Does 616 need fixing?

[Thennary Nak]

I think the Marvel Universe is broken in such a way that if you tried to fix it it would just make matters worse. It may not be perfect the way it is but it runs well enough with it conveniently forgetting things that would get in the way of whatever it is currently doing.

[Dog]

But I believe my point still stands, outside of events, how much interaction is there?

Spider-Man fans have been complaining about too much Fantastic Four and Avengers in Amazing. All kinds of different people show up in Avengers Academy, even the frickin' Runaways.

[Grapeweasel]

It never needed fixing.

Fixing it is how it got this way.

[Venomous Mask]

Besides fewer "events," no, nothing needs fixing.

[cookepuss]

It never needed fixing.
Fixing it is how it got this way.

Clearly, you must be joking. Do you remember what the 616 was like before Heroes Return & Morrison/Quitely's New X-Men?

- Wolverine went noseless, had big fangs, wore a rag mask, and had bone claws that were sometimes longer than his actual forearms.
- Thor dressesed like a reject from a 80s heavy metal band.
- Wasp was actually mutated into looking like a human bug - complete with antennae, a Snookie-esque skin tone, and gigantic bug wings.
- The X-Men had it bad too. with the Neo, the Skrulls, the lackluster reveal of The Twelve, the flip-flop on Onslaught and how he was, but really wasn't Dark Xavier. The X-Men family was downright self-indulgent and goofy.
- Iron Man was proven to be a mole for Kang, died fighting the Avengers, was replaced by a teenaged alternaverse version of himself, and took on an armor that would make the one with nosed faceplate look like a triumph.
- Spider-Man and the Clone Saga. So much wrong here. Impossible to pick a single bad moment. The MJ backhand? The disintegrating Ben Reilly? Dumping of the core cast? The flip-flop on the clone revelation? So much trash.
- The Fantastic Four had Ben wearing a bucket helmet, Sue dressing like a stripper, Franklin aged up and a member of (ugh) Fantastic Force, and so on.
- The Avengers ket getting more and more "extreme" each issue too. So many pouches. So little time. Just read the year's worth of issues before Heroes Reborn. Awful stuff.

I can keep going on, but 90s Marvel was pretty messed. Morrison got the X-Men stripped back to basics, even if they largely ignored most of what he changed after his stint was over. The Avengers, Hulk, Iron Man, & the Fantastic Four all got zeroed back to their iconic looks and sensibilities. Bendis tweaked a lot leading up to Disassembled, but that's a whole other issue. Spider-Man kinda got back on track all on its own as the 616 changed around him. Sadly, Marvel STILL thought that he needed an actual reboot and unleashed the sadness that was OMD/BND/OMIT.

[cookepuss]

Do I think that the 616 needs fixing in 2013? Definitely. Let me (not so) quickly explain why.

1. Since Civil War in 2006, Marvel's heroes have lost their way. They spend more time fighting each other and themselves than actuall fighting the real bad guys, who are largely collecting dust. It reminds me of that scene in DC's Kingdom Come where it's explained how there are no heroes are villains anymore. There's just one group of capes fighting another group of capes because that's kinda what they do. There's no moral code in Marvel comics anymore. No good VS evil. Too many shades of gray. Some comics get it right, but most read like stories about super powered gangbangers fighting over turf and who's better. Sickening.

2. DEATH TO ALTERNATE UNIVERSES AND TIMELINES!!! I get it. Dark. Gloomy. Sad. But unavoidable? Let's stop referencing Days of Future Past and coming up with a bazillion variations. AoA was awesome when it first happened. Get over it. It's not the ultimate X-Men alternate universe. Maybe a world without Xavier might be just fine. Cable needs to lose the keys to his time hopping Delorean and stop dwelling on his Apocalyse ruled future hell. So much has changed since his arrival that it probably doesn't even exist anymore. Marvel uses alternate futures and parallel "What If?" worlds as a crutch. Live in the now, man! Like Doc Brown said in Back to the Future, "No man should know too much about his future." For one thing, it's boring if things keep on heading on one (relatively) predictable path. For another... Lighten up! Not every future has to be so dreadful. Maybe, suffering and all, the heroes are on the right path.

3. Death is meaningless. We all know this. Why do we accept it? It doesn't make for better storytelling? Killing a fan favorite doesn't shock us anymore, nor does resurrecting them 9 months later. Death has to stop playing favorites in the 616. Make death permanent, even if it means changing Marvel's personification it - giving the Hall Jordan Spectre treatment to some well known, soon to die character. Marvel's afterlife needs border patrol. Marvel's implementation of death is like a tightrope walker using a harness and safety line. It's not really "death defying" if you're never in real danger.

