Over in the forums, there’s a thread about why some of us Revolutionaries are no longer reading Marvel Comics. Allow me to present the most recent exhibit for doing so: They don’t know how to write for the characters anymore. For example, Doom would never talk like this.

Setting aside the whole misogynistic angle of what’s said there, that whole sequence is just not Doom’s style. Doom is proud, arrogant, manipulating, cunning, and evil, but he’s never crude. Just look at these past shots of Doom in action to see what I mean. Here’s a good example of how Doom would make that same threat, in a way that fits his character.

This all really ties into the main problem that exists at Marvel right now: they don’t care about continuity anymore, either historical or when it comes to character consistency.

Just about all of their characters have been acting out of character for years, and they will continue to do so as long as Bendis and Millar are Quesada’s go-to guys.

The only characters that Bendis have really gotten right are Spidey, Daredevil and Luke Cage. Millar hasn’t gotten anyone right at all. These two have written everyone so out of character (turning Tony Stark into a fascist prick, and Mr. Fantastic praticly into Dr. Mengele in Civil War, for example), that Marvel has had to resort to the current Secret Invasion event to try and fix things.

Marvel wouldn’t have had to resort to this event to explain why everyone’s been acting so out of character if Joe Q and the other editors had reigned in their writers and made them write people in character. I thought that was the job of Marvel’s editing staff, or at least part of it.

Somehow, I just get the feeling that SI is going to cause more problems than it fixes, and it’s not going to bring me back into the Marvel fold. Mainly because afterwards, Millar and Bendis are still going to be the "head writers" at Marvel, which was the source of this problem to begin with.

What’s frustrating is that there are some great writers at Marvel, who respect the characters and portray them in ways that stay true to their past. When JMS took over Spider-Man, it was great. Sure, there were some rough patches, but over all, it was Peter, as we’ve always known him. He’s also doing a bang-up job with Thor.

Same thing when Joss took on Astonishing X-Men. He captured the feel of the characters, and it was like coming home.

Peter David is doing fantastic work with X-Factor and She-Hulk. That brings me to Dan Slott, who is a master of not only respecting continuity, but in using past events in unique ways to drive his plots foward.

I really love the characters in the Marvel Universe, and its past. There are some good people there now, but they’re not the ones guiding the main editorial decisions. As long as Joe Q, Bendis and Millar are the top dogs, writing without any regard to the characters and their history, I’ll not be making mine Marvel.