Petty insults from petty people. I am a genuinely sensitive person, and these vile comments hurt. If that's your intent, congratulations.
No one has learned anything from the comics of old. Everyone belittles each other, hates each other, and has no hesitation about tearing each other to shreds. And that is the polar opposite of what Marvel and Spider-Man used to stand for.
I hate conflict. I try not to attack people and insult them personally, even if I really want to. I voice my opinions in a clear-cut, mater-of-fact fashion.
I believe in love and happiness and everyone treating each other with respect. If my own bitterness towards the direction comics has taken has led me to offend anyone here, then I am sorry.
But this place is starting to look like the the Comic Book Resources Forum, and that's not a compliment.
(Do we even have moderators here?)
In the end, my bottom-line point is that Spider-Man has been lost. The character Lee and Ditko created was so perfect, so universally appealing, that he earned his fame. And, as time went on, other writers and artists (such as Romita, Conway, Andru, Stern, Frenz, etc.) added to that legend, and did it well. Despite moving to college and "evolving", Spider-Man still looked, talked, acted, and felt like Spider-Man.
And then the proponents of growth and change took over completely, and laid on gimmick after gimmick, stunt after stunt. Now, "Spider-Man" is a stranger being battered from stunt to stunt, horror to horror. He is being controlled and read by people who only care about crude entertainment, about instant gratification. This is a major step-down from the intricately written, character-driven stories of the past.
Well, that's not necessarily true. Today's stories are character-driven. It's just that the characters are out of character.
As I've said, comics were created for a certain age bracket (all-ages acceptable, but aimed at kids), and were designed to be infinite, designed to be mythic. Where would comics be today if a writer in 1943 had decided that in order to be "realistic", Luthor would kill Superman with a chunk of Kryptonite, or that it would be neat to see Wonder Woman raped and beaten, or that Batman become a fugitive?
This genre and these characters were created with certain unspoken rules which, if obeyed, would keep them "evergreen". Unfortunately, today's creators are breaking all of the rules, at great cost to the characters and to people who are invested in them.
And that hurts. It hurts.
Anything goes, these days. There are no standards of decency. Many writers write the stories to serve them, not the characters. What they fail to understand is that they are not important. The characters are important. Being true to the characters created by Lee and Ditko and Kirby and all the rest are what's important. The writers and artists, once anomyous, uncredited people the readers never heard of (or from), have now become the stars of the books. It seems that the fans now argue more about the creators than the characters and the stories. And that's wrong.
After a while, after endless stunts and retcons and horrors and out-of-character behavior and 127 different versions of the characters, it all becomes bland and empty. The characters become hollow, the readers become jaded. There's no beauty, no mystery, no fun, no thought, no love, no passion. The characters and the fans become shells of what they once were, but they can't even hope to change things, because they're too entrenched in the routine of "*****-buy-*****-bag-board-buy-*****" to stop.
Most of the fans left today squabble among themselves endlessly, or worship every move the creators make because they don't know any better.
I'm not sure why I'm clinging to a sinking ship. Perhaps it's because I can't help but watch as these beloved characters are mangled. Because I care.
But it still hurts.
Aww, but that takes away from all the life in it. However, I'm afraid I have no good replacement, so I'll take it. 
Because when it comes to obsessiving over something, there is no gender boundaries. 
