This is the thing though... people talk about JB as if he's a saint. I love the guy's work and he's got a right to voice his opinion, but is he not a high-profile comic creator regularly slating Marvel on the net? I'm not saying he's wrong to say those things, but it's not as if it's Mother Teresa that Breevort was responding to. And I say that with full respect to JB.

Decompressed storytelling and writing for the trade shocked me when I came back to comics after being away for a decade. I was like, what the *** is going on here?! The industry had so changed I didn't know where to begin...

So I began AWAY from Marvel with WALKING DEAD and INVINCIBLE. Those are my two favorite books. Love them to death. Love that Walking Dead is an emotional powerhouse and that Invinvible can have eight to twelve panels a page on every damn page.

For Marvel, I found that the oversized HC's are awesome. That is how I read the entire Bendis/Maleev run on Daredevil. That is how I read Millar and JRJR's Wolverine: ENEMEY OF THE STATE.

But I cannot buy single issues because I am lost. There is no way to know what is happening without first buying all the trades that come before it.

And forget about the X books! There are so many, with so many changes of canon, that it is impossible to get into it. Bought the House of M tpb and tried to get into everything, but I found it to be far too self important and bloated.

The only Marvel book I am currently reading is Daredevil, because it is pretty much kept clear of the other BS going on in the Marvel Universe. I was into Iron Fist, but they dragged the storyline on and on and I got bored, so I dropped it.

By the way, those of you who want Marvel to drop the top writers... dream on. That will never happen. It shouldn't, either. Those guys are good. My problem is they are stretched too thin. Why are Bendis, Millar and Brubaker writing 1/2 the titles? Why is everything else written by Ellis and (always late) Hollywood writers?

Marvel is boxing themselves in with this give it all to the three superstars crap. No, how about putting a star artist on a top book with a lesser known writer? How many guys who write creator owned books at Image or APE are perfectly capable of delivering the goods on a Marvel title?

By the way, I think the return of John Byrne to a Marvel title like FF or Spider-Man or X-Men would be a major event. Make no mistakes about it... That would huge.

Personally, I would love to see John go berzerk with FF if he returned to Marvel.

But more than anything, I want to see him finish NEXT MEN. I had my set custom bound into a gorgeous Hardcover last month and just the other day I learned it will be released as three oversized HC's. Well, good! I'll buy them all.

And I'll hope, always hope for the series to continue.

J BYRNE stated: I wonder. I returned to the X-Men, with HIDDEN YEARS, and Marvel threw it
away. I coined the term "stealth promotion" to describe how the book was
barely mentioned in ads, or on the Bullpen page, and how months into the
run a big chunk of potential readers still thought it was the terminally late
CHILDREN OF THE ATOM or a miniseries!

------------------------------------------------------------ -

Well, my statement was assuming they actually promoted it. Put it out there and said, HE'S BACK! Otherwise what would be the point?

Matt S., I agree that Marvel assigns too much of its work (particularly its core, best-selling titles) to the same three or four guys. DC does the same thing - I like Geoff Johns a lot, but he seemingly writes half of the company's books.

Yes, part of it is that these guys are being stretched too thin. But the bigger problem I see is that we've got the same voices telling all the stories. All writers write with a particular style and the overreliance on a small group of writers has led to certain amount of sameness at both companies, I believe.

I returned to the X-Men, with HIDDEN YEARS, and Marvel threw it
away.

**********

And that's their loss. I only recently discovered X-Men: Hidden Years, as you did this during the period I was out of comics. But it is simply fantastic, and it was an easy jumping-on point for new readers. I'm not sure why a publisher wouldn't want to promote such a quality product.