fubarthepanda wrote:
I look at myself as a target demographic:  I was raised on super-hero comics and still enjoy reading them today and have two kids who also both enjoy comics.  However, I rarely touch a modern Marvel book with a ten-foot pole -- and it has nothing to do with the characters.  I just don't want to read "adult" super-hero comics -- if I want to read more adult comics, I'd much rather (and do) read books from Fantagraphics, D&Q and Top Shelf (not to mention European comics and manga).  I took my kids to the LCS for FCBD over the weekend, and all of the kids were fighting over a small spinner rack of Archie and DC's kids book and didn't bat a single eye at any of the "mainstream" product coming out of Marvel/DC.  Of course, these kids only come to the LCS once a year, so it's not a recurring sale, but it did clearly illustrate to me that if you can find a way to get the books made for kids in-front of kids, they will buy them.  Which is probably why Archie comics today sell just as much as Bendis Avengers, just outside the direct market.

I just think in this particular case, the Gold Key heroes got way, way too shopworn over the past two decades. Nobody even knows who the hell they are anymore. Valiant pushed the characters and concepts so far that by the end, none of them were even recognizable. Then they suffered through the reinvention of two more short-lived reboots. Now they're being rebooted again. That's about 4 different interpretations of these same characters in 20 years. It's just too much.

There's stuff you can probably bring back "as is" and make a fairly successful go of it (John Byrne's Next Men is the perfect example) but all these other characters have been "redefined" so many times by so many hands that the fans neither recognize nor care about them anymore.