Ah, the body blows to shared-universe storytelling just keep on coming! (It’s this year’s little black dress of super-hero comics.) This time, J. Michael Straczynski has apparently dug up Gwen Stacy just long enough for her to get her freak on, and the reaction isn’t unexpected. Jeff Lester at Savage Critic takes a point-by-point look at Amazing Spider-Man #512, and he doesn’t really like what he sees. A thread on Usenet wonders if the book doesn’t claim the title of “most disgusting comic of the year.”
(Because I have a cold, black heart, I’m eagerly awaiting the story arc that tells us why Bucky Barnes really jumped on that bomb. I’m guessing it involves Baron Zemo and “bad touches.” They can call it “O Captain! My Captain!”)
In comments at Cognitive Dissonance, George (Grattan, I’m guessing) offers the following theory on where all this is coming from:
“[Johanna asks] “What is wrong with big-name comic superhero writers these days?” I think part of it may be a fairly common response among artists in all fields, especially those who hold some doubt about the relative merit of their talents vis a vis their forerunners: Oedipal Pissiness, a.k.a. Kill the Father Syndrome. That is, folks like JMS, Johns, Meltzer, Smith, Winick, and others cut their creative eyeteeth on the great deconstructive superhero works of the 1970s and 1980s by Miller, Moore, Starlin, Gaiman, Morrison, Veitch and others, a genre which itself quickly slipped into the often uintentionally self-parodic “Grim and Gritty” works of the 1990s. Now, they’re left with the understandable impulse to “one up” both those deconstructive works, but also to indulge their (and readers’) nostalgia for the pre-deconstructed works of the Silver and Bronze Ages. That’s an impossible task.”
James Schee at Reading Along has an interesting theory of his own on the last issue of Green Lantern. I’m not really inclined to give DC even that much credit, but it would sure be interesting if it happened that way.