PeterDavid.net

I didn't read it either, but from what I heard of it, I didn't like it.

I always thought the coolest thing about the MU was that they never had a "Crisis" thing to mess up stuff. Most reboots in the MU just undid some months of a particularly ill-conceived storyline (I'm thinking of the Clone Saga here and Heroes Reborn).

Undoing decades of stories is a new thing for the MU and it's something that makes me groan already. Pre-OMD and Post-OMD will be forevermore part of any discussion of Spider-Man now. Sigh.

I dunno... I'm not radically in favor of the marriage, but I also don't agree with Quesada's take, that young readers necessarily want young characters (so let's undo the marriage that makes Peter "old"). When I was a teen, I liked Batman and thought Robin sucked. I liked Jean Grey and thought Kitty Pryde sucked. And several of my teen friends were just the same.

Things have changed so much now, that this new generation require characters that are as young as them?

Sorry about injecting the request into the other entry. I kinda miss you having a board where we could raise these kinds of things. Even if you're not personally involved in a storyline, you have been in the industry so long and your storytelling sense is so consistent, that I think it's natural people want to hear your opinion on big events. It's like MSNBC asking Zbigniew Brezinski his opinion on the Bhutto assassination.

I haven't either. I don't think I plan to. I'm just curious what this means for Fearful Symmetry? That's my all-time favorite Spider-Man story ever. MJ was kinda crucial to the story, as she recognized right away that Spidey was an imposter.

what bothers me most about this is, that I thought that's what ultimate spiderman was for a younger peter parker unmarried etc etc.

I haven't read the last chapter but i did read spoilers.

It just feels Joe Q is sitting there saying I want this Spiderman I don't like change.

The fact that he feels that the stories of married Peter are limited says me to me that he's more of an artist than a writer.

I suppose PAD, unlike JMS you're not going to weigh in on any particular opinions.

I've been keeping tabs on spidey alot more since FNSM and gave OMD a good look. Overall i would have to say that the reasoning for the 'reboot' was flimsy at best (May is old and will die soon anyway) and the end result (if the last few pages of ASM 545) felt like Spidey had taken a gigantic leap back in time in two ways:

1. he's living with his aunt despite, being a grown man (or is he anymore?)
2. the party seemed to be filled with teenagers, with hormones abound.

I may reduce my spidey intake soon.

Elton

I can't comment on the story because I haven't read it. I'll say a few things about the reboot.

It seems like a bit much.

The marriage, organic web shooters (and I'm guessing all the powers he got from The Other), the unmasking, and Harry back to life. Who knows what else, will Gwen Stacey's kids ever be mentioned again?

It's not that I particularly liked these things. In fact, I'm glad to have Harry back. But there are so many things that have been wiped clean that anything that happens in the next few years will feel like it will probably be temporary, too. Several things getting wiped away (like the new powers) were barely touched upon in the comic.
It's like there was a promise of character advancement that didn't actually happen.

As for the marriage, I can see Joe's point. And 20 years from now any talk of Peter getting married will bring responses of "Spider-Man has been single all my life! How dare you make him get married, you evil bastards!" It does seem like a lot of the objections to the break up are more about momentum than good story telling. Were the writers itching to write certain stories that depended on Spidey being single? If so, a few good stories will go a long way to making people move past this change.

PAD Said "What do I think of it? Well, I have not read it, to be honest, since I knew the story particulars for months now. Let us just say that it is not the direction I would have taken things."

My opinion, as a life long Hard core Spidey-Fan: I wish peter david was EIC at Marvel.

Fortunatley ANYTHING in comics can be undone, as this idotic storyline shows, it's a matter of the will to do so. But untill marvel fixes this shit, i'm not buying any new spider-man comics. Reprints of old stuff sure, other marvels like hulk, and the upcoming Clandestine relaunch , yeah, and the PAD Hulk TPBS of course, but no spider-man. Not even x-overs as just seeing the "new" spidey hurts to much. And i sure as hell won't be buing the one more day tpb.

Keep up the good writing Pete and Happy New Year!

I don't, for one second, believe this change will be forever. I give it two years, tops. We might get some good stories out of it, but those will hardly be enough to erase the bad taste left in so many mouths by this particular plot hammer.

Oh, and I'm really afraid that Aunt May will go back to not knowing that Peter is Spidey. Forget the marriage, that was the best thing that ever happened to Spidey. Aunt May stopped being a fragile invalid who would have a heart attack if she ever found out. I really liked her as a strong willed supporter of Peter.

Let us just say that it is not the direction I would have taken things.

Thank God for that. I wish it had been your call, or JMS's for that matter.

Here is a little thing I wrote when I realized where this story was going. I was planning on sending it to everybody who was contactable online who was somehow connected with Marvel, past or present (PAD, Brian K. Vaughn, Roger Stern, anybody with a site), but abandoned that plan when I found that this wasn't what JMS--the writer--wanted to do either. So it wouldn't matter how much of a fuss I raised, because in the end it came down to what Joe Quesada wanted. I e-mailed this to him as well, but it got returned. Anyway, here it is.

Right now it's looking depressingly like by the end of this story arc, One More Day, Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson-Parker will be broken up. Broken up either for a long time, or for good.

It's no secret that Joe Quesada thinks they never should have been married in the first place, nor that he's far from the only person in the industry who feels that way. Maybe we're seeing him indulge himself.

Here's why I think this is a mistake.

First, I've read people complain that having Peter being married makes him seem less young, less like the male readers he's supposed to resemble since many of them aren't married. This is somehow a problem. But the thing is, Peter's still young. He's still under 30, but he isn't 16 years old any more. People generally do try to get married in their mid-20s, and even before that they are ALWAYS on the lookout for that special person who makes their life complete. Peter being married doesn't make him seem old.

Second, this is not something that the fans want because they like MJ and they like Peter and MJ as a couple. MJ has been seemingly killed off in the past, and the readers didn't like it. MJ was brought back from the dead only to walk out on Peter, and the readers didn't like that either. Listen to what the fans are saying today, or read what they're posting, or read their e-mails. Most of them do NOT want Peter and MJ broken up. They don't want Peter and MJ broken up for the same reason that they wouldn't want Reed and Sue Richards broken up, for the same reason that they didn't want Scott and Jean broken up. That reason: they like these people as a couple, and when you break up a couple that's so beloved by the fans--and I'm not exaggerating with what I say next--it breaks their hearts and makes them hate whoever is responsible. Creating characters who are so three-dimensional that fans grow to love them is a double-edged sword; it makes the fans keep coming back for more, but it also means that the fans are emotionally attached to the characters.

MJ is not just a prop, not just so much dead weight keeping Peter from playing the field and keeping writers from writing stories about Peter's romantic adventures and misadventures. She is just such a three-dimensional character beloved by the fans, because the more talented writers have fleshed her out and made her part of the stories instead of giving her a couple of lines each issue and shunting her to the side so Peter can shine. Over the years the fans have become more attached to her as Peter's significant other than they ever were attached to Gwen Stacy or Betty Brant or whoever else Peter's hooked up with.

For a writer or an editor-in-chief to say "Well, I don't care what the fans think, I don't like her married to Peter, so I'm going to break them up" is a gigantic, enormous middle finger right in the face of the fans who have supported Marvel from the beginning to the present, those fans whom Marvel should not only try to keep happy to keep them buying the books but whom I'd say Marvel has an obligation to listen to. If a writer feels like he or she has too many restrictions on what he or she can do with a character then that isn't good, but it should take a back seat to the desires of their audience, the people they are writing for, the people who are buying their product. If you just write the stories you want and say "the hell with what the fans want", well, you had better prepare yourself for a sharp drop in sales. The fans are only going to pay to read the book as long as they're happy with it.

As I said in the other post, I am dropping this book in protest. If you feel like I do, like JQ knew that you and the majority of fans did not want this and he went ahead and did it anyway, I suggest you do the same.

I also posted elsewhere that Quesada might be planning to get Peter and MJ back together, just not married. He might be saying "after that all the people who want them together will be happy, and I'll be happy, and everybody will be happy." Well, no. People aren't just gonna forget about this (I know that I won't).

Also, as this review says, Peter's revelation of his identity (now magically undone) had a HUGE impact on how Civil War went and on the rest of the Marvel Universe. Undoing that means changes not just to the Spider-Man titles, but across the board.

And why? Because Quesada wanted things to be like Amazing Fantasy #15 again? Because somehow the current stories aren't interesting enough without Peter sleeping around, or the possibility of him breaking up with MJ?

As I read somebody ask in their post, "Isn't this what the Ultimate books are for?"

I'd be curious to know what you think of it from the perspective of a creator who's spider-man stories have now been invalidated or erased from continuity. I think that's what bothers me most about the whole thing is the lack of respect for people who managed to tell good spider-man stories just fine with married Peter and MJ.

Sorry, I screwed up with the tags. Everything from "Right now..." up until "...they're happy with it" was part of that old post I wrote.

And I'm also sorry for interjecting, PAD. This kind of thing is hard to contain when you love a character, or a pair of characters together, so much.

Okay, I am going to say one anti-marriage thing.

When the first few issues of F'n Spidey came out, I came on this board and complained about Peter and MJ fighting. I said that I was tired of that and didn't want to see them constantly fighting.

However, they weren't constantly fighting. They fought in one issue and made up in the very next one. So really, I was complaining about a short term disagreement between a married couple. That was the most minor form of drama possible, but I didn't want to see it, I just wanted to see them happy. I think I remember other people having similar feelings.

That's a lot to ask of the writers. Always make the couple completely happy, but still make them entertaining? I think I liked the marriage as an idea better than I liked the actuality of reading a comic about a happily married Spidey.

My first reaction was "He was sent back in time--to about issue 97--(Harry out of rehab for drug problem, etc.) So, did everything in all the Spidey titles since the wedding still happen, BUT with PP/SM being single???? Very disappointed. Scratched all Spidey titles from my pull list at my local comic shop.

I merely want to point out that any kind of development like this one, essentially a ‘reboot’ of a character has always been one of the intrinsic flaws of comics.

There is a great read titled The Cheapening of Comics by Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson. It was delivered at the Festival of Cartoon Art at Ohio State University in 1989 and is still quite relevant today.

The particular passage that resonates with this specific discussion is this:

And then we have established cartoonists who have grown so cavalier about their jobs that they sign strips they haven't written or drawn. Anonymous assistants do the work while the person getting the credit is out on the golf course. Aside from the fundamental dishonesty involved, these cartoonists again encourage the mistaken view that once the strip's characters are invented, any facile hireling can churn out the material. In these strips, jokes are written by committee with the goal of not advancing the characters, but of keeping them exactly where they've always been. So long as the characters never develop, they're utterly predictable, and hence, so easy to write that a committee can do it. The staff of illustrators has the same task: to keep each drawing so slick and perfect that it loses all trace of individual quirk. That way, no one can tell who's doing it. It's an assembly line production. It's efficient, but it makes for mindless, repetitive, joyless comics. We need to see more creators taking pride in their craft, and doing the work they get paid for. If writing and drawing cartoons has become a burden for them, let's see some early retirements and some room for new talent.