4. There IS such a thing as too much of a good thing. Marvel needs to stop expanding its lines. The X-Men line is huge. As of July, they're nearly up to 12 books. So much redundancy. So much meh. Trim the line down by at least half. Do we need 2 Fantastic Four books? Does Avengers REALLY merit 5 books now? Are there too many Hulks now? Weren't Jen & Bruce enough? Marvel thinks that they're giving us what we want. They're just not giving us what we need. Expanding the lines to hell is only managing to water each property down.

5. Continuity is a f***ing mess. Spider-Man's has been rewritten into near incoherence. So much so that we STILL don't know what bits from pre-BND did or didn't happen as written. I've been reading X-Men for 30+ years. I have almost every single issue of every single X-title ever. Even I can't write you a single cohesive roadmap of their continuity. It's more convoluted than any daytime soap. It's like this in nearly every corner of the 616. It's one crazy, incomprehensible twist piled onto another. It's a house of cards. None of it makes sense anymore. The parts that seem to don't hold up to close inspection.

6. You can't change a damn thing for fear of damaging the "icons". Spider-Man can't get married or have kids because aging is bad in the 616. Never mind the fact that Marvel's readership isn't made up wholly of 10 year olds anymore. There's that death thing again. You can't have Tony Stark die because Iron Man makes too much money at the box office. If a character does have a kid, be prepared for some rapid aging like they did on TV shows back in the 80s. Franklin Richards childhood is an anomoly. Even then, it's not a good one. He's barely aged in 44 year. Yeah. He's been around that long. Because no character changes on anything more than the most superficial levels, nobody really grows. I hate the comic strip "For Better or Worse", but I really commend the writer/artist for allowing the characters to grow, change, and age with us. Why do you have kids? You have them because, one day, you'll die. They're your legacy. When Spider-Man dies, people will mourn him, but nobody will take his place. When Hulk moves to Florida to retire, who will smash for him? There are no little Bruce or Betty Juniors out there. Marvel, to keep their character iconic, have managed to make them unchanging in any real sense. This is where I commend DC for its legacy characters and willingness to throw it all away on a whim.

7. Does Marvel tell any stories about people anymore? Of course the do. They just don't tell as many as they should or used to. PAD "gets it" with X-Factor. It's crazy and tells superhero-y stories all of the time, but they're never about superheroes. Ultimately, they're stories about people with quirks, vulnerabilities, ambitions, and so on. Read PAD's X-Factor and then go back and read Avengers VS X-Men. AvX makes for a great Michael Bay experience. The bombast is sensational. Does it really deal with people? Only if you count Scott's (final) descent into madness. These characters used to have personal lives outside of the masks and code names. Nowadays, that stuff barely exists. It's like going to work one morning and not leaving the office ever again. These characters don't "clock out" anymore. They're too defined by their powers, costumes, and nicks. The best storytelling is the type that resonates the most with readers on a personal level.

8. Where are the social issues? Marvel still does them, but it's no longer as much a part of its fabric as it used to be. Occasionally, Marvel will tackle issues like marriage equality or the paranoia of terrorism, but they tend to eschew that stuff in favor of cosmic threats, petty in-fighting, mustache twirling schemers, and faux drama that doesn't even rise to the level of soap opera melodrama. Plus, in this f***ed up economy, why haven't the heroes all been hit hard? The Marvel Universe used to be a spandexy reflection of our own. You'd have to think that the Avengers or X-Men would take better care of their toys instead of crashing jets every other week. You'd think that Spider-Man would get laid off due to cutbacks or people would march on city hall to protest Jameson's latest budget. What? No heroes on bath salts or other designer drugs? You don't see much of the real world creeping in on the 616 anymore. Marvel only does it when they need to grab headlines in the mainstream media. That's kinda sad. Steve Gerber is probably rolling over in his grave right now. You Howard the Duck fans know what I mean.

9. THIS ISSUE CHANGES EVERYTHING!!! Uhm.... No it doesn't. Nothing changes really. Now, this is not a redux of my "Marvel is on a treadmill" argument. It's more about hype. Usually, the issues that change everything (for realsies) aren't hyped. They happen off-event and in those spaced between the panels. The events only change things until the next event or until Marvel realizes that they screwed the pooch. The hype was all for nothing then. Marvel, I get that you have to push product, but stop playing carnival barker. You're no good at it. You tell us that we're going to see a werewolf when you're only prepared to show us a hairy fat dude. Let the comics speak for themselves. You can't buy buzz.

