Or a creative person could have come up with a new name for her. Let her have her own identity... oh well.

Most distaff counterparts really don't get that. And if they do, it tends to be only because another distaff counterpart has arrived to claim her name.

The polite thing to do is call first.

That is one of the problems with comics today. They have no characters building their own identity but instead taking up the names of others, like Hulk & Thor & Captain America (a few times in the last decade alone). The new characters could have gone by different code names. They just seem to think using the name will bestow greatness upon their creation(s).

Now, when the X-Men find themselves stranded in the Savage Land, they can have S'Mores.

All thanks to Wolvie's heated claws.

I think it actually has more to do with an unwillingness on creator's parts to create a true new character that they'll never have ownership of. You create a character for Marvel or DC, they own it, you don't. When/if that character earns millions of dollars in box office and merchandising, they receive it, you don't.

Why create a whole new character when you can just slap an old name on a "new" character (rarely are they actually new characters), get the creative surge of having a new character without actually creating anything new? Jane Fos-Thor had all the freshness of a new character in a Thor title, but she wasn't a new character at all. Jason Aaron doesn't have to feel like he gave something away because all he did was rework an old character in a new way. Same deal with Jeph Loeb and Red Hulk. Jason Latour and Spider-Gwen.

They reuse old characters in new ways, like Jane Foster, who was around in the beginning of the Thor comics from the 60's. Though, in her case, she did gain Thor's powers in an old "What If", but still.

But then there are characters where they take on the roles for no apparent reason except that they are minority characters so the already popular name is then taken by them in order to make them popular. Basically, it's a lazy way to bring in a "new" character.

I'm not sure I agree with that. I have heard that argument made before about legacy characters being lazy attempts at introducing new characters. That assumes that the writer and editors have the introduction of those new characters as their primary goal. I'd argue that is not usually the case. It strikes me that the most important thing for those writers and editors is to keep existing properties viable.

For example, After 50 years of more-or-less continuous publication, a LOT of Thor stories have already been told. Presumably, Marvel would like to publish Thor comics for another 50 years. They have to tread very familiar ground and at the same time make things feel different enough that long-time fans don't feel like it is all redundant. If you own Thor as a superhero comic book property and expect to be publishing his adventures FAR into the future, what's the harm in taking a few years of Thor comics (a blip in the overall history, really) and exploring his mythos from a different perspective, in a way that has never been done in a Thor comic before? Letting Jane Foster Thor take over the title for a couple of years would seem lazy if it were really about promoting her as a character long-term, but that series never felt like that. The entire time it felt like she was holding the place of the traditional Thor and having bold adventures in the Thor universe in the meantime. She was dying from the very beginning, which suggests to me it was never about her, but about the Thor property.

Sure, now they can go back to telling stories with the traditional Thor, which puts them in the same place they would have been before. Now, though, they are doing so after giving the character a long break. His ongoing adventures now have a new era to reference and new ideas to bounce off of. That doesn't seem lazy to me. It seems like they were playing a longer game.

The "Incredible Hercules" interlude was an enormous breath of fresh air for a Hulk property that had been reduced to "Erm, there's another Hulk, except he's angrier. Yeah! Like, he's so angry, he's red! Umm... smash!" Contrast that with the insanely high concept "and this is why I love comics" Sacred Invasion arc and I feel like it's an easy sell to convince people that it was time for the Jolly Green Giant to take a little hiatus.

I've had a few thoughts on that Hulk era:

1. Jeph Loeb made ####, and Jeff Parker turned it into haute cuisine.

2. Pak should've stayed. I enjoyed his contributions FAR more than Loeb's ####, even though Pak is responsible for one of the more ludicrous Hulk retcons in the character's history.

3. That retcon? That Hulk (through Banner's influence) instinctively knew where humans were during his rampages, and knew where to hit to minimize casualties.

Hey, speaking of Hulk, have any of you guys been reading The Immortal Hulk? Issues one and two have both come out. It reads kind of like a horror comic, with the Hulk as the unmerciful judge and jury of sins. I like it.


EDIT: Agreed on Pak and Parker - those two are very underrated and have an almost ridiculous consistency of greatness associated with whatever they work on.

As an unabashed Ewing fan, I picked it up, and it is AMAZING. I love it so much. GF loves it too, and it definitely reads like a Horror comic, in a very good way.

Let me put it this way: Making changes to a character in the sense of creating a new character to take over the role is often an attempt at diversity by the industry. That said, an original character in an original role could easily fill in any need for diversity of any kind. There really is no need to change a pre-existing character in such a way as to fill that need. It takes away some originality from the new character. And by "change" of character, I mean something like the Hulk was a different guy who changed into the Hulk and called himself Hulk. They could have done his story with some slight changes and have a diff name. At the same time, Thor became Odinson and Jane became Thor. Thor became a female. Still, she could have used a different name.

Then there are the 3 Cap America's. One is a nazi. That's diversity at the cost of originality.

I have not read it, but I read about it. The writer stated he was taking the character into the horror realm with this new series.

If Jane Foster called herself anything but Thor, I feel like it would have lessened the impact of her story. I'm in agreement on Amadeus Cho and Jennifer Walters as Hulk (mostly because giving Jennifer Walters Bruce-Hulk's personality is the worst possible character decision for her and will automatically make me refuse to read whatever book she's in), but not at all with Jane.

She was always Thor's strongest mortal connection, and having her take up the mantle, wielding the power and name of a god while it literally killed her was some seriously powerful stuff, and if they called her "Thunder Hammer" or whatever else, it wouldn't have felt right. Not to mention that a key aspect of her story as Thor was that most of Asgard considered her a usurper and unworthy, so proving that she was neither of those became a key element.