Spider-Man: Major in real life, Minor in-universe?

[Prof. Warren]

The price of writing those stories, and the price of justifying those stories, is the permanent loss of respect for your judgment and taste. And you never get it back.

From you, maybe.

Somehow Quesada will have to carry on.

Other people, of course, aren't so uptight.

They realize that not every story is going to land as planned.

They realize that not every decision is going to be one they agree on.

In life, as in comics, 100% perfection isn't possible.

Jim Shooter himself talks about it here (http://jimshooter.com/2011/09/three-...-or-holy.html/). If there had been no fan support and agreement to it, if that fan hadn't asked that question then to Stan, it wouldn't have happened. It was a spontaneous and unplanned thing at a public gathering.

For the umpteenth time, you're introducing "evidence" that does not mean what you think it does. What a shock.

From Shooter, in his blog entry:

"Toward the end, someone in the back asked Stan if he was ever going to have Spider-Man get married. A lot of people in the crowd voiced support."

"A lot of people in the crowd" at one convention is not a mandate from fandom.

And, as Shooter tells the story, saying yes was more about feeling pressure in the moment from Stan.

As Shooter relates:

"Stan said that it was up to “Marvel’s entire editor,” and right then, right there in front of all those people, Stan asked me if I would allow Spider-Man to get married."

As Shooter says:

"...Anything to do with the comics that Stan wanted I would have cheerfully done."

Of course some fans were all for the idea of Peter marrying MJ. It's just as true that many weren't.

Marvel went ahead with it anyway, knowing full well that no matter what it would guarantee a ton of publicity.

Shooter then went to Jim Salicrup (editor of Spider-Man) and asked what he thought about it. And Salicrup agreed that it would be a great idea. Lot of the writers of Spider-Man titles at the time, PAD, and JMD approved it as well, as did Sal Buscema and Todd McFarlane.

Yes, some people working on the books were for it, others weren't and had to be convinced to go along with it. This is all well documented.

I said specifically whether there were any shakeups in Avengers going "no more Avengers". The answer to that is no. Quit moving the goalpost. That x-men stories were in an editorially mandated rut and stagnation was well known and is of no concern.

I'm not moving the goal posts. You are. It must be exhausting.

You're trying to claim that there was no ramp up to HoX/PoX and that is incorrect. There was.

In the same way that Bendis' New Avengers was preceded by Avengers: Disassembled, HoX/PoX was preceded by X-Men: Disassembled.

And the X-Men were not in an "editorially mandated rut." That is incorrect.

You're perpetrating a false perception that Marvel was deliberately making bad X-books.

They may have been in a creative rut but it was not editorially mandated.

And certainly, there were still good X-books being made, it's just that the line as a whole wasn't gelling.

Marvel's not supposed to be the company that apes DC you know.

They aren't. I simply stated that the industry has changed and that readers have increasingly shown a demand for both Marvel and DC to make event storylines that "matter," hence we see more events that have a broader, line-wide impact.