10. Event overload. To paraphrase the Incredibles, if every event is special then no event is special. Stop bombarding us with events. Like I said before, the changes aren't permanent. There are no real consquences. All you're doing is milking a cash cow. Worse yet, event overload is keeping the writers from doing their thing. Have you ever wondered why so many fans and reviewers are happy when a book sits an event out? It's because they get to develop organically instead of being forced to adhere or change via editorial mandate.

11. The revolving creative door. Bendis & Bagely. Stan & Jack. Find me a creative team that'll be in it for the long haul these days. Too many creative shifts. Too many artists coming in and out. Plots don't develop because they aren't allowed to. One writer come in and eradicates what the last writer did over the past 18 issues. Too many cooks in the kitchen.


I can REALLY keep going on and on here. I can get into lots of book and character related specifics. However, Marvel and the 616 suffers from a near terminal case of creative and managerial cancer. It's eating itself. If you only look at the small picture, you don't see it. Step back. Look at Marvel now. Look at where it was during its creative glory days. Look at how the 90s seem to be rearing its ugly head again. After nearly 50 years, Marvel is long overdue a nu52-level reboot. It's painful to imagine what that would bring or what we'd lose, but the 616 is sick. I sincerely hope that somebody with any power takes it upon themselves to get it back on track. I sincerely love comics. I'm a HUGE Marvel fan. I just don't think that their comics are anything more than stories about action figures or not so cleverly disguised ads or concept testing grounds for their movies.

[The Action Ace]

I don't think a complete reboot is needed but something like Big Time needs to be done across the company. Have a jumping on point that says here is what happened in the past that is important and here is where we are headed and then take off from there. It just needs tightened up a bit

[BrotherUnitNo_4]

I don't think a complete reboot is needed but something like Big Time needs to be down across the company. Have a jumping on point that says here is what happened in the past that is important and here is where we are headed and then take off from there. It just needs tightened up a bit

You may get your wish come November.

[whiteshark]

Nope Marvel does not need fixing.
One of the things that make marvel stories original is the continuity which started in the first marvel comics and is still carried on (with a few small retcons but nothing major)
Let that unique marel feature carry on.

[Lord Bravery]

No it doesn't need a fixing, like a full on reboot. It just needs some stream lining, cut the fat. No franchise deserves or needs 10 friggin books. That's just money grabbing hack work. Same as these continuous events.

I mean yea, Marvel needs to make money, but let's have some artistic integrity too huh?

Also, get some editors who have the balls to you know, actually do their jobs and stop brown nosing their "architects" like Bendis and Fraction. When they come up with a stupid idea, or decide that other writers work, continuity, isn't important? Tell them "Errrr actually it kinda is, your idea is pretty stupid Brian".

[cookepuss]

No it doesn't need a fixing, like a full on reboot. It just needs some stream lining, cut the fat.

Ideally, you're right. In practice, that doesn't work. JoeQ tried that 10 years ago. The X-line got stripped & gutted. He promised that each book would have a unique mission statement. Otherwise, it wouldn't exist. 10 years later.... We're back to square one with a line that's bloated up to 12 books and only 1/2 have a concrete reason for existing. Avengers is falling victim to that expansionism too. 5 books is too much for what they have to say. This is also why I commend nuDC for publishing books on lesser known characters. They could have 10 Batman & Superman books, but they're focusing on some more of the cult favorites. Even if the books don't sell like they should, at least they're to be commended for not making their catalog all about one or two franchises.

Also, get some editors who have the balls to you know, actually do their jobs and stop brown nosing their "architects" like Bendis and Fraction. When they come up with a stupid idea, or decide that other writers work, continuity, isn't important? Tell them "Errrr actually it kinda is, your idea is pretty stupid Brian".

As long as Bendis' name sells books, editorial will do no such thing. As one Marvel creator put it on this board a while back, all Marvel cares about (in the end) is sales. It doesn't matter if the writer/artist is a dick. It doesn't matter if they're controversial. It doesn't matter if they're impossible to work with. It doesn't even matter if they've got very little talent. As long as their names sell books then they're more than welcome to produce for the House of (out of) Ideas. The industry rewards bad behavior. It's full of no talent Kardashian types. Not saying that Bendis has no talent. I love some of his work. However, Marvel has this small Illuminati-like group of "architects" and "young guns" that rule everything. Even when an editor wants to change things, the suits say otherwise. There's a massive chain of command these days. It's not like it was back in the small bullpen days of the 70s or 80s.

