Strap in, this will likely be the longest post in the history of this blog. I think the previous record holder was probably Spider-Man #75. This cover doesn’t match the others because I got a variant, for some reason. Each of the 4 issues of One More Day also came in a single character cover by Marko Djurdjevic. Here’s the other 3:
Poor May doesn’t even rate! And here’s the real cover to this issue:
The idea of Mephisto wearing such a realistic leather glove is just weird to me. They don’t make gloves in hell. But they couldn’t give anythign away on the cover. Straczynski felt Joe Q changed his story so much in this issue in particular that he wanted his name taken off the book, but was talked out of it. Just to set a tone! Ok. Let’s get to it. In a sequence where Aunt May dies and then Peter wakes from a nightmare, Mephisto’s last words from last issue repeat over the art.
Peter reiterates that May’s situation is because of him, and if this is really how she dies, he couldn’t live with himself. “I’d break in two.”
Next, a wordless 4-panel page of MJ looking down, then looking up. Next, a splash of them embracing and sinking to the floor. Next, a nearly wordless-6 panel page with a single image repeated 6 times of them just being close to each other. Really getting your $4 worth. In the 5th one, Peter smiles, and in the 6th, he asks, “Do you remember when–” and MJ shushes him. The 1 panel on that page 6 times is on the next one 3 more times.
The titular One More Day has passed. It was represented by different color treatments on the 6 copies of the same panel a page ago. This series gives our beloved couple a single day left in their relationship, and they don’t even speak during it. Very rewarding.
What’d she whisper? A lot of people thought this might be some kind of escape hatch, some kind of way to get the marriage back if fans didn’t like this or something. But give them more credit than that. You don’t do something THIS stupid unless you think the outcome is 100% worth it. No one’s changing their mind. But what did she say? It’s revealed much later, and buddy, it sucks. The theoretical premise here is MJ is being so selfless, so brave, so heroic, that she’s deciding for him. But the practical execution is she treats Peter’s life like a real concern and her own like nothing. Like she knows she’s a supporting character in a comic called “Spider-Man.” Well, then, it’s all about to happen and Mephisto’s a jerk, so he says he’s surprised Peter forgot to ask about the little girl, and then reveals, yes, she’s the daughter they would’ve had if they’d let May die, the best of both of them, and now she’ll never exist. Oh bloo hoo hoo. Too late now! Peter’s reaction is to try to fight, but what does he think this is, a superhero comic, come on.
She’s right, you know. They will be together again one day. But it’s a long time comin’, and when it arrives, it is written by the worst writer in the history of Amazing Spider-Man. So, you know, look forward to that! There follows a 2-page spread of their lives together, sort of, featuring versions of their meeting in ASM 42, Spider-Man rescuing MJ in her discoball dress in ASM 59, them on a 2-seater bike from no actual comic, their first kiss from ASM 143, their wedding in ASM Annual 21, MJ & May watching TV for some reason (Maybe watching him unmask?), and them on top of the Empire State Building in the Sensational Annual we looked at before this (See, canonically, it appears to be the moment right before this story). Then a 2-page splash that’s almost all darkness with the hint of their figures slowly getting smaller and smaller and MJ says her famous catchphrase one more time. And that’s it.
Aunt May’s house, no longer destroyed.
Flash inexplicably blond instead of a redhead again, like he only briefly was in the late 60s? That one I don’t get.
Harry Osborn, no longer dead.
The photo reference has been a bit wonky in this, but the Peter in panel 5 really makes no sense.
They fill the back of this one with Aunt May’s handbook entry and then have the gall to run the end of the wedding issue. The last page is a bunch of quotes from big comics people (And MCU boss Kevin Feige before there’s an MCU) talking about how great Straczynski is. Stan Lee’s including “my biggest regret is I never really got to work with the guy so it’s hard for me to take any credit for what he’s done,” which is WAY too honest, wow. And that’s that.
