I don't know...too obviously manipulative? Too Hollywood "smart sexy"?
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Yet, if we want to increase the attraction to kids, it's wise to look at what trends are popular with that market. Watch The Suite Life and Hanna Montana and all the other shows and see how the kids are represented. 

Oops...did I wreck your point? :)

Some kid gets betrayed but survives and convinces some nomads to to shelter him and fight for his eventual politcal ascendancy.

Now, do you REALLY know what happened in Dune?

It seems to me when you have a really complicated story truncating it almost blindly is not the problem. It's making it understandable to a new reader WITHOUT seriously truncating it to the point where it contains almost no useful information. And the more information there is to convey and the weirder and less compatible all that information is (like two death/rebirths in 3 years) the harder that task becomes.

You are right, Emery, you shouldn't. There has to be a context to make the information useful.  With your Dune example, is the context to get a reader to jump into the second book without reading the first? Or perhaps the second mini-series? Are they trying to get into it on their own, or will you be sitting there watching it with them? Well, in some of those contextual situations, you may have just provided enough information that they can join.  In others, maybe not.

Could a new reader have jumped into Spider-Man three to six months ago and been told absolutely nothing about the Spider-Totem, Sins Past, The Other, House of M, or any other storyline from the past handful of years? I think so.  I think, based on the context of what was going on, you could have told that new reader "the world has found out who Spider-Man is, he is wanted as an outlaw, and his Aunt has been shot and in critical condition," and they would have had enough information to read the book and follow along. So what you say makes sense that we don't want to create blind truncations but should rather consider what is going on.

"I'm hip! Earrings on dudes and cutie-pie bangs and big nerdy glasses on a hot chick!"

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In all fairness, Spider-Man comics have always reflected the current pop culture trends. Don't forget that Mary Jane worked as a go-go dancer in the late '60s and Harry Osborn sported a Fu Manchu mustache for a time. Don't see how him wearing an earring is any different.

I have to agree with what Bruce just said. Marvel has always followed the styles of the times in their books.

We just don't like it because we're old.

Every ISSUE used to be a good "jumping on point."

It's not that hard. They managed to do it for decades.