[Rolltideguy77]

This. This. This.

do i think that the 616 needs fixing in 2013? definitely. let me (not so) quickly explain why.

1. Since civil war in 2006, marvel's heroes have lost their way. They spend more time fighting each other and themselves than actuall fighting the real bad guys, who are largely collecting dust. It reminds me of that scene in dc's kingdom come where it's explained how there are no heroes are villains anymore. There's just one group of capes fighting another group of capes because that's kinda what they do. There's no moral code in marvel comics anymore. No good vs evil. Too many shades of gray. Some comics get it right, but most read like stories about super powered gangbangers fighting over turf and who's better. Sickening.

2. Death to alternate universes and timelines!!! I get it. Dark. Gloomy. Sad. But unavoidable? Let's stop referencing days of future past and coming up with a bazillion variations. Aoa was awesome when it first happened. Get over it. It's not the ultimate x-men alternate universe. Maybe a world without xavier might be just fine. Cable needs to lose the keys to his time hopping delorean and stop dwelling on his apocalyse ruled future hell. So much has changed since his arrival that it probably doesn't even exist anymore. Marvel uses alternate futures and parallel "what if?" worlds as a crutch. Live in the now, man! Like doc brown said in back to the future, "no man should know too much about his future." for one thing, it's boring if things keep on heading on one (relatively) predictable path. For another... Lighten up! Not every future has to be so dreadful. Maybe, suffering and all, the heroes are on the right path.

3. Death is meaningless. We all know this. Why do we accept it? It doesn't make for better storytelling? Killing a fan favorite doesn't shock us anymore, nor does resurrecting them 9 months later. Death has to stop playing favorites in the 616. Make death permanent, even if it means changing marvel's personification it - giving the hall jordan spectre treatment to some well known, soon to die character. Marvel's afterlife needs border patrol. Marvel's implementation of death is like a tightrope walker using a harness and safety line. It's not really "death defying" if you're never in real danger.

4. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Marvel needs to stop expanding its lines. The x-men line is huge. As of july, they're nearly up to 12 books. So much redundancy. So much meh. Trim the line down by at least half. Do we need 2 fantastic four books? Does avengers really merit 5 books now? Are there too many hulks now? Weren't jen & bruce enough? Marvel thinks that they're giving us what we want. They're just not giving us what we need. Expanding the lines to hell is only managing to water each property down.

5. Continuity is a f***ing mess. Spider-man's has been rewritten into near incoherence. So much so that we still don't know what bits from pre-bnd did or didn't happen as written. I've been reading x-men for 30+ years. I have almost every single issue of every single x-title ever. Even i can't write you a single cohesive roadmap of their continuity. It's more convoluted than any daytime soap. It's like this in nearly every corner of the 616. It's one crazy, incomprehensible twist piled onto another. It's a house of cards. None of it makes sense anymore. The parts that seem to don't hold up to close inspection.

6. You can't change a damn thing for fear of damaging the "icons". Spider-man can't get married or have kids because aging is bad in the 616. Never mind the fact that marvel's readership isn't made up wholly of 10 year olds anymore. There's that death thing again. You can't have tony stark die because iron man makes too much money at the box office. If a character does have a kid, be prepared for some rapid aging like they did on tv shows back in the 80s. Franklin richards childhood is an anomoly. Even then, it's not a good one. He's barely aged in 44 year. Yeah. He's been around that long. Because no character changes on anything more than the most superficial levels, nobody really grows. I hate the comic strip "for better or worse", but i really commend the writer/artist for allowing the characters to grow, change, and age with us. Why do you have kids? You have them because, one day, you'll die. They're your legacy. When spider-man dies, people will mourn him, but nobody will take his place. When hulk moves to florida to retire, who will smash for him? There are no little bruce or betty juniors out there. Marvel, to keep their character iconic, have managed to make them unchanging in any real sense. This is where i commend dc for its legacy characters and willingness to throw it all away on a whim.

