Tony's Online Tips and Tony's Other Online Tips (which appears at cbgxtra.com) will be running a day or so behind schedule the rest of this week, due to a variety of crisis (family, computer, etc.) on my end and World Famous Comics web-wizard Justin's busy schedule on his end. But we won't skip any scheduled columns and should be all caught up by Monday.

My e-mail access has been uncertain this week, but I'm trying to answer it as fast as I can. Thanks for your patience.

Here's today's column...

My ratings votes did not capture my mix of feelings on the questions, so I offer these additions thought:

The storytelling by J. Michael Straczynski in "One More Day" was excellent. He executed a fundamentally hideous idea in an exceptionally capable way. USA Today had an article on this change in Spider-Man. It included a quote from Craig Shutt of Comics Buyer's Guide to the effect that nobody wants to read about a married Spider-Man. Obviously, he has no way of knowing this, and also obviously, it's not correct as written. At most, he can say that nearly everyone he talks to or that he respects feels this way. Even then, the question is whether people don't want to read about a married Spider-Man or don't like the stories that a succession of writers and editors uncomfortable with the concept have written about a married Spider-Man. And also, the question is always "as opposed to what?"

It would seem obvious that if you will not let a character change in any meaningful way, then you will eventually - I would say sooner rather than later - end up writing the same stories over and over. That's what DC found themselves doing in the early 60s, and I believe that was a major reason why Marvel was able to roar past them.

I will keep buying Amazing Spider-Man, at least for a while. I bought the clone stories and the Mary Jane is dead or separated stories. I didn't like them or, more precisely, I didn't like the tone of the stories or the direction they were going, even though the stories were often quite interesting by themselves, but I kept reading. And just as I did then, I will hope that this new direction will be neither permanently nor fully implemented.

In the short run, if Peter Parker has no believable romantic relationships (because he is editorially barred from any long-term relationship and has never been the type of person to enjoy dating for its own sake), no meaningful career prospects (because he is editorially barred from successfully completing graduate school or taking on any adult career that would make use of his substantial intellectual capabilities), and no interesting friends (because any member of the cast who becomes interesting is regarded as taking the focus off Peter, viz the Superman cast implosion of several years ago), I have to ask what there will be to interest a reader over age 10 apart from a succession of fights and action scenes, which are likely to seem new only to new readers.

I find my preferences for the various outlets doing new Spider-Man material tend to be opposite, depending on whether I am expressing my liking for the story-telling or my liking for the character of Peter Parker depicted therein. I like the Peter in the newspaper strip best of all, followed by Spider-Girl, but I like the stories and dialogue best in Ultimate Spider- Man and Amazing Spider-Man. In the latter two, however, I find Peter, in different ways, darkly unrecognizable and unsympathetic. The movies are right in the middle on all scores.

World War Hulk also inspires mixed feelings. I found the off-planet portion different from the usual run of the comic but not that interesting. I found the set-up for the invasion of Earth to be more interesting but not enough for the huge event it became. I liked the Front Line mini-series as I had the one for Civil War, but I didn't care for most of the characters WWH introduced. I found the story tainted by the Civil War mess and, in hindsight, compromised by the secret Skrull invasion story that's coming. And I didn't care for where the character ended up. But then, since Peter David left the series after his historic run, I think the Hulk has been engaged in a series of futile searches for a tone and direction that will support a long-term interest in a developing character. Arguably, in hindsight, Spider-Man has been in that state, with long interludes of interesting stories since Gwen Stacy died.

I'm certainly interested in the Secret Invasion Skrulls among us storyline, but I'm concerned that there are so many recent major story events at Marvel that have left a sour taste and are being defended with the claim that they will make more sense and seem more acceptable after Secret Invasion. I just don't think they can pull it off.

In the past many years, the best job I've seen of writing a good story that very credibly undoes a whole series of distasteful dead ends and sets long-running characters on more solid footing has been the Green Lantern arc. But even there, it seems there are bad stories they could not fully undo and distastefully dark new directions they are happily swinging into. I'm hard pressed to think of any major character I feel close to or excited about these days - I'm nearly 60 - even though the quality of the storytelling is probably the best across the board I've seen in a very long time.