Since opinions on “One More Day” keep threading their way into other posts, even though they are of no relevance, I figured the simplest thing was to begin a comments thread for it even though I had nothing to do with it.
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.
PAD
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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 bášŧárdš!” 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 šhìŧ, 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 hëll 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 hëll 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?
Now obviously this depends on people being as good as their word. By now Quesada honestly reminds me of George W. Bush because both men 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’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.
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 “Jáçkášš” 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 hëll 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, hëll maybe this crap won’t go on much longer.
For laughs, there is also a video on YouTube of a disgusted fan wiping his ášš 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 Hëll” 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 hëll 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.