And that, dear friends, is where I checked out. This blog was a lot more autobiographical when I could cover important things to me, personally. The first comics I ever had (ASM 148 & 180), the first one I ever bought (ASM 320), things like that. But I ran out of milestones. Until this one. After reading since 1987, after buying since 1988, One More Day saw me drop all Spider-Man comics. Aside from, I think, 2 one-offs, I wouldn’t buy ASM again for 15 years. One of those was because Bendis had a back-up story in it. The other was the preceding issue, which I just… got, for some reason. And, much closer to the present, I did dip into some of the side books, the ancillary titles. But these days, a comic series rarely lasts more than a year, so I’d soon be right back out. I basically broke with my favorite character, finito.
Whew. You know, I’ve thought about writing this post basically since I started the blog. What it would be like. I mean, comics have been such a big part of my life, and it was all because of Spider-Man. And these clowns chased me away. It’s stupid and silly, but this felt extremely important to me. And so I feel like I have to talk about it. In-depth.
Obviously, as we’ve seen, when I got into comics, Peter & MJ were already married. It was the status quo, I had no reason to dispute it. I don’t think I had a strong feeling about it, I was a child, I was mostly there for Spider-Man (And Todd McFarlane). The folks who spent the marriage adamant that it must end would have you believe that it ruined Spider-Man, because “Spider-Man represents youth.” That a single Peter is simply more relatable. How all these married men go home to their wives after letting various sources print them saying this, I don’t know, but for me, for at least a whole generation of fans, Spider-Man being married was as normal as Reed & Sue Richards, and as correct as Spider-Man being single is to these people. This is to be expected in a medium where the stories never end. It’s the same as the poor, unfortunate souls who came in with Ben Reilly, for whom he is the “real” Spider-Man. Their feelings, however, insane, are valid. It’s what they got into the comics with. I had no problem with him being married as an elementary schooler. It didn’t stop me from “relating” to him. I am proof positive that that attitude is simply not true. Which isn’t to say their preference for a single Peter isn’t valid, either, mind. It’s just the nature of these things.
But more important than that, to me, is they were married TWENTY YEARS. Almost exactly. They were NOT married for 21 years before that. This wasn’t like when DC “killed” Superman and brought him back a year later. Or when they replaced Peter with Ben and brought him back in 6 months, for that matter. This wasn’t reversing a brief, deliberate shake-up of the status quo. Despite all their assurances to the contrary (More on that in a minute), this felt like it invalidated literally my entire history of buying Spider-Man. I felt betrayed, as a reader, to have my entire history with Peter Parker swept away. I had not yet read literally everything that came before their marriage. I’d seen a little. Peter & MJ together was what Spider-Man was to me, and now not only was it over, it never happened.
One thing Marvel is proud of is being the longest ongoing narrative in human history. Unlike DC Comics, who blow everything up and start over every 10 years, Marvel deals with continuity problems and changes in the smarter way of just not talking about the things that don’t work anymore. Until now. Until this moment. This is as close to a Crisis as Marvel had come. They’ll come closer, but that’s for later. This felt wrong. Marvel doesn’t do this.