It’s one of the reasons why we are in a loop but, publishers and creators both have yet to break the cycle.

I haven't read Spider-Man since "Sins Past." If Harry is back, is Gwen back, too? I might try the book again if that's the case.

Hoy Murphy

I like the idea, but hate the execution.

I was in high school when Peter Parker got married. I thought to myself, "Oh, that'll be interesting for a few years. Then they'll change it."

I was amazed to return to comics 20 years later and realized he was still married.

I actually agree with Quesada's main points that Peter Parker should be unmarried, because the soap opera aspect is a main defining feature for the character. That's certainly what I remember about Spider-Man growing up.

But would Peter Parker ever agree to a literal deal with the devil? Would MJ go along with it? What damage does this do to all those stories that went on before?

And this is more of a fanboy's sticking point, but is it really true that Peter and MJ's marriage was all that unique and rare, as Mephisto suggests? Didn't we see in "House of M" that Peter TRULY wishes he were married to Gwen (which I think is probably more true to the character?)

It's just not good storytelling.

I think it's narrow-minded editorial fiat masquerading as a story, and I'm sad for JMS to be put in such an untenable situation. It diminishes the work of every other creator who's contributed to that now-erased legacy, and I'm tired of that approach to the narrative. It's like improv class with Michael Scott, and nobody wants to be a part of that.

PAD,

I hope this question is appropriate and that you can answer. Given your experience with marketing, etc.: Are any of the threatened actions by readers ever effective? There are a ton (an internet ton, but still) of folks threatening to drop ASM, to drop all of Marvel, etc., etc... does any of that ever really do any good in the comics world?

There's a post over at the Spider-Man message board where someone argues that, ultimately, it's sales that are the bottom line, and that Marvel has "succeeded" in this project if they drop less than 30% of ASM's sales. (ASM sold 100K, but Sensation and FNSM only sold 50K--rough, relatively arbitrary numbers. If the 3x weekly ASM beats that combination, then Marvel has not only "won" but it will ignore comments from "internet fanboys".)

I'm not advocating the argument, but it's made me think, and I'm ignorant of so much of the "other" side of comics that I thought I'd ask someone who wasn't ignorant.

Thanks for your time.

Eric

I read a lot of Watterson's essays in "The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book" and agree with him on most things and his desire to make his work as good as possible.

I really wish that it were possible to stick with one creative team from start to finish, but when a character's been around for 45 or 50 years that obviously becomes impossible. Failing that, I at least hope that when a new writer's brought in that they will respect what the old one did and not screw around with it, and that is what we've got happening here. Quesada decided he didn't like what the old guys did (Michelinie and DeFalco as writer and EiC respectively, I think) and decided to undo it. I would be interested to hear their thoughts on OMD, since I would say that DeFalco and Michelinie have given us some of the best Peter/MJ stories in continuity, both in the main universe and in the MC2 line.

I never liked reading Spider-Man because his life seemed so depressing. I don't want to read comics to get depressed. The first time I actually bought and enjoyed a Spider-Man book book was when he became an Avenger and was living in the Avengers Tower with his aunt and wife, and was actually somewhat enjoying his life. It was a new start for Peter and it was a joy to read. I was thrilled he was finally climbing out of all the angst that defined his character.

And now all that progress is going away and, most likely, I'll never again pick up a Spider-Man book.

There are a ton (an internet ton, but still) of folks threatening to drop ASM, to drop all of Marvel, etc., etc... does any of that ever really do any good in the comics world?

Well, I recently read something Dan Slott wrote back in March in which he said "Your sale acts as a vote." (The whole thing is here. So if enough people drop the book...who knows?

I've seen Quesada in person enough times to believe he's a very very cool person; a real gentleman. But this whole deal with the bottled genies is striking me as unrelentingly selfish. Like he's held back from forcing his hand into most things but couldn't help himself in this case. Time will tell how this goes. It feels like a Bart-Allen-as-Flash sized mistake at this point.

I'm not thrilled with how this was accomplished, and it's still unclear just what Peter's current status is.

On the other hand, over time I have come to the conclusion that every 20 years or so, doing linewide reboots wouldn't be a bad thing in order to scrape off the barnicles that end up getting attached to characters. And it occurs to me that with the possible exception of Superman (basically due to both the radical diminishing of the difference between Clark and Superman and the marriage to Lois), Spider-Man has changed from his roots more than any other major comics character.

I mean, take a look at, oh, every non-comics version of Spider-Man. They all put him either in high school or college. While Peter has potential, he's not successful at anything other than grades. There's at least a love triangle, if not a generally bad social life. Etc. When starting Spider-Man from scratch, *no one* is doing so with him as a married upper-20s type with either MJ or Aunt May as knowledgeable about his other id and thus a valued support element and making Peter much, much, much less lonely.

Nope, it's Peter as general loser with future, not current, potential, and Spidey as still learning and hardluck hero release for Peter, who has no one to talk to about his life or his guilt complexes. Yes, the Fox cartoon and Spider-Man 3 were changing to MJ being a general confidant, but note that S-M3 is generally considered the weakest of the movies (admittedly including other reasons for that).

So the real questions are whether Spidey has gotten too far from his roots/core elements, and whether the changes have made him a better, more interesting character. To be honest, I've tended to prefer the Ultimate version for a while now (yes, I know MJ and May now know who Peter is in that). So while I'm not thrilled about the method of rebooting, or how it's unclear just what Spidey's history is now, I think this is a genuine attempt to get Spidey back to his roots, particularly as no other character in the MU has gotten so far from their roots as him.

I'm willing to consider that perhaps the marriage was not the very best thing for the books, and that there would have been more possibilities if it had never happened.

But I firmly believe that whatever else the marriage did, it absolutely did not wreck Spider-Man. Plus, it's done. It happened. You can't turn back the clock and change it...or perhaps it's more accurate to say that you shouldn't.

What I want to know is: Is Aunt May still going out with Jarvis? I think that's the real issue here...

I don't and haven't been following the titles for many years, so my opinion doesn't make much difference - but my impression is that it is hostile to present fans to directly contradict continuity unless it has become entirely unworkable. I don't mind ignoring the WWII war service of characters who just don't work as men in their late 80s, for example, but just can't see the need for ignoring Spider-Man's marriage and adulthood. As a child, I never liked child or teen comic book heroes (except for the original X-Men, who were written as teens, but spoke like the middle aged men writing them in the 1960s). The Hulk was a grown man with a doctorate, and I always saw Iron Man as at least in his 30s. Most of the other appealing heroes seemed to cluster between 25 and 35, and that seemed fine. Spider-Man was originally written as younger, but his concerns and employment were those of a grown man. He "sounded" like Stan Lee, who was last a teenager at the same time as my parents. Now that I am much older, like so many readers, I still have no interest in child heroes.

Here's what kills me about this:

I don't really have strong feelings one way or another concerning continuity. I like a good story, and out of continuity stuff and re-boots etc. are fine with me. I used to love the old "Brave and Bold" stories set on "Earth Bob Haney" (People over 40 might get that.) But I also enjoy the cross-overs and the Easter-eggs, and having a sense of history of the characters.

But Marvel wants to have it both ways. It seems that they've gone from having maybe a cross-over happen between a few titles over the summer to having two or three going through all the titles all the time. Is World-War Hulk over yet? What about the Initiative? And is Cap still dead? Spider-man was in the Avengers and a big part of those stories, so if he's re-booted, you pretty much throw away any sense of suspension of disbelief you have for the whole thing. So Marvel should either re-boot the whole line (again, isn't that what the Ultimates is about?) or not have everything tied so closely together that you can't just pick the titles you like without having to buy the crossover with that other crappy book.

Well, I think what you didn't say about the storyline speaks volumes.

MJ should have also asked Mephisto to bring back Steve Rogers, add more mutants, make the Hulk grey again, and revert it all to 1962 while she was at it.

Might as well make the screw job 100%....

http://img242.imageshack.us/my.php?image=omdhn1.jpg
My response to the "Spider-Man makes a deal with the devil" reboot. 'Nuff said.

I'm not currently reading anything from Marvel (and haven't for a few years now), but I did read about "One More Day" in CBG. As I understand it, Peter was given the choice (presumably by some sort of cosmic entity) between Aunt May's life and his married life with M.J. In order for Aunt May to live, he must agree to allow history to change so his marriage never happened. Alternately, if he wants to stay with M.J., he must allow Aunt May to die.

Again, that's how I understand the situation Peter faced. It's a tough choice, but to my way of thinking the right answer, under those circumstances, would be for Peter to say his good-byes to Aunt May. And I suspect Aunt May would have agreed; that she'd say she's lived a full life, and that Peter and M.J. are just getting started.

You know, in a way it's too bad that instead of a choice between Aunt May and M.J., Peter didn't have to choose between M.J. and, say, his younger sister (if he had a sister). Now that would have been a really tough choice, especially since the "lived a full life" aspect would no longer be part of the equation.

Again, I'm not reading anything from Marvel, including, obviously, the "One More Day" storyline; so all I have to go on is what I've read here and in the CBG article. But it seems that my understanding was correct, and Peter now never was married. Some people will think that's a good idea, that marrying him off in the first place was a mistake; others will think it's a boneheaded move.

Me? As I read this thread, I thought of an issue of Sandman: "Men of Good Fortune" from "The Dolls House" storyline. Morpheus and Hob Gadling meet once a century in a tavern, and in one of their meetings, the following conversation takes place:

Hob: "I saw King Lear yesterday. Mrs. Siddons as Goneril. The idiots had given it a happy ending."

Morpheus: "That will not last. The great stories will always return to their original forms."

One may argue that the overall Spider-Man story has returned to its original form- with a single Peter Parker- but I disagree. I think Peter's marriage was part of that "original form", which isn't a play with a specific beginning, middle and end, but an ongoing storyline that hasn't yet ended.

No matter how many times you see (or read) King Lear it will always focus on the same people in the same situations, saying the same lines (give or take some degree of artistic license by actors and/or directors). If we view Peter Parker's story the same way Morpheus and Hob Gadling viewed that particular work by Billy Shakespeare, then Spider-Man's "original form" would be the high school student living at home with Aunt May and harassed by Flash Thompson. And it would always stay that way. At one time that might have been fine, but the comicbook industry no longer has new "generations" of readers coming in every few years; and who knows if those older readers would want to read about a high school aged Peter Parker.

It's possible that they would, I suppose. Years after I was out of high school, I enjoyed both Buffy and Veronica Mars, two shows that addressed, among other things, some of the challenges of teen life.

But then, both Buffy and Veronica eventually graduated and moved into adulthood. I wonder if even those readers long past high school age themselves who'd welcome a return to a teenage Peter Parker would want him to always remain that age. Especially since it would strain credulity (even more than gaining super powers via the bite of a radioactive spider) to have all of his adventures take place within just the four years of high school.

Actually, when the Sandman scene sprang to mind, I just recalled Morpheus saying "that will not last", not the rest; but had he and Hob been talking about the (apparent) "it never happened" situation with Peter and M.J.'s marriage, I think his answer would pretty much have been the same.

In short, this will not last.

