A thrilling image of Spider-Man battling 2 guys who would stand behind the named villains and not have speaking roles in a 1990 Rob Leifeld comic. The only thing more mysterious that how those straps stay on is what they’re for. Sadly, that’s not the mystery this book seeks to solve. No, instead, MJ was just about to tell Peter she’s been hiding something utterly devastating from him since 1970.
This should destroy their marriage. For real. This is an insane thing. Why would they publish this? It makes me think of MJ being so livid with rage about Peter lying about being Spider-Man again back in the Mackie days. With this in her back pocket the whole time? What leg had she to stand on?
Incorrect, Gwen had been back for 20+ issues, and back then, that was a lot longer than it is now. When I was a lad, there was a trade paperback (Still a relatively new idea, that) called The Death of Gwen Stacy. It collected ASM 89-90, 96-98, and 121-122. It gave anyone reading it the feeling that George’s death, Harry’s drug problem, and Gwen’s death all happened back to back and not over the course of almost 3 years of publishing. This isn’t the first thing I’ve covered on the blog that makes me wonder if the author read that same trade, and got that same feeling. Well, anyway, they were standing over Harry’s bed, as seen in ASM 121, when they heard Norman coming, and Gwen said she would go talk to him. Harry got a little better, but MJ realized Gwen had been gone a long time. She went looking for her, and stumbled onto a shouting match, wherein Gwen was saying Norman would “never get his hands on them” if he doesn’t let them take Harry to the hospital. And on top of this, on top of them beginning to reveal that NORMAN FUCKING OSBORN is the father of Gwen’s kids, I have to deal with this:
Anytime Deodato draws Norman for the rest of his career (Which is a lot more often than you might guess), Norman is played by Tommy Lee Jones. And I can’t handle it. It’s so distracting. Which is kind of good when you’re reading an absolute pile of shit, but it’s not what you want in a book, to be constantly distracted.
Where to even start. It’s personally disgusting, it’s logistically impossible, it’s a really good time. I think… being charitable… JMS may have thought he was doing something helpful here. First, that he was recontextualizing Gwen’s death, making it about her and Norman rather than Peter and Norman, making it her story instead of her being a pawn in Peter’s. And with that in mind, maybe he went back a bit further and thought it made her rather abrupt flight to, and return from, Europe make a little more sense. Maybe he thought this would strengthen what came before. There’s just the little problem of it being an absolutely disgusting, stupid, improbable retcon that shatters so many things it could never, ever be worth printing. And yet, here we are. Gwen stormed out, right into MJ, and then she obviously had to tell her the deal. In the present, Peter asks how it happened.
You buy that? “He just had this magnetism!” Come on, dogg, he’s the creepy shriveled up old dad of your friend, possessor of the world’s weirdest haircut, already known to freak out, throw tantrums and disappear sometimes. Get real. Clearly abusive to his son. “So hot!” Well, anyway, Peter arrived, Gwen talked him out of talking to Norman and asked if they could all just go somewhere, MJ “went back for her purse,” and slapped Tommy Lee Jones in the face. Then Gwen asked Peter if he’d “love her no matter what she told him,” and then Tommy Lee Jones watched them all walk away. In the present, Peter says it all makes sense now. Why he’d go kidnap Gwen. He was after both of them, had a score to settle with both of them. La di da.
Dear reader, I don’t want to have to show you the next page if you haven’t seen it before. Hell, I don’t want to show it if you have. But I had to see it, and so do you:
So NOW we get to throw in the idea of Norman taking her delicate flower of womanhood being so traumatizing to the male, just in case this wasn’t horrible enough, AND I have to see Tommy Lee Jones getting freaky in a comic book he never approved. We can all go home happy tonight. Peter then trashes the apartment like it’s ASM 390. Mj gets him to stop and he collapses into her arms. Hooray. What a great comic book.
And that’s the game as we head into the final issues. Redemption for Gwen’s poor, doomed Goblin children. I remain resolute that this should have shattered Peter & Mary Jane’s marriage. He couldn’t hate her, not even now, but could he ever trust her again? If she could keep this secret, what else could she hide? And it’s not like “Well, Gwen swore me to secrecy” is a good enough excuse. Those kids were orphaned! MJ knew it and left it that way! Who even knew where they were, who was taking care of them!? What an unmitigated disaster. I don’t know if it’s the worst Spider-Man story ever, but maaaaaan is there very little competition. Behind the scenes, Straczynski absolutely did want Peter to be these kids’ dad. Editorial wouldn’t have it, for all the obvious reasons you would never allow that. But they were still stupid enough to let this story see print, anyway, in this modified, actually-even-worse form. Axel Alonso bears the responsibility for not putting his foot down on this. Joe Quesada bears the responsibility for not putting his foot down on this. And yet, somehow, as hard as it would’ve been to imagine from this moment, this isn’t even JMS’s worst idea. That would come later, and when push came to shove, he was finally told “no.” But that’s getting ahead of ourselves…