People in favor of this change, pros and fans, immediately set to telling people against it what their opinion was and why they held it. They were just “marriage fans,” which is truly hilarious thing to tell people. But, for me personally, it wasn’t them being married. It was Mary Jane being the co-lead of this series my entire time reading it. Mary Jane was as much a part of the book as Peter, and now she’s not. And now that I’ve read everything from 1962-2007, I know that was also true of most of the time they weren’t married. They dated for so long. Before they dated, MJ was always around, in almost every issue. Aside from Marv Wolfman exiling her for a few years in the late 70s/early 80s, she’s been an absolute fixture in Spider-Man, and to me, one of the very best characters. She’s one of the few supporting characters in all of comics with an actual arc, from ditzy party girl to complex and mature adult. And, remember, I read ASM 259 (Via trade) when I was still just getting into all this. Who MJ is, why she’s important, is just baked into this whole thing for me. And when you take such absurd, drastic steps to unmarry them, well, you don’t want MJ just hangin’ around, right? So she is once again exiled from the book. And this time, she’s gone more or less 11 years, bar a couple little cameos. So it’s not “They simply must be married or I’ll stop reading the book.” It’s the loss of one of my favorite characters from the title, in a very permanent way, for a very long time. They rewrote the history of every Spider-Man comic I ever bought, and then they shuffled one of my favorite characters off into limbo. It’s not like she’d go appear in some other comic. She’s just gone. It’s not like when Beast quits the Avengers and you can just follow him in X-Men. And I think that’s a prrrrretty valid concern. And people on the internet yelling at people like me that it wasn’t, a bunch of them didn’t even read Spider-Man. It was a surreal experience. This was obviously a heated debate topic in nerd spaces. All these people checked out the series due to the post-OMD hype, and weren’t about to listen to someone who was already invested say why they didn’t really like this change. It was an unpleasant time.
But beyond all that… despite feeling betrayed and ripped off and frustrated… That wouldn’t necessarily have made me quit. I’d bought through much stupider things, as this blog can attest. Sure, they reversed the marriage, they got rid of MJ, they did these insane status quo reversals (More on that in a minute, also). And they did it all in a story so bad, so poorly received, that even the people who wanted Peter single, hell, seemingly even some of the people who worked on the story, didn’t like it. I mean it was a real pyrrhic victory, at least at first. But, still, I probably would’ve been tempted to see what happened next. But they screwed that up, too.
Starting with ASM 546, Amazing Spider-Man was published 3 times a month. Instead of running three Spider-Man titles, they run one 3 times. To do this, the book is now run by the so-called “Spidey Brain Trust,” a group of 4 different writers who would alternate stories. And to do that, they would need more than 4 different artists. So, whereas in the past, I could say “Reggie Hudlin sucks, I’m not buying MKSM!” or “I hate Humberto Ramos’ art, I’m not buying TAC vol. 2!”, and still pick up ASM… now I’d have to be willing to buy 3 comics a month where once I’d bought one, and I would have to watch the solicits like a hawk to see if I actually wanted each of those 3 issues, based on the writer & artist, ad infinitum. I would suddenly need a flowchart to buy ASM. It would be a part time job figuring out what issues to buy.
So I chose to buy none. Not only did they make me feel betrayed, they made sure the product going forward wasn’t for me. And I was out. And I wouldn’t buy ASM again until 2022. It was the most bizarre, disappointing situation in my long, dumb history as a comic book reader.
That’s the autobio part. Let’s get into the “this comic sucks” part. Mephisto says he wants their marriage because they had the most ever-so-special love ever and taking it from them would be sweet sorrow. Then he says they won’t remember, which is complete crap. So he didn’t even really take their love, really, not for those 20 years of comics. He just stopped it for awhile. A long while, but awhile. That’s a bum deal. Makes Mephisto look stupid. And then MJ forces him to include re-concealing Peter’s identity in the deal. Ok, sure. That’s the most practical thing done here. But then Mephisto, Lord of Lies, just throws a bunch of freebies in there. He brought Harry back from the dead! He brought Aunt May’s HOUSE back from the dead! Notice the last page. Peter has mechanical webshooters again! We’ll never see or speak of his stupid stingers again (I think)! Mephisto just kinda fixed all kinds of things, gratis. That’s insane! Why would he do this? It doesn’t benefit him at all! It’s such an obvious “we’d like these things to be true, so whatever” decision. It’s lazy, it’s stupid, it sucks. THEN Marvel editorial rushes out to say all the comics in which they were married HAPPENED, don’t you worry, we’re not DC, none of it was wiped out. They just weren’t married. This was to reassure you your comics “count.” But they didn’t get married, so that’s not the same. And apparently May didn’t get shot, so that’s not the same. Or, what, are we to assume she just magically recovered and we skipped that part? The text of the issue seems to imply reality was altered such that she wasn’t shot at all. And if those 2 points are different, well… All bets are kinda off. And that’s not taking into account the whole secret ID. Quesada said Spider-Man unmasked, but people don’t remember who he was. An entire planet full of people know they saw who Spider-Man is, and also don’t know who Spider-Man is. And, what, just let it go? A mass hallucination is just accepted? Iron Man just let it go that the name of his most wanted fugitive has somehow faded from his memory? What about JJJ? Why was he suing Peter Parker? Was he suing Peter Parker? So you can say “all your comics happened,” but that’s not possible. It doesn’t hold water.