Rick

I've now read some of the posts made while I wrote my previous post. M.J. made the deal, not Peter? That's interesting. If that's the case, did she do it with or without his knowledge? Why did she do it?

whatever the answer, I still think this will not last.

Rick

Yeah, Marvel just lost an AMAZING SPIDER-MAN reader. If I say too much more, I'll devolve into sentence fragments and Cro-Magnon noises, and those don't come across well in print.

SPIDER-MAN PLOTS: YOU'RE DOING THEM WRONG.

Heh. The way I look at it, the core driver for Spider Man is "With great power, comes great responsibility."

A single, unmarried Spidey constantly has to choose between things that are important to him (fame, popularity, grades,e tc.) vs. other people. Hard decisions, but we can generally agree that giving up a social life, or even giving up grad school to save hundreds of people is a good choice.

But a married Spidey? With a mortgage? Maybe even with kids? Now, you're forcing Spidey to make choice among other people. A hero decides to forgo personal good for the greater good. It is NOT a choice of a hero to be made to choose FOR other people--that's the choice of a person in a bad situation.

I'm not so sure that a married, older Peter Parker is such an integral part of the Spider Man story...

WGA strike analogue/question.

I was told that you are doing one of the BND arks on Amazing Spider-Man. A lot of us are dropping Amazing Spider-Man in protest of OMD. You are now put in a similar position like the non writers that are effected by the halt of production by the writher’s strike. Sales of your books will be down through absolutely no fault of your own. Could this effect your job, pay, or job security when your exclusive contract is up? Can you get some numbers from retailers that your friendly with to see how many people are actually dropping Amazing Spider-Man?

PS I’m sorry your caught in the middle of this. I’ll still be buying X-Factor.

I had a feeling this was coming for a long time since the Q-man kept getting more and more vocal about his dislike for Peter's marriage, especially saying how he felt it was "limiting". To me, that just smacks of an unimaginative writer who shys away from challenges. Honestly, how many characters have been killed off simply because of A) Writer X didn't like him/her, or B) The writer had no idea what to do with the character. Look how often certain creative teams on the X-books have tried to kill off Gambit simply because they had no idea how to write him! Characters revamped or simply done away with, just because a newer creative team threw a hissy fit of "I can't work in this storyline! I don't know what to do with this character! Change it for me!!", characters like the intelligent Hulk, Supergirl, Genis-Vel.... Crap, I'm seeing a pattern here...

The point is, if you're going to be a writer, then work WITH the established character, work within the flow of the story and continuity. Restarting things just because you feel like crying "This is too hard!!!" is lazy, hack storytelling; JMS deserved better, the fans deserved better, and more importantly, the character deserved better.

I haven't read the story, but I do agree with the POV that SM worked fabulously as a soap opera for a very long time and that having him married limits story possibilities (soap opera stories, not villians smaking people stories).

Also, the whole idea of her being a (former) supermodel was just a horrible development and her subsequent acting career was not much better. I mean Peter Parker/Everyman married to A Claudia Schiffer? That is so OT it's not even funny.

I think MJ's character needs a return to roots: she should be fun and interesting, but whenever I've read SM tales in recent years, she just seemed like "the wife."

I plan to pick up the new Spidey run and am looking FWD to it too.

I had a feeling this was coming for a long time since the Q-man kept getting more and more vocal about his dislike for Peter's marriage, especially saying how he felt it was "limiting". To me, that just smacks of an unimaginative writer who shys away from challenges.

Actually, I don't think it was "limiting." In many ways, it simply wasn't possible. In a lot of ways, having a wife and children makes it impossible for Peter Parker to be a hero.

The new status quo of the Spider-Man books feels less like a "Brand New Day" and far more like "This is where I came in".

It's a shame. I really liked the Spider-Man books, but I'll not buy another until this travesty is undone. Thank God for Spider-Girl.

If Quesada was so intent on getting rid of MJ, he should have just killed her off. Make it a death you could easily get out of, Like She's found years later captured in Dr, Doom's castle. I suppose you could have them get a divorce, but that's not nearly as dramatic.

I think the stated reasons for this Cosmic Command-Z are fraudulent and the execution is inane. I also find the additional undoing of Peter's unmasking pretty exasperating.

When the unmasking happened, I still had enough faith in Marvel to wonder just how they were going to deal with the unavoidable repercussions of such a development. The obvious answer: they had no intention of dealing with it.

I really think Marvel has screwed itself pretty badly with this. They've stated quite emphatically that in the Marvel universe, nothing that happens is ever all that important. Yup, this is just comics, and we're all used to the idea of big events being either actively retconned or simply swept under the rug.

But with this one issue they've truly confirmed that Marvel Editorial will bail out of any story or twist at the first sign that the sales boost is over and the inconvenience is about to begin.

Note that I haven't even discussed whether I like the idea of a single Peter Parker or not. That's immaterial.

I mean, when I say "One More Day has brought me several steps closer to writing off Marvel for good" it's not a hissy fit. "How dare you make Spider-Man more relatable to teenagers! Sirs! Consider yourselves DROPPED from my pull list!" Nope, that's not it at all.

It's that Marvel is increasingly failing to produce a product that I'm interested in buying. I need to see a certain level of quality and craftsmanship.

Other publishers are producing "Citizen Kane" and "The Godfather" on a regular basis. Marvel is content to crank out an endless series of "Jackass" sequels, where the stunts have to get bigger and more explosive just to hold the audience's attention. Things where lots of stuff happens, but none of it matters.

You know what's ironic? I'm thinking of a terrific thing JMS said about the editorial absolutes of "Babylon 5": "On this show, not only does **** happen...**** STAYS happened!"

It brought home an important point: you don't get credit for having the "guts" to blow up the Enterprise if the ship and its crew are all as good as new the very next week, and nobody on board is the least bit affected by the experience. It's just too bad that Marvel Comics doesn't have a "show runner" that's one-tenth as committed as JMS was.

Well, the one thing that will make me forgive Quesada for this (latest) crapfest issuing from Marvel is when he has Ororo make her own deal with Mephisto to get out of that misbegotten marriage to the Panther.
Of course, since Joey Q was one of the prime architects of THAT marriage (despite his vocal distaste of the Peter/Mary Jane marriage), I expect it will be a cold day in hell before Ororo splits from T'Challa and marries the *real* love of her life--Stevie Hunter.

Even though thanks to numerous rumors and spoilers I was fairly aware of what was going to happen, I was still pretty upset when I was finished reading ASM. As Spidey has been my favorite comic book character since I was about 2 years old, I currently own every single issue of Amazing (thanks to Essentials) PPSM, Web of...and all the others. I have to say that this is the first time I have ever considered dropping Spider-Man completely.

I also want to add that between Newsarama (which has conducted a poll on this everyone should check out), CBR, Cityofheroes.com (gaming site, but we dicuss comics) and a few other sites I visit...a majority of people are pretty disgusted. It makes me feel a little better to see hundreds or even thousands of people just as disgusted as I am. And gives me hope that if all these people drop the book as they claim they are going to, hell maybe this crap won't go on much longer.

For laughs, there is also a video on YouTube of a disgusted fan wiping his ass with ASM 545 :) Don't have the link handy, but I assume it shouldn't be too difficult to find...

Michael

Retcon bombs are always lame, unless it becomes a core piece of the story like PAD's F-in' Spidey arc, that is.

Short version: I think the direction the Spider titles are taking can be interesting and fun (I like what I see of the Brand New Day), and while moments of One More Day were well executed, the whole thing just felt really, really awkward. It was like you could see Quesada in the panels where Mephisto was supposed to be. I did find a few moments in the final issue well done (the MJ / Pete stuff was just plain ole heatbreaking), but it just felt very forced overall.

Retcon-punching away Civil War #2 (and, by extension, pretty much every Spidey story in the last 20 years) is fairly lame. Harry Osborn back is a neat surprise, though. Joe is right about one thing - Spidey had one of the best supporting casts out there that was slowly atrophied over the years by various storylines and it needed to get it back to something that makes it tick.

Anyway, I still think this is a moot discussion because the numbers for Brand New Day Amazing x3 will probably be huge and then that'll be used as proof that Joe Q. "did the right thing".

Further proof that the only retcon story that I actually like is Voyager's "Year Of Hell" becuase that storyline was meant to be really, really ironic. And that first arc of Captain Marvel Vol. 4, that was pretty cool too.

Postscript: I saw somebody buying a Civil War trade at the bookstore the other day, and it kind of bumed me out because that crazy cool reveal in #2 is just done gone away. I was one of the few people who liked the ID reveal, I thought it was intersting. Yes, Parker screwed up by doing it, but it's his M.O. ever since Amazing Fantasy #15.

Given all the OMG reactions to the whole "deal with the devil" thing, I find it rather amusing that the arc is widely referred to as OMD...

Posted by: Brian Osserman at December 31, 2007 01:49 AM

Could this effect your job, pay, or job security when your exclusive contract is up?

I hope not, and I doubt it. In making the decision whether to keep PAD they would look at sales of X-Factor, of She-Hulk, of FNSM before it got discontinued...everything, as opposed to just his part of BND. If sales drop, they're gonna know that it was the fault of the person who decided to break up Peter and Mary Jane, not PAD.

That said, I'm sorry that taking this stand is going to have any sort of negative impact on you, Peter.

Posted by: Eric Qel-Droma at December 30, 2007 11:00 PM

There are a ton (an internet ton, but still) of folks threatening to drop ASM, to drop all of Marvel, etc., etc... does any of that ever really do any good in the comics world?

Well, I recently read something Dan Slott wrote back in March in which he said "Your sale acts as a vote." (The whole thing is at http://www.comicscrew.com/dan-slott-on-downloading-comics/ ) So if enough people drop the book...who knows?

Now obviously this depends on people being as good as their word. By now Quesada honestly reminds me of George W. Bush. Based on his appearance on the Colbert Report I'm guessing that Quesada wouldn't like that comparison being made, but he really does. That's because both men seem to think that they can do whatever they want without taking what the people want into account, and both men are confident that they can do it without their being enough of a backlash to affect them. In both cases, I want to see them proven wrong in that belief.

I'm gonna quote a guy you probably don't know named Phil Hunn, whose one of the staff at comixfan.com. He wrote "You'd think the fact that a poll at Marvel.com showed the people who supported the marriage outnumbered the people who didn't by a factor of 2 to 1, and that fans booed Quesada when the subject of the Spider-Marriage being destroyed came up might have clued him in on the fact that destroying it in favour of resurrecting a thirty- or forty-year-old status quo was a bad idea." Oh, he got the hint. He knew how most of the fans would react. He just didn't care. That disgusts and angers me as much as what was done to the characters, and that is why I'm comparing him to Dubya, who also doesn't care about polls.

I'd be lying if I said that I was unhappy they brought back Harry Osborn (who I actually liked), or if I said I wasn't even a little curious about what was gonna happen in BND. But I don't have a burning need to read it, and no matter who is writing it I'm not going to.

Posted by: Nathan at December 31, 2007 02:48 AM

If Quesada was so intent on getting rid of MJ, he should have just killed her off.

