How Marvel Destroyed Amazing Spider-Man

(Email sent to Marvel)

I want you to know that I am thoroughly disgusted with the way you have destroyed Amazing Spider-Man. I won't buy another product from you after Parker is gone. This fellow named Slott should have been removed as the writer long ago. You've junked the comic up so much that you have destroyed what Stan Lee and John Romita made special. Time and again, you've made the story a physics carnival. Slott complains that he can't keep doing the same things over again. But in truth, he cannot do even those things well. His feelings in this respect were clear evidence that he should have been removed from the comic. What used to be drama and good stories have become one sugar high after the next. It's like you have the brain trust geared toward attention-deficit teenagers. What I recall when I was young was that Spider-man captivated people along a wide age range -- sort of the way Harry Potter does. Potter was supposed to be a children's novel, but the story was so good that it could stand on its own. You don't have stories that can stand on their own anymore. You have a carnival. You no longer know how to even draw the characters. It's like the whole thing was turned over to people who could only falsely imitate a lost art, and who now complain that IT has outlived the day, rather than that THEY have.

You ought to be ashamed at yourself for what you have destroyed. You killing Parker is like someone wanting to do the original Lord of the Rings without Frodo. Don't you people even see that Parker IS THE STORY?

What you should have done a long time ago was quit forcing your comics into a pre-defined universe. There's an aspect to Parker's story that requires a simple, uncluttered environment, like it was in Lee and Romita's day. One of Parker's greatest traits is the way he faces alienation and tragedy, alone, with only the desire to do good -- something that paradoxically results in even more tragedy in his life. His innocence is what actually makes him reckless.

I don't understand why you can't sell separate lines of Spider-man as stand-alone stories. I would have split ASM into different arcs, denoted, I guess, by volume. Tomorrow, for example, you could start an ASM volume where Gwen Stacy had lived. Just pick right up with that issue. You could run the story out for a few years, as though you were developing a novel. E.g., maybe they get married and Spidey hangs it up at the end: choosing her over everything else (as if she had profoundly changed him). Then, when that runs its course, start another arc that assumes a completely different set of circumstances (as if none of that other stuff ever occurred). Some arcs could be 50 issues long, some 150. Why do you make it so that one story has to start and end, in one universe? Why can't they just be like a series of novels involving Parker? Do it like Sherlock Holmes or Nancy Drew, for crying out loud. You don't need to read those in any order. Each one is a stand-alone story.

Anyway, you people have lost your way. I'm not buying another damn thing from you.

Regards and thanks,

Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq.