Maybe the next big crossover evenet should be Marvel/DC Exorcism: Out Out Damn Spot!

Thomas Mets: I believe the Clone Saga/ relaunch were better examples of bad stories that drove readers away than anything JMS has done

Not for me!  I stuck it out through the Clone Saga, because there were elements of Spider-Man there that I still liked, and I knew in the back of my mind that eventually, everything would be put back in order.  Plus, there was some great John Romita Jr and Mark Bagley artwork to at least keep me interested on the artistic side.

With JMS doing his Spider-Totem nonsense, and then the Gwen Stacy/Norman Osborn tryst, I was finally pushed over an edge I never thought I'd go.  I haven't picked up any of the mainstream Spider-Man comics in over a year.  That has never happened before.  And because of the inmates running the asylum right now, I don't feel that eventually everything will be put back in order.  If nothing else, it'll probably get worse.  Oh wait, what's this I hear about an eye being eaten?

Yeah...

I'm with Robert. The decisions that led to these characters being married were spurred by needs that had nothing whatsoever to do with the books themselves. In the case of Spider-Man, Stan Lee wanted to get them married in the daily comic strip-- God only knows why. The Man should have known better.

As for Superman, Lois and Clark were getting married in the TV show Lois and Clark, after he revealed his secret identity to her. WB probably put some pressure on DC to ensure the books would match their series, which folded about a year later when viewers realized that (duh!) a married L&C were pretty damn dull.

In both cases, the decision to get the characters married played to an aging fanboy mentality (golly, wouldn't it be kewl if L&C and P&MJ finally tied the knot? woohoo!) but betrayed fundamentals upon which the characters were based.

As for Superman, Lois and Clark were getting married in the TV show Lois and Clark

***

To clarify, the marriage was supposed to happen until LOIS AND CLARK.  When L&C happened, they asked DC to hold off on the marriage.  Trying to think of something else big instead, they decided to kill him.

"The Batman titles started selling a lot better once
Dark Knight was published, then got another boost
from the national media attention of Death in the
Family, and then got a giant push with the 1989
Batman movie, so I'd say that's more a case of
Batman gaining in popularity than Spider-Man
nose-diving."

I don't think that's the case.  Bat-sales (like other DC books) improved and stabilized somewhat after CRISIS, but I believe Bat-titles were still selling about half what Amazing Spider-Man was.  All comic sales fell after the speculator boom/bust, but Spider-Man fell more than other titles because it had more readers to lose.

The point I'm trying to make sales-wise is that Spider-Man used to be read by the same sort of folks who read Hulk or Iron Man or Thor, and it was read by some folks who didn't read those books.  Spider-Man has not only lost the same sort of readers every other comic has lost, it's lost those readers who didn't read other comics.

Mike

"I still think JMS has handled Peter and MJ well as a married couple--in
some areas, he's probably handled them the best. It's all the other stuff
he's done with the series that drove me away."

That's the sort of thing that really makes it frustrating as a comic reader today.  There are things that guys like JMS and Bendis do so well but then there are things they do so poorly and doing that poor stuff is just as intentional as the good stuff.  It's not like I can keep reading creators like that and hope they're going to get better.  What's that computer expression - it's a function, not a bug?

Mike 

Spider-Man has not only lost the same sort of readers every other comic has lost, it's lost those readers who didn't read other comics.

***

That might be true, but then, there's a host of reasons casual readers abandoned the industry.

So Spider-Man married goes against the very idea of the character, but having a 20 year marriage negated by a cosmic reality shift doesn't?  Interesting...

After the marriage, sales were doing pretty well - heck, Spider-Man wound up with a fourth solo title.  Not like there was a plummeting readership.  What seemed to kill the books was the middle/tail end of the Clone Saga, which basically used "comic book" tropes in an effort to undo the marriage.  Didn't go over well. 

After that, there just really wasn't anything particularly great enough to convince readers to come back (and, all respect to Howard Mackie and the other writers, it really was a dumb idea to keep the architects of the Clone Saga around after TPTB at Marvel decided to divorce themselves from it).  Currently, the situations that seem to be driving Spider-Man readers away have nothing to do with the marriage.  It's having the dead girlfriend sleeping with his arch enemy retroactively, Mystic Warrior Spider-Man, etc.  Those stories would be crap no matter what his marital status was. 

Not saying that sales would be lower if he was single or anything like that, but blaming the marriage on every sales hit the Spider-Man books have taken over the last 20 years is just scapegoating.  Some people like it, some people hate it, and for others it's simply been the reality for as long as they've been alive.

I confess, there are some segments of fandom that I will never understand -- and would probably prefer not to -- but this one.... this one mystifies me beyond measure.

Marketing was the "architect" of the Clone Saga, not the writers.