in many ways, because it created a perception that Jane and Sam were just part of an agenda, and not worthy of those rolls. Sam is not only a fellow hero, he is Steve Rogers best friend. There is no one Steve would want to be Cap when he could not more, except maybe Bucky. I've been reading Thor on and off enough years to remember when Jane was a regular supporting cast member(I liked Jane enough I wrote her into an X-Men fanfic years ago), and actually cheered when it was revealed she was the new Thor, because it was keeping it 'in the family' instead of some random S.H.I.E.L.D. agent getting the hammer. Marvel would have been better served letting the stories speak for themselves instead of going on The View and announcing they had a 'black Cap' and a 'female Thor', because then THAT became THE story, and everything they have done since has had to fight that perception that they themselves created. Same thing with Bendis making himself the story with Iceman and his orientation. 'Posters on my Tumblr convinced me...'.

It's hucksterism, and I don't mean the carnival barker act of Stan Lee that people embraced. Too many misleading covers, too many misleading solicitations, too many misleading interviews. I feel like instead of trying to make a product people might want to read, they are more focused on manipulating people into reading books, and by the time you find out it isn't what you thought it was, it's gone and a new book is replacing it.

I feel like with Marvel, especially, they are at the point of just throwing things at a wall and then trying to make something out of it. I've been reading comics, aside from a short break from my late teens into my very early twenties, for over thirty years. The X-Men have always been a very big part of that; from the core books to many of the satellite titles. Out of the 45 titles announced so far, I am looking at getting only two X-Books, All-New X-Men and Extraordinary X-Men, and the ONLY reason I am even doing that is because some iteration of Iceman is in them, and considering how Iceman is being treated lately, that may ultimately not be enough to get me to buy them or keep buying them.

If someone had told me just a few years ago that Marvel would relaunch with 45 new #1's and I'd only really be excited about a couple of them, and the one I'd be most interested in would be Ant-Man, I have told them they were crazy. Yet here I am.