Why not?

That's what Stan said on a couple of ocasions years after the fact when he was put on teh spot and asked in interviews. It's not necessarily the way he wrote things when he was working on the actual books.

That's a question for each individual reader, I think, in either accepting and embracing the story, or not. With so many stories over such a long period of time, there are going to be things that virtually every reader won't like buried in characters somewhere. In terms of your example, the Scott/Emma relationship isn't one I've bought into all that much, for the simple reason that I feel like I was never shown (in an emotionally genuine way) what the attraction for Cyclops is (apart from physical attributes.) It's always felt to me like, at the end of Grant's run, Jean put Scott and Emma together to avoid the "Here Comes Tomorrow" future, and at least in my reading, that felt like psychic coersion. But all that said, that's the status quo, so we play the ball where it lies. If I was editing X-MEN tomorrow, though, one of my first orders of business would be to try to build a scene that did get to the heart of those emotional truths, and dramatize just why these two characters are in this relationship, and why it works. But that's because it's a deficiency to me--the guys working on the books now have alerady embraced and accepted it, so for them, there's no need for such a scene.

Glad to hear that you dig it. And there's more Panther-related stuff coming down the pike.

He's been in the Spidey books pretty consistently. And yes, he's still a villain.

I can see your point, but I was unconvinced by the story--it didn't seem to me like the character had experienced that growth or change, but instead that he'd simply turned on a dime. And absolutely everybody accepted his change whole-heartedly. When Chris and Jim eventually did the story in X-MEN #1-3 that indicated that Xavier and Moira had funked with his mind, that made much more sense to me.

I'm happy for them to argue however they like, just not around here.

I wouldn't think so, but only time will tell.

Unless, of course, my support of OMD is genuine--which it is. It's astonishing that you would think that anybody who would agree with that story's goals must be lying.

Like anything, I would say wait and see teh movie and judge for yourself. Really, what's teh point of getting rankled so many months in advance?

You're talking about all of those Scott McDaniel charts, aren't you? I haven't scrutinized his data, but I don't think that specifically holds true, at least not for Marvel books--he was analyzing DC's output for the most part, and the figures there may add up.

I'll fire Rick Remender immediately!:)

Yes, Scott Hanna is inking JRJR on AVX.

Nonexistent. I think that creative/editorial team snuck that through.

Honestly, nobody thought of it, otherwise we probably would have.

She'll be in and around it, but she won't be a central player.

I'm afraid that you're likely in for some disappointment on that score. This isn't the kind of marketplace that would be condusive to such a project, I don't think.

You don't want to just keep doing the exact same thing over and over again. That would be boring, for all concerned.

I think DC and Geoff Johns in particular have done a good job of making Green Lantern as a character important and relevant to the DC line--the centerpiece of at least two of their last three big event storylines. And Green Lantern was always a relatively central character in their mythology, he just hadn't been given a lot of love and attention in a while.

Yes, that's pretty much accurate.