Beyond that, this 4-part story is the least exciting run of Spider-Man ever published. He has some chats, he wanders down an alleyway, he makes a deal with the devil. Aside from Peter Parker fighting Iron Man, it’s prrrretty boring! It’s boring in a way where they are like “oooo, isn’t this mysterious?” but this is comics, everyone more or less knows what’s happening 3 months in advance. No epic tale, no exciting conclusion. Just some walkin’ and talkin’.
They don’t even give Peter & Mary Jane a nice send off. They could’ve used their “One More Day.” But they couldn’t, because then the big twist would be revealed an issue early, and comics don’t work that way. So they just sit on the floor of a shitty motel in a puddle of Aunt May’s blood for 24 hours, not speaking. That’s their One More Day. Atrocious. Mindboggling. Insane.
Speaking of Aunt May, reducing her to little more than a McGuffin for a year of Spider-Man comics was so strange. This entire story hinges on her, and she’s not in it. I don’t know how much she could’ve been, especially with the absurdity of the Back In Black thing, but it feels wrong to make her an object instead of a person in this, her most consequential moment in the series.
And apparently, it coulda been worse. The changes Quesada made to JMS’s story that were so drastic he wanted his name taken off the book were all to the end of the story, in part 4. In Straczynski’s version, when Peter woke up at the end, the entire continuity had reset to the early 70s. Gwen alive, Harry alive, everyone going to ESU. Despite their constant denials of same, One More Day felt like it was invalidating 20 years of stories, but if Straczynski had his way, it would’ve literally struck 35 years of comics from the record. Real DC hours. Between that not being a good idea and the logistics of “How could Spider-Man even interact with the Marvel Universe of 2007 from his continuity of 1972?”, he was overruled. FOR OBVIOUS REASONS. Also it would’ve undone Sins Past, on purpose. That would’ve been kinda nice. But anyway, no way, no sir. The book as printed is a disgrace, the book as JMS intended would’ve set comic shops on fire. And, according to Quesada, he, Straczynski and various other parties had all worked together to determine what would happen to undo the marriage, how it would work, and what the status quo would be after. And then JMS turned in a script that contradicted those plans, even as the books to follow were in production. What a flame out for JMS.
Finally in this long post, I want to dredge up some ancient history behind the scenes. Once upon a time, there was a website called comicbookresources, and it was the best source for comics news, interviews and info on the web. It still sort of exists, but it’s been sold and resold and absorbed into crappy clickbait websites and become one, it’s borderline useless now. But once, I visited every day, and when ASM 545 hit stands, founder Jonah Wheiland began running an exhaustive interview with Joe Quesada in 5 parts. And while the pages are kinda messed up and all the pictures are gone, the text of the interview is still on their website, so let’s look at some of the more salient points, right from the source. You can see the whole thing here, here, here, here and here, if you like. First, Weiland sets the scene:
“One More Day” was controversial from the moment it was announced. The story would be long-time “Amazing Spider-Man” writer J. Michael Straczynski’s swan song on the title where he’d be joined by Marvel Editor-In-Chief Joe Quesada on art, but it was the title “One More Day” that really got people talking.
