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Comic Review: Spider-man - One More Day |
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Written by The Last Angry Geek
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Saturday, 07 June 2008 22:00 |
SPIDER-MAN:
ONE MORE RETCON
or
THE TOBEY MAGUIRE EFFECT:
WHY I WANT TO GIVE PETER PARKER A WEDGIE!
Have you ever had a friend, or even a mild acquaintance who did something so monumentally stupid that you had to hit him upside the head so hard you were afraid he'd have brain damage? Welcome to Spider-Man: One More Day and it's follow up, Brand New Day. A controversial storyline that's already been talked to death, but I guess one more rant won't hurt it.
Over the last year, Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada decided to enact his plan to re-vitalize the Spider-man titles. What was wrong with them? Well, under head writer J. Michael Straczynski, Spider-man (aka Peter Parker) had gone public with his secret identity during a super-hero Civil War and then switched sides. Spidey & his family were now being hunted by every government official and super-villain with a score to settle there ever was. To put it bluntly, the webhead's world had gotten dark.
Too dark.
Aunt May, the beloved super-septuagenarian had even taken a bullet to the bean meant for nephew, Peter, and was now fighting for her life. Surely it would take a feat of Herculean writing to save the day and lift Spidey up to be the super-hero icon and forerunner of the Marvel Universe that we all know and trust him to be! So how exactly did he save the day?
He made a deal with the devil. Literally.
Joe Q's plan for getting the books out of their dark phase was to have the Marvel Universe's most recognizable hero make a deal with Satan.
I'll let that one sink in for a moment.
The Devil (embodied in longtime Marvel demon Mephisto) would save Aunt May's life, when no one else can, if only Peter and his wife Mary Jane, let him wipe their marriage from existence. It will never have happened. You see, Mephisto didn't want their souls, they were simply too happy and Mephisto wanted to get rid of that happiness. Funny, I thought this book was too dark. Anyway, in a moment of unabashed boneheadedness the couple agrees. Thus May lives, no one remembers who Spidey is, and Peter Parker is now a swinging (sorry) bachelor.
You see being a frequent guest at Wizard World Chicago, I know that EIC Joe Quesada has been putting to the fans for years that Spidey would be better off single. He'd run through a list of changes he'd want to make and the fans would cheer each one. Then he'd always get to dissolving the marriage and it would be met with a stunned silence. The fans didn't want it. Using his puppet propaganda machine of Wizard magazine they'd put out various articles telling how the writers all felt the marriage was holding Peter back. How you couldn't tell the stories with a married Peter that you could with a single one. So Joe's whole idea for making the book lighter was to get Peter single again. Since you couldn't do a divorce without scandalizing him, a deal with the devil was the next best thing.
Now let me state that I don't read Spider-man's book at all. I read him in the big crossovers or in New Avengers. But for the next three months after it happened I would spend days and nights obsessing over this. Whenever I thought about it, I would just get angry. So here's my problems with One More Day:
1. HEROES DON'T MAKE DEALS WITH THE DEVIL
This is more or less saying the ends justify the means. Heroes especially A-listers like Spidey hold to a high moral standard. They don't kill, they don't cheat and they don't sell out. But that's what he did. Oh he had a good reason, but it was still wrong.
2.THOSE WHO MAKE DEALS WITH THE DEVIL DON'T WIN
Peter and MJ don't remember this deal, so now Peter's happier than he's ever been in his life. He may be the first person ever to get the better of Sat...sorry, Mephisto, in one of their bargains. Apparently there's a tiny piece of his soul that remembers but Peter's too busy night clubbing and hanging with the Avengers to remember to feel sad.
3. SIMPLER DOESN'T MEAN HAPPIER.
Peter has lost his soul-mate. He no longer has anyone to share his life with behind the mask. It used to be that being Spider-man was what made him unhappy, somewhere along the line it became being Peter Parker that did him in. He has no one to share these burdens with and still he's now happier than he's ever been.
I guess those Satanists are actually on to something. Screw mass on Sundays from now on it's killing a fresh goat every full moon.
