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Years of torture by the Skrulls??? i'm unfamiliar with this plot point but i remember Hank Pym being restored/redeemed during Kurt Busiek's tenure on The Avengers so i don't get why they'd 'unravel' Pym to now redeem him again. Seems redundant to me. Even with the Skrull factor.

-C!

                   

Edited by Charles Valderrama on 25 August 2009 at 9:18pm

Marvel had a golden opportunity to get rid of all of the post-Frank Miller Elektra appearances, Nightcrawler's goofy "son of a demon" origin, any Hank Pym appearance where he's been an unstable wife-beater guy, Tony Stark's Superhero Registration Act-goon phase, Norman Osborn's return from the dead, Peter Parker's marriage (which I didn't mind, but which Quesada wanted to get rid of), and any number of stories that they could have swept under the rug without reverting to a "Crisis"-style reboot.

Instead, the Wasp got killed, Dum-Dum Dugan may have been killed, Mockingbird came back from the dead, and characters as major and shocking as Jarvis the Butler and maybe some Young Avengers were replaced by Skrulls for a few weeks. Even if they didn't want to use that storyline as an excuse for some housecleaning, they could at least have revealed that a character more major than Spider-Woman had been missing for several years' time.       

I was thinking more along the lines of a Skrull Mary Jane, although I guess they already went that route with the Human Torch a few years back. They could have used Skrulls to undo Peter Parker's secret identity revelation, though. Capture one of the Skrulls who was pretending to be Spider-Man, unmask him, and reveal that the whole thing was part of a plot to infiltrate the Earth's media. Toss in a Skrull J. Jonah Jameson or Robbie Robertson, too, and you're all set.

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Why, yes, because Moore actually pressured people into buying copies of Watchmen under some kind of duress?

No, I'm sorry, I can't let that pass unchallenged ... Watchmen sold…

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Who's talking about sales? If you'd bothered to read my entire post, you might have noticed I was talking about the effect WATCHMEN had on other writers. Hence my comment about Frank and DKR. WATCHMEN had not sold copy one when other writers began climbing onto Moore's bandwagon.

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No, it wasn't. It was for EVERYBODY. The story contained "adult" elements, but they were presented in a way that would have slipped right past the average 8 year old. Then as now, I liked to layer my stories, so a reader returning from time to time would find new things as his perceptions of the world matured.

Quesada, of course, was about 18 when Dark Phoenix happened, so he read it with his 18 year old perceptions and assumed himself to be the target audience. We used to encounter a strata of fandom that was like that -- the books were for them and them alone. Now, it seems that most of the people working in comics are from that strata.

There's an article on Newsarama about how the big three might be getting back together  in the Avengers. It points out that they haven't been together for something like 8 years.

8 Years

Captain America, Thor and Iron Man have not been together for 8 years.

And we wonder why people who see a film don't start to buy the comics. Because the characters they see on the screen are not in the comics anymore (Granted it used to be that the characters had been changed for the screen but with Iron Man and Hulk it's the other way around).

Eight years?????

Meanwhile, DC seems to be trying to emulate this by once more removing Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman frrom the Justice League for "continuity" purposes. It seems like every time the JLA is rebooted, a big deal is made of getting the Big Three (and maybe even the Original Seven) back together in the book. And then a few years go by and suddenly Vixen is the longest continuously serving member of the team...

Cheers, Jon