“If [Peter Parker]’s still fouling up as an adult, he just isn’t a hero anymore. He’s pathetic.”
Marv Wolfan in DeFalco (2004: 78)
A curse upon the US comic book industry?
The US mainstream comic book industry is facing an ongoing crisis in terms of both corporate leadership and dwindling readership; meanwhile, Japanese mangas, graphic novels, and comic books targeted at a younger demographic enjoy an unprecedented success (Medina 2019; Barnett 2019; Kemner and Trinos 2024). This turbulent shift in readership preferences comes on top of a disturbing sequence of sexual misconduct and/or assault accusations against celebrated mainstream authors (to name just a few, Warren Ellis, Jason Latour, and, lately, Neil Gaiman) (McMillan, Drury and Couch 2020; Shapiro 2025), the dire aftermath of the systemic disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic (Thielman 2020), the financial exploitation and cannibalisation of artists and writers by the corporate Hollywood system (Thielman 2021), the double whammy of machine learning and AI art generated through intellectual theft and copyright infringement (Nam 2024), the baffling public disappearance of industry-wide comparative sales chart (MacDonald 2023; MacDonald 2025a), new prohibitive tariffs on paper import affecting print costs that will exacerbate ever-increasing prices (Myrick 2024; Gagliano 2025), and the bankruptcy of giant comic book distributor Diamond (MacDonald 2025b; for a timeline of the still developing situation see Johnston 2025). If one was inclined to believe in such things, it could be argued that the satirical curse – or accursed satire – that literary maestro and ceremonial magician Alan Moore placed on the comic book industry as a whole via his novel-size novella “What We Can Know About Thunderman” has finally start to work its magic (see Ambasciano 2023 on Moore 2023) [1].
If we focus for one moment on just the publishing crisis of the last decade or so, with some remarkable exceptions, editorial stewardship concerning most historic flagship titles of the Big Two (i.e., Marvel Comics and DC Comics) seem stuck in a loop according to which plots are mainly designed to replicate both the archetypal narrative beats of old and the now so-passé postmodern subversion of expectations, resulting in the promotion of what have become stale and uncreative storytelling tropes. Given that the publishing divisions of Marvel and DC are merely infinitesimal cogs in the corporate entertainment machines of Disney and Warner Bros. respectively, this is rather unsurprising: in the words of journalist Catherine Shoard, “Hollywood, it appears, is stuck on repeat, sucked with an ever-more deafening gurgle into a death cycle of creative bankruptcy desperately presented as comfort food” (Shoard 2025). Through the ongoing barrage of uninspired relaunches and insipid reboots endorsed by a corporate leadership that apparently loathe comic books qua comic books, we can clearly observe the industry version of Tancredi Falconeri’s nihilistic and opportunistic motto “if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”, immortalised, only slightly rephrased, by French thespian Alain Delon in the movie version of Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard (1958), and recently retold by Italian actor Saul Nanni in Netflix’s “steamy, sumptuous” adaptation (Aroesti 2025).
Briefly put, new titles struggle to gain traction and are continually cancelled while ongoing ‘legacy’ titles are forced to periodically revert to the status quo ante, erasing any real progress in the characters’ story arcs (when present). A widespread and short-sighted policy appears to prioritise artificial and momentary sales boosts by relaunching those series with a shiny new “issue #1” on the cover often without offering sufficient in-universe justifications; of course, the brief sales spikes resulting from these editorially mandated resets fade quite rapidly, which in turn prompt publishers to relaunch the titles with a another “issue #1” in the span of a few years or even mere months. Inadequate salaries for artists and writers and minimal acknowledgment of creators’ rights and contributions only exacerbate the problem, as such factors severely limit the appeal of taking on a job in the industry and shrink the available pool of potentially interested creators, and so the corporate and self-defeating loop can start again… at least until corporations go bakrupt and/or their intellectual properties enter public domain (for a short term-based defense of this modus operandi as a “valid strategy” see Brevoort 2024).
