i am really torn.  i am 27 so peter with MJ is "my spiderman."  i am personally against separating the two AGAIN.

I will still read spiderman though if they disolve the marriage in a way that is not off putting to me.  i would like to see a return to the down on his luck peter parker.   i don't like the tragedy after tragedy peter parker that has been around lately.

Either way, i am eager to see who makes peter this offer and why.  what would strange or the devil or god have to gain by taking away peter's marriage to save his aunt.  i hope they can do it in an interesting way.  Usually a sophie's choice has to be directly related... not a random exchange... i hope this is well done.

See how naive I am?  After all Marvel has done in the last 6 years, I still give them the benefit of the doubt.  I don't know why I bother.

About the "Sins Past" storyline, it simply doesn't work from a chronology standpoint. It just doesn't fit with the events of ASM #90-121.

Gwen was only in London for a short period of time (probably a few weeks tops), as Greg points out. She certainly wasn't gone long enough to get pregnant and carry twins to term. This is a classic case of shoehorning a story where it doesn't fit, rather than working in the confines of what you've been given. I'm not saying writers should be a slave to continuity, but this is a pretty big discrepancy.

I also happen to think it was an absolutely horrible idea to begin with and completely misrepresents the Gwen Stacy character. But if you are going to ruin a character, at least get the basic facts right!

What's implausible is having GWEN STACY in that situation.

***

BINGO! That's what drives me nuts about some current writers. It's true that almost anything is possible in fiction, and there's really no kind of story that can't be told, but too many writers fail to realize that it is NOT appropriate to tell ANY story with ANY character. It's fine to have a "hero" who kills his enemies, but if that tendency is suddenly tacked on to Captain America, for example, the writer is just plain WRONG. There's no other way to put it.

 Glenn, I wish you were still writing comics.

What do people think about the way M****l is apparently going to fix Spider-Man?  Both how they are seemingly going back to the traditional Spider-Man (secret identity, web-shooters, maybe single again), which I can't see how they can do without some cosmic reboot, and going from multiple Spider-monthlies to just one book (AMAZING SPIDER-MAN) three times a month?

It'll be interesting to see how "new school" fans will react to having a bunch of stuff they've read undone and if "old school" fans have been too pissed off to come back.  I also haven't seen anything at M****l in the last 5 years to make me think they can exert enough editorial control to handle multiple creative teams on a thrice-monthly.  The best they can hope for is to transform AMAZING into an anthology title with a regular sequence of creators, which doesn't seem like a sales bonaza to me.

Mike

As one of those disgruntled "old school" fans, I'd love to come back to Amazing. If the stories are good, that's one bandwagon I would be more than happy to climb aboard.

However, I'm skeptical of the thrice-monthly approach for a number of reasons:

• As you point out, the logistics of juggling multiple, interlocking creative teams on such a tight schedule are nightmarish. I'm not sure why the Marvel editors would set themselves up for such headaches. Such an intricate web (pun intended) seemingly is an invitation for blown deadlines and other troubles.
• Part of the problem in the last 20 years or so is that Spider-Man is simply overexposed. Too many titles, too many guest shots, etc. This tends to dilute the product and it drives away fans who don't have a small fortune to invest in comics every month. The thrice-monthly move doesn't address that issue - it just puts three titles under the Amazing Spider-Man banner. Less often is more - I'd rather see one or two really good Spider-Man titles a month.
• And as a purist, I believe that Amazing should be a monthly, ongoing series because that's how it was in the Lee/Ditko days. When I was a kid, I once counted backwards to figure out the month and the year of Amazing Spider-Man #1. They've already monkeyed with this tradition twice - the first time in 1990 when they did the twice-monthly issues in the summer months and the second time in 1998 when they rebooted with issue #1. Thankfully, they've restored the original numbering system.

I would come back to Spider-Man if I liked the creative teams and the direction of the book, and the character was someone I recognized. I would prefer a single strong book two or more times a month to multiple books with multiple storylines.

I did come back to Spider-Man for the Mackie/JB/JRjr restarted books, but the contrast between the character I loved in Spider-Man: Chapter One and the married-to-a-supermodel guy in Amazing and Peter Parker eventually pushed me away from the core books. I didn't care for the crossover either.

I would love to come back to the Avengers and the Fantastic Four too. I was gone for years and years before Busiek & Perez refreshed the Avengers, and I picked up Waid & Wieringo's FF after being gone since Walt Simonson's run.

I hate the fact that Marvel isn't publishing anything I want to read.