Remember when you were a kid and you had all those great toy action figures: GI Joes, Megos, Star Wars action figures and so forth?  You used to make up stories with these figures and have great epic battles with them.  It was great fun.

Now remember that little kid you did not want to play with -- a younger brother, cousin, that nerdy little boy down the block that your mother wanted you to play with?  You didn't want to play with this kid because he or she would insist on playing with your treasured action figures and doing dumb things with them  --  come up with the dumbest ideas, totally inappropriate for whatever make- believe story you thought was cool; and then that kid would wind up throwing those figures down the stairs, burying them in a hole or setting fire to them.  This kid just ruined your treasured toys and your nice dreams. 

All the children everywhere who used to do this to you and me  -- ever wonder what happened to them?  They grew up...

...and now they write for and run M***** Comics and are doing it to you again!

These thoughts occured to me while reading "Civil War".

Moving back to story elements, when asked about Reed Richards’ motivation for joining the pro-registration side in Civil War, Straczynski said that in an upcoming issue, he has Peter Parker ask Reed that very question. As Straczynski related, Reed tells Peter about his uncle, who was a writer and creator, and was caught up in a McCarthy-esque witch hunt, and as a result, was jailed and saw his career destroyed. When Peter expresses his feelings of how horrible that must have been for Reed’s uncle, Mr. Fantastic says it was, but the law is the law is the law, and his uncle was wrong for not cooperating with the government – a stance by Reed which Peter finds unsettling.

This is the guy who's in charge of writing Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four. Terrific.

Edit: And more...

Honest to God, I've already quit FF and Amazing. If Reed Richard's ISN'T playing Tony and the world, and he truly does believe this, I'm giving up Marvel entirely.

This kind of garbage from a guy who was willing to break into a military base to get on a rocket, take over Latveria against government approval, stand FOR Galactus during his trial. Yeah. Right. He believes whatever anyone tells him to believe.

Whatta sick, vomitous joke.

but, the writer said, the costume will go away and other, Civil War related things will go away, allowing the changes to the character to move to the fore again.

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The sad thing is, he thinks this is a good thing.

But how many threads do we need rehashing this same topic over and over.

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Until they listen.

As soon as the buzz dies down (and the cash stops flowing in) stemming from the reaction to Peter's unmasking, someone will (hopefully) find the Scarlet Witch and (hopefully) she can reverse everything. Hopefully, she can revert the M***** Universe back to mid 60s continuity.

Hoping for some decent, self contained stories is similar to hoping for a movie director that actually gets the characters and doesn't feel the need to make unecessary changes such as killing off essential characters,(X3) spinning a deep, psychological, boring yarn (Hulk), or just totally missing the essence of a main villain (Doom in FF).

The true crime here is, the writers are causing irreperable damage by further muddying the continuity waters and making it harder for a decent writer to repair the characters. But then again, they all work for an EIC who blatently ingnores continuity as long as a 'good' story is being told. (Magneto destroys Manhattan, but there are no repurcussions in the rest of the M***** U.  Bulls***!)

It seems to me that all of this, the bad comics, the bad movies, is beyond repair. I'm not a negative guy, but it seems to me that the whole thing has been run into the ground. For me, it's going to be a piecemeal process. I'll have to get the good stuff where I can get it, made by creators who "get it." I can pick up the new Atom series, for instance. I can trust the writer and artist on that series. I'm not going to give up on the medium, but I'll have to be extremely selective. This board helps me make informed choices.

Damn, what a sad turn of events.

p.s. -- I dig your analogy Darren. Very apt.