Oh, they did that around 1999/2000 during Howard Mackie's run. Fans didn't like it, so they brought her back. Then they had her and Peter break up immediately after she was revealed to be alive. Fans didn't like that either, so they were eventually reunited.

It may be true. This may not last. But that doesn't mean I'm not gonna be angry that they (or perhaps he) keep(s) on trying to make it happen.

Posted by: JosephW at December 31, 2007 03:53 AM

Of course, since Joey Q was one of the prime architects of THAT marriage (despite his vocal distaste of the Peter/Mary Jane marriage), I expect it will be a cold day in hell before Ororo splits from T'Challa and marries the *real* love of her life--Stevie Hunter.

Hehe. I honestly like her and Forge together. Has old Stevie been around much? I haven't been reading any of the X-books aside from X-Factor (unless Exiles counts).

Posted by: Andy Ihnatko at December 31, 2007 03:41 AM

You know what's ironic? I'm thinking of a terrific thing JMS said about the editorial absolutes of "Babylon 5": "On this show, not only does **** happen...**** STAYS happened!"

That's what made the death of a certain member of the Runaways such a big deal (I'm not gonna say who it is because I don't want to spoil it for anybody who buys the digests, which I totally recommend because they are brilliant). Brian K. Vaughn did not plan to bring this character back, and the arc in which the character died was called "Dead Means Dead". By now something of a hollow promise, considering that this is almost never a 100% certainty for any character in any Marvel book, but it was clear that BKV wasn't going pull a resurrection or reveal the deceased to be a Skrull or anything.

Posted by: michael t at December 31, 2007 04:27 AM

I have to say that this is the first time I have ever considered dropping Spider-Man completely.

There've been times when I dropped it before, but I also dropped every other comic I was buying at the time because for some reason I simply lost interest in comics in general. It wasn't an act of protest. This is the first time I'm going to stop buying a comic out of protest. I consider myself to be pretty loyal, since I'm still buying Exiles even though Chris Claremont's work on that book does not compare to his X-Men stories of the 80s and 90s that I grew up on. I keep hoping that he'll step up his game and keep paying for each issue when other fans have given up and have said as much online. If I'm buying comics regularly, as I am right now, it takes a lot to make me drop a book.

Btw, Queen Anthai, nice to see another reader of MGK's blog here. Also nice to see that we're on the same page, no stupid pun intended.

I think it would be interesting if they tried to revert back to the marriage. I thought the proposal from Mephisto was interesting. But if they keep it like this forever with Peter and MJ always apart, then I don't like it. If it is an ongoing storyline for the next year or 2 years and they ultimately get back together then I think it was an interesting plot device.

I haven't read the last OMD issue yet but I have read every spoilers I could find.

Looks like I will sadly be canceling Spiderman. If I wanted to read Ultimate Spidey I would have bought Ultimate Spidey.

Sidebar first: Are the last few pages of OMD supposed to be set in current time, or was that a flashback - or, indeed, a harryback - to the time when Peter and MJ split from the path that led to matrimony?

In terms of general feedback, I'm as schizoid as ever on this one...

Professionally, Joe Q speaks for Marvel and Marvel own Spidey. End of the day, he has to care about numbers sold, and if flushing a huge chunk of continuity out the airlock makes Spidey more accessible to the millions who know him from the movies as opposed to the hundreds of thousands who buy the comics then it's a numeric no-brainer.

I think JMS is going to get a degree of flak he doesn't deserve, just by having his name and fingerprints on the smoking gnu, when all he's doing is being a professional. As a contractor, you take the company dollar, you sing the company song...

Personally.. personally, after a year where Marvel have produced some of the best written comics I've seen in 40 years of collecting this turn of events is just unacceptable.

I hate that they got rid of the marriage, I hate the way they got rid of it, and I absolutely hate, loathe and detest that they undid the reveal of Peter's identity.

That reveal, for me, was the absolute comics highlight of the year, but hey, guess what, it never happened...

So.. Professionally I know and understand that fan loyalty counts for zip when a company is looking at the bottom line.

Personally.. Chances of me buying any more Spidey titles for a while, pretty damned slim methinks.

If there's no mileage in caring about the characters and what happens to 'em, I'm not putting my money down for the books, simple as that.

Cheers!

Personally, I'm still waiting for the big news outlets to release the "Marvel advocates satanism, Spidey makes deal with devil" story.

Last time I checked, the poll figures showed 80% of the respondents in the "didn't like it/hated it category".

I'm coming around to the notion that we're all being hosed, scammed, "fished in" as Wayne would say.

All of the anti-marriage talk? Just pre-event publicity. Remember pre-Civil War, he went on a tear about Speedball, "We're gonna kill him".
Then the fan base keeps watching, wondering when he's going to die.

How long has the publicity been out for this story line? How long has it been delayed? Wasn't Brand New Day supposed to start in October?
How long have we known the "spoiled" ending? The wait to see the car crash of a comic story has been almost sadistically engineered.

We're being played, here. How could an editor-in-chief not realize what a bad idea this is? not realize what the reaction would be? Not realize how poorly executed it all was?

He's looking at 80% disapproval and saying that's my sales base when I pull a mea culpa, "the fans have spoken", and we launch the 12 issue, $5.99 a pop, reset button series, with multiple zombie variant covers.

The man's a genius at promotion.

Or maybe he is just an idiot.

In a rare public comment on the issue, JMS quoted Dave Sim to make the point that he accepted the EiC's discretion to determine the direction of the storyline. I've heard others refer to Sim's accomplishment as a self-publisher why JMS used him to make his point, but the state of the market over the last 20 years had even Sim admit no one can repeat his accomplishment, and Sim is also someone who lost at least half his circulation for persistently (to say the least) portraying women who don't take orders from a man as unworthy of any fidelity. So I took the Sim reference as an implication annulling Peter & MJ's marriage, at best, caters to the misogyny of the reading audience.

I think this is just a chapter in the bigger story that is playing out. I mean come on when you make a deal with the devil...
Its kind of bittersweet for me. I didnt mind the marriage. It was the lack of doing anything interesting with it that bothered me. Mind you I dont think this is interesting.

Screw Marvel. Screw Joe Quesada. When one of the Civil War editors stated quite frankly that continuity was not important and when asked about the constant ignoring of history stated that people who have been reading for over 5 years are not the type of reader Marvel caters to (and have probably been reading too long anyway), I knew my time of reading Marvel comics was coming to an end.

Now Joe Quesada has taken it a step further, and has basically slapped me and every long-time Spider-Man fan in the face and said "HA HA SUCKER! Those last 20 years don't matter!" This is the man that, when he came into power at Marvel, proclaimed that he was a fan and would never let something as horrible as the Clone Saga ever happen again. Now we probably find ourselves wishing for those days in the face of what Quesada has done to Marvel.

So yeah... screw Marvel. I know my protest won't make any real difference, because by and large the comic community will tend to be pathetic lemmings... they'll whine and cry about the changes, but they'll show up every month to buy a book that they claim to hate. Me, I'm done with it. I won't waste my time reading Marvel... I won't even read a free copy that I could download.

Marvel has been telling me for months that they don't want me as a customer. Finally, I'm listening to them. How about the rest of you?

Mike, I took JMS's Dave Sim quote as someone quoting a relevant funny line from a (at the time) funny person. Reading a layer of mysogeny in that is just reaching, in my opinion.

I never want to see you lose a book, PAD, but I'll just say that I'm glad that you're no longer having to worry about F'N Spidey after OMD.

Poorly written, poorly drawn, poorly thought out, poorly executed. And it really feels like because of all of the above, and Joe Q's comments over the past year, he's sitting there with a fat grin on his face while giving us the finger.

I usually don't get that worked up about retcons and character changes and all that stuff in comics, but this whole thing just comes across as downright insulting to anybody who reads Marvel comics.

What a colossal joke.

I wouldn't have minded ending the marriage, if it had been in a 'normal' (for the MU) way. Using Mephisto as a plot device just works against everything Spider-Man is supposed to be, the street-level, everyman hero. When he was in Starlin's Thanos story, he commented about how out of place he felt. This just strikes me as more stupid than any DC retcon; Quesada can no longer mock 'Superboy punches.'

I haven't read OMD, but I'm depressed to hear that they've undone the marriage (which I had heard of some time ago), and Spidey's identity revelation. Given what Scott Bland related about that editor who stated that continuity wasn't important, I'm guessing that Jeph Loeb and the editors of The Ultimates are of the same mentality, since the The Ultimates 3 totally ignores the premises in the Ultimate universe that are so different from the main universe Avengers, without any explanation whatsoever. I was so disgusted that I'm not going to continue with that title, even though I otherwise like Loeb, and adore Joe Madureira's art. It's the for the same reason that I generally stay away the big corporate franchise books like the X-books or Spidey books, unless it's a single book written by someone like Peter, who tends to stay away from the "big events", and writes something because he thinks it'd be a good story, and does just dump 20 years of continuity simply because he personally "doesn't like" some change to it that occurred 20 years ago, even if fandom has come to accept it.

While the commentary has been primarily focused on the relationship of Peter and MJ, what I find totally uncharacteristic was the portrayal of Mephisto.

"Here's your greatest desire in one swoop" he offers to Peter & MJ. The life of Aunt May.

I was waiting for the final pages when Mephisto grants their wish and the next page would show Aunt May getting run over by a car (or some other tragic 'accident') right in front of the couple effectively doing to Aunt May what had happened to her in the first place, putting her at death's door for the (final?) time - negating everything Peter and MJ wished for.

That's the Mesphisto I've come to know. Who was that wanna-be player impersonationg Mephisto anyway? OR that could be the way out of the Brand New Day storyline..... it has happened before.

I thought the same thing that someone mentioned earlier when comparing Quesada's "anti-marriage" hype to his "kill Speedball" hype. I thought "he's pushing this idea way too hard for it to be real...At the very least, it's going to be part of a larger story." But noodle this for a second: Quesada's Speedball fake-out led to Penance, one of the most ridiculous things done to a character in all my years of reading comics...

One More Day disappointed me on so many levels...I find the way the retcon came about as deplorable as the retcon itself. Spider-Man makes a deal with the devil?! Where's the sense "Great Responsibility" here?! It was so out of character I couldn't believe what I was reading...

Pete Poole: I'm not trying to mock you for making a completely understandable typing error, but I can't help but wonder what a "smoking gnu" would look like...:)

You know, thinking about this some more, I see a way out of this if sales of ASM are affected by this move: MJ is a Skrull, and thus just made the deal to try and screw Spidey over.

Then they can retcon the retcon.

Either way, I think it's now safe to say that the clock is ticking on when Steve Rogers will come back from the dead.

After all, seeing as dead isn't really dead in the MU as Joe Q said it was, and they can't even keep Spider-Man unmasked for 2 freaking years, I don't want to hear any more of this kind of bs from anybody at Marvel.

Has anyone else thought through just what this means for Mephisto - he's got to be the most powerful entity in the universe to do something like this?!?! You would at least think that a retcon of this propotion would have to go through the Living Tribunal - now we know its Quesada's face under that hood.

