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Due to his brain injury,  Flash has now gone from being an invalid to again being the bully he was in high school.  Talk about lame-ass writing.


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Another problem with aging in comics: Flash as bully makes sense for a high school student. As an adult, he's a complete jerk.

SO many silly things to comment on....

I will start with several comments made about Ellis....

To paraphrase, someone asked if he Morrison and others are such writing geniuses why don't they do any work outside of comic books? Well, why isn't George Lucas doing broadway plays, or television shows? That isn't what he does. He does movies. Ellis does comic books. It is that simple.

I happened to think his Thor was one of the better takes I have ever seen on the charachter. I also think that the vast majority of his stuff that I have read is just dreadful crap, but that is just me. Plenty of people like it.

I think it is narrowminded to say that if Peter Parker isn't a teenager then it isn't really the same charachter. Someone else stated it very well that if you pin down the charachter to such a limited definition, then you are missing the point.

I like growth in charachters. The whole point of seeing a young charachter is that you watch what they become. I just think that after reading 25 years worth of Peter Parker worrying about being late for third period math class is a terribly dull idea.

I never thought that he HAD to get married, but it never bothered me. It is just something that would be terrible to go and say "nope, we are just going to ignore it". Same thing with Superman. If neither one never got married, that would have been fine. If Captain America never marries Sharon, that is okay. If Green Arrow never marries Black Canary, that is okay too. But if it happens, just go with it. To me it is kind of like killing charachters. You should be DAMN sure that it is what you want to do before doing it, because undoing it is virtually ALWAYS worse than leaving it done.

I need to stop reading because a particular aspect of a story no longer serves a purpose and has become dull? Because I want stories that are fresh and unique?

That is at the very least as stupid as the arguement for you to just go read back issues.

I need to stop reading because a particular aspect of a story no longer serves a purpose and has become dull? Because I want stories that are fresh and unique?

I think the point was that once you've grown tired to Spider-Man, it's time to move on to something else, as opposed to expecting Spider-Man to change and grow along with you.  Leave Spider-Man for the next generation of kids to discover. 

That battle's over, I think, and the good guys lost.

I don't see how the next generation of kids could, or should, NEED to have him be a teenager for them to discover him.

I personally have never had any interest in Peter Parker during his high school days. I didn't when I was 5, or 10, or 15 or so on. Now, as I am older, I can read the stories with a finer appreciation for the craftmenship of it, but not so much the actual content.

I know that there is really no way of testing this theory, but I would be willing to bet that twice as many of the people who have ever read Spider-Man regularly got hooked on him by first reading his post high school stories.

Gregg Halecki wrote: I need to stop reading because a particular aspect of a story no longer serves a purpose and has become dull?

Once again, incredibly f**king selfish.  They have become dull to you.  They don't serve a purpose to you.  For most of the history of comic books, people read them for what they were and stopped when they didn't do it for them anymore because they had obviously outgrown them.  But they didn't ask that they change so they became more interesting to them.  They left them the hell alone for the next generation to enjoy. But no, now there's a whole contingent of fans who have been reading the same comic book characters for decades, who don't understand the basic conceits of mainstream, company-owned characters, and who insist that said characters "age" and "grow" in order to serve them and f**k the next generation.  It's more important that the characters appeal to you than for the characters to appeal to everyone.  Yeah, that's the textbook definition of selfish.

For the record, I've read characters from both Marvel and DC for over 30 years and I've had no problem with Spider-Man fighting the Green Goblin 1,000 times or seeing JJJ call Spider-Man a "public menace" every time he sees him.  That's the conceit, Gregg.  Love it or leave it and, by your asinine posts here and in the "Reboot" thread, looks like it's time for you to leave lest one more character be written to your satisfaction, leaving yet another potential audience in the dust.

I don't see how the next generation of kids could, or should, NEED to have him be a teenager for them to discover him.

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Then what's unique about the character? He's a wisecracking 30something with spider powers? If the powers and the jokes are what constitutes Spider-Man in your view, then that's a superficial viewing of him.

I'd also argue that more people have encountered Spider-Man in outside media and he's always been depicted as a teenager and a student  (with the exception of the upcoming movie, in which he's in his early 20s). The average person probably thinks Spider-Man is "just a kid" -- not a married man.

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I know that there is really no way of testing this theory, but I would be willing to bet that twice as many of the people who have ever read Spider-Man regularly got hooked on him by first reading his post high school stories.

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I encountered Spider-Man during the early '80s (having first seen him on the NBC Saturday morning cartoon). You're right, he wasn't in high school then, but at least the character was still in the ballpark -- young, single, student with money problems and not a member of a respected superhero team.