AWKWARD ZOMBIE

They still got a letters section? What is this, 1973?

Well there's also e-mail. And giving fans a place where they can see "Oh, they got my mail, that's cool!" Is simple and fast positive PR. Many print magazines today still have a section for reader feedback, so why not continue the tradition of letters to the editor for comic books? Even Hellboy has a letters column.

Cant they just mix their feedback with racial slurs and homophobia on message boards like everyone else?

And they call it

Does anybody here watch Tron: Uprising?
Because I'm kind of in love with the show. I don't know why, but the setting is really cool and it does really well on the action scenes.

Ive flipped past it, but it didnt really impress me

I just finished Superior Spider-Man 1. Was some pretty good reading. He's got some serious prep-time now. What pisses me off is that they set something up that completely goes against what happened in ASM #700. What happened is that Parker is now some kind of blue Jedi ghost/subconscious thing, and he wants to find a way back. He showed up to stop Octavius as Spider-Man from killing a villain.. The problem is that in 700, Peter gave the new Spider-Man his blessing. So basically they're already setting up for a plot-hole ridden return to the status-quo later-on. I fucking know this was done to appease the butthurt overreacting fans. Sure, I knew that they would set up something like this; it's a superhero comic after all. The thing is, I didn't expect them to set it up in the first Goddamn issue.

New show that prequels Wakfu. It's called Dofus: Treasures of Kerub. Pretty cool, yes?

Don't blame bad writing on the fans, I'm pretty sure this was planned in advance since it's the start of a whole new series and all. Also the fans hate this too.

So he took neckbeard rage into account when writing all this out. That sounds highly appropriate for the comic book industry. I wonder if they have some kind of flowchart regarding angry fans?

What I don't get is why people are so angry at this when it's a superhero comic book, a genre widely known for poorly thought out deaths and eventual resurrections. You'd think that by this time people would be used to it. Stan Lee should have known better, given his experience. But instead he overreacted for the sake of attention.

What I'm getting from this issue is that, either (my hope is that) Peter sticks around as a Jedi Ghost thing for while, maybe tries a couple of times to get his body back, but then gets used to just being a conscience for Spidey-Ock, or we'll have at least a few more issues until everything is back to square one. I'm just glad Peter died the way he did: Massive memorial statues are utterly fucktarded when there's a revolving door in Heaven just for superheroes.

Beecause the comic book industry shouldnt rely on deaths for cheap plot devices and focus on sharp, character based stories instead of overblown publicity stunts and desperate moneygrabs to draw in "new readers" who wouldnt give them the time of day anyway?

The death of Pete in ASM didn't feel like a cheap plot device. Sure, it was a publicity stunt, but his death wasn't cheap. It was just a different way to die than going out fighting and punching in a super-heroic way. It's only after this latest issue that I see it for a cheap plot device. They already used the super-heroic, everyone-saw-him-going-out-swinging death on Parker in the Ultimate Universe. Using that twice would have just made people call copy-cat.

And they could have tried to come up with some character-based stories for Spider-Ock, have him grow as a character in his own right. But no, they had to plan out a contingency for nerd rage and put said contingency into the FIRST ISSUE, instead of 10 or so issues later.

The blame really rests on both parties, though. It works in a cycle: There are the fans, who drastically overreact even though badly-written superhero stories happen all the time. Then there are the creators, who bow down to the fans' wallets and have to (badly) write out emergency retcon plans to their if/when most people hate on some kind of change (the case is mostly "when", from what I've seen). So it's either keep writing the same stories for all time and maintain a steady cash-flow, or push something forward in an attempt to stir things up, fuck it up, and then go back to whatever you were doing beforehand with some elements of said stir-up still intact.

It seems like the only things that stay permanent are the characters. For every bad story, we get some new things. When One More Day happened, we got Peter working at Horizon Labs, creating tech there that would help him defeat villains and then put that tech out there in the real world. That gave us some solid stories. Avengers vs. X-Men was pretty bad, but it gave us 1) New mutants popping up around the world (since Scarlet Witch put a damper on that back during House of M, another bad thing) and 2) A+X, a new series where it's all about Avengers and X-Men teaming up to slap the shit out of bad guys. That's all the series is about, and it does its job well.

So with Superior Spider-Man, we may get some kind of Peter-Parker+Octavius mind-meld, or we may get regular Peter back, but with Ock as some kind of advisor supplying some more brains for gadgets or critical reasoning to help Spider-Man figure out how the hell to get something done. Either way, I hope that before then we can get some interesting stories out of Spider-Ock, or Spocktavius, or just Spock.

The fact that badly written stories happen all the time is hardly an excuse. In fact, it's the opposite of one and probably one of the reasons the industry is failing.

It reminds me of the whole clusterfuck surrounding Alan Moore and Watchmen.

After the movie did so well, they wanted to make prequel comics, but they (mistakenly, as they owned the rights for it) asked for permission from Alan Moore, the writer. They told him they'd have it done by the very talented writers of this time. He asked them why, if they had such talented writers, didn't they have them write entirely new good comics and characters, instead of relying on his.

Instead of creating something awesome and new, they just go "ZOMG, THEY'LL BE SURE TO BUY WATCHMEN". Which explains why the prequel comics suck so bad.

Yeah, bitch to be Alan Moore right now.