Really though, I have never identified with Spidey and/or Peter, so really I don't care either way. I like good writing with charaters that are interesting and this change isn't going to get me to start picking up his book (3 times a month!).

1From the last few pages of the book it should be evident that Joe's goal was more than just to break up the marriage,he wanted to undo a hell of a lot more than that! He wanted to undo a lot of bad storylines that has led Spiderman man in a direction that as EIC he thought was wrong,(The Other storyline for instance),the strange thing is that he ok'd those storylines. Siderman as a book and a character had gotten too dark over the last few years,and despite PAD attempts in FNSM it was not going to change unless there was a major revamp. The last revamp of Spiderman was in the Chapter one failure of the early 90's so that clearly was not the path Joe was going to take. So lets start talking about how the marriage was a wrong turn that needed to be fixed,that gets the creators of the last few years off the hook.Aftter all they all turned in excellent storylines under the guidance of Joe and Alex Alonso. Joe created the greatest MC Gauffinn in comic history to bring Peter back where he needed to be but make no mistake the dynamic of Peter's and MJ"s relationship can still be in play.

Apart from all of my other disappointments with the story, I thought that they had a PERFECT Peter Parker moment sitting in front of them. Pete is wracked with guilt over Aunt May getting shot. He is literally offered a deal with the devil to undo it. His choice: May lives or May dies.

He says No to Mephisto. Because he knows that M never makes an offer at face value, that there's some horrific twist coming up, or that at the very best, handing over his marriage is just a small but significant contribution towards one of Mephisto's larger and darker goals.

So he does the responsible thing and accepts May's death, but the guilt of having turned down a chance to save her life (regardless of the terms) is a burden he carries until the end of his days. First Ben, now May; Spider-Man has had a hand in BOTH of their deaths...first by ignoring his responsibilities, then by living up to them.

But hey, I'm sure this other way will be just as awesome. Maybe we'll get to see the Spidey-Mobile again! Teens LIKE awesome custom cars!

1Posted by roger Tang at December 31, 2007 02:40 AM

Actually, I don't think it was "limiting." In many ways, it simply wasn't possible. In a lot of ways, having a wife and children makes it impossible for Peter Parker to be a hero.

Please explain this to me. A wife and children do not keep policemen and firemen from being heroes. What would be the difference with Spidey?

You know, there was this period when JMS came to the title and he was working with JR jr and I was extremely happy.

The biggest reason I liked the run was that JMS bought some new stuff to the table. He took everything that had been built up through the years and just put a new slant on it.

It was refreshing because it said something about how it isn’t necessary for a writer to use hackneyed stunts to generate interest in a book and to make it fresh again.

Then, we had this event where they tacked on a the rape of Gwen Stacy by Norman Osborn and subsequent birth of twins due to that act of violence.

Well, they lost me after that.

I picked up PADs run (on the other Spider title) because it was just ‘fun’ in a sense.

There have been so many characters to traipse through the Spider Man universe through the years, there is a wealth of material you can take and have fun with. It’s really that simple. To do it though you have to have the support of both the editorial staff (including the publisher) and the sales figures to back it up.

Over the years, I’ve watched Aunt May die and come back, MJ die and come back, Uncle Ben die and come back... are we seeing a pattern here yet?

Honestly, how anyone can find themselves surprised or up in arms over this strikes me as a bit ironic - it’s not like it hasn’t happened before and it won’t happen again. As a matter of fact, if there is one thing you could probably call a sure bet it’s that at some point they’ll be a further retconning of the character.

Spider Man will always be Peter Parker, Peter Parker will always have some kind of problems to deal with and the cycle will continue as long as Marvel can get people to fork over money to buy their books.

You know, more than anything else it’s not so much that it affects this title (or titles) - it’s the ever increasing prevalence to have these big company wide events and crossovers that make it more intolerable. We always seem to be having the discussion about continuity in regards to the overall history of a book and what has gone on in all the preceding issues up to the present but, there is never a discussion about how much these interlocking storylines across a series of titles and all books have a way of just bolloxing up characters and titles.

If Marvel's sales drop over the next few months, you can bet this kind of event will never happen again.

Will characters die and come back? of course, it's comics. And retcons will continue to happen. But will a retcon be pushed by an EIC just for the sake of pushing the EIC's will onto a story, stamping on a 20+-year development, and prooving said EIC a liar on multiple accounts, all in one fell swoop? No, if Marvel's sales take a significant drop over this, we won't see something this badly executed again.

Posted by: Rob Brown at December 31, 2007 06:23 AM

Hehe. I honestly like her and Forge together. Has old Stevie been around much? I haven't been reading any of the X-books aside from X-Factor (unless Exiles counts).

Well, my comment about Storm and Stevie was slightly tongue-in-cheek but I think Stevie has been MIA for the better part of the past decade.

Posted by Joe Patrick at December 31, 2007 12:13 PM
" Pete Poole: I'm not trying to mock you for making a completely understandable typing error, but I can't help but wonder what a "smoking gnu" would look like...:)"

What typo? >-)

Remember; when you assume, you're pulling an emu out of your ass...

The smoking gnu has a fine traditional role in defective fiction. Why else would Sheerluck Holmes have worn a deerstalker?

Cheers. Also, Happy Brand New Year!

I find what happened as annoying as the infamous scene in Dallas with Bobby in the shower: It never happened, all was a dream, an illusion – call it what you want. What is worse is that the outcome is a return to the formula Spider-Man was stuck with and from what I could see in Marvel Previews the result will be predictable fast food. That is also enjoyable (Well, I like fast food occasionally) but it is nothing special.

I hate the end of the MJ/Peter relationship. This is why I returned to Spider-Man after a long time and that is the main reason why I will leave again very soon. On top of that I hate the way it is destroying much or even all of what made the Spider-Man series interesting during the Civil War saga. The revelation of his identity never happened either. No consequences here and Iron Man/Tony Stark doesn`t have to lose sleep over this any more as well.

I have more than enough to read and will concentrate on things I enjoy more than formulatic Spider-Man comics that are stuck in past patterns.

As much as I am upset about the heavy-handedness of the OMD plot-- I am much more excited that the FREEDOM CLOCK is at 385 days and counting!

I am planning on celebrating New Year's in about 20 DAYS-- which will mark less than a year in office for our current selectee... Something truly worth celebrating.

I can't see why this story makes sense for Marvel.

Back when Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas took over Marvel oh so many years ago, one of the things Jemas wanted to build was the trade paperback program. At the time, Marvel was very inconsistent about trades. It wasn't at all like it is today, when you feel reasonably sure that you'll get a trade of the popular materials fairly soon after the issues wrap up.

To keep the trade program strong, you have to keep readers interested in the back stories.

But OMD just wiped out any reason to read a Spider-Man trade from after 1989. After all, the stories "didn't happen", so why read them?

Was the need to get rid of the marriage so strong that it was worth destroying six years of work in the trade department, along with three months of sales of Spider-Man comics (you know, the ones that didn't come out because OMD was so delayed)? I doubt it.

The only way this new storyline could be a good thing is if it highlights exactly how much Peter and Mary Jane belong together. Mary Jane has been the one to comfort Peter when the weight of the world threatens to crush his spirit. Without her in his life, I can see him slowly crumble into a helpless wreck. Aunt May should then learn of the deal, and convince Peter that he should stop living in the past and start looking towards his future. Aunt May should then pass on to the afterlife, allowing the world to change back and reuniting the two lovers. This would be the perfect Aunt May death and Peter/Mary Jane reaffirmation.

Please explain this to me. A wife and children do not keep policemen and firemen from being heroes. What would be the difference with Spidey?

One, in a real world context, we recognize that the demands of the job are so tough that it often comes down to choosing between the job and their family. That's not a fair choice to put an individual through. So the police and firemen build as much institutional support as they can (and more is being built all the time) to support the families and spouses, so that the police and fire fighters don't feel they have to choose between the job and family, that if something happens, the family is taken care of. Spidey, as a vigilante, doesn't have that. It's irresponsible in many ways, for him to go off fighting crime with no backup with the very real possibility of leaving the spouse/children high and dry if they're killed in action (and that, of course, undercuts the very premise of the series).

Second, in a literary sense, a married Spider man has to choose between two sets of people when he fights crime, instead of choosing between himself and others. That's less of a hero's choice, and more of a protagonist's choice...a more adult dilemma because one group of people gets sacrificed no matter what. That's a more adult type of story, which is what, frankly, I would prefer...but may not be suited for a corporate character who is the flagship of the company.

but mr tang, with spidey in the avengers, he has the extended support structure that a (as i recall) is now government sanctioned. hell, i am sure he is getting at least soldier level pay which isn't too bad when you add on combat modifiers.

i'm with the the guy who said that seeing the marriage as limiting is just a symptom of writers who are limited.

i also thought of the other guy's idea that this could be turned around to show how important mj is to spidey and how he is living in the past chosing an old lady who has died a couple of times already (and pete should be smart enough to know if she died, she'd only come back again) over someone who he pledged his life to.

I am currently reading "Speaker for the Dead" by Orson Scott Card. In the preface, he wrote how most (sci-fi?) fiction is written about juvenille characters. That is characters, no matter the age, that are free to move, change and have no real roots. It mirrors the time in life when we are not yet "adults" but more than children. It is the time in life that we can uproot ourselves, because there is only ourselves to uproot.

"Adult" fiction is about people who have "families" and "roots" for lack of a better terms.

What we see with OMD is a return to "juvenille" fiction rather than "adult" fiction (and I don't mean the XXX kind of adult fiction).

BTW, for those who wonder why Ultimate Spider-man doesn't provide enough of single Spider-man; I think that Marvel is getting ready to upset the Ultimate Universe so badly that USM will no longer be a viable alternative.

And the whole "undoing"; I see some benefits, but I don't like it and especially don't like the "how". Only stupid people make deals with the devil and Peter isn't stupid. (I don't care if he desperate, he's not that stupid.) Also, it's just created another genie--when is the ax going to fall, because sooner or later someone is going to write the story of how "you can't trust the devil."

I could rant, but I just don't care anymore. I'm done. I've dropped the book from my subscription list, and it's take PAD being brought back on board to make me pick up another Spidey book.
Which is a damned shame, since I've been a Spider-Man fan from damn near infancy.
Way to show us that our opinions don't matter and that twenty-odd years of loyalty mean jack-squat. Thanks a f'n heap, Joe Q.

Well, I guess now the Clone Saga has lost its place as the "most hated Spider-Man story" in history (assuming it still happened, of course)... Even though I'm a huge fan of Ben Reilly, I can't say I'm happy about that.

Hell, while they're at it, why not start the issues over at #1? If it's "all-new", why keep any references to the old stuff?

Posted by: Ed at December 31, 2007 09:16 AM

I'm coming around to the notion that we're all being hosed, scammed, "fished in" as Wayne would say.

All of the anti-marriage talk? Just pre-event publicity. Remember pre-Civil War, he went on a tear about Speedball, "We're gonna kill him".
Then the fan base keeps watching, wondering when he's going to die.

