The more canon a book is, the less likely I am to enjoy it. The Mighty Avenger was good BECAUSE it wasn't canon.
Partially. But I have no doubt that Langridge and Samnee can produce equally great work that's set in the MU proper.
Keep in mind that what constitutes canon is a flimsy and subjective thing in the first place. Nextwave is Marvel canon. So's X-Statix.
And hell, part of why Langridge's Muppet Show is so endearing is his love of pulling out more obscure characters and bits from throughout the franchise's history. Remember there was a whole arc devoted to Skeeter. (Of course, the second anyone starts debating whether Muppet Babies is canon I'm out of here.)
Comic book canon is always a terrible, bloated mess, and getting away from it almost invariably makes your story better.
Almost, but guys like Busiek and Morrison do some wonderful damn things with it. I don't know that bad continuity-whoring is any more prevalent than bad anything-elsing; Spurgeon's Law and all that.
That said, I'm still convinced that Mighty Avenger was mostly hurt because at my store, it was kept on a rack with Sonic the Hedgehog, all the BOOM! Disney stuff and the Marvel Ages books. The comic book who pick up singles usually ignore that stand.
Indeed; my CBG said Futurama started selling a lot better after he put it in with the indy books instead of the other cartoon adaptations.
Course, at my shop, Mighty Avenger is right in there with the half-dozen other Thor books. Which probably doesn't do it any favors either.
I think the hell of it is that most of the people who come into the shop every week WANT the canon books, and BUY the event books even if they bitch about how terrible they are. (I once read an anecdote on a comics site about a father who didn't buy his son a kids' Spidey book because it "didn't count". Of course, my response to that is to pick up a damn Marvel Masterworks Spider-Man vol 1, which is about as canon, about as kid-friendly, and about as straight-up fucking GOOD as it gets, but that's a tangent. Also, Marvel Masterworks paperbacks cost fucking $25 now. For 10 issues. Of decades-old comics with coloring that doesn't look very good.)
Hem. Where was I?
Oh yeah. The audience that Mighty Avenger would have most appealed to isn't the people who go to the specialty store every Wednesday, it's kids who just saw the Thor movie and then see the trade in their local bookstore. Which is why it's so blindingly goddamned boneheaded that it was canceled (1) before the movie came out and (2) before the TRADE came out.
I could go on for days. Mighty Avenger's cancellation is pretty much the perfect example of everything the industry is doing wrong.
Your tiny and shrinking audience only buys event books. So what do you do? You cancel everything that could possibly appeal to any other audience, of course.
