It's hard to argue against the publication of a comic that's making money, and particularly against one that has grabbed the top spot among all comics published today.

Yet here I am to do just that.

Bear with me, OK?

The book we're talking about is Marvel’s New Avengers; or as I prefer to call it, Spidey, Wolverine, and Their Amazing Friends.

We've had various incarnations of the Spider-Man-centered Marvel Team-Up over the years. And the Thing had his Marvel Two-In-One for a good while. But with New Avengers, Marvel has at last found a way to include both Spidey and Wolverine — their biggest sellers — in the same comic, every month, along with a bevy of other favorite characters of the writer, Brian Michael Bendis. Um, I mean, a bevy of other great Marvel characters. Ahem.

So: Having Spidey, Wolverine, and company in an ongoing book — great idea.

But: Calling that book Avengers, or even New Avengers — terrible idea.

This is a maneuver only slightly less annoying than when Marvel took the compelling but underrated reformed-supervillains comic Thunderbolts and inexplicably changed it into a Fight Club rip-off.

No, seriously. Fight Club. Go find those issues and check for yourself. Not that anyone actually kept those issues in their collection — or would admit to it now.

Having a rotating door installed at the front of Avengers Mansion is a longstanding tradition, going all the way back to Avengers 16 in the 1960s, when almost the entire membership resigned and we got Cap's Kooky Quartet — with Hawkeye, the Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver — in their place. Heck, just take a glance at one of George Perez's occasional portraits of "everyone who has ever been an Avenger" to get a sense of the turnover in the Assemblers' ranks. (And see if you can find Waldo while you're at it.)

Bringing in Spider-Man and Wolverine, however, goes far beyond the usual circulation of second-string members.

Those two, each of them bigger than the team itself, overshadow everything the series should be about.

The Avengers is, at its heart, a family book. Sure, the "big three" of Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America often carry the flag, but the real center of the series, historically, has been the relationships between Henry Pym and his sometimes-wife, the Wasp, and between Wanda "Scarlet Witch" Maximoff and her . . . sort of . . . men.

Even as we often thrilled to the flashy exploits of the headliners, it was the human (or mutant, or synthezoid) drama of that core of less popular heroes that pushed the storylines along.

That power and pathos, emerging from a mixture of exotic characters who seemed often otherworldly yet still touched us with their sheer human-ness, with their genuine love and compassion for one another — that, I would argue, was the real strength of the book for decades. Any writer who strayed too far from that basic concept inevitably lost the book's focus and the readers' interest.

New Avengers has entirely abandoned this. The Scarlet Witch has become a victim of the writers and a plot device for an ill-conceived crossover event, House of M. The Vision has been gutted and tossed aside with the trash — literally. Hawkeye was given a most ignominious death. Wonder Man has been forgotten. The Pyms are nowhere to be found.

But, hey, we've got more Spidey and Wolverine for you, in case you didn't get enough of them in their other fourteen books this month.

Avengers has, traditionally, been a showcase for great characters who could not necessarily carry their own individual books, but who nonetheless interacted well together and generated real human drama. Now, it is none of these things.

Now, those characters have been unceremoniously jettisoned, and the book has become a showcase for the characters who sell the best, regardless of characterization or logic.

And that's the biggest disappointment in all of this.