But what about the aftermath you ask? The aforementioned “Brand New Day”? Well, true many have come out in praise of this storyline. “It was too dark for too long, BND is a breath of fresh air.” But what they forget is that comic books have things called writers and editors who decide on the tone. If it was too dark, they could have started writing funnier, lighter stories. But no, the dark tone was as good an excuse as any to have Spidey ask Beelzebub to annul his marriage to a super-model hottie who loved him and supported his desire to wear bright red P.J.s
So what's different with Brand New Day?
1. Peter and Mary-Jane never got married.
Even though time itself has been re-written, Joe Q continues to stress that everything you've read before happened. Except that they didn't get married. Apparently all those stories happened when they were living together. So it was better for Spidey to live in sin with a loose woman instead of in the bonds of matrimony? Huh. Let's hear it for free love!!!
2. No one remembers who Spider-man really is, NO ONE!
Spidey unmasked in the Civil War, but no one remembers who was under the mask. Despite living in a world obsessed with minutia, no one apparently cares that the world leaders have forgotten this fact. Also, one of the best things Joe Straczynski did in his run was let Aunt May in on the secret that her nephew was Spidey, but now she's back to her senile wheat-cake flipping caricature-self. This is what Spidey made the deal for, to get back a senile old bitty who brings nothing to the book except the occasional heart-attack and Alzheimer's reminiscence of “the good ole days”? Even those villains like Venom (who once shared a nervous system with Peter) and the Green Goblin don't remember. So now these interesting villains are now no longer able to be a personal threat to Spidey.
3.JACKPOT
The whole point of this was to tell stories that they couldn't do with a married Spidey. The only thing I can think of that meets that requirement is the new super heroine: Jackpot. She looks like Mary Jane, she talks like Mary Jane, is she Mary Jane? Who the hell cares? I think everyone has figured out that she's just some sort of misdirection. So the only thing that's different now, is that if it happened before Spider-man would try and find out who Jackpot is. Here he's made little effort to figure out who this woman who looks like his former lover is. Way to care. Perhaps his bachelor diet of ramen noodles and warm Pabst has eaten away at his brain?
The whole contention for this retcon is that the marriage aged Spidey. And that you couldn't put him in romantic situations without him being, and I quote, a scumbag. That is, that if a woman were to smile at Peter in a bar or something and he smiled back he was automatically an asshole. WHAT? You can't smile at people who smile at you if you're married. Did I miss that in the vows? Harsh.
I don't think that the marriage aged Spidey. You know what does age him? Having the adult children of his ex-girlfriend that were fathered by his arch enemy show up. That ages him. I told my best friend that Gwen Stacy, (Peter's dead ex) while dating Peter, had gotten knocked up by Norman Osborn (The Green Goblin) and their adult children had shown up in the books. He looked at me like I had just told him I liked to wear tutus and slap nuns with dead fish. Straczynski wanted to do away with these twins during OMD but was overruled by Joe Q. Straczynski also wanted to establish the rules of this deal with the devil. Joe Q's answer, “We don't have to explain it, it's magic.” That's like saying the Earth is flat. So long as we don't fall off the edge of the world, who cares about the truth.
So I guess the question is why? Why was Spidey's marriage so unpopular? Well consider that Joe Quesada was born in 1962. That means when he started reading comics it was the 70s and Spidey was single. Somewhere in the back of Joe's head, Spidey was meant to be single. He returned Spider-man to a simpler time. Of course I grew up with a married Spider-man and feel that that's the way to go. In my mind there are three couples in comics who belong together: 1) Reed and Sue Richards of the Fantastic Four 2) Clark Kent and Lois Lane and 3) Peter Parker and Mary-Jane.
I'm afraid that until someone of my generation becomes the Editor in Chief over at Marvel we're stuck with this retcon. Would it be more palpable to myself and the legion of fan-boys if OMD hadn't been so damn hurtful to Spider-man's character? I don't know. All I know is this is no longer a Spider-man I'm interested in knowing.
Sorry if this one wasn't so funny but it was very cathartic for me.
Yours in Fandom,
The Last Angry Geek
Also if you'd like to read more essays about Spider-Man, including the OMD/BND debacle, written by someone who's far more eloquent than I ever could be, check out: Spideykicksbutt.com
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