Originally Posted by
Spidey_62
Yeah, for sure. Look at the Batman books right now, they keep populating the book with new villains/anti-heroes out there left and right almost every couple months just seeing what sticks and so far some of them have been pretty popular already. Some of them fit into molds that older characters do but having Punchline fills a void when Harley Quinn isn't who she started out as anymore, and she isn't just a replacement still called Harley Quinn. Ghostmaker is another one that's been pretty popular, more of an anti-hero but still. Another new Batman book is starting up written by Tom Taylor with another new villain, too.
The attempts over in Spidey land recently are just more things that cling to the past and technically aren't even really new characters. Kindred is cool but it was never gonna be somebody new, it's just a new dynamic on the Parker/Osborn rivalry. I think that lame Cadaverous villain from the Abrams Spidey mini was revealed to just be Anton Vanko from Iron Man or something, great.
Part of me wonders if the lack of real new villains has to do with the fact that Marvel creators are just more hesitant to "give" Marvel new characters when they could see more from them in their own creator-owned books. It seems like when they do create new villains they prefer to see them through to the end and kill them off before their run ends, like Knull. I mean, now they exist and other writers can do what they please after but a character like that has served its purpose at this point, rather than like the oldschool Stan Lee ideology of "don't kill em off! We gotta be able to keep using em!"