UPDATED--A Man Alone?

UPDATE: It looks it was indeed Marvel policy to keep Brand New Day Spider-Man isolated from the rest of the Marvel Universe. Quesada at San Diego CC: "When we started 'Brand New Day,' we didn't want Spider-Man to start crossing over into the bigger Marvel universe. But now we're starting to bring in the old villains. You're going to see those guys in full force."

I love it when I'm right.

Back to the original post:

While reading Amazing Spider-Man #566, I noticed something.

Seeing Peter hop around in a spare Daredevil costume (what, Peter has no spare Spider suits?? One goes missing and he's out of business??), I realized that, since Brand New Day began, Peter Parker has essentially been isolated from the rest of the Marvel Universe.

There's probably a few good reasons for this, of course. Bendis' decision to make the Avengers mags all flashbacks about non-Avengers has certainly eliminated (temporarily, I hope) one of Spider-Man's main venues for interacting with other Marvel characters.

The directive that we have all-new villains has, I think, distanced Spider-Man, by not letting him interact with anyone who might have interacted with anyone else.

Unofficially, I wonder if the writers just don't want to deal with the headache of having to figure out exactly what Spidey's continuity is with other characters, what they're supposed to remember and what their current, Mephisto-altered relationship with the wallcrawler is supposed to be. Given that the Marvel "brain trust" seems to have yet to have decided exactly what's in and what's out after the retcon, it's maybe the wiser strategy.

But whatever the reason, until Daredevil showed up the past couple of issues, it's been pretty lonely for Spider-Man. And wasn't that always one of the great things about Spider-Man, that you could never tell who might turn up in his mag? Even without Marvel Team-Up, you could never tell when The Human Torch, or the Punisher, or Captain America, or Nightcrawler, or Daredevil, or gosh knows who might show up, even if only for a cameo.

But under Brand New Day (question: at what point does it stop being a brand new day??), it's almost as if Spidey were in some alternate pocket universe created by the Time Trapper, or a static warp bubble, or something. Is that what Mephisto did? Hmmm......

But really, I don't care. Dan Slott et. al., let's have Spidey start interacting with the Marvel Universe again. Please??