On the other hand, a significant portion of good contemporary storylines can rarely grow to express the full potentialities that are unique to sequential storytelling, even within the constraints of the mainstream, because they exist mostly as first drafts, rough outlines, or ashcans for the media conglomerates that own the Big Two [2]. The recent launch of reimagined alternative universes (Marvel’s Ultimate and DC’s Absolute) has enjoyed significant critical and commercial success; however, the situation reportedly remains far worse for Marvel Comics. In the surprisingly sincere words of Senior Vice President of Publishing and current X-Men Group Editor Tom Brevoort,
“[…] the purpose of Marvel Publishing is to be out in front, the tip of the spear, generating new ideas and new stories that can serve as creative fodder for eventual film and animation development. So trying to revert things to 1992 or whenever would seem to be defeating the purpose in a major way. Better, I think, to try to develop new status quos that future X-Men projects in film and television can draw from” (Brevoort 2025a; my emphasis).
It is true that the X-Men comics recently tried very hard to escape the frustrating stasis dictated by mainstream superhero narratives by establishing a radical new status quo, but after a while the bold (and equally divisive) storyline originally masterminded by Jonathan Hickman seemingly suffered a lack of editorial guidance and then reverted nonetheless to old, uninspired tropes (Johnston 2021; Meenan 2024). As a blatant example of both the illusion of narrative change and the domestication of the once liberating postmodern approach into a standardised m.o. that rewards creative mediocrity and short-term gains, on February 18th, Marvel announced, to public befuddlement, the resurrection of Earth 616-Gwen Stacy as an assassin, of all things (Anonymous 2025). Stacy is an important character not just for the Spider-Man lore but for the entire medium as well: she was Peter Parker’s first true love and her death was so groundbreaking when it was originally published in The Amazing Spider-Man #121 (June 1973) that historians of the medium argue that it contributed to mark the end of the naïve, optimistic Silver Age of Comics and the start of the relatively more realistic Bronze Age (Blumberg 2003). In the limited series, which is currently still being published, Stacy is accompanied/confronted by a narrative mix & match of different multidimensional and unrelated variants of her character.
Death in mainstream comics has long become a meaningless and transient inconvenience, but today the problem is exacerbated by the absence of any real stake within the current explosion of multiversal narratives (Kain 2023). In this particular case, the announcement felt like the straw that broke the camel’s back. The news was so baffling that even mainstream industry-friendly outlets had to vent their anger via self-explanatory articles like “There Are Things We Want for Spider-Man, But Gwen Stacy’s Return Is Not One of Them” (Myrick 2025) or “Marvel Comics Is Doing The Unthinkable”, the latter sporting an unambiguous “What the F***?!” subtitle (Wilding 2025). Besides, Marvel’s announcement came after years of readers’ frustration at the editorially confusing (mis)management of Spider-Man and awkward, if not outright confrontational, interactions with the readers (fjmac 2023; Angeles 2024).
Infinite crisis in the Spider-Verse
The roots of these problems run deep. The main titles that feature Spider-Man, arguably the most famous Marvel character and one of the most iconic characters in contemporary pop culture, have arguably been in a state of narrative disarray since the controversial storyline entitled One More Day hit the spinner racks. Elaborated by then Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada with the collaboration of screenwriter, novelist, and former The Amazing Spider-Man writer J. M. Straczynski, One More Day was a 2007 crossover limited to the three Spider-Man titles published by Marvel at that time and specifically designed to kickstart a hard reboot of the company’s flagship character (Ginocchio 2017: 233-238). This goal was achieved by undoing Peter Parker’s marriage with Mary Jane Watson by way of a deal with Mephisto, the literal devil of the Marvel universe, to save the life of Parker’s elderly aunt May. As an added bonus, Mephisto would also erase from everybody’s memory Spider-Man’s secret identity, previously revealed during the Civil War limited series. The result ended up being almost universally disliked by readers because of its messy plot and out-of-character decisions, making it even more despised than the Second Clone Saga of the 1990s (a glance at the “Reception” section of the Wikipedia entry for the storyline should suffice; cf. Reaves 2025). If you were there at that time, you know what I’m talking about (cf. Lennen 2023).
