Now that you can spend $10 a week and only walk
away with three comic books, I think editors are
downplaying the idea that you'll want to sample the
company's other books since what they really want is
for you to keep reading the one that you're already
buying.

*****

True. When I was a kid I could read the whole line, pretty much, for within my paper route money. I couldn;t do that today.

***

Stan was very good at maintaining the illusion of a shared universe. But there were very few actual crossovers or tie-ins back in the 1960s, and when they did occur they were small.

****

My Thor Spider-man example was small. It was a little thing to let you know more was happening, it was a tease, but it wasn't essential.  

If you wanted to ignore it you could.  I am also going through the Marvel Masterworks, and getting into the late 60s, there are a lot of Stan editor boxes (much of them in books Stan wasn't writing). For example, in X-men, a note that Wanda, whose mind is frazzled, got hurt in Avengers 46.

I guess INFERNO pushed it a bit too far. Yet, some of the best stories were
Daredevil's, not in the mutant titles.

***

Inferno didn't bother me cause even when it crossed over into something like Spider-man, he had to deal with Demons but you didn;'t have to read the X books. And it was a fairly coherent cross-over.

What bothered me first was Infinity War, where I would pick up these cross-overs which did not tell their own stories and were just horrible.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately, and I think the problem is that with 70-some years of DC history and 40-some years of Marvel history, the characters have gone stale. It's not that good ideas can't even happen, it's just that it's harder to come up with a good idea that hasn't been done. And, then, that new idea has to be somehow wickered into the existing continuity.

Somewhere, there's a saturation point for every character. The problem is, in today's marketplace where there are such iconic characters, significant change is either: a. impossible, or b. unwanted. So, the books continue along, derivitive after derivitive until something comes along to revitalize them. Maybe that involves a complete renewal of the character. I think the success of DC's silver age heroes and Marvel's Ultimate titles shows this: give fans a new look on an old hero, and it energizes the genre.

Maybe what's needed is a complete breakdown in super hero sales, a la 1950-something, to stop everything and rebuild it from the ground up. But that's too risky -- the characters are too embedded in our culture to try to re-introduce someone and tell the world that this guy is Superman now.

Another possibility is that a new company can come up with new characters that can elbow into the existing cadre, like the early 1960s Marvels. But, we saw how well Valiant, the New Universe and all those worked. So, it's a daunting task at best.

In the end, I think we as fans are stuck with a lot of schlock with some good stories occasionally, and once in a great while there will be a welcome Frank Miller Daredevil or John Byrne FF or Walter Simonson Thor.

I think Jefferson makes a valid point.

I'm reminded of what John Byrne once said. About how nothing new can really happen in the Marvel U. Like doing the first "aliens invade the earth"-type story. Not only has it been done at Marvel, it's been done like 17 times already!!!

So eventually, characters run out of stories. And begin to tread water. And that seems to be the case now with M*****.