>>149293324
>I don't think Claremont should be demonised for the decision, he was already sick for the stagnation and status quo and wanted the characters to grow, evolve, and eventually move on and be replaced by new characters and stories.
And if he's doing that with his own creations, that's fine, but when it comes to characters who were there before him and would be there long after him, writing them out of the book is fine, maybe he can bring them back later, maybe a later writer will, but even back in the 80s, the idea of trying to genuinely retire any of the characters readers actually read the books for, and think your own OCs are good enough to replace them and it won't hurt sales at all, it was never going to fly for long, even back then.
But just writing Cyclops out for a few years could've worked fine, it's giving him a wife and child that was the problem. When the wife is an OC he only just met, it's not remotely the same situation as when it's a longtime relationship that readers have been invested in for years, and marriage and children are logical next step and positive development people have been hoping to see for years.
Claremont had been in the industry more than ten years by the time he was trying to do this, he should've had more awareness of how much change he could and couldn't get away with by then.
The current situation, the problem isn't even the important established characters that Marvel and DC literally CAN'T retire, it's the subsequent generation after generation of newer characters, most of whom never really took off as well, but a lot of them are still around and won't go away either, because someone at the company likes them, or they have just enough fans that they don't want to make them angry, but every new writer keeps introducing his own new generation of OCs because he thinks he'll get that royalty money from adaptations, so we end up with a number of characters who all have the same powerset, or personality, or role.