By contrast, the passing of time seems to have been particularly kind to the Second Clone Saga (Behbakht 2023; Lennen 2024). The revelations concerning the behind-the-scenes corporate drama (which helped contextualise the whys and hows of certain misguided decisions) (Goletz n.d.), the subsequent publication of many lackluster storylines, failed reboots (Ginocchio 2015), and controversial retcons (Ginocchio 2012), along with the equally exhausting and narratively bankrupt decades-long teasing of a dissolution of the One More Day status quo (e.g., Isaak 2021; Mendoza 2024), made many readers re-evaluate what once were considered unforgivable missteps (cf. Singer 2019: 74-94). In hindsight, the Second Clone Saga, which run from 1994 to 1996 and saw the unexpected return of the main protagonist’s clone from a half-forgotten 1970s story (i.e., the original Clone Saga), had its sincere and emotional moments of true wonder, sadness, and joy (e.g., Mary Jane announcing she was expecting a child to a jubilant but sick Peter in The Amazing Spider-Man #398), it was organically tied to the previous continuity while propelling the main cast forward in their adult lives, it boasted a solid start and a coherent first act, and had at the very least a couple of issues that may well rank among the greatest in the history of the character (with J. M. DeMatteis, Mark Bagley, and Larry Mahlstedt’s The Amazing Spider-Man #400 probably taking the crown). In sum, as Douglas Wolk wrote, it was “a solid idea” that would have marked “a concrete and timely end to the third Spider-Man cycle”, whose defining feature was Peter Parker’s identity struggle against his various “shadow sel[ves]” and “nightmare id[s]” (like Venom and Carnage) while trying, mostly in vain, to overcome the loss of his parents (Wolk 2021: 93, 91; my emphasis). Unfortunately, given that the bold story arc proved to be extremely popular and profitable in a time of financial distress, the Clone Saga was derailed by the marketing department at Marvel, that kept imposing an unreasonable extension of the original storyline, and plagued by some editorial indecision and infighing between different publishing divisions. After almost two years of stalling, disaffected readers left the titles in droves, and in the end the books lost almost half of their initial audience (Howe 2012: 365-366, 370, 372, 381-382). Ultimately, the Second Clone Saga failed only insofar as it was a victim of its own initial spectacular success.
Conversely, One More Day, with its brazen erasure of decades of the main character’s continuity, stands out as a jarring and disconnected narrative U-turn marred by plot holes that “nobody, including its creators, likes” (Wolk 2021: 95). Even more damningly, from the perspective of virtue ethics, the storyline doubled as a profound and unexplainable betrayal of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson’s character traits and moral integrity, which understandably resulted in a general loss of faith in the editorial stewardship of the books:
“absent a life-altering event or a mind-blowing epiphany, we don’t expect fictional characters – or real people – to alter their deep-seated behavior abruptly and for no reason. Given the fantastical circumstances Peter Parker has faced throughout his career as Spider-Man, even the impending death of his aunt and a surprise offer from Mephisto don’t seem enough to trigger and justify such an about-face” (White 2012).
Ironically, the entire storyline was a hasty attempt to resolve the lingering issues that had been plaguing the Spider-Man-related titles since the top-down tampering that affected most of the 1990s Clone Saga. This time, the editorial powers that be doubled down by straightforwardly imposing their questionable preconceptions and personal biases against having the main character married, thus “allowing the villain to get a permanent win over Spider-Man for no real reason aside from a business-oriented dislike of Peter's growth” (Reaves 2025; cf. Sanderson 2008 and White 2012; see the Joe Quesada interview in CBR Staff 2008). Running the same experiment in the same conditions delivered the same results, and One More Day arguably damaged the titular character and its casts of supporting characters from both an emic and an etic perspective. Perhaps most crucially, One More Day also hurt Spider-Man financially: after an initial spike of interest due to the controversy surrounding this story, sales steadily declined for Brand New Day, the immediate follow-up storyline. With only rare exceptions, sales never actually recovered to the previous highs of the Clone Saga (see the tentative data gathered from Comichron and presented in Sartheking 2023).
