You're probably wondering what this post is all about. Well, my friend CJ has been providing all the content for our cool new blog, and my name is Herbie and I'm the other voice on The AV-Room Podcast (you can listen to it on this page at the bottom right corner). While he was covering The Los Angeles Science Fiction Convention, I've been suffering from writers block, fueled primarily by disbelief and more than a bit of anger. Let me explain.
One More Day is a storyline conceived by Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada to mark the last story arc in long term Spider-man writer J. Michael Straczinkski's term on the title and stands to rectify some glaring mistakes in Spider-man continuity that Quesada is convinced have weakened the appeal of the character.
Quesada believes that the character is hamstrung by the fact that while the appeal of Peter Parker is pure adolescent wish-fulfillment, a sort of uber-nerd get's his due, he is saddled with the right and responsibilities of a married man and it eliminates the every-nerd appeal of the character.
While that isn't necessarily a bad idea, as with any story, the problem is in the details. Given the choice between the life he has with his hot, runway model wife Mary Jane, or the life he has with his elderly Aunt May, inexplicably the young inner-city teacher chooses the life with his Aunt. Alright, I'm skeptical already but I continue reading, and we find out that the engine that establishes the new status quo is one of the worst plot devices in drama and that's the deus-ex-machina.
Let's say you're Joe Quesada and you have a particular ending in sight. Peter will be living with his Aunt May, have no memory of his wife and the marriage, and you want best friend Harry Osbourne alive and well. Oh, and you hate the organic web-shooters so you want the mechanical ones back, but you don't want to negate Civil War, where Peter revealed his secret identity to the world, and you want him to have a stable life as the young college student again.
A skillful writer might create a scenario where one event in the past is changed and the ripples of that one event create a the new reality you want. That was the original premise that Straczinski came up with using logic, albeit the strained logic of a time paradox. Instead, the idiotic Mook of an editor-in-chief nixes that idea as being too radical, and instead comes up with this winning premise:
* Mephisto (Satan) casts a spell that makes everybody forget Peter is Spider-Man. He saves Aunt May from certain death, makes the scar on her midsection from the assassination attempt go away too, and causes Peter to magically wake up in her old house that was burned down. The spell is so powerful that Dr. Strange can't tell that a spell has been cast, the newspaper articles and news footage have been changed, there's no record of Spider-man's identity, although people do remember he revealed it, just that no one can recall more than that, and all of these changes come from this same Mega-spell. O, and the webshooters are back and Harry Osbourne's alive and he never died.
Wow. Worse yet, when asked to explain the plot-holes in the premise, the editor says, "It's magic, we don't have to explain it." Hmm.
Yes you do Joe. It is precisely this sort of scenario that needs more explanation than normal. Marvel prides itself on being more "naturalistic" than DC, that continuity means something, and that characters change over time and evolve. Even galactic epics have an internal logic, time travel needs a structure, and most importantly there are rules to magic, or else there is no suspension of disbelief and the reader fails to buy in to the reality of the story. The only reality this story sets up, is one in which the Marvel Universe is a capricious place where demonic entities can, for no good reason, change the fabric of time and space and screw with life and death. One More Day establishes a character set whose lives are meaningless, mere puppets, with no resonance to who we are and what we stand for, and thus why should we care.
