Amazing Spider-Man #650: Context

[stolisomancer]

cyberghostface's continued posts on Amazing Spider-Man are the single greatest example of Accentuate the Negative I have ever seen in my life, but today's post on the topic of issue #650 really pushed it too far.


By posting two panels without context from issue #650, cyberghostface managed to create a scene that reads entirely differently than what is actually in the issue itself. cyberghostface's post from earlier today is, in short, a hit piece; it is divorcing a scene from its surroundings to make it look worse than it actually is.





There's a lot you can say about this scene. The first thing that jumped out at me when I read it was eating a donut and a hamburger at the same time, because that does not sound good at all, but somebody's eating those fucking Krispy Kreme burgers so who cares.

Second, there's that first page, where Mary Jane is thinking faster on her feet than Peter is, and is doing more than her share to help maintain the secret identity. That is not a stupid woman.

Third, the second page, when you get the follow-up panel with Mary Jane, just makes Dan Slott look like a moron. I'm not sure what that was meant to accomplish, aside from Slott not taking the time to research pseudo-scientific gobbledygook or something that sounded like a fashion term; the scene isn't from either MJ or Peter or Carlie's perspective as written. It's like the omniscient narrator isn't paying any attention.

The scene as written just doesn't work very well. It happens.

Yanking the first two panels off of the second page and using it as yet another batch of grist for the "hey guys, let's all sit around and hate on Quesada/Amazing Spider-Man/Dan Slott" mill, though, is simply dishonest. It's the exact opposite of thoughtful critique, it irritates the hell out of me, and it represents just about ninety fucking percent of the reactions to Amazing Spider-Man on s_d since "One More Day": people taking one or two or four pages out of any semblance of context and using it to wail about how much the book sucks now.

I figure I like about thirty-five to forty percent of the issues since "One More Day"; I jump on and off depending on the creative team. (Waid, Wells, and Van Lente have done great work. Guggenheim, not so much. Slott usually has good jokes and action scenes but lousy characterization, but even he did great on "Mysterioso" with Marcos Martin.) "One More Day" was a mistake; "One Moment in Time" compounded it; and everything Quesada has said about it or Mary Jane has been accompanied by him corkscrewing his foot further into his mouth.

Thus, it's not that I'm a big fan of the character, the company, or the creators. It's that people are still passing this crap around, absorbing just as little of the book as they can to maintain the illusion that it's a black hole of pure suck (rather than the "throw everything at the wall and hope something sticks" smorgasbord it's been for the last few years), spinning the facts as hard as they can (Amazing Spider-Man has been in the top twenty comics of the month, every month, for the entirety of 2010, usually holding down two to three spots, but no, go ahead and pretend that it's a failure) to maintain that perfect air of jaded comic-book-fan ennui. This is pointless, intellectually dishonest bullshit that does a disservice to just about everyone and everything that participates in it, and people in this community have not only done better, but do better every single day.

Comments

[stolisomancer]

Wow. Even now, you're editing what you see to serve your preconstructed narrative.

[cyberghostface]

The sales have been plummeting steadily ever since OMD/BND started (with some exceptions such as the Obama variants, nearing the lowest it's ever been with the title. The titles during the ASM reboot under Mackie were at a similar level, and they were still in the top 20 as well.

How is any of that wrong?

[stolisomancer]

For one thing, it's a false equivalency. The sales numbers when compared to the sales numbers of all comics are very competitive with other books in the same demographic and market, particularly considering that it was coming out three times a month for most of 2010.

The sales plummet can clearly be at least partially blamed on the worldwide recession and the industry-wide general malaise, since in terms of raw numbers, nobody's doing that much better than ASM. Taking October 2010 as a random sample, both issues of ASM moved between fifty-six and fifty-nine thousand issues; the #1 book moved 96,000, with a steep drop-off between #1, #2, #3, and every book down the line.

The trade paperback sales figures are a bit harder to come by, but I'm also curious how they relate back to sales on the floppy. Mackie didn't have to contend with "trade-waiters."

tl;dr: It's not 1997.

[cyberghostface]

Marvel wasn't nearly as big as it is in popular culture as it was in 1997, either. Bob Harris would have sold his left nut for Marvel to get a quarter of amount of publicity Joe Quesada has been getting. FFS, Peter getting fired from his job got media attention. I'm sure the economy isn't helping, but the fact that so many people left after OMD and the sales continue to plummet speaks volumes.

And if Spidey was such a big success, the title wouldn't need to get such a drastic overhaul and make such a big deal about Brand New Day "ending", would it? Heck, Wacker even e-mailed all the people who wrote in saying that they dropped the title to see if they would or had come back to the title. (But not even Big Time, not with all the promotion and hype it got, managed to raise the sales of ASM) Not to mention the shitload of variant covers they're plugging into each issue. It reeks of desperation.

[stolisomancer]

It seems like Ultimate Spider-Man is getting most of the publicity from the various multimedia tie-ins, which is probably pretty sensible overall: smaller universe, less continuity. The main book mostly seems to benefit from the old guard of constant readers.

Of course they want more readers, and to bring more readers aboard and back. It's a flagship title. The fact remains that "plummet," in this instance, means that sometimes the book is around #19 on a tracked list of #300, selling fifty-five thousand copies when the #1 book moves a hundred thousand, and issue #648 came in at #8 on the November charts for Diamond. The book is surprisingly healthy for as much goodwill as it's lost.