7. Does marvel tell any stories about people anymore? Of course the do. They just don't tell as many as they should or used to. Pad "gets it" with x-factor. It's crazy and tells superhero-y stories all of the time, but they're never about superheroes. Ultimately, they're stories about people with quirks, vulnerabilities, ambitions, and so on. Read pad's x-factor and then go back and read avengers vs x-men. Avx makes for a great michael bay experience. The bombast is sensational. Does it really deal with people? Only if you count scott's (final) descent into madness. These characters used to have personal lives outside of the masks and code names. Nowadays, that stuff barely exists. It's like going to work one morning and not leaving the office ever again. These characters don't "clock out" anymore. They're too defined by their powers, costumes, and nicks. The best storytelling is the type that resonates the most with readers on a personal level.

8. Where are the social issues? Marvel still does them, but it's no longer as much a part of its fabric as it used to be. Occasionally, marvel will tackle issues like marriage equality or the paranoia of terrorism, but they tend to eschew that stuff in favor of cosmic threats, petty in-fighting, mustache twirling schemers, and faux drama that doesn't even rise to the level of soap opera melodrama. Plus, in this f***ed up economy, why haven't the heroes all been hit hard? The marvel universe used to be a spandexy reflection of our own. You'd have to think that the avengers or x-men would take better care of their toys instead of crashing jets every other week. You'd think that spider-man would get laid off due to cutbacks or people would march on city hall to protest jameson's latest budget. What? No heroes on bath salts or other designer drugs? You don't see much of the real world creeping in on the 616 anymore. Marvel only does it when they need to grab headlines in the mainstream media. That's kinda sad. Steve gerber is probably rolling over in his grave right now. You howard the duck fans know what i mean.

9. This issue changes everything!!! Uhm.... No it doesn't. Nothing changes really. Now, this is not a redux of my "marvel is on a treadmill" argument. It's more about hype. Usually, the issues that change everything (for realsies) aren't hyped. They happen off-event and in those spaced between the panels. The events only change things until the next event or until marvel realizes that they screwed the pooch. The hype was all for nothing then. Marvel, i get that you have to push product, but stop playing carnival barker. You're no good at it. You tell us that we're going to see a werewolf when you're only prepared to show us a hairy fat dude. Let the comics speak for themselves. You can't buy buzz.

10. Event overload. To paraphrase the incredibles, if every event is special then no event is special. Stop bombarding us with events. Like i said before, the changes aren't permanent. There are no real consquences. All you're doing is milking a cash cow. Worse yet, event overload is keeping the writers from doing their thing. Have you ever wondered why so many fans and reviewers are happy when a book sits an event out? It's because they get to develop organically instead of being forced to adhere or change via editorial mandate.

11. The revolving creative door. Bendis & bagely. Stan & jack. Find me a creative team that'll be in it for the long haul these days. Too many creative shifts. Too many artists coming in and out. Plots don't develop because they aren't allowed to. One writer come in and eradicates what the last writer did over the past 18 issues. Too many cooks in the kitchen.


I can really keep going on and on here. I can get into lots of book and character related specifics. However, marvel and the 616 suffers from a near terminal case of creative and managerial cancer. It's eating itself. If you only look at the small picture, you don't see it. Step back. Look at marvel now. Look at where it was during its creative glory days. Look at how the 90s seem to be rearing its ugly head again. After nearly 50 years, marvel is long overdue a nu52-level reboot. It's painful to imagine what that would bring or what we'd lose, but the 616 is sick. I sincerely hope that somebody with any power takes it upon themselves to get it back on track. I sincerely love comics. I'm a huge marvel fan. I just don't think that their comics are anything more than stories about action figures or not so cleverly disguised ads or concept testing grounds for their movies.

[Rasputin9977]

we need more deals with the devil

This. They need to reboot the entire 616 not just the Spider universe.

[britishmixedwhiskey]

So Many Talking points on this subject ... i believe the reason the Recession hasnt affected the Heroes is because i like many other readers read comics as escapism and to get away from daily life. In real life there isnt anyone down my street who has incredible powers (unless you count the girl who is 6 ft 3 ..she seems to be pretty good in goal when ever theres a footie game but i digress) and that's part of why i got into comics when i was young.

The Heroes were Larger then Life characters who in turn taught me about responsibility, predjudice and a lot more in ways school never could. My point really is i was 6 and a half maybe 7 years old when i picked up my first comic and the continuity never botherd me ... in fact it made me search out old comics and try and figure out the pieces that werent spelt out for me .

I learned through back issues about what happend in the years before i started reading and that Marvel had a great Tapestry of comics which hadnt really been altered (continuity wise) and that got me interested in different characters and their backgrounds.

