I haven’t bought a comic book in over a decade and a half, and I’m REALLY fuming over this: Peter Parker (Spider Man) and Mary Jane Watson are no longer to be married.
Those who know Spider-Man only from Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst in the movies might be surprised to learn that in the comic book, the web-spinning hero has been married for almost 21 years.
Has it really been that long? Whoa.
That’s why the comic world is in an uproar over Marvel Comics’ decision to undo the marriage of Peter Parker and red-haired bombshell Mary Jane Watson, reversing two decades of storytelling.
In Amazing Spider-Man #545 last week, Peter and Mary Jane make a tearful deal with the devil-like character Mephisto: In exchange for saving Aunt May’s life, Mephisto erases all traces of the Peter-Mary Jane marriage from memory.
They couldn’t even do it a normal way, like a divorce… they had to do some spooky deal to save Peter’s Aunt May, who was about 115 when they got married 21 years ago. Of course, in comic book years, that makes May a spry 39. Making even less sense, they have killed Aunt May a few times, only to bring her back with a flimsy plot device like the “genetically altered actress” who played May for months while the real May was a super-villain’s prisoner.
From what I can gather from the rest of the linked article (and a bit of Wikipedia), this is the biggest point, but not the only point, in what will amount to a re-set of the series. Peter will return to being the young single nerd, Mary Jane will be just another character, Peter will not have unmasked before the world (undoing Spidey from the Civil War storyline completely), and Harry Osborn — the Green Goblin — will be alive again.
Stupid quotes from the article:
But in 1987, Peter and Mary Jane, by then a fashion model, got married. Marvel had instant regrets.
“I remember editors and editors in chief lamenting that a married Spider-Man was not where we want to be,” Quesada says. “A married Peter Parker makes for a less interesting soap opera than a single Peter Parker going about his nerdy kind of life.”
Writers tried everything: The couple separated for a while. She miscarried. And in a much-criticized story line, Marvel tried to convince readers that Peter Parker had not gotten married, but his clone. That didn’t stick, either.
They tried real life situations, then they tried colossally retarded situations, and nothing stuck. Why? Because the marriage thing was working for the fans.
“Nobody wants to read about a married Spider-Man,” says Craig Shutt, a columnist for Comics Buyers Guide.
Which is why the other attempts at destroying the marriage worked so well, right guys?
The marriage had always worked for me, in a Beauty and the Geek kind of way. I always liked the fact that Petey got to marry the hot model that he had always had a crush on. This reset reeks of lazy, and I’m not happy.
Anyway… as an additional note, look at the cover shot of the comic in question… the price tags on these things has climbed to $4! I am sure this is the price just for the special issue, but the point stands that these things are running $3 a month now. I used to collect back when they were $1 to $1.50, and I griped about every price hike… this has gotten too expensive for me even now, when I make a grown-up’s salary.