How long has the publicity been out for this story line? How long has it been delayed? Wasn't Brand New Day supposed to start in October?
How long have we known the "spoiled" ending? The wait to see the car crash of a comic story has been almost sadistically engineered.

We're being played, here. How could an editor-in-chief not realize what a bad idea this is? not realize what the reaction would be? Not realize how poorly executed it all was?

If we are being played, it's still bloody cruel.

Posted by: Neil C. at December 31, 2007 11:31 AM

I wouldn't have minded ending the marriage, if it had been in a 'normal' (for the MU) way. Using Mephisto as a plot device just works against everything Spider-Man is supposed to be, the street-level, everyman hero.

That's a really good point.

Posted by: JosephW at December 31, 2007 03:04 PM

Well, my comment about Storm and Stevie was slightly tongue-in-cheek but I think Stevie has been MIA for the better part of the past decade.

Yeah, it made me laugh. The last time I remember seeing Stevie was at the beginning of the "X-Tinction Agenda" crossover, and there was an editor's note saying that she was appearing for the first time in...they couldn't even remember! So when you mentioned her, I wondered if she'd resurfaced.

Posted by: Peter J Poole at December 31, 2007 03:23 PM

The smoking gnu has a fine traditional role in defective fiction. Why else would Sheerluck Holmes have worn a deerstalker?

Gnus are notorious for wiping out entire civilizations with second-hand smoke. Oh, they'll TELL you they've quit, or even act like stupid animals that don't have the opposable digits to operate a cigarette lighter, but it's all a ruse to make you lower your guard. Then, when you least expect it...BOOM! They light up, and you've got cancer. And it's your own damn fault for trusting those duplicitous gnus.

Posted by: bobb alfred at December 31, 2007 02:46 PM

If Marvel's sales drop over the next few months, you can bet this kind of event will never happen again.

I think you're giving them too much credit. *sigh*

Posted by: Andy Ihnatko at December 31, 2007 01:23 PM

He says No to Mephisto. Because he knows that M never makes an offer at face value, that there's some horrific twist coming up, or that at the very best, handing over his marriage is just a small but significant contribution towards one of Mephisto's larger and darker goals.

I agree. That would've been great.

Btw, here's how Christopher Bird would've fixed this story, and I think it would've been pretty cool as well (especially considering what we GOT):

http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2007/11/30/geez-do-i-gotta-fix-everything/

It starts with this

Oops, forgot to delete the thing I began writing and then decided not to. Sorry.

...I took the Sim reference as an implication annulling Peter & MJ's marriage, at best, caters to the misogyny of the reading audience.

Mike, I took JMS's Dave Sim quote as someone quoting a relevant funny line from a (at the time) funny person. Reading a layer of mysogeny in that is just reaching, in my opinion.

You're going to take JMS using Spider-Man to explicitly challenge Jerry Fallwell's homophobia and like it, but you're going to take his reference to someone who sincerely refers to women as "a gender which has no ethics, no scruples, no sense of right and wrong" as an indication of his approval of Dave Sim as a funny guy? I just don't picture JMS being that hard-up for the company of funny people.

What happens when the new readers decide to look back on this character theyve been introduced to and become addicted to the classic legacy? Theyll want the marraige restored knowing who the characters are and how Peter evolved.

We all know this wont last, it'll be retconned, the marraige will return, but we are still the subject of harsh interviews, condescending comments, and general unpleasentness from a man renowned for not being courteous under pressure for bad decisions. It's editorial bullying.

Spider-Girl is the true future for the character, which is hardly disputable anymore since present timelines and status quoes have now been changed by four people, Jean Grey, Wanda, Peter, and MJ. All except Jean did what they did for selfish reasons, Jean at least let Scott find happiness with Emma and will likely be back

What defines canon anymore? Everything is too diverse for anyone to care. People can pick and choose what they want. If Joe were in charge and had done this in 1998, when we had NO diversity and the company was going to tank, it'd have killed Spidey dead forever.

All of us know, from this story, and "Secret Invasion", that Quesada's time as EIC is nearing it's end. He will be removed from power, not resign, du

As much as I loved what he did for the buisness, and how I'll likely learn to appreciate him again if he returns to freelance duties, it's time he left.

Much like Bob Harris, Joe is burned out, I pity anyone who takes this job, because you become a bitter person if you cant handle the posistion, and eventually, despite promising yourself you wont...you'll abuse it.

And he has. Oh, how he has.

I think that ultimately writers have to write for the characters on the characters terms and that it was foolish for Quesada to take this direction in the series -- especially since Spider-man is one of the hottest properties around. 3 very successful movies, dozens of animated shows, Between 5-10 monthly comics featuring the character. Why change the character in such a way when there wasn't a fan or critical outcry to do so.

Ultimately this is going to bite spider-man in the butt and the series is going to tank. It happened with the clone saga (that essentially attempted to return spidey to an earlier time period), it happened when PAD left the hulk when editorial attempted to steer hulk back to an earlier incarnation to coincide with the movie release, and so on and so forth.

bye bye spidey for me

"Well, I guess now the Clone Saga has lost its place as the "most hated Spider-Man story" in history"

If you're only going to judge by the fan reaction of the first few days after the comic came out, then "The Death of Gwen Stacy" was hated much, much more immediately after it came out.

Someone mentioned a bunch of comments back whether or not viewer response is a factor that marvel or any other publisher takes into account.

The answer is yes!!!

About 10 years ago Tony Burns wrote over 80 letters to marvel requesting a Rick Jones trading card. It brought attention to the character, a marvel value stamp and a baseball card of jones. And ultimately if people stop buying the book editorial will have to change its point of view.

I predict that issues of spider-man will stay consistent for the next month or so and then plummet. At first fans will wait to see if there is a silver lining or a reversal in the plot. When that does not happen or does not happen fast enough people will jump ship.

Posted by Peter J. Poole: "Cheers. Also, Happy Brand New Year!:

Likewise, Mr. Poole! The same to all of you here as well.

As someone who has always valued continuity in both the DC and Marvel shared universes, I find the fact that Marvel has begun doing this...and opting to publicly decide that continuity isn't so important anymore...to be disturbing and also discouraging.

As a person who has seen more continuity re-boots at DC than I care to count, I find myself not all that surprised, and feeling somewhat jaded about the whole thing.

As a person who has engaged in numerous debates on the DC message boards about the importance of continuity, only to be met with adamant insistence that it "shouldn't" be such a big deal to anyone and that only "good stories" matter, I find it amusing that now that Marvel is doing it, so many people are in an uproar. And pointing out the same things I pointed out when I began protesting it at DC...what a slap in the face it is to fans of the no-longer-in-canon stories, what a disrespect it is to the writers of those earlier tales, the ripple effect it has on continuity universe-wide, etc. Not so hard to understand now, is it?

Was Bill Watterson talking about Bob Kane?

Hmmm. Just got done reading the issue and I was not that impressed. I am not happy with the decision, but I won't be dropping the title because of it. I will pick up the first few arcs and see if it still grabs by attention as I do like some of the writers that will be assigned to the title.

As for the prediction that sales will drop on ASM, well this is likely to occur after the first arc or two. Not because of the marriage, but because JSM will no longer be on the title.

All I have to say $10 the Richards are next in line. No one said anything when Cyclops started cheating on his wife and look where it got us...

The only "real" reason for a historical reset is so it makes sense that the characters have the right history for their ages: How else could characters who were teens in the 1960s be in their late 20s or mid-30s in the 21st century? That said, most fans don't seem to mind this, and it seems ridiculous that Peter would think Mephisto would have his best interests at heart? Feh.

Haven't read through all the comments, so forgive me if I repeat sentiments...

I didn't find it believable. In fact, when it was revealed that the red haired stranger was Mephisto, I chuckled. When he said "I want your... MARRIAGE!" I literally burst out laughing and stopped reading the issue.

See, I've never been a big fan of JMS, until he got involved with comics. He promised a lot for B5 that just wasn't delivered, such as "Oh our aliens won't just be bits of plastic on the actor's faces." No, they have Patti Labelle hair and one is a flashlight.

Okay, it's a little unfair to act like that. I have to admit, I never gave B5 a fair chance, because in the first season it was bumped on my local channel from one time period to another, sometimes on Saturday evenings, sometimes on OVERNIGHTS. Not very fair, and I was mostly only able to watch the first season regularly, which I'm told was not exactly the best representation of the show.

But I was a little miffed at JMS because of slam pieces he'd do against Star Trek early in B5's and DS9's lives... of course at first DS9 didn't impress me much either (it also suffered from that channel's scheduling spottiness), but eventually it's claws were dug in so deeply that it was my favorite Star Trek ever. I never thought THAT would happen.

So I went into ASM with JMS a little wary; perhaps I'd read Midnight Nation or Rising Stars and decided to give him another shot. I was glad I did. I thought the retro-conning of Peter's powers into a possible totem-animal based thing as really cool, mainly because he didn't REALLY ret-con it... he just said, look, you can look at this from a different point of view. I liked that.

But it was obvious that editorial decisions were screwing with certain storylines. The Other was just a mess... I still don't remember what it was that Peter was sick from. They'd get to the end of each issue and say... "Oh yes Peter... you're going to DIE... from something..." and then never tell you what it was. Man, I'm not sure if they ever did.

"Sins" was just... well. I could have done without it.

By that time I'd lost interest, although I have no idea if it was JMS or JQ who caused this. I picked up the first issue of OMD hoping that something important was being accomplished, but no... no.

You know the kid in the sandbox you hated while growing up? The one who had every toy possible? And he'd never let you play with them or do anything cool with them? That's how I view some writers and editors now at Marvel. They're in the sandbox and they have all these cool toys and they're THEIRS and if you don't play by their rules THEY'LL JUST GO HOME.

Suffice it to say, if I couldn't take the Mephisto issue seriously, I think it's safe to say that OMD isn't for me. I've never really been much of a Spider-man fan anyway, so that's okay. But I did like being one for a while. I'm sad that's over with.

PAD,

Ok. Now I am depressed. Because if there was any sort of secret plan to reverse this idiotic nonsense, I doubt you or JMS would have politely expressed your objections.

Joe Q is an idiot. No matter what happens next, he will be known for this storyline. This is not a minor character.

As others have said well, the idea that great stories cannot be told about a Peter who is married is insane. I realize his being married does close some doors. But his not being married also closes some doors. Perhaps not as many, but it does. Let me name two: No matter how close a dating couple are, there is no replacement for marriage. The commitment that is made is very different on so many levels. If nothing else, there are now legal entanglements if they get divorced. More importantly, it is a dedication to one person for life (at least that is the normal hope).

More importantly, Peter is now the biggest selfish jerk in the Marvel universe. He makes a deal with a version of the Devil and trades his wife for his aunt. Obviously those new spider powers have warped his mind.

I am glad, PAD, that you are no longer writing a Spidey title because I would not be reading it. I am not sure I can keep reading New Avengers either. While I have not liked a lot of things lately at Marvel (especially making Tony Stark a jerk), it at least followed the story line. This time it was a giant reset button that does for Marvel what the first Crisis did for DC -- fixing one "problem" creates 50 others.

I'll check back in a year or two with Spidey since I doubt fans will tolerate this change very well.

