We want stories that speak to our world, not the ink cartridge is dry regurgitations of much better stories by much better writers. We want editorial to care about story craft as much as it does about maintaining tepid sales in a shrinking market - shrinking because stories are bland & regressive.

This is the crux of fans' complaint. We don't want Peter Parker to age with us; on the contrary, we want Peter Parker to be relevant to 2025, not 1975 when Brevoort first started reading. We want Peter Parker to be a three dimensional character, not a soulless corporate mascot made out of rubber.

especially creative systems, which heavily rely on the quantity, quality & diversity of input - they stagnate. Editorially, Marvel is the equivalent of a dank oxygen-less pond where fish are forced to inbreed. And when fresh voices do start to emerge at Marvel - they mostly leave, for DC or indie.

Tom Brevoort has been at Marvel since 1989. His length of employment is now eligible to run for US president. Nick Lowe started as a college intern around 1998 & hasn't worked anywhere else. Akira Yoshida/CB Cebulski has been at Marvel since the early 2000s. When systems like this are closed -

Issa is a carpetbagger. East County needs to vote him the F out.

The fan criticism isn't about "muh characters must age!!1!" as it is that 1996 was thirty years ago, with the Stern era now forty years ago, and while Peter was once a character who was allowed to reflect his times, now he only reflects the long ago and hidebound childhood of boomer/GenX editors.

Since One More Day, Peter Parker has been stuck in a cycle of ever diminishing returns, revisiting & retelling the same old stories from 1964-1996, with originality &freshness also becoming four letter words. Characters like Batman & Superman are able to move forward, but Peter is frozen in amber.

Characterization has been made a four letter word since One More Day, and editorial's ever-increasing strident insistence that fan criticism is "RONG" at this point can only be characterized as spite and misplaced pride instead of doing what is best for the story.

The fan criticism of Marvel's handling of Peter & MJ's relationship is based on Marvel using nonsensical and clearly authorially imposed devices wholly unmotivated by the story such as "the devil made me do it" with deeply and overtly misogynistic tones to keep the characters apart.

I don't think technically they are selling at a loss. I'm sure ASM is a profitable title for Marvel. What they are doing is leaving money on the table.

DC understands this which is why they hired Matt Fraction to revitalize Batman. While Marvel continues to dust off its rolodex for ASM writers.

In 2009, while the Obama issue & anniversary 600 sold very well, that was driven by collectible one-off interest and not the storytelling. No other issues of ASM cracked the year-end top 100. Now, this is direct market only & maybe newsstand sales were robust enough to make up for that, but doubtful

The latter statement is false, looking at Comichron/Diamond sell-in figures for 08/09. It's only true if Marvel counts shipping 3 issues of a title/month the same as shipping 1 issue of a title/month. Which, hmm, is probably why the assertion that biweekly ASM sells as well as monthly USM 🤔