Originally Posted by
Revolutionary_Jack
The hard truth is that you can't kill off too many characters without changing the tone of the stories. Just as you can't bring in too many love interests, just as you can't keep bringing characters from the dead. The more you do that, the more emotional investment you drain from the stories. So in that sense, in terms of an ongoing serial story as opposed to selling merch, it cannot be truly said that long running supporting characters can be safely discounted and removed. It's important for a serial story to maintain a tone and style, and the way to do that is to keep hold of and maintain long-running supporting characters. More than the protagonist, it's them who maintian and uphold the emotional investment of the story. You can sell Superman and Batman toys without anyone knowing they are Clark and Bruce, but you can't tell the story of Clark and Bruce without the Kents of Smallvile, the Staff of Daily Planet, without Alfred the Butler, James Gordon, and a Robin of some kind.
In the case of Spider-Man, he lives in a fairly sanitized corner of the Marvel Universe as it is. Compare the tone of Spider-Man with Daredevil. Spider-Man has only one dead girlfriend with Gwen, but Daredevil has several, Wolverine even moreso. The criminal element in his stories don't touch on rape, molestation, human trafficking, and other kinds of stuff. The more death, violence, and tragedy you pile on, it becomes impossible to have Spider-Man be Mr. Quippy or whine about "Typical Parker Luck" without coming off as a sociopath when faced with the far greater suffering faced by people around him. You saw this in Mackie's run with Mj's "death/separation" thing. It made the titles really depressing to read and drove down sales. At the end of the day, Spider-Man is not the character who buries loved ones by the dozens (that's Daredevil, Batman), whose daily life is preoccupied more with the lives of people he fights than the ones he loves (Batman, The Punisher). So you can't really kill off major characters like Jameson or Mary Jane, and still pretend the character is the same as he was before.