>>93748614IIRC the entire point of the Gauntlet was because Slott was late as shit getting his scripts in on time and sales were in the toilet as far as fans wholesale rejecting Brand New Day.
Kelly was hired as part of the writing crew for BND and basically wanted to bring back Spidey's older villains (there had been a moratorium of sorts on using Spider-Man's existing rogue gallery at the time; hence villains like Mr Negative, and other relationship drama dominating the book at the start of BND, though this had started to loosen by the time Mark Waid started writing BND Spider-Man).
The plan with Gauntlet was to spike sales by bringing back Spider-Man's older villains, tied into the whole Loli Raven story Slott was building. Slott's involvement in Grim Hunt was kept to a minimum, due to him running late with scripts, issues with Bendis (Bendis basically BANNED Slott from using Jessica Drew in Grim Hunt), and Gauntlet itself being a sort of stealth test to get rid of Slott.
It's why Slott's role in the Gauntlet was kept to a minimum outside a couple of chapters and why Kelly (granted going off of Slott's notes) wrote Grim Hunt. They wanted to see if removing Slott from the book and letting Kelly run things (with other writers backing him up), could stop the sales downward spiral trapped in.
Also the return/death of Kaine? Done mainly because Slott had done a Spider-Clone themed story a couple of months back and it had pulled better sales than most BND issues at that time. Julia Carpenter as supposed to die instead of Kaine, but Slott vetoed it and suggested Kaine die instead, but with the "out" that Kaine would rise from the grave as a Spider-Monster, since Slott was already working on Spider-Island during this period where he was basically on an unofficial vacation from the book.
Sadly, Grim Hunt and Gantlet did not do well, so Slott kept ASM and Kelly had to wait a couple of years before he was given his own Spider-Man book.
