Yep, Nick Fury is the best preserved member of The Greatest Generation. And that stands whether he's Stan Lee or Samuel L. Jackson. By the way, Jackson was on a talk show recently and said that he wants to do the Avengers movie and that considering that the character in The Ultimate Avengers is him if he doesn't get the part he's going to be really steamed.

I don't think the backstories of the characters over the years are the problem. The soap opera aspects of the Marvel characters are what always seperated them from the two dimensional heroes and villains of other comic book companies. It was the outlandish nature of the storylines that proliferated the books from the mid-eighties through current storylines. And when Marvel attempted to jump start the characters with the Heroes Reborn arc it was pretty good---the problem was that not everybody was taken aboard for the ride and the ones that were left behind suffered. Spider-Man was one of the guys that was left behind.

Make sense?