The Four Color Media Monitor

IGN's comics section is asking if Marvel needs to do a reboot/relaunch just like DC's been doing with much of their line. In the article they've published, the things they tell include:

Marvel faces various problems when it comes to attracting new readers. There's an increasing perception that their books are hard to get into. With so many X-Men and Avengers titles on the stands, where is a newbie supposed to start? Books are becoming increasingly interconnected again through events and crossovers. Marvel's revelations that events like Schism, Fear Itself, and Avengers: The Children's Crusade are all building towards a larger storyline next year may sound enticing to some readers, but just as many might be put off by the notion that everything is tied together and nothing is allowed to stand on its own.

Well of course they're facing severe problems of their very own making, a process that may have begun when Bob Harras was EIC, and metastasized into mammoth proportions when Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas took over. Specifically, they took to telling stories that were overflowing with political correctness and even overt leftist politics, began padding out their storylines for the sake of trade paperbacks, and increasingly ignored continuity in doing so. And while they seemingly avoided crossovers initially, they soon sprang back to them when it became apparent many of these other steps weren't working. It also didn't help that a lot of the writers they were hiring during the first half of the past decade were recruited based on popularity with certain segments of the readership, not according to how talented they actually were (and Brian Bendis has long been proving he's not).

Also, they may have initially tried to make the stories they were working on stand-alone - supposedly anyway - but it was so editorially mandated and forced, it didn't work out that way either. They soon abandoned it all for the sake of bearhugging line-wide crossovers, proving that they never intended to make a convincing effort to make their books accessible again.

And a reboot isn't what Marvel needs. Definitely not a hardcore reboot. If they do need something, it's to clear away the mess from the past decade that began when Quesada took over; that's when they really started unraveling into mishmash. I think the best place to move Spider-Man back to would be the period just before "The Final Chapter" in 1998. That was where Harras, just 4 years after the auspicuous send-off for May Parker, undid her death and brought back the Green Goblin too. Clearing away those kind of mistakes would help tremendously, as would restoring the Spider-marriage. Similarly, they could move back and continue X-Men just before the terrible death of Colossus in 2000, one of the worst death stories ever written, and something that needs to be omitted from continuity. And for Avengers, it could probably be moved back to the Kang War conclusion in 2002. Those are, as far as I can estimate, the best places to restart and what came afterwards at the time could be stricken from the record.

IGN does say that:

...there's little to be gained by rebooting the Marvel Universe so that Peter Parker is back in college and hanging out at the Coffee Bean and the original Uncanny X-Men cast are back in the Xavier Institute. As long as Marvel makes it clear that new readers are being given a clean, fresh start across all titles, audiences will come.

If they'd follow the blueprint draft I've given here, and even replaced the old editorial that's continued with Axel Alonso - possibly even gaining a new ownership like a book publisher who'd work on a new format - then there's a better chance that audiences will come. Moving away from the kind of editors and writers who brought Marvel and DC down to the level they're at today would help tremendously in giving the 2 universes a fighting chance for the new generation.

Labels: Avengers, bad editors, crossoverloading, marvel comics, Spider-Man, X-Men