Some post-mortem gaslighting in the wake of the post-Clone Saga slump tried to pin the blame on the readership itself. The “simple truth of comic book readers” would be that, according to former Marvel Comics editor-in-chief and writer Tom DeFalco, they “don’t like change. They claim they like change but they always [want] everything back to the way it was when they were kids” (DeFalco in Singer 2019: 94). Now, this is not intended as a critique against DeFalco himself (who relinquished his editorship in 1994 because of irreconcilable disagreements with Marvel management), but the real problem seems to lie with the editorial decision making sanctioned by Quesada and fixated on deconstructing something that needn’t be dismantled in the absence of solid in-universe justifications, while listing all the etically wrong reasons for doing it nonetheless (a sequence of fallacies and biases concerning One More Day, along with Quesada’s justifications to undo Peter and Mary Jane’s marriage regardless of the implications for the history of both the characters involved and the books themselves, are available in Sanderson 2008; see also White 2012). While it can be argued that some great stories were indeed published after One More Day, the price to pay was the collapse of the Marvel universe’s tightly woven continuity epic – and the character assassination of arguably the company’s flagship protagonist – that had once set the company apart from its mainstream competitors (for the once coherent Marvel Comics continuity as an “epic among epics, Marcel Proust times Doris Lessing times Robert Altman to the power of the Mahābhārata” see Wolk 2021: 4). The stubborn editorial refusal to undo the Mephisto-sanctioned status quo remains quite puzzling indeed:
“[i]t’s the strangest thing that Marvel has ever done: the publisher took a character who seemed to have unstoppable momentum and simply removed all of his progress and trapped him in a static state for no benefit at all. There haven’t been any amazing groundbreaking stories told because Peter and Mary Jane aren’t together. It didn’t push his character further in any way; it didn’t teach him a lesson about responsibility, because he doesn’t even remember having been married to Mary Jane to begin with” (Reaves 2025).
The “best Platonic ideal”
Despite DeFalco’s complaint against the readership’s alleged preference for a perennial reversal to the status quo in vogue when fans were kids, which stifles any character progression, the overwhelming success of inter- and multigenerational emic narratives in decades-long mangas (and animes) demonstrates that readers are eager to embrace long-term narrative evolution, character growth, and definitive conclusions. This, in turn, leads to best-selling collected editions long after the series have ended, cementing their status as ‘classics,’ particularly when their quality is exceptional (see Lippi in Tosti 2016: 779, 781-782). On the contrary, change is rejected when it is poorly conceived, cheaply developed, badly executed, subjected to interference, and then – following the inevitable backlash from the target readership – reverted to the wrong status quo ante due to corporate incompetence or editorial unwillingness to pinpoint why such a flawed change was rejected in the first place. This is precisely what happened with the post-Clone Saga and post-One More Day sales slump – hailed instead as a significant business success. As Brevoort has recently stated:
“I believe that we’ve concluded decisively that the best platonic ideal of Spider-Man is one that is unattached [i.e., unmarried], and that conclusion isn’t going to be changed by a particular alternate interpretation momentarily performing well […] [P]ointing to ULTIMATE [Ultimate Spider-Man is the current alternative-universe title by Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto in which Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson are married with kids. My note] and concluding that the one and only factor contributing to its success is coincidentally the one factor that those fans would like changed about ASM [i.e., an acronym for the flagship title The Amazing Spider-Man. My note] is working backwards from a desired conclusion” (Brevoort 2025b).
