Quote Originally Posted by Jason Eberly View Post
I personally am against Marvel doing a reboot.

The reason being is that you throw out a lot of good along with the bad. And even nowadays, there are good stories out there to go along with the blech.

The wonderful part about comics is that anything broken can be fixed, any plot holes or inconsistencies explained (or just ignored to fade away into oblivion). Fred and Greg have proved that with this current AF. These characters were way mucked up prior to the current run, almost recognizable in some cases. Yet here we are, with the characters feeling more like themselves than we've seen in over a decade.

Marvel used to have an official "fact checker" named Peter Sanderson (he helped write some of the Deluxe Marvel Universe Handbooks) whose job was to make sure things lined up story wise in the MU. Want to know the status of The Leader for a story you want to write? You went to him. I know Marvel is slimming its workforce so doing this again would probably never happen, but it is obvious that not having someone like this in their stable has hurt the storytelling.

Also, there are some writers who so a good job of fixing those characters. Granted, you may not like the results, but you usually end up with a character that makes more sense. Kurt Busiek is good at this, as is Geoff Johns.

For instance, for almost two decades, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch's origins constantly changed and contradicted itself, until a couple different writers finally not only gave a definite origin, but even made all those conflicting accounts fit in and be relevant to them. Marvel needs to do this on a line-wide scale.

So I feel that Marvel doesn't need to do a reboot so much as pause, take a deep breath, look at their characters and try to stitch back together their fractured universe.
Nicely said. Fact checking should be so much easier, now, too. Not only does Marvel have it's own guidebooks and database, fans have created even more detailed wikias. Just look at the one here! If a writer is unsure about something, there are eager fans willing to list in detail dropped plot lines, conflicting back stories, loose threads, or plot holes. I think another problem is some writers want mindless adoration from fans and nothing else, and those are the writers who screw the MU up, because NOTHING seems to be done at all to reign them in anymore... which just seems insane to me.

It's a shame I won't be reading the stuff by the good writers because I can't find them amidst the muck and mire. Another problem with Masrvel is it's instability of late. I don't have the patience to start reading a book with a good creative team just to have it ether cancelled suddenly do to one bad month, or turned over to the Frank Tieris and Jeff Loebs of the industry. The stress isn't worth it, not at the high price comics cost now and how far out of the way I have to go just to buy one in person.