Iowa Jim

Actually, I don't think it was "limiting." In many ways, it simply wasn't possible. In a lot of ways, having a wife and children makes it impossible for Peter Parker to be a hero.

Hmm. Guess that means Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic) is not a hero. (Or Clark Kent / Superman?)

Does it make it difficult? No doubt. Just like it does for anyone who serves in the military, as a police office, a fireman, etc. What about the person willing to testify against a drug lord, knowing his or her family might be in danger?

Having a family in no way makes it impossible to be a hero.

Iowa Jim

This storyline started to fall apart on me almost immediately. Spider-Man goes to everyone on the planet that might be able to help Aunt May and no one can? Not a single person can help her recover from a gunshot wound? I could maybe understand that if she was suffering from a Rigelian Death Virus or something, but someone in the Marvel universe should be able to handle that request.

Then the one person who does say they can help is a little girl. (If this was a movie, this is the point where I would be yelling at the screen.) It threw me off because I thought sure Mephisto was going to show up. Then it turns out he was disguised as the little girl, or something like that. (The story was making my head hurt too much to try and remember details like that.) Following that is the most ludicrous offer from the devil that I've ever read.

I actually skimmed the last issue of One More Day in the bookstore today, to see if maybe, just maybe, it had a decent ending. What I read was ridiculous and insulting - Spider-Man does not make deals like that. Heroes find a way to win that does not involve giving in to the bad guys.

I came back to Spider-Man because I thought Marvel had learned its lesson after the Clone mess and Chapter One, but apparently not. So I'm dropping the title again as of now. At least I can still enjoy The Amazing Spider-Girl where Peter and Mary Jane are still together.

Not for me, thanks. Not interested in OMD/BND. I'll wait this out until the "fix" is repaired.

Okay, I'm in a different boat than the most of you. I haven't read Spider-Man in years.
I haven't read Spider-Man since it was revealed that he was a clone.
You see, I didn't start reading Spider-Man until around issue 200 and revealing that Ben was actually Spider-Man meant that I NEVER read Spider-Man.
I just dropped all the Spider-Man titles then because the long time investment I had in the character was completely thrown out the window. I know Marvel reversed their decision because of the negative reaction but it was too late for me. I follow writers to books but I never considered picking up Peter's Spider-Man book because the clone saga destroyed my interest in the character.
Hope "One More Day" doesn't do the same for others out there.

How wrong is Quesada?

He WANTED TO BRING GWEN BACK, but had to be talked out of it.

Hope "One More Day" doesn't do the same for others out there

Back in 1996, none of us had the mutliple canons and alternates we have now. We can pick and choose Spidey timelines now at ease, changing the channel.

The sad thing is I stopped reading at the Unmasking. Not because they actually did it nor how they did it in such an absurd way, but because I knew they weren't going to do it justice. It wasn't about SPider-man it was about other books and yet I doubt you heard about it much in issues of the Fantastic Four. It's supposed to be the biggest thing to ever happen to a superhero, you ever see Superman or Batman get a reveal like that?

It should of been completely about Spider-man, no Civil Wars or New Avengers. Though they could show up. It would be a great joke. "That's Spider-man? What a disapointment."

But more importantly, the reason I stopped reading was because I knew they would never do it justice, because of all these things and that's the style of writing now at Marvel. It's not as important as the next big deal. The OTher, New Powers, New Costume, Unmasking, New Costume... etc.

I also knew they were going to undo all of this, and it would be a waste. Because somebody at Marvel (Q shall remain nameless) complained that Spider-man being married limited all the stories somehow. So basically, they do something that had never been done, ignore it, and complain some more about how the stories possibilities were limited. It's just a waste. Oh yeah, the Mephisto thing. Worst. Idea. Ever.

I would just like to say the following: I agree with Iowa Jim on many of his points. I think the idea that a father cannot be a hero shows that Mr. Quesada has some daddy issues. Not only are most dad's heroes, dad's SHOULD be heroes.
I disagree with Jim on one thing: Quesada is not an idiot, he's a boss. Like most bosses who have one, or in Quesada's case a string of them, they all begin to think that they genius' and can do no wrong (IE Vince MacMahon and some of the wrestiler characers he's come up with)
House of M, Ultimates, Civil War, World War Hulk, hiring Garth Ennis to do Punisher, hirring Peter to do Hulk and X-Factor again, shows that he's a smart guy.
But he's an arrogant guy too. And One More Day proves that.
One of the reasons I read Marvel over DC is because they have never done a Crisis/ Countdown history change, until now. This is a bad idea.
First of all, as many have pointed out if Quesada wanted an unmarried teenage Spider-Man he already has it in both the Ultimates-verse and in Marvel Adventures. Second the idea of taking Peter Parker back to his late teens and starting again from there is silly, because long-term characters grow up anc change. For example, by the time Star Trek 6 came out in 1991, Captain Kirk was no longer the same man he was in the pilot "Where No man has gone before". Yes he was still the great explorer, but he had a harder edge and he was wiser.
To take that away from either Kirk or Parker it just a slap in the face to fans and does a disservice to the character.
Third, Spider-Man and whole of the Marvel universe are supposed to be characters in change, growing and devloping. This is one of the things that set them apart from the same old same old DC stuff of the early 60's. Peter's marriage, growing up, going to college, getting a job, having a family, loosing his aunt; these are all part of life and that's the key thing about Peter Parker, a normal guy with super powers. For those of you think this makes Spider-man too much of a soap opera, I've got news for you: If you want a character who continues for years and years, you have to give him new things in his life, not just new powers or new villains, but new things in his life that are worth fighting for. Also I rarly see soap ad's in comic books.
If Mary jane had just been killed by the sniper's bullet, I could live with that. But the gut 20-30 years worth of comic books is just wrong! Also to say that Peter's marriage makes him harder to write is not a writing problem, it's a sign of a bad writer. Quesada had a great writer in JMS and he removed him when he told him something was a bad idea. This was a mistake.
I understand Mr. Quesada is the boss and that he can do has he pleases. Fine, it's not his job to keep the Parker's together, it's his job to make money for Marvel comics, so let's all do the one thing that will get his attention. Let's not read Spider-man
Josh Pritchett Jr

> I'm gonna quote a guy you probably don't know named Phil Hunn, whose one of the staff at comixfan.com.

Speak the name of the devil, and he shall appear :)

Yes, I am now very firmly of the opinion that Quesada doesn't want to please the fans. He wants to please himself by taking "his" characters back to "the good old days" of the 1970s, and he clearly expects the fans to simply bend over, grab their ankles, and take it like men (the respective returns of Captain Mar-Vell/Nova/Iron Fist/Luke Cage to prominence is another indication of said nostalgia-overload. I mean, The Immortal Iron Fist is a great comic, as is Nova, but was anyone other than Quesada actually crying out for these characters to return? I don't think so). I mean, he wanted to bring back Gwen bloody Stacy, of all people, in addition to Harry Osborn, as if that was in any way, shape or form a good idea.

Clearly, clearly, this should have been viewed as a terrible idea right from the frickin' start. Not to mention that there are already two "teenage unmarried Spidey" titles at Marvel at the moment (the Ultimate and Marvel Adventures Spider-books), so why it was necessary to reboot the 616 Spider-Man into the exact same thing, I'm not sure. Wouldn't it have been better to, I dunno, keep one title with the Parkers as a married couple so that everyone was happy?

Oh, wait, that title is obviously Amazing Spider-Girl, the book that Quesada keeps trying to cancel. Gosh, what a coincidence...

I dropped the Spider-Books a while back, but I'm now considering dropping all of my other Marvel titles as well. There's only so far my patience can take me, after all...

I haven't seen *any* comics for a couple of months, but reading these comments, one thing is clear:

Someone said that the clone saga is now the second-most-hated Spider-Man continuity?

*I* think Shooter has just given up First Place...

Oh, wait, that title is obviously Amazing Spider-Girl, the book that Quesada keeps trying to cancel. Gosh, what a coincidence...

You know, I think Phil's hit the nail on the head here. We still have a book we can go to where Peter & MJ are happily married.

What kind of message do you think it would send if Amazing Spider-Man's sales plummeted and Amazing Spider-Girl's sales skyrocketed...?

What a way to end the year :-(

I've always thought that Peter's greatest achievement was finding the love of his life. After everything else that's happened, all the Hell he's been through, he deserved that one thing.

I join all those who support the retcon being retconned. Fortunately JMS has left a backdoor. I direct your attentions to ASM 504, page 24, panel 5....

Fer: interesting question there re: "Mayday" Parker. A large number of people will be interested in pursuing that option. Ditto for Ultimate Spider-Man, for different and yet similar reasons.

As a wise man once said:

"A shared universe, like any fictional construct, hinges on suspension of disbelief. When continuity is tossed away, it tatters the construct. Undermines it."

I will continue to buy ASM, provided that as long as they're going back to telling 1970's stories, they're also going back to charging 25 cents an issue.

After these last couple of days and reading all the comments by everyone I've decided to destroy my copy of OMD and send it back to Marvel. If anyone want's to join me mail your torn up OMD issues to:

Spider-Man Editors
Marvel Enterprises, Inc.
417 Fifth Ave
NY, NY 10016

Posted by: Phil Hunn at January 1, 2008 08:31 AM

Speak the name of the devil, and he shall appear :)

Eek! The devil! Flee, flee!

(Hey man, good ta see you here.)

Posted by: Fer Goodnough at January 1, 2008 10:13 AM

You know, I think Phil's hit the nail on the head here. We still have a book we can go to where Peter & MJ are happily married.

What kind of message do you think it would send if Amazing Spider-Man's sales plummeted and Amazing Spider-Girl's sales skyrocketed...?

You know, I might pick up that book now. I liked reading Spider-Girl back in the day, and if it'll help send a message now...

OMD was a crappy story.

Peter Parker doesn't make a deal with the devil to avoid feeling guilty about May getting shot.

They must be rolling in the aisles over at DC. Q just made the Superboy punch look GOOD.

Maybe Quesada is just projecting his own doubts about his marriage onto the Peter Parker/Spider-Man character?

I'm upset with the story's outcome, too, as much for the undoing of Spidey's unmasking, Aunt May's knowing his secret, etc.

But I can't get TOO upset with it, because I'm looking upon this as another alternate reality storyline like "Age of Apocalypse" and "House of M." I think that, eventually, someone (Doctor Strange, Thor, whoever) with a LOT of power will come along and undo the whole mess.

It may have to be when Marvel sees sales on these issues come back, but I think it'll happen.

My thoughts from OMD are this:

No matter what, there will ALWAYS be someone first in Peter's life.

That person isn't Mary Jane.

Mary Jane knows this to be so, or else she wouldn't have gone through with the decision in the first place.

Let's face it, while I don't condone Aunt May's death, I do think her still being alive limits Peter. Her death is something that Peter is going to have to go through in order to progress more as a person.

Does MJ care about May? of course she does. But I think even she would know that a time would come for Peter to say goodbye to his beloved aunt. But I think she also knows that some of Peter's actions as of late lacked the great responsibility she knows he has. So maybe this will be the most painful lesson for him.

