Those vibrant colors remind me of a rant* I enjoyed a few weeks back about how the advances of HD filming in comic book movies are offset by this trend to de-saturate the costume colors.

I'd pay very good money to see above costume in movie.  Exactly as is.

*Was either Nerdist or SModcast, can't recall.

Regardless, the PEANUTS strip above is surely not "canonical."  All in good fun... no problems with Charlie Brown kicking the football in that one.

++++++++++

I agree. It doesn't seem any different to me than a convention sketch or a "what if?" story. Just a fun little way of having Spider-Man guest-star in a non-canonical strip, or possibly just a fun one-off by Romita, imitating Schultz.

Several She-Hulks? Aunt May wearing Iron Man armour? I didn't know about those, kind of glad I'm not buying much Marvel nowadays. You can have too much of a good thing.

I posted a topic about the He-Man movie in the movies thread. I liked that franchise very much, it's one of my favourite of all time. That said, wouldn't have enjoyed it if there were 3 or 4 He-Men, multiple Skeletors, etc. Each character in the He-Man franchise is unique (okay, He-Man has an evil double), but that's the way I like it.

Back in the day, one of the ways to distinguish Marvel from DC was that each Marvel character was unique. Oh, sure, there were two Human Torches -- but not when Johnny Storm first appeared in FF 1. Stan and Jack were not building "continuity" with early Marvel/Timely/Atlas product. That would come quite a bit later. And the Hulk was created in a rather shameless attempt to cash in on the popularity of the Thing -- but originally that failed and the Hulk's book only lasted six issues.

DC, on the other hand, from very early on, set about relentlessly "de-uniquing" their characters. Superman was "sole survivor of the doomed planet Krypton", and they respected that for a while, even as Superboy was introduced into the mix (same character, just younger). But soon there was a cousin, a dog, a cat, a horse -- a city of one billion people!!

The Flash took about eight minutes to develop a kid version of himself -- a separate character, this time.

Green Lantern was relaunched in the Fifties, and the whole CONCEPT of the relaunch was that he was not unique. Ditto for Hawkman.

On and on. And now, it's the same at Marvel. Almost PATHOLOGICALLY the same, in fact. As if "creators" at Marvel and DC are somehow COMPELLED to copy each others mistakes.

It seems that few people can resist the temptation to de-unique any character, comic book or otherwise.

A lot of TV shows have done it. Was KITT a one-of-a-kind car in KNIGHT RIDER? Yes, until KARR, the original prototype, appeared. In AIRWOLF, the billion-dollar helicopter was a one-of-a-kind chopper - until it was revealed there was an earlier version. And another version later on, in the fourth season. And if $6m wasn't enough for one bionic man, there was a second one costing $7m, plus a bionic dog, too.

Perhaps some people just cannot resist the temptation. I wish they would keep characters special, though.

One thing I have noticed a lot of fans seem to love to "create" is copies of various Marvel and DC characters, so it would not be surprising to find them doing the same thing when actually offered a chance to do so. But I think there's a different slice of the fan mentality at work, too.

One way Marvel cashed in on, to multiply their characters without "de-uniquing", was to put them in multiple titles. Spider-Man got multiple titles. Via reprints, at first, the FF, the X-Men, the Avengers got multiple titles. But one of the things I noticed when I joined the industry, in the Seventies, was that some of the more anal fans complained about multiple titles, as they had trouble "fitting them together". Cottage industries arose, in fact, based on figuring out where all the pieces of the "jigsaw puzzle" fit. "When did Spider-Man have time to link up with Daredevil in TRAM UP if he was fighting Doc Ock in AMAZING and Kraven in SPECTACULAR?" "Well, if this happened between these two panels, and that happened as the page was turning here, and. . . "

In the end, it's easier to just have multiple iterations of the characters.

And then put THEM in multiple titles!!!!