Quote Originally Posted by Mister Mets View Post
Marvel solicitations for January suggest a new Spider-Man monthly title will be launched with Tom Taylor and Juann Cabal's Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. There's no sign of Peter Parker the Spectacular Spider-Man, suggesting that title might have been cancelled.

Satellite titles have a history of lackluster sales. The big question is whether doing these is a good idea? Is it worth the low sales for whatever reason? Are there ways to do it better/ more successfully than we've seen in the last 15 years? Or should Marvel cut their losses, and just publish Amazing Spider-Man?
Financially 2 issues of ASM will sell more because ASM automatically sells more due to the name brand recognition.

Creatively speaking 2 ASm issues instead of ASM + 1 satellite is worse.


Bi-monthly schedules strain creative teams, especially artists, which compromises consistency and impacts newer readers. It is akin to new actors coming in every so often to play characters you are familiar with.

Additionally having just the one book creates a major gamble creatively because if that one writer is not good or off their game then your whole month just sucked and people just paid £4-8 for it to suck.

A seperate creative team increases the chances of better results, but only if you have ONE other title. 3 or more titles is stretching the character too thin, he can't support that many titles and have the stories be broadly good. Hence Web of Spider-Man and No Adj suffered.

But in the 1980s when you had Stern, DeFalco and Michelinie doing upbeat boiler plate superhero action adventures with a dash of the soap opera stuff whilst Manlto, Milgrom, Peter David and Conway handled either the Spidey/Black Cat relationship, gritty street crime stories or drama involving the wider supporting cast's lives, there was a creative justification to the satellites that mutually supported ASM.

The same can be said of ASM and Spec when you had Michelinie and DeMatteis. Both seires were Spider-Man, but with very different approaches, one offering light and fun action, the other offering dark and heavy psychology. Had the series JUST had those 2 titles you'd remove a shitton of weaker stories from that era.

Whilst Superman works better in light and optimistic stories (most of the time) and Batman in darker and grittier stories (again most of the time) the nature of Spider-Man's characetr as defined from the Lee/Ditko run allowed him to have a foot in both.

Hence you can have tragic tales like the Death of Gwen Stacy, dark psychological stories like Kraven's Last Hunt, humour stories like when Commeth the Commuter, action thrillers like the second Venom story, 'day in the life' boiler plate superhero soap operatics like the Hobgoblin mystery, small personal stories like the Kid Who collected Spider-Man and none of them feel foreign to Spider-Man the way say a gritty noir story could in Superman or a space story would in Batman.

Coupled with a rich supporting cast and deep villain bench of costumed criminals and regular criminals (I'm counting Kingpin and Hammerhead among the latter) and there is more than enough material to creatively justify two titles.

But again, financially if that second title isn't called 'Amazing Spider-Man' it will never sell as much because ASM auto sells off the back of prestige alone.