By now, it should be abundantly clear that Marvel’s current editorial team has chosen the One More Day status quo as the narrative hill they are willing to die on (a decision reiterated in Brevoort 2025c, where the editor bluntly addresses the concerns of a reader by telling him, verbatim,“if you just don’t like Spider-Man without him being married to MJ, you can always stop reading it”). Conveniently enough, corporate sales charts have vanished while marketing shenanigans to maximise short-term profits at the expense of collectors and die-hard completionists have exploded (the worst offenders being variant covers and incentive covers; Avila 2019), so there is no way to properly assess Brevoort’s argument from authority. From a narrative perspective, and regardless of the more or less biased explanations that invested corporate insiders and editorial teams may come up with to defend their work and avoid acknowledging their missteps, Brevoort’s own “Platonic ideal” includes the immoral suggestion that an irresponsible, out-of-character deal with the devil is preferable to a divorce (“Sorry, divorce is out, but Faustian bargains are cool!”; White 2012: 238). Furthermore, such a conclusion may alienate
“present and potential women readers by putting an end to Peter and MJ’s marriage, thereby arguably suggesting that the marriage wasn’t a positive development, that MJ was an inessential character, and even that the heroic male is better off alone” (Sanderson 2008).
I can hardly imagine a worse betrayal of a character whose entire arc was originally built on the credo: “With great power, there must also come – great responsibility!”.
The “essential quality of a legend”
In his brilliantly controversial, and ultimately rejected, synopsis for the DC Comics crossover Twilight of the Superheroes, Alan Moore considered “how one of the things that prevents superhero stories from ever attaining the status of true modern myths or legends is that they are open ended. An essential quality of a legend is that the events in it are clearly defined in time” (Moore 1987; on myth and comics see Curtis 2019). In his pitch, Moore reasoned that because (post-)Bronze Age superheroes storylines were chained to the “commercial demands of a continuing series” in which nothing could ever change or evolve permanently, such stories
“can never have a resolution. Indeed, they find it difficult to embrace any of the changes in life that the passage of time brings about for these very same reasons, making them finally less than fully human as well as falling far short of true myth” (Moore 1987; my emphasis).
Interestingly, Twilight of the Superheroes was also meant to offer a meta-commentary on DC’s canonical continuity in the wake of Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s epoch-making crossover Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985-1986). As recently noted by Jackson Ayres,
“[t]he broader point made in the Twilight proposal […] is that when established narrative histories are invalidated – an editorial move that also implicitly invalidates the creative labor responsible for producing that history – serialized comics lose the crucial ability to engage productively with their past” (Ayres 2021: 71).
Once seen through Moore’s lenses, One More Day managed in one fell swoop to both prevent the natural character progression of 1990s Peter Parker/Spider-Man towards his final resolution as a character (with his mythical twin Ben Reilly rising to the occasion) and invalidate decades of “established narrative histories”. No wonder that the current Amazing Spider-Man’s storylines are met with either cold feet or widespread indignation: they have lost the “crucial ability to engage productively with their past”.
As if such insights were not enough, in 1983 Moore had already singled out the narratively crippling stasis suffered by Peter Parker/Spider-Man as an adolescent, immature character who “has a lot of trouble with his girlfriends” (and published it on a Marvel UK magazine, no less) to denounce the fact that sometimes in the mid-1970s Marvel’s storylines had “ground to a halt” and “stopped developing” (Moore 1983). Even though subsequent runs on The Amazing Spider-Man and The Spectacular Spider-Man invalidated Moore’s initial analysis (as they slowly and organically integrated more adult and mature themes, including Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson getting married and expecting a child, possibly even as a consequence of Moore’s own revolutionary approach), One More Day’s blank slate, which featured the uncalled-for return to a perpetually post-adolescent, immature Parker who “has a lot of trouble with his girlfriends”, proved Moore’s assessment eerily prescient [3]. Beware the magic of the Northampton Bard.
