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Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Having No Opinion Is Freeing
It's official; I have no strong opinions about One More Day. This shouldn't be particularly surprising, seeing as how I don't like Spider-Man the character. At all. If I wanted to hear about the life of whiny, neurotic losers, I'd spend more time in bars. Or comic shops. I don't see why I should be expected to pay for the privilege.
The outrage has been fun to watch, though, as it usually is. Nerd rage is highly entertaining after all, especially the more self-important and self-righteous it becomes. For the sake of comparison, the last time I saw raw anger that approached this level it was when Blue Beetle was killed. This eclipses that though, as unlike Blue Beetle, Spider-Man actually is a popular character. I can understand why, even despite my dislike for the character; having Peter Parker sell his soul to Satan in order to avoid the consequences of his actions as Spider-Man really is about as far as you can get from the core concept of the character without rendering him utterly unusable.
I think the thing that gets me is that people are genuinely surprised at the turn the storyline took. I never thought that the Straczynski run was any great shakes to begin with, not from any of the issues I read, and so given that it started badly, with lots of negative reaction from fans, continued badly, with lots of negative reaction from fans, how did people expect it was going to end? In sunshine and lollipops? That the book would be of such fantastic quality that it would cure cancer?
The only interesting thing about the book, to my mind, is the back-and-forth squabbling between Straczynski and Marvel's Editor-In-Cheif, Joe Quesada, over whose bad idea the book was, and to what extent. Not that they're quite phrasing it like that, mind you. It's interesting because, in the early days of Quesada's tenure, Marvel was supposed to be the big-time comic company that let the writers work on corporately owned characters in whatever manner they saw fit, without heavy editorial interference. And those days, apparently, have passed, if editorially mandated rewrites of the book really did happen. Which, again, shouldn't be too surprising, given that Marvel just finished up Act Two of a cross-over cycle that began with Avengers: Disassembled and seems poised to go on for another year or two at least. You simply can't manage, or micro-manage, so many events of such magnitude for an extended period without having a heavy editorial hand. (Or, to look at it another way, it's Marvel once again copying DC's bad ideas...)
And that, after all this, a few foolish people have been seen expressing optimism for the storyline to follow this? Oh, that's the funniest thing of all, really.
