Both Developments  that occured to The SW and Vision made sense. She has been erratic in the past and the Visions attempt to take over the world was going to illicit an response. As far as Byrnes departure, I don't remember that he was fired. More likely he got mad over an editorial decision and quit like the baby he is.

I can't comment on what happened after his run because I only read one issue after it and then pretty much dropped out of superhero comics in general for a while (not because of Byrne!)  But I am glad that he broke up the hideous state into which Wanda and the Vision had been written by Englehart.  The explanation for their children (who made no sense at all) was ingenious, I thought, especially for tying it into an existing WCA foe.  I didn't have any problems with the writing, in fact making me sort of like the U.S.Agent was quite an accomplishment. 

It certainly isn't my favorite work of his, but it's the best the book had been since Gruenwald.

Byrne was basically the harbinger of married couples can't work and happily married with kids don't belong in super-hero comics with this run too. It is certainly the example everyone points to when they want to justify breaking up all the couples in modern comics (Peter/MJ, Lois/Clark, etc.) furthering the legacy of damage that run did as well. It's the bad gift that keeps on giving. 

I was wondering what happened. I just read the first 3 issues of the current  New Warrior series and he's a wise cracking silly guy again.

I hated how Steven Grant wrapped up OMEGA THE UNKNOWN in a DEFENDERS arc. It was a given that he couldn't have finished things as Gerber would have, but Grant could've tried to keep the emotional tone.  It was so bad, even the non-Gerber versions of HOWARD THE DUCK are models of fidelity.

For the FF the family was the team.

The problem with marrying long-standing characters off is that it messes with the integrity of those characters.  Peter always had Aunt May, so nothing changed there--however didn't everyone get sick of it after a while?  Imagine Bruce Wayne settling down (mentioning Robin is a stretch, and anyway he was part of the lifestyle, Bruce didn't have to be home by 8pm to tuck him into bed.)  I have less of a problem with minor, less frequently-seen characters getting married, but for people like Superman or Spider-Man it just doesn't work.  Nothing is more boring to read about than a married couple... and I feel that way about prose fiction as well.

Here's where we part ways..nothing is more boring to me than a character that is not allowed to have story. Not plot. Story. Story is the result of character meeting conflict. If you worry about character integrity and preserving it, you're concern is not telling story but maintaining the ease of plotting. However, if there is not story, there is no characters, just plot puppet which are boring as hell to read about and have no integrity whatsoever. 

Story is not plot. And plot is not story. If you strip the protagonist of the connective tissue which allows for consequences of your conflicts, you strip the ability of the character to have stories told about them. They can dance on the strings of the plot, they can maintain their costumes and powers and rogues galleries and all of the status quo in the quest for "integrity" and go through all the motions of a plot structured like a story, but it's not story and ultimately it's not interesting because none of it matters in the end to the growth of the protagonist. It cannot grow and preserve it's integrity in the way you frame it, so in the end it is just the same thing over and over and over again..which is boredom personified. The more connective tissue you have for the protagonist, the more potential you have for conflict and thus for story. Family, spouses, marriage itself is a grist mill for potential coonflict and thus for potential stories. 

If you look at the seminal runs of super-hero books, of the stories that become evergreen sellers and pointed to most often on best of lists, it is not stories that preserve the integrity of the character, it is stories that say to hell with that and tell good stories with consequernces for the characters and the connective tissues surrounding those characters. The common trope you hear all the time is that the best stories come form fringe characters because no one worries about preserving the status quo with those characters, i.e there are stories being told not plot exercises that have to maintain the integrity of the character. If maintaining integrity is the point, boredom is the natural outcome; there's no suspense, no drama, no story. I'm not advocating change for the sake of change-that's not story either, but set up a status quo, introduce the conflict, resolve the conflict and let the consequences of that conflict play out on the character and how he interacts with his environment i.e family, friends, antagonists, setting, etc. Family doesn't inhibit that, it's not an obstacle to interesting storytelling, it is a source of it. 

-M