Matt relax, I'm just trying to keep it light, please don't misread my tone.

He looks the same only younger?  Maybe, but again, current Spidey (sans new costume) and Ditko Spidey look and act far more similarly.  If anything, your prolbem is with their disperate circumstances.

How would a pic "crappy" or not, tell you anything about the action of voice of the character? 

"So if a casual reader picks up Ultimate Spider-Man one day on his lunch break and likes it enough to want to read more Spider-Man and goes back the next day an picks up a copy of Sensational Spider-Man, he's likely to be confused, and feel disappointed."

In totally understand your point, but your analogy would make more sense if someone read two issues of Ultimate SPiderman and got two different characters.  Your example is more akin to someone walking into Pizza Hut express and expecting to get everything they can get at a real Pizza Hut, which I can also see as being a problem, so I'm not totally disagreeing with you.

"He's not trying to imply it-- that's the way it is.  He just proved it to you.
"

How?

His point: characters should stay consistant.

His example: Daffy Duck

But Daffy signigicantly changed early in his development, and in fact, has had different iterations marketed to different age groups.

He would have proven it by using a character that has NEVER changed.  But that just doesn't exist!

Not to like, bring out a nuclear bomb, since we are where we are, but I could argue (I'm not sure how succesfully but I can) that JB's Supes was a HUGELY different character than the previous iteration.  And not to smooch behind, but that's what drove me to try out a character that I had previously not been interested in. 

I was not interested in a Superman who could move planets around, had 17 diff versions of kryptonite, a dog, a horse, etc etc.  But I was interested in JB's more down to earth version.  Some people might not have liked it, that's fine.  But whether it was a good or a bad thing is totally dependent on your personal point of view, not some objective quantifiable principal.

Matt, baby, it's unfair to make me repeat points I've already made.

If your contention is that these two products, which are meant for different consumers, are confusing, then that would be a problem in MARKETING.  The consumer ABSOLUTELY SHOULD be led to the correct product that meets their needs, this is true of any kind of product.  Like the current line of Conan YA novels Tor is currently producing, aimed squarley at the pre-teen market.

Whether or not this is a problem is not the issue at hand.  You SEEM to be saying, and please correct me if I'm misinterpreting you, that because in your opinion the marketing of these titles is problematic, M***** should abandon any plan to offer different iterations of its characters because there is no way imaginable to clearly market these two products to their appropriate audiences.

If this is your point, I just can't buy it.

If it isn't, then please correct me.

(And to be fair, I believe the piece on the right is a promo piece mean to promote the character in general.  I could be wrong and probably am.)

(btw, I beg all of you to please forgive my constant edits, I apparantly spell as well as the average chimp.  But I do smell better)

How do you convey, through marketing, that there are multiple versions of the character, that the versions live in different worlds, have different histories, but are the same character? 

You obviously feel that this hasn't been done well enough or at all with the MU.  Maybe, maybe not.  But it's not impossible.  And if it can be done, then that would be a good thing not a bad one.