For some time, Quesada has made it clear he was not a fan of the marriage of Peter Parker and Mary Jane, feeling it just never felt right for Peter to be married. Immediately fans began to speculate that “One More Day” would in some way dissolve the marriage of Peter and MJ, setting up a new status quo for the character and title. When it was announced that “Amazing Spider-Man” would become a thrice-monthly shipping title following the conclusion of “One New Day” and would launch with a story called “Brand New Day,” what was previously just speculation was now looking to be fact.
The debate raged — how would the dissolution of the marriage be handled? Would it simply be a divorce? Or would something happen that would erase it from the memories of everyone who knew Peter and MJ? If the latter, how could they pull that off? How would it affect the Marvel Universe?
While the debate played out on message boards and in comic shops, new controversies emerged. First, the title’s shipping schedule began to slip with each subsequent chapter of “One More Day” finding its publication pushed back weeks. In fact, the final part of “One More Day” was originally supposed to be delivered in November. Readers began to point the finger at Quesada for the delay, citing his duties as Editor-In-Chief getting in the way of his production schedule.
As much as the delays the title experienced may have upset fans, it was a statement from writer J. Michael Straczynski posted on Usenet that really faned the flames of controversy. In the statement, JMS said he disagreed with changes made to the story in “One More Day” and had even gone as far as to ask for his name to be taken off the final chapter ultimately agreeing to keep his name on it at Quesada’s request. For a writer to take his editor to task publicly is rare. For a writer to take his Editor-In-Chief to task publicly is virtually unheard of in this industry.
Then he wants Quesada to expound on the new status quo previewed at the end of the book, and Joe says:
Okay, let’s start: Face it, the book is so much more fun with Harry in it. 😉
The two new girls, much like Harry and Flash, are symptomatic and significant in one very important way, “Amazing Spider-Man” (on sale thrice monthly, kids!) will bring back relationships of all kinds into Peter’s world — friends, lovers, frienemies, family, etc. Lilly and Carlie are only two of many new people entering Peter’s inner circle, and we’re going to see some old pals returning, too. What you got a taste of in the “New Day” sequence is exactly that, just a taste, because cast and relationships and soap opera is what’s going to be at the heart of “Amazing Spider-Man” moving forward. Over the years we’ve done so much damage to one of the greatest casts in all of comics and we wanted to bring it back and add some new cast members as well.
All reasonable points, actually. I thought killing Harry was a mistake right as it happened, but this is no way to bring him back. Likewise, under Jemas, Spider-Man isn’t the only world that narrowed its focus and abandoned great supporting characters, so this all sounds pretty good. He also mentions bringing back the webshooters was his idea, he just thought the book was better that way. He says making them organic was also his idea, so he takes blame and credit, ok. Then he says:
[…] what I’m saying is that Spider-Man is always its best when it’s about the life of Peter Parker and how being Spider-Man collides with that life. By the way, that’s the hallmark of every great Marvel character — what separates them from DC characters in many ways. Batman is about Batman, Bruce Wayne is not what’s important, Bruce is a facade. But the best Spider-Man stories are about Peter and his circle of family and friends, with Spider-Man thrown into the middle of it all. If fans want to bristle at the description “soap opera,” well then call it what you want. But whatever you call it, it’s the “soap opera” aspect of Spider-Man that made the character great in the first place and it’s really at the end of the day what makes the character different from any other.
ALSO true. It’s so weird. He’s saying everything I want to hear. I should be so excited to see what’s coming. And yet, I was not. In the course of explaining the changing look of the 4 issues, he brings up some of what became the usual rhetoric about people who didn’t like One More Day:
The issues start out gritty and as they progress, Peter’s world, from a stylistic point of view, starts to become more and more real — to the point where it’s much more photorealistic by the fourth issue.
