>>97244301This is close to correct, or at least the most correct post. Marvel mostly avoided legacy characters until around the 80's and 90's. James Rhodes became Iron Man, John Walker became Captain America, Eric Masterson became Thor, Ben Reilly became Spider-Man.
Of those the one that was most controversial was Reilly becoming Spider-Man, and that was mainly because Marvel insulted the audience by claiming Ben was the real one and Peter was the clone. If they hadn't done that, the audience might've accepted the temporary change. This is close to what G. Willow Wilson said about legacy heroes:
>This is a personal opinion, but IMO launching a legacy character by killing off or humiliating the original character sets the legacy character up for failure. Who wants a legacy if the legacy is shitty?I would say for the killing off part, it depends. For instance people were okay with Wally West being the Flash and Barry Allen being dead. But a lot of character deaths (or whatever) today do feel like cheaper stunts compared to even 90's comics' cheap stunts.
And DC doesn't have it perfect; Kyle Rayner had the problem that Wilson described, they killed off the GLC and made Hal a villain so it poisoned the well for older readers. Had they not done that I think Kyle would've been generally accepted like Wally was by a larger audience. As it was, Kyle still had a large fanbase but it was to make up for the loss in older fans that dropped the book.
