[mburbank]

That was funny.

I think what's going on with Marvel right now is an extreme case of something I may get around to writing a "Hey Dork" about someday if I have enough time.

It has to do with the problems of long form storytelling, where you have the same characters and an ongoing continuity. The longest form stories I can think of are soap operas, some of which have ongoing continuity dating back to pre television radio days. After soap operas come comic books, with Superman having the longest story, even though the story loops back and gets started again over and over, it still presents the challenges of the long form story.

Seen in one way, all Marvel is one longform story going back to the early days of the FF , spidey etc; or you can go one step further back to Nick Fury who came out of their war books, and some characters that made it out of their romance books OR go back to timely comics and Captain America et al. Any way you slice it, it's a loooooong story that's been written by a lot of writers who run the gamut from pretty darn good to astoundingly awful. The longer a long form story goes on, the harder it gets to do anything new and the more absurdly ornate the backstory becomes. Any writer is free to ignore whatever backstory elements they choose to, but they're still there.

Long story short, my theory is, the longer a longform story is, the better a writer you need to add to it and have it be anything but awful. Because you are either treading well trod ground, in which case you really need to have a new angle or be a very good writer; or you're trying to move the plot forward in which case you have to try to cope with an ever more absurd, clanky backstory. The longer the longform goes on, the harder it gets to tell, the more frequently it sucks.