To be fair, it seems pretty obvious that the higher-ups at Marvel understand the consequences of this attitude. Responding to a offhand remark I made recently, journalist and weblogger Franklin Harris offered a dead-on summary of the recent trends displayed by The House That Jack Built:

"Actually, I think it's becoming clear that most of Marvel's characters function best as hybrids, mixing superheroics with other genres. We see that with Daredevil (police procedural), Hulk (Hulk meets The X-Files) and New X-Men (soap opera/sci-fi). I believe this strategy works because, from the outset, the Marvel characters were a 'real world' alternative to DC's characters. As Stan Lee likes to say, if you live in New York, you half expect to see Spider-Man swing past when you look out your window."

I think Harris tends to overemphasize the innate "realism" of the Marvel universe; Stan Lee's big innovation has always struck me as introducing two-dimensionality into a previously one-dimensional genre. It's a relative thing, I suppose. That said, his basic point is correct; Marvel has in fact been trying to expand the superhero mythos in such a way as to sneak in other genres under the retailer/reader radar. The results vary wildly — New X-Men succeeds aesthetically by ditching the accumulated clichés of the superhero schema (goofy costumes, black-and-white motivations, and many of the underlying assumptions of the genre), while still keeping most of the basic mechanisms of the form, and as a result is able to graft science fiction and a pop-culture sensibility seamlessly to the book's basic chassis. Bendis' Daredevil, by contrast, is too smart for its own good; while frequently quite readable, the intelligence on display in the writing is undercut by the continued reliance on the genre's goofier tropes, and while the results may appeal to fans, it can be offputting to readers who come to the work with no emotional investment in superheroes. Frank Miller, who revitalized the book over a decade ago, got around this by skipping the cleverness and submerging the series in an almost primal film noir. The technique worked because Miller never asked you to take the work as anything other than an action-adventure joyride, which in turn merged the Mickey Spillane trappings and the Ditko-esque underpinnings without sacrificing either. Bendis brings too much self-conscious sophistication to the project to succeed with the same gambit.

The problem with Marvel's approach is that it plays more to the established reader than the curious onlooker; while a police procedural/superhero hybrid might be acceptable to the faithful, new readers are still going to have to get past their preconceptions to get the meat, and as the sluggishness of superhero graphic-novel sales in bookstores suggests, this is simply asking too much for most readers. A reader looking for a crime story isn't likely to settle for a sorta-crime story when there are alternatives available — and in today's booksellers market, there are always alternatives available just a couple of shelves over.