At the end of the day im sure some people will say its confusing and should be fixed but when i was a little kid i understood what i was reading and how it fitted into this amazing universe and just wanted to read more and more about it . Years later the Main reason i think that i Love Marvel and merely "like" (if even that) the Distinguished Competetion is the Continuity and the fact that if you want to use your imagination to fill in the Blanks you can .

[Rimmer]

9. THIS ISSUE CHANGES EVERYTHING!!! Uhm.... No it doesn't. Nothing changes really. Now, this is not a redux of my "Marvel is on a treadmill" argument. It's more about hype. Usually, the issues that change everything (for realsies) aren't hyped. They happen off-event and in those spaced between the panels. The events only change things until the next event or until Marvel realizes that they screwed the pooch. The hype was all for nothing then. Marvel, I get that you have to push product, but stop playing carnival barker. You're no good at it. You tell us that we're going to see a werewolf when you're only prepared to show us a hairy fat dude. Let the comics speak for themselves. You can't buy buzz.

10. Event overload. To paraphrase the Incredibles, if every event is special then no event is special. Stop bombarding us with events. Like I said before, the changes aren't permanent. There are no real consquences. All you're doing is milking a cash cow. Worse yet, event overload is keeping the writers from doing their thing. Have you ever wondered why so many fans and reviewers are happy when a book sits an event out? It's because they get to develop organically instead of being forced to adhere or change via editorial mandate.

11. The revolving creative door. Bendis & Bagely. Stan & Jack. Find me a creative team that'll be in it for the long haul these days. Too many creative shifts. Too many artists coming in and out. Plots don't develop because they aren't allowed to. One writer come in and eradicates what - the last writer did over the past 18 issues. Too many cooks in the kitchen.

Not trying to be argumentative, but playing Devil's Advocate on a few points here. I actually agree with most of these comments.

#9 - They've been doing this since Stan & Jack's first comics, though. They HAVE to drum up excitement or else they feel like people won't buy it. What if the cover just said, "Hey, in this issue, nothing really happens, they sit around and eat pizza, complain and joke, and then a bad guy shows up on the last panel - so make sure you get NEXT issue!" I'm joking, but still, you're right, they do play carnival barker, but we're pretty much used to it. We all realize these are all temporary things, these massive changes, etc...

#10 - I agree with you, but bottom line is events sell, collections of events sell, tie-ins sell, people buy tie-ins for books they normally don't read. Sometimes these ancillary titles live & die on these events tie-ins. For good or for bad, I don't see these events going anywhere. I think branching out from one writer (Bendis) writing EVERY event is a good thing. They let Fraction write one, which no matter your opinion, was experience for him for next time (or future non-event stories). AvX has multiple writers, so everyone gets their shot, which I kinda like. Maybe grand consensus will be to let someone who was not on the horizon to write an event get the next one (Hickman, please).

#11 - I agree here as well, but this might just be sign of the times. In non-comic creator world, there is no company loyalty from either side - company or employee. This kinda feels like the same way. Every writer and artist is looking out for themselves (as they should be) and constantly gunning for that next gig. We all do the same thing, to a certain extent.
I compare it to pro sports. The days of one QB staying with the same team his entire career, or hitter, or whatever position/player/sport are long gone due to free agency. Same thing here. Plus, an incredibly long run by today's standards could be perceived to get "stale", which is why Marvel is rumored to switch things up after AvX. The Fraction/LaRocca teamup for IM has been going on for years, and some people who don't like Fraction's work or LaRocca's style get turned off and leave the book. New blood will bring them back.

For me, I think the biggest thing is how some have said each group has their own universe. For AvX as an example, at least you have the Avengers world and the X-Men world interacting for once. BUT, if the PF is this huge earth-altering event, why isn't the FF involved?? Reed and crew have staved off Galactus, the world devourer, multiple times, fought Annihilus, etc... They are experts at world-level threats. Why didn't anyone contact them? I get that Marvel wants to pull in these two teams/worlds, but there ARE actually other characters in the MU. For me, an EVENT should be ALL-ENCOMPASSING. one of the coolest things when the initial Secret Wars came out was that it had just about everybody in it, and they all interacted.

And for forgotten characters, why can't they have a "Marvel Presents" monthly that has dif. characters in it each month? Where forgotten characters like the Black Knight, Monica Rambeau, and others could appear ever once in awhile? Granted, it may not sell, and that's why Marvel has never done such a thing...