Sometimes when I look at the way that the lines of opinion have been drawn in comics about the marriage, I see the argument falling into two basic camps. The fans may not perceive it this way on the surface, but it is what’s happening when you look at it clearly. When we fall in love with these characters, we claim ownership over them in our own way; so for some fans, Peter belongs to them and no one else. So, the way I see it, there are two sides of the argument, two segments of fans. On one side, there is a contingency of fandom that wants Peter to age along with them and live life as they do. He needs to get married, have kids, then grandkids, and then the inevitable. One the other side, there are fans that realize Spidey needs to be ready for the next wave or generation of readers, that no one can lay claim to these icons, no one generation has ownership and that we need to preserve them and keep them healthy for the next batch of readers to fall in love with.
To me, only one side of this argument is correct. If Spidey grows old and dies off with our readership, then that’s it — he’ll be done and gone, never to be enjoyed by future comic fans. If we keep Spidey rejuvenated and relatable to fans on the horizon, we can manage to do that and still keep him enjoyable to those that have been following his adventures for years. Will everyone be happy with the decision? No, of course not, but that’s what makes it a horserace. At the end of the day, my job is to keep these characters fresh and ready for every fan that walks through the door, while also planning for the future and hopefully an even larger fan base.
So, to that point, by the time we’re in the fourth issue, I’m drawing Peter and MJ as real as our readership perhaps unconsciously wants them, at least as real as my abilities will allow. I wanted to give the reader a sense of what it would really be like if we made Peter’s world an echo of our real world, and he was flesh and blood and started aging along with us. The Peter and MJ in this segment of the story aren’t twentysomethings, they’re definitely in their thirties to mid thirties.
According to no less a source than Joe Quesada, thinking Spider-Man selling his marriage to the devil is a bad thing is a fault in me, not a fault with the storytelling. No one, literally no one, wanted Peter & MJ to grow old and die. I, for one, never thought they should have kids, that would be terrible. And, you know, four years of college took Peter thirteen years to complete in real time. To say they had to have kids if they stay married when they’re never gonna turn 25 is disingenuous. I simply didn’t think reversing 20 years of comics was a good or, dare I say, respectful choice. And I thought having our “hero” sell his love to the devil rather than just having him getting a friggin divorce displayed a cowardice and stupidity behind the scenes I couldn’t even put into words. But, no, Joe knows what I REALLY think, wink wink. Being condescended to like this sure didn’t inspire me to keep buying.
Quesada later mentions, offhand, that Brand New Day had been planned as much as a year and a half before OMD saw print. Which explains a lot of the decision making. You can do Sins Past and unmask Spider-Man and all that if you know you’re gonna reverse it all. And, frankly, regardless of my opinion, that’s much more responsible than just doing it. Shame about Sins Past, tho. Much later, Quesada says of the whole genesis of this:
Well, to be completely clear, the idea for OMD was actually created by a room full of people. From the very first day I was in the EIC chair, I made no secret of the fact that I felt that a married Peter Parker wasn’t the best thing for an ongoing Spider-Man universe. The problem was that we never had a decent methodology to get ourselves out of it. I always said that if we ever found a way to do it, I would pursue the avenues to get us there.
Close to two years ago at one of our creative summits, the seeds of that idea began to blossom. Those ideas were then taken and a two week long e-mail chain began where we started to throw around ideas until we got the story kind of where we wanted it to be. The guys involved in all of this from the beginning were Joe, Bendis, Millar, Loeb, Tom Brevoort, Axel Alonso and myself. It then all carried over to the next summit, at which Ed Brubaker and Dan Slott also had some stuff to add. It was at one of these summits that JMS said the methodology we were using was more akin to the movie Sliding Doors than Back to the Future. Rather than a single incident not happening that causes a huge domino effect across the timeline, he explained it was more like one door that wasn’t taken or opened that only changed the subtlest of things.
In the end, knowing what that story was going to be is what allowed us to go ahead with the unmasking of Spider-Man in Civil War — we had our way out ahead of time, it was a great place to be. The only thing we kept vacillating on was Gwen Stacy; we had a debate as to whether to bring her back. In the end, Joe and I wanted Gwen back. Several months later, several of my editors and some of the creators spoke to me and lobbied to keep her dead and in the end, much to Joe’s and my disappointment, we had to leave her be. Ultimately, I felt that the arguments I was hearing for keeping her dead were stronger than my reasoning for bringing her back.
