Originally Posted by
Revolutionary_Jack
The idea that Spider-Man is some large ensemble story and that a good Spider-Man story involves every supporting cast member at the same time is simply bull-crap. That was something that BND and Slott people foisted but that's not actually true and in fact the way they used the supporting cast is often counter-intuitive. Spider-Man has a great supporting cast and so on but most of his best stories in the classic run and period only focused on a few characters at a time while others were at the side. Read the Lee-Romita era for instance, most of the stories focused on Peter, Gwen, and George Stacy until Stacy's death. When that happened, you had the Harry Osborn Drug Trilogy and the motivation for that was that Gwen was absent from the books at the time. Liz Allan was gone for some 100 issues between ASM#30 to the Conway run, Flash Thompson was in Vietnam from ASM#47 aside from some furlough visits for special issues, and then returning to the Spider-Man titles shortly before Gwen died, where he formed a brief romantic triangle between Peter, Flash, and Gwen because at that time Harry Osborn was a little decommissioned and not in use all that much as a supporting character.
That's the Brevoort manifesto talking and not you. In the 80s, the attitude towards satellite titles was in fact to make them distinct and unique and allow for interesting stories there. Jim Salicrup considered the best Spider-Man editor by both Roger Stern and David Michelinie also said that he wanted every Spider-Man title, main, satellite, and so on to be unique and capture the flavor. The creation of the satellite titles in the 70s, i.e. Spectacular Spider-Man was precisely to put in more work with supporting cast stuff there than in the main title. That's what Stan Lee (then the publisher) and Gerry Conway (in his very brief tenure as EIC) decided on.
Jim Salicrup who I quoted above was one of Spider-Man's editors (among other titles) in the '80s and during the early 90s as well. So your argument is invalid in terms of "not understood".
By the arbitary rules you invented (actually invented by Brevoort without acknowledgement on your part), sure. By the actual context and understanding of Spider-Man's publication history across time, no. It's not consistent with the patterns, with the past judgments of previous respected editors on Spider-Man titles and the general reading experiences.
This whole ASM-Supremacist attitudes people have ignores blatantly the fact that Felicia Hardy among others got the majority of her defining stories in the pages of Spectacular. Aside from Roger Stern's Black Cat 2-Parter and "The Daydreamers", most of what we know of Felicia comes from Bill Mantlo's work in Spectacular. Most of PAD's work was also in Spectacular. Including the Death of Jean Dewolff and so on.
As for JMS. His opening story arc was called "Coming Home". In other words, trying to get Peter back to something like his roots after the mess that the Clone Saga and the Post-Clone Saga did. Reifying the main leads of the Spider-Titles (the Parker family) was absolutely crucial at the time. Especially since you had this great movie blockbuster coming in which Peter, Mary Jane, Aunt May have crucial roles. Raimi wanted an Aunt May who sorta knew-guessed that Peter was Spider-Man, so that was in-synch with what JMS wrote. Peter becoming a high school teacher was the most grounded he had been and in that entire time as school teacher, he interacted with a cool supporting cast that brought realism and kept things grounded after a half-decade of Osborn cults and cabals. The Spider-Totem stuff isn't mysticism...it's magic realism. I.e. an elaboration of the everyday. And the everyday remained a consistent part of JMS' run. The problem with JMS was that as great as his highs are (Coming Home, The Conversation, Doomed Affairs, Spider-Man #500, the early New Avengers era, the Civil War tie-ins with Spider-Man and Cap, Back in Black) his lows are really low (Sins' Past). So I get that his run is controversial. Still his version of Peter Parker is the last real time he really worked as a character, and that applies to MJ and Aunt May as well.
Why do people act like this was ever not a thing? The tri-monthly and bi-monthly publication of ASM after BND and so on is basically the same principle as Spectacular, Web of Spider-Man and so on but just now they are all calling it ASM. It was all done to get people to spend more money per month on Spider-Man. Before it was at least honest and optional...you know that ASM had a distinct separate story that other runs are in principle take-it-or-leave-it except for crossovers like "The Other". Post-OMD, to follow Spider-Man seriously you had to triple-then-double-dip per month to keep up with the serial Spider-Man stuff. The only exception was stuff like Conway's Spiral with its unique ".1" titling trying to distinct it (basically a Spectacular Spider-Man story written by the guy who created that title to start with).
So to me, as far as asking readers to spend more money goes, OMD-BND is the freaking nadir not before.
I"d like to recommend Chabon's Gentlemen on the Road, a cool historical novel about a period nobody even knew existed. It's great. As for McCarthy, I don't like the "cult of Blood Meridian". I just don't think he succeeded in trying to do a literary masterpiece about ethnic cleansing, and all he did was tell a horror story with political-military trappings. I like Don Delillo and Paul Auster best among that group and style of novelists.