I thought this demonstrated how far off the rails Spider-Man has gotten. Doctor Octopus, along with all the other Spider-Man villains, were supposed to represent authority and adulthood through the lens of youth -- an assortment of Captain Hooks taking on Spidey's Peter Pan. A kid doesn't identify with them, he identifies with Peter Parker. And Peter Parker's life shouldn't be a fantasy -- Spider-Man is his escape (just like reading his adventures is an escape for us) but he should be the character with whom the geeky kid identifies.

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I'm not sure this is a demonstration of how Spider-Man has gone off the rails, but rather how the comic book audience has gone off the rails. Instead of wish fulfillment for kids, he's wish fulfillment for chubby thirty and forty somethings.

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The industry has gone off the rails PANDERING to that audience.

When Stan Lee decided -- at the suggestion of his wife, Joan, according to him -- that he stop writing comics that basically embarrassed him, and start writing what HE wanted to read, he set about inventing "the Marvel Age". But he did so with a keen eye on the REAL audience, which was not himself. I was twelve years old when I bought my first Marvel comic, and I was immediately drawn into a world that was very, very different from the current DC fare. I could not have told you what that difference was (DC books were very bland, I now realize), but I knew there was a difference.

But the books Stan and Jack and Steve and the rest produced, while definitely "grittier" than DC books, were still completely accessible to tweens and teens, the primary audience.

Unfortunately, that audience -- a couple of generations of it, in fact -- has "grown up" to become the people producing as well as reading the comics, and so the books have become more and more about what those "creators" want to read, and the all-important entry level audience has been forgotten.

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"You don't know what you don't know" is a mantra all comicbook fans and professionals should learn. It walks hand in hand with "No sense of history", and together they have carved a wide swath of scorched earth thru the Industry.

Much complaints, in Ye Olden Days, about the "terrible distribution", and how Marvel and DC had to print 600,000 copies of a book to hope to sell 300,000. But they DID sell 300,000. Profit margins were narrow, to be sure, but at least the publishers still controlled the marketplace, and were not at the mercy of a few thousand clerks in comic shops paging thru catalogs and ordering on the basis of what they think is "hot" or, worse, on the basis of internet rumors about the people producing the comics.

The publishers may have had to work a lot harder to get the books out into the marketplace, but at least it was a marketplace in which EVERY book had the same chance of reaching a potential reader.