So there’s that bit. Further:
When the group of creators decided what “One More Day” was going to be, a huge train was set in motion. The “Brand New Day” creative teams and editors began to have their summits. At those summits we explained to the new creative teams the science behind “One More Day” and where we were leaving all the pieces. In essence, the mandate from that point on was, “here are the pieces, here’s where we’re leaving them. Go have fun!”
When I was halfway through issue three of OMD, we received Joe’s script for issue 4. After reading it, we (Axel, Tom and myself) all quickly realized that we had a problem — the script we had just received was not the one we were expecting, and the events that were being set forth in that issue were going to conflict with the work that was already being done on “Brand New Day.” I thought that perhaps Joe had forgotten some of the stuff discussed at the summit meetings and the subsequent e-mails and discussions that followed, but that didn’t seem to be the case; this was the story he wanted to tell. In his story, Mephisto was going to change continuity from as far back as issues #96-98 from 1971. In Joe’s story, Peter drops the dime on Harry, and that helps get him into rehab right away. Consequently, MJ stays with Harry, and Gwen never dies and never has her affair with Norman, etc., etc. And in the end, Peter and MJ are never married.
This, in my mind, while it neatly puts the pieces back in some way, was not what we wanted to do. First, it discounted every issue of “Amazing” since that story arc. Second, the series of events that it discounts in the Marvel U are too far-reaching to contemplate. And third, it had severe ramifications for the creators already well underway on “Brand New Day,” the thrice-monthly “Amazing Spider-Man.” In other words, there was just no way to tell Joe’s story without blowing up the entire Marvel U and every Spider-Man’s fan’s collection. What we originally discussed with Joe and the group was much simpler and cleaner: The wedding? Something happened on the wedding day that prevented it from happening. The unsmasking? Mephisto makes people forget it; much like the Sentry, it happened — it’s just no longer remembered. And Harry? Well, there’s always a price to pay when you make a deal with the devil. Is it a perfect solution? Absolutely not. Does it get us to where we want to be? Yes.
Anyway, we discovered all of this midway through the third issue and it became very evident to us that we had a problem. Not only that, now knowing what we knew, issue three had to be changed slightly in order to set up the things we needed in issue four. Joe fought hard for his story and you have to respect any creator for supporting his vision, I know where he was coming from. But by the time we knew what he was shooting for, I had to make a decision that served the greater good and what everyone had signed on for. Eventually, Joe told us that he would try to give us what we wanted in issue four, though he disagreed with it and also felt that it wasn’t the kind of story that he wanted to tell. He was a trooper and, while I know it couldn’t have been fun for him, he gave us a script that served as a road map to help us along — because when we received the new version, we were still missing some beats to get all the things across that we needed for the “Brand New Day” run. Joe gave us an okay to do what we needed, so stuff had to be repaginated, and reconstructed. We used a lot of Joe’s dialog, but some of it was mine, or Axel or Tom’s — everyone had to chip in, especially since now the issue was going to be over thirty pages in order to get us to the closing scene at the party. It was a lot of work, but everyone pulled through and we got it out. Like I said, the fact that it made December is a Christmas miracle.
And let me repeat: I couldn’t be more sorry for having to change Joe’s story and that’s why publicly I’m apologizing to him for doing so. But, ultimately, we had to get to the place where we promised other creators we would be for them to launch their stories.
What a mess!
So, to get this straight, OMD doesn’t actually negate the previous 20 years of Spider-Man stories?
Exactly, that’s precisely what we wanted to avoid. What didn’t occur was the marriage. Peter and MJ were together, they loved each other — they just didn’t pull the trigger on the wedding day. All the books count, all the stories count — except in the minds of the people within the Marvel U, Peter and MJ were a couple, not a married couple. To me, that’s a much fairer thing to do to those of us who have been reading Spider-Man for all these years. Like I said, is it perfect? No. As far as we investigated, short of divorcing Peter, nothing really is.
