About a year and a half ago, J. Michael Straczinsky, the creator of Babylon 5 and renowned Spider-man author was finishing up his long running term on the flagship title. He had saved the the comic from goombah editorial directions before resulting in a character Renaissance, from one of the lowest selling titles after the ill-conceived clone saga to a top selling title under his watch. He did it with innovation, an exploration and expansion of the myth and an adult sensibility. It wasn't the Spider-man I grew up with certainly but it was the Spider-man of today and if you were yearning for a simpler take on the character there was always Ultimate Spider-man the concurrent systematic reboot written by Brian Michael Bendis. Instead of telling the stories he had planned, JMS was forced into a corner by the dim-witted blockbuster mentality that writer Mark Millar forced on the Marvel Universe with his Civil War, darkening up the character even further, changing the status-quo and revealing his secret identity to the world. In my opinion it was a character ruining event for sure, one ok'ed by Joe Quesada I might add, but they compounded it. Instead of running with it for a time, using it to organically re-mount the character, Marvel chickened out. Instead they planned an event for Spider-man that took every noble attribute of the character and washed through the sewers of New York.
In the comic, Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson like the movie reality references, fell in love and got married. They handled the stressors of life and mutual careers and settled into a normal life of committed matrimony. He had super-powers, he saved New York but he had the love of a beautiful woman behind him to urge him on. It was the character arc of an adult with great power and great responsibility. Peter Parker may have been a kid with the same ideals but he had grown. He was no longer the eager nebbish with glasses and girