Anonymous
asked:
There was a point where authors like Roy Thomas could take old continuity laden plot points and rework them so that new and old audiences could enjoy them. It seems that nowadays it's easier to ignore old stories and thus, you do. Is it because you feel new audiences won't respond to intricate stories that reference older material or is it a conscious effort to throw off the yoke of continuity?
I think that Roy in particular was always interested in exploring old continuity–it’s difficult to find any story he wrote past a certain point that isn’t chock-a-block full of references not only to older comics but to other things he was interested in as well. So that’s the choices of a particular writer, not anything that was a mandate per se. Also, I think it was a lot easier to focus efforts in this manner when the Marvel Universe was only 10 years old rather than 50 years old, in that the history and continuity that was being referred to had a greater chance of being understood and appreciated by a larger segment of the audience.