Of mice and spiders
One More Day deliberately froze the flagship character of the company in a state of arrested development, much like an old-fashioned comic strip figure, in order to dilute his complicated history, cancel his emic personal growth, and maximise his appeal as a purely commercial mascot. Regardless of any original goal, Quesada and Straczynski’s storyline came to epitomise the corporate strategy aggressively pursued since Marvel had to merge with Isaac Perlmutter’s Toy Biz after filing Chapter 11 in 1996 and confirmed in the aftermath of the 2009 Disney buyout of Marvel (for the financial history of those tumultuous years see Howe 2012: 379-432). It is somewhat ironic, then, that the Italian licensee of the Disney characters, Panini Comics, has recently found renewed critical and commercial success with its flagship weekly title Topolino (lit., “Mickey Mouse”) under the direction of new editor-in-chief Alex Bertani thanks to his introduction of traditional Marvel-style continuity rules, increased emphasis on fictional worldbuilding through crossovers, and more emotionally complex storytelling involving the core characters of Duckburg and Mouseton (Brambilla 2022). This editorial shift is perhaps unsurprising, given that Bertani began his career in the comic industry in 1994 when he joined the marketing department of Marvel Italia, then the Italian subsidiary of Marvel USA.
Interestingly, Marvel has recently published a series of “What if…?” one-shots co-produced by Italian Disney writers and artists under the supervision and strict narrative control of the American company. These issues feature familiar Disney characters taking on the roles of iconic Marvel superheroes: Goofy turns into Spider-Man (and Hulk), Donald Duck becomes Iron Man (and Thor), Minnie Mouse dons the Captain Marvel insignia, and Mickey Mouse is reimagined as Mr. Fantastic and Iron Man (again). While the art, courtesy of seasoned Italian Disney veterans like Giada Perissinotto, Alessandro Pastrovicchio, and Donald Soffritti, truly shines, the narrative beats and tropes felt relatively stiff, disjointed, and uninspired by European standards. Perhaps the best What If…? scenario is still to come: What if Marvel Comics, as we know it, folded… and Panini Comics’ editorial board took over? Now, that’s a crossover I’d really love to read.
Notes
This post first appeared here on March 10, and was later shortened, revised, and (hopefully) improved between April and August.
[1] “If a bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates, it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was an extremely finely worded and clever satire, that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries. Then years after you were dead, people still might be reading it, and laughing at you, your wretchedness, and absurdity” (from Moore 2003).
[2] ] I’ve recently come across a post by a comic book shop owner that aptly summarises other relevant issues here: “price, decompression, constant events, oversaturation, and writers not staying on books for more than a year makes it harder to want to buy single issues. [Comic books are] [e]xpensive, [there are] too many events, too many entangled stories, [and] not enough actual stories per issue” [Anonymous 2024]. Another contributing factor affecting the quality of the stories itself might be the diffusion of storytelling handbooks and the proliferation of courses and classes about creative writing over the course of the last decades, which standardised and popularised certain narrative techniques to the detriment of other out-of-the-box approaches and choked the unorganised, but lively, creative effervescence experience by the industry in the second half of the 20th century (for an analysis of the widespread diffusion of the hero’s journey in Hollywood see Ambasciano 2021; on the creative explosion that characterised mainstream US comic books in the 1970s see Mazur & Danner 2014: 45-60).
[3] In Moore’s own words: “[w]e were wild-eyed fanatics to rival the loopiest thugee cultist or member of the Manson family. We were True Believers [Stan Lee used to call Marvel faithful readers and aficionados “True Believers”. My note]. The worst thing was that everything had ground to a halt. The books had stopped developing. If you take a look at a current Spiderman [sic] comic, you’ll find that he’s maybe twenty years old, he worries a lot about what’s right and what’s wrong, and he has a lot of trouble with his girlfriends. Do you know what Spiderman [sic] was doing fifteen years ago? Well, he was about nineteen years old, he worried a lot about what was right and what was wrong, and he had a lot of trouble with his girlfriends” (Moore 1983: 47).
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