Brand Old Day

Usually I keep my comic book geekiness in check on OP, but the latest Spider-Man storyline has made CNN and I have to talk about it. 

First, I'm going to provide a summary of the story so far.  If you plan on actually reading the stories, don't read this entry because it will be completely ruined. 




Again, if you don't want spoilers, turn away now.  You have been warned.





Okay...
During Marvel Comics' Civil War, Spider-Man reveals his secret identity to the world with encouragement from Aunt May and his wife Mary Jane.  Unfortunately, he realizes he has chosen the wrong side by choosing to stand with Iron Man and the government-sponsored Superhero Registration Program, so he defects...but now, he and his family no longer enjoy government protection.  Ultimately, the Kingpin tries to have a sniper kill Peter, but instead the bullet hits Aunt May.  Spidey tracks down the Kingpin and whoops his ass, promising to kill him if Aunt May dies. 

Then the demon Mephisto comes along, and offers to bring Aunt May back to full health and restore Peter's secret identity -- but the price will be removing Peter and MJ's marriage from existence.  Why?  Because their marriage is so pure that it sickens Mephisto, and he will get to listen to a small portion of each of their souls scream in pain for all eternity.

MJ basically agrees to do it on Pater's behalf.  The rationale: everyone would still be alive, and Peter would save the life of the one person on earth he loves as much as MJ.  But MJ tells Mephisto that she wants to remember everything.  So Mephisto waves his hands, and everything changes.  Aunt May is alive, Peter is living at her house again, Harry Osborn is alive, and Peter and MJ's marriage never happened. 

There are so many problems with this it's difficult to sum them all up quickly.   But in case you're keeping score at home, Marvel Comics' most popular character sold his and his wife's marriage, and future, to the devil.  Why?  To save the life of his octogenarian aunt.   And his organic webbing is gone, because in so doing, his mechanical web-shooters are restored and Peter now cannot produce his own webbing as he could for a few years.  And an old, tormented friend has come back to life. 

Joe Quesada, Marvel's current Editor In Chief, has long wanted to bring Spider-Man back to his old-school, pre-married days with the mechanical webshooters and no mysticism.  Believe it or not, I appreciate the sentiment.  I don't even think it's a bad idea to get rid of the marriage. 

But not like this. 

No, not like this.  This basically destroys years of Spider-Man stories based on his marriage, enhanced powers and a whole lot of the history of the character.  In the words of Spider-Man author Joe Michael Stracynski, here's why (as outlined in a conversation between himself and Marvel EIC Joe Quesada):

So what does Mephisto do?" I ask.

"He makes everybody forget Peter's Spider-Man."

"Uh, huh. So Aunt May's still in the hospital --"

"No, he saves Aunt May."

"But if all he does is save her life and make everybody forget he's Spidey, she still has a scar on her midsection."

"No, he makes that go away too."

"Okay...:

"Then he wakes up in her house."

"The house that was burned down?"

"Right."

"But how --"

"Mephisto undoes that as well."

"Okay. And the guys who shot at Peter and May and were killed, they're alive too? Mephisto can bring guys back from the dead?"

"It's all part of the spell."

"And Doc Strange can't tell?"

"No,"

"And the newspaper articles? News footage?"

"Joe, it's been forgotten."

"I'm just asking is that stuff there or not there?"

"Not there. And Peter's web shooters are back."

"Is this the same spell or a different spell?"

"Same spell."

"How does making people forget he's Spidey bring back his web shooters?"

"It's magic, okay?"

"I see. And Harry's back."

"Right."

"And Mephisto does this too."

"Yep."

"So is Harry back from the dead, or has he been alive? If they ask him, hey Harry, what did you do last summer, will he remember? And the year before? And the year before? If he says they all went on a picnic two years ago, will they remember it?"

"It's --"

"Because if he now has a life he remembers, if he's not back from the dead, then you've changed the continuity you said you didn't want to change. Those are your only options: he was brought back from the dead, and there's a grave, and people remember him dying --"

"Mephisto changes THEIR memories too."

"-- or he's effectively been alive as far as our characters know, so he's been alive all along, so either way as far as our characters are concerned, continuity's been violated going back to 1971.

How do you explain that?"

"It's magic, we don't have to explain it."

In other words, this is the stupidest thing to happen to Spider-Man since the Clone Saga.   Again, it's not the idea of losing the marriage that bothers me.  It's that in order to do so, they decided to use the most trite, cheap, lazy literary convention in existence to do so.  Instead of writing stories that took months or years to unfold to bring Spidey back to this prior era, they just said, "Ta-da!  Magic!  Deus ex machina!"

The next day, I went to the comic store and asked them to stop reserving Spider-Man for me.   I don't care how good the news stories might be: this whole event was just horribly executed, and I don't want anything to do with a title that would insult reader intelligence this way. 

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