It seems weird to me when you say that Marvel is run by fanboys who lived in the 70's because that's when I was starting to read to and my first thought would be "Okay, so what did they not get?"
While quality was very up and down in the 70's what stands out to me most is that there was a kind of balance in terms of tone that worked rather well. It's hard to quantify it by I would say that comics were still comicbooky in the best ways but were also playing the stories more straight forward and dramatic. There was something of an equilibrium there if that makes sense.
I get what you're saying. Comics back then were toying with a not-quite-innocent age...things were staying the same, but a black cloud hung over the rotuines, which forced the characters to get a little more serious and steady. It's the perfect dichotomy, really, there isnt anything wrong with the 1970s portion of comics, but Marvel going back to that equilibrium NOW is an injustice to that rare and different age.
Every event tries to be the Night Gwen Stacy Died, or the marraige of Reed and Sue Richards (look no further than Luke Cage and Jessica Jones), or making up for the lack of focus on Norman Osborn being just Norman Osborn, or a wannabe Claremont on X-Men.
About the only poor bastard to stay above all of this is Daredevil, who wasnt doing **** all until the 1980s and then didnt do **** all until 2000.
I think what I mean is that, just shortly after
Secret Wars , Marvel got vocably
NICER, that equilibrium you mentioned, where nothing was too old or too young, was lost as the company allowed their characters to grow up completly...figuring they could move on to legacy heroes and freshen up. Under Shooter's reigme, this is what would have happened, DeFalco had the same idea, being Shooter's prodige, and in that instance Marvel were
agreeing (Thunderstrike and Ben Reily), but the
fans didnt.
Now the fans have caught up and are more accepting of change, but we've gone back to people who want comics to have that equilibrium of a loss of innocense, yet life goes on.
That's not something I see in Marvel's line at all even with things like with Spider-Man where the attempts been made to get him to a sort of his more iconic self. Not to mention that ending the marriage that way...even as someone who prefers Peter as a single guy character I felt that was just all a dumb,needless, and classless way to go about it.
It's been followed up by equally dumb, classless things. Peter getting drunk in front of MJ and her not lifting a finger to help him out (she has an excuse since Marvel confirmed her own deal with Mephisto will be ellaborated on in 2010), sleeping with his roomate and not realizing it...**** like this isnt what Peter does as a character, so it's not Spidey back to being "iconic", it's just showing that without marraige, he's a loser and can't go on the way he currently does without some kind of matured progression. It's almost a promotion of how valuable marraige is than to show the "perks" of not having your flagship hero married.
I'd like to think BND is just a very coy bait-and-switch tactic the way Cap's death was presented as ("Dead is Dead"), to show you can't go home again and Peter being married defines the character now and forever... but we'll see. Right now, it's backfired so badly that the title is in the red and the marraige really hasnt gone anywhere either due to Stan keeping it in the Dailes (creator knows best), and the EIC being, at his heart, a fan of it everywhere else.
So if Joe and his crew were somehow looking to appeal to me or someones who's more exclusively old-school or whatever it doesn't succeed that way either unless they just thought sticking Spider-Woman's ass in my face through the layers of grimschlock would be enough to make dig their books.
It's not that there pandering to you, there pandering to everyone like you that works over there and acted the way THEY did, which is, to say the least, slightly different
They are the type of fanboy who lived that era of Marvel as it was cusping more on the deapths and limitless appeal of virisimilitude, but they also wrote sex scenes with all these characters on their notepads at age fourteen or wacked off to Mss Marvel and Spider-Woman's arses in their sleep (looking at you Bendis)...and the minute they got in power, you started seeing all the repressed hormonial stuff take a rise.
Ever notice also how the more recent beneficial stuff happens to characters that had their titles canned after the 1970s ended , or had their relevancy laregely reduced in stature afterwards even when the titles werent cancelled? Spider-Woman, Thor, Iron Fist, Mss Marvel, Luke Cage, and Captain America ...there the cream of this era's crop while everyone ELSE gets excruatingly lazy writing..like their time has passed but they need to keep the money circulating based on name value until Marvel want to do something new with 'em. An all-too easy comfort trap like this is the one that led to "Heroes Reborn" and "Heroes Return", from which FF, Cap, and Iron Man regained direction
It's hard to DEFINE characters from that era like Spider-Woman, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and Mss Marvel, they don't have anything to define them WITH. They were heroes cut down in their prime by Shooter before they could grow at all. No matter what they do right now, the outpouring of development, the feuds with Osborn and HYDRA...nobody
really gives a **** about them. They don't have a recognisible brand. Why waste money on them if nothing's to be done with the brand FIRST? It's pure 1970s wishlist indulgence and it's a distraction from buisness. It's not THE reason Marvel's flagship heroes are going through ongoing stages of SUCK, but it's THE reason nothing's being done about it.
And then we have the modern audience of comics, fans half their age that are thinking all the same dirty things they are, the impressionable kind that will be convinced that doing this in comics is "ok", and you have success without there really being any "real" success to speak of, and worsens the buisness all the more when it's finished. It's all hormones and human greif at the world transferred on to characters that arent ABOUT that in addition to characters who you would EXPECT to be about that. No variation. No diversity. And no buisness will be made in the future if this continues without extreme toning down and status quoe restorations. Disney or no Disney, the bubble is on the verge of bursting worse than it did in the 1990s.
There's only so many times Hank can smack Janet.
