The other day, someone linked to a blog post Tom Brevoort did awhile back, and in it, Tom makes a comment that I completely agree with, and I've been meaning to post about for awhile.

To set up the quote, Tom was talking about a "Year One" Hulk Annual by John Byrne that had some changes to the Hulk's origin, including effectively changing an earlier Hulk story by Peter David.

Tom says:

Months later, once John had left HULK, Peter David asked to do a scene in an early issue of CAPTAIN MARVEL, a series in which Rick Jones was the co-star. In the sequence, Rick is reading a copy of this Annual and laughing his head off at how wrong they'd gotten all the facts. There was a certain satisfaction to letting Peter do that, but that was a bad call as well. There's a place and a time for such criticism, but within the stories themselves isn't it.

(emphasis added)

I absolutely agree, and I was struck by how concisely Tom put it.

I don't have a problem with creators speaking their minds about comics and other comic creators. But when they begin to take their issues with other creators into the comics themselves, I think that's crossing a line into pettiness, which is not a good thing. If a change to a character/story is so offensive, then fine, reverse the change if you think it is important enough. Just don't use your story to take shots at another creator/creators.

There's plenty of places where you can get your views across (blogs, message boards, interviews) that there should be no need for it to appear in the comics themselves.