“Short of divorcing Peter.” He goes on to say Sins Past is “one of his favorites” from the JMS run, and they ran that embarrassing editorial of him heaping praise on The Other, so you know, I don’t know if we should really give him a lot of credit for “knowing what a good Spider-Man story is.” He goes on to explain how being young is so important to Spider-Man and how being married makes his life more boring (Yikes). When asked why Peter can’t just get divorced, he says this:
Sure, that would have been a very easy solution. However, how would a parent feel when they had to explain to their kid that Spider-Man just got divorced from his wife? How would that headline read across the AP or on USA today? The same can be said with an annulment. Sure, divorce is a reality of life, but Peter Parker and Spider-Man are not the types of characters that would do that. Spider-Man is a worldwide icon and is considered one of the good guys, like Superman. There’s always the option of killing off MJ, but over the years way too many key characters in Spider-Man mythology have been killed off. Much like the marriage, those deaths hurt the book. The Spider-Man books were better with Harry in them, as well as Norman. Also, how much older would Peter seem as a widower — yikes!
HE’S GOT A DEAD BABY, JOE. 1. That doesn’t make him “older,” and 2. That’s largely because no one talks about it! It’s SO EASY for him to divorce MJ, shuffle her off the page like they’re doing anyway, and just not mention it anymore. they more or less did that already! From the moment Paul Jenkins had Peter take off his wedding ring, they coulda never mentioned the wedding again. This logic is insane. Patently insane. I would take Peter divorcing MJ in a 24-part saga with chromium covers and buy every issue if it meant he didn’t SELL HIS LOVE TO THE DEVIL. When confronted with Ultimate Spider-Man on the question of youth, he says:
I also don’t buy into the argument that just because “Ultimate Spider-Man” Peter is single that Marvel U Spidey shouldn’t be. I mean Ultimate Spider-Man doesn’t kill, does that mean that I should let Marvel U Spidey start killing his enemies?
Disingenuous and terrible. There’s a whole lot more, if you’re interested, but I think that’s all I want or need to represent here. All of this, to me, is just saying my own last word on the subject, some 17 years later. Being on a comics forum, I got a lot of flack from a lot of people, a weirdly large percentage of whom didn’t even read Spider-Man, that I was being unreasonable for objecting to this terrible story and its terrible ramifications. But this is my website and this is what I think, for the record. A lot of those people who didn’t read Spider-Man were going to start with Brand New Day. And, you know, good for them. Sales certainly did spike due to this, but because it was a stunt, a hyped event. After not too long, Amazing Spider-Man sales were right back where they had been, more or less. Which is still probably a win for Marvel, since it’s 3 issues a month instead of ASM selling 1 at that rate and selling 2 other titles at a lower rate. But, for me, it was the end, for a long time.
But what of this blog? It’s called “All The Spider-Mans I Have,” after all, and I just quit buying Spider-Man. But, as noted during Civil War, now we have easy digital access to comics. There’s even Marvel Unlimited, basically a Netflix for Marvel, all you can eat for a small monthly fee. So… I’m gonna press on, digitally. For ASM, anyway. I kept buying New Avengers, plus various events Spider-Man was in and so on. I kept buying Ultimate Spider-Man. I still have books I own to cover. But I figure, why not? Why not look at all the material I skipped, now that it’s easy? So that’s what’s coming. Me experiencing 15 years of stuff I mostly didn’t read (More on that “mostly” as it’s relevant) combined with the stuff I did read. Not unlike what this blog has been the whole time. I just won’t have to take so many crappy photos on my desk. So, who knows how that’ll go. BUT FIRST: I have to read 34 comics with Spider-Man in the black suit that couldn’t possibly have happened. In retrospect, I probably shoulda done them first, because now I’m ready to move into the future, but I gotta do this instead. But… I gotta! So that’s what’s coming tomorrow.