Chris, your comments on the demographics of the Spider-Man readership are spot-on and reflect the reality of comics fans today. Interestingly, though, it was an attempt to cater to those same demographics that led Marvel to have Parker get married in the first place -- in other words, the fans who wanted Spider-Man to age along with them and not stay a happy-go-lucky (or angst-ridden, in this case) teenager forever.

These are the same fans who, by and large, grew weary of Spidey fighting Doc Ock for the hundredth time and needed newer and more novel storylines to keep them reading, forgetting that for decades, most comic book readers were kids who read the books for a few years and then moved on to something else. For those kids, the one hundredth Doc Ock battle was as exciting as the first, because for them, it was the first!

Fans like us, who stayed on into adulthood, were the exception. Of course, with the decline in comics availability at newsstands, and the rise of the direct market (which cater, by and large, to the already converted), soon the adult readers became the majority and began to call the shots. This is too bad -- just as comic-book sensibilities and super-hero properties have broken through to the mainstream -- movies, video games, television -- the books themselves are nowhere to be seen outside a small ghetto set up next to the rows of manga in bookstores.

Wouldn't surprise me a bit to see Marvel reset the whole Spider-Man mythos yet again in a few years and return to the Mary Jane/marriage era, once they've milked the newly single Spidey again. As I hadn't read the title for years before this latest revelation and wasn't inspired to jump back in because of it, I guess it doesn't matter too much to me. The only Spidey I have read lately -- and intermittently, at that -- is the Ultimate version, which I pick up every so often in trade paperback format. That Spidey is closer in spirit to the Lee/Ditko original, and it fulfills my spider-fix quite nicely.