But I think JQ will have to realize very soon that this will indeed cause problems with the history on a major scale. I think merely this was to just push sales and if it did, it succeeded for him. But he has to know that this event wasn't really major to the world, really. Now if Superman and Lois got divorced, that would be on every news outlet possible.

I would have done things differently as well.

Here's what I would have done.
1. Not written Peter into a corner that this was absolutely necessary. At the end of Back in Black, a Deus Ex Machina save was the only thing that was going to save the Spider franchise.. how many years of Peter on the run could actually be milked? Peter committed how many crimes at the end? It was necessary on some level.

2. I would love to have seen JMS notes on this because reading Babylon 5 script books, his bible on Spiderman must be awesome.

3. Keeping the same idea in place, Mephisto does the deal.. but Peter always thinking has told one other of the deal before accepting... Doctor Strange.. Stephen calls his friend and Mephisto enemy, Silver Surfer, for help...

4. With the combined might of the Sorcerer Supreme and the Power Cosmic, Doctor Strange cannot stop Mephisto but he can make some changes along the way...

5. Amazing Spider Man#546-549 by JMS and JRJR
Details what subtle changes were made by Mephisto's meddlings and Doc Strange's saves..
A recap of the Spider Man mythos..

550 - Brand New Day

I think this was an opportunity not only to bring Peter and MJ out of marriage and into a not working relationship (whatever), Harry randomly alive (how does this effect Thunderbolts for example), and the web shooters back(thanks for the Order except it probably never happened) but clean up a lot of the Spider continunity. They missed it.

And they will be missing my dollars on Spider Man. I was buying Spider Man twice a month because two great writers were writing it. I've followed Peter to She Hulk and JMS to Thor. I will catch Mr. Guggenheim on other projects. I don't need to read Spider Man three times a month. I will miss Peter and MJ but as PAD said, there are the trades I will be buying instead of the older stories.

So goodbye for now to Spider Man. A book I've enjoyed reading in some form since Peter Parker 96 or so and the beginning of Web of SpiderMan.

Enjoy the Brand New Day without me.

Until later
John

I just want to chime in with my support for this storyline. It was needed. I love MJ too, and I love Peter so I want him to be happy but I recognize the marriage is bad for the character. Peter marries a super-model and lives happily ever after should be a "Spider-Man: The End" story not mainstream continuity.

The marriage to a "perfect" woman undid some of the key things that made Spider-Man great as a character. 1) It made him seem older - Peter was a lead Super-Hero who was still in school. 2) Peter was alone - all the craziness that happened to him he had to deal with sans the support of an all-forgiving wife (and aunt).

Everyone who is threatening to stop reading the comics because of this...yeah right! Who are you kidding? If you care that passionately about him to write these things, you'll be back even if you never admit it. And for those few who really do jump off in "protest" I say more power to you but my guess is you're going to miss some really fun Spider-Man stories that will take the character in directions unavailable for almost 20 years.

Everyone who is threatening to stop reading the comics because of this...yeah right! Who are you kidding?>>

Talk is cheap. Not buying the books is the only way to show my choice.

Peter left the Incredible Hulk ... so did I. He made me love those characters but he left so did I. I came back for Peter's small re run and left right after.

I liked Judd Winick and Tony Bedard on Exiles. Chris Claremont came on, I gave it a chance. Why? Because I did like Chris on Uncanny (even though I haven't like anything that much he has done since) and I really enjoyed those characters. Gave it a few issues and was done and will not be there for the New Exiles.

I was a SpiderMan reader for years. Amazing, Web, Peter Parker, I was there. Dropped off for a bit after Maximum Clonage. Read Untold Tales instead. Read JMS and PAD's work. Stayed away from MK Spider Man title.

I will leave Spider Man now. Don't like how the ended One More Day and the few pages that give me a glimpse of Brand New Day.. do not interest me. I will go back and buy the trades of the older stories I've enjoyed. I would love to see a Marvel Visionaries Peter David: Spiderman for example :)

It may only be one penny in the giant Marvel bucket but my penny isn't going into Brand New Day, three times a month.

Until later
John

Oh and I suppose you had nothing to do with poor Pluto being eaten by Borg, either?

(that was a joke, by the way)

Bit late to the conversation, but I can see why marvel decided it was a good idea to free up Peter Parker from all his attachments. Sadly I also hated the way they did it in a way that nulled an awful lot of character development over the years, both his and his supporting characters.

Him being married is undeniably annoying for some writers. If, say, a writer wants to write in a romance between Batman and Wonderwoman/catwoman/a down to earth nurse/the mutant lovechild of Satan they can (as much as DC will let them ;) ). If readers don't like it or it stops being interesting they can simply break up. Obviously new romances, sexual intrigue and the like are 'good things'TM in the soap opera that is most comic book characters lives and keeps things fresh and interesting. While you can't really get away with big obvious changes in who an established character is (changing spiderman too much or so on) you can shuffle the scenery near them around and romance is often a good way to do it. Buffy does this a lot. Rather than looking her into a love for Angel the writers introduced new potential mates which created new storylines. All of them follow the usual stages of love but in different enough ways to keep the audience engaged.

In some cases being married and unlikely to cheat is fine. The fantastic four are probably the best mainstream example of this because it's a team book. Sure you can't really split up the married fantastics - but Johnny and Ben can play around and you can spin stories out of the happiness/misery they encounter. The cast is big enough with no one definable key character that this is possible.

In the case of Peter though he is the central character. His marriage locks him into a romantic dynamic with Mary Jane that means any romantic interests are nixed because him pursuing another girl makes him look incredibly unheroic (and her leaving him would make her look like an unworthy mate - which is unfair to a character who's been well rounded over the years). So I can see why Marvel was keen to change this and a broader range of stories out of spider-man.

That said what I REALLY objected to was the whole 'no one remembers who spider-man was'. That seems a horrible decision for a few reasons.

Certain characters relationships to Peter were defined by them knowing who he was under the mask. Obviously Norman Osborne springs to mind as does Felicity. Felicity in particular is an annoying one as her whole break up with him, eventually getting past it and them becoming close actual friends (and presumed attraction to him as an actual person) later on was all based on her awareness of his identity.

Then there's the characters who found out his identity and while not vital to their history were still improved by knowing it. Aunt May is a biggy here. She's a bit of a one note character who was given a lot more to do by awareness of her nephew's big secret. There are others (Flash, Johnny Storm, the other avengers etc) who should know.

lastly - even if you ignore the obvious flaws of having characters forget his identity - it's a bit... problematic in a lot of cases. Reading the recent spider-man I found myself confused as to the age/era I was looking at. I felt there had been a big push to get spider-man back to where he was in the 70's. Problem was comics as a whole have moved on since then and the audience is older and more sophisticated. I'm not sure how many of us want spider-man to be stuck living with his aunt, penniless and so on eternally. I accept he's unlucky. I accept he's the sort of guy who'd help a girl he loves get marries a la Cyrano de Bergerac or lose a great job because he stopped to help an old lady cross the road. I just find it hard to accept his life is basically that of a 17 year old student - where misfortune happens because it just feels like he bumbled into it.

Ah well - we shall see what happens. I'm sure Marvel will try and bring their A game to the comic this year to convince fans it was a good idea ;)

One weird note - didn't John Byrne basically come up with the idea for this story ages ago? I remember him blogging about it a year or so back... and was surprised no one mentioned this anywhere.

While I didn't necessarily enjoy how the story was handled (nobody on the entire EARTH can save Aunt May from a gunshot wound? :P) or the treatment of the fans was considered, I don't necessarily think BND will be utter crap.

Purely as speculation, I think it would've been cooler to see Peter handle a devil's deal with larger stakes.

- In exchange for his marriage, how about Mephisto offering Peter the chance to change history and save Gwen's life instead of killing her?

- Even more dramatic: Uncle Ben's life for Peter's marriage.

I know... I know. Those would have been HUGE retcons. But seeing Peter wrestle with such a decision would have been incredibly interesting.

Call me an old foggy, but I personally stopped reading Spiderman after the whole 'MJ is Peter's ideal woman that he is so in love with that he acts like an idiot' cliche started gaining impetus.

I was OK with Gwen's death and Peter getting together with MJ who had been flirting with him -and tons of other guys for years- when she stuck to him after Gwen's death because she was a true friend and Peter eventually recognized it.

MJ knew from the beginning that Gwen would always come first for Peter but she was OK with it and Peter eventually got over Gwen's death and started appreciating MJ's true qualities. That was actually very realistic and showed their tender side in a way that made up for the shock killing first of Gwen's father then Gwen herself: a much more mature log-term romantic storyline than one would expect from a comic book.

But Marvel lost me when they started retconning history so that Peter started being all goo-goo eyed and romantic about MJ: before that, they had had an adult relationship -as opposed to the very idealized loved Peter had for Gwen- and they both respected and genuinely loved each other. Then, apparently overnight, Peter acts like a teenager in love? Spare me. That worked with Gwen because they truly were in 'romantic' love and college sweethearts, by which I mean still teenagers, but it rang false with MJ because it was out-of-character for Peter.

When you start rewriting Peter's character so that MJ is the 'love of his life' and suddenly he is all silly and jealous about her, you lose any intelligent reader. And when you bring back Gwen to try and demonstrate that it's MJ Peter loves, not Gwen, you've lost me.

So if you now want to erase 20+ years of Spiderman history, do I care? Nope. Let's just hope your marketing strategy will get you the teenybopper audience you are looking for (I am being ironic, because I doubt the younger generation reads comicbooks: they fool around in MySpace instead, and no retconning will change that).

*romantic, but not a 15-year old anymore, which is perfectly understandable for someone who started reading Spiderman when Peter was still crushing hard on Betty, long before Gwen's character made an appearance!*

This'll be the end of my Spidey reading. I don't necessarily mind the War on Marriage but this tremendous undoing of SO many things all over the Marvel universe is, to me, just sloppy. Spidey shows up all over the MU and if we're undoing The Other and the unmasking then... what else?

The only answer I can come up with is "potentially everything." And that's just annoying. I was okay with comics not having perfect continuity, but if the publisher is going to make an effort at it and try to pump sales with crossovers then I expect them to do it right.

So, eh. I will vote with my dollar. I might like the new Spidey direction okay, but I already spend more than I want on comics and there's other stuff that I have no reservations about.

On the bright side, this resemblance of a story wraps up what I sometimes saw as a "tapestry" of continuity and so I no longer feel compelled to collect the continuing adventures of anything in order to keep up on the status of the Marvel Universe.

If anything this gives me a chance to "collect them all"... with the belief that if I worked hard enough I could amass a saga with a beginning, a middle, and at least a point where there is no canon afterwards.

If the new Spidey stories are good I'll pick them up in my convention sweeps and fifteen-cent long box runs.

Although I'm still tempted to look at anything Brubaker writes at the other titles I buy nothing until it has been read and enjoyed by another and sold to comic shop. There are some other franchises I'll come back to read now and again but comic book reading is a wait and see sort of thing.

I like the message that Quesada is sending to the kids that dealing with the devil is better than divorce.