One More Dog!

No Spoilers following:

The fourth and concluding chapter of the last Spider-Man storyline by JMS and Joe Quesadsa came out yesterday and it's even worse than I thought it would be. I was looking forward to the three times a month shipping Amazing Spider-Man that will follow this arc even fearing what I thought would be the final outcome of One More Day (the actual title of this mess, which others have suggested should have been called One More Delay because this was originally supposed to be over in September). Well, now I'm concerned how good Amazing Spider-Man can be post One More Day because even though the upcoming creative teams look to be really good, they're left with a very messy, backwards turn of events.

Ugh, One More Day, is a huge punctuation mark for what is wrong with most superhero comics, and that is that no progression should take place in the character's lives. I realize that because these characters will be around for many years they can't age too dramatically, but I really think that a good writer could work around this and make the stories still be entertaining without going backwards. I think Amazing Spider-Man will sell well at least for the first three months with Marvel's new three times a month schedule as readers will want to see where they go and how these new creative teams will handle Spidey, but I think ultimately unless the dumbness of One More Day is addressed within upcoming Spider-Man stories, that sales will start drastically falling before the third quarter of 2008 (and if there isn't regular really good creative teams on Amazing Spider-Man, sales will fall even faster as people don't want to just buy a title that has constant rotating creative teams especially if the caliber of that talent starts getting used up).

I'm putting the awfulness of Spider-Man One More Day up there with previous missteps in the character's history, such as Aunt May (and Norman Osborn) returning from their deaths the first time (back in the mid 1990's) and the missing / kidnapped baby of Peter and MJ that Marvel is just ignoring as ever happening (both that they had a baby and that it ended up being shittingly written out of the book). History will not be kind to One More Day - actually as more people read this and share their comments, the present won't be kind to One More Day either. I hate having one of my last posts of the year being negative in tone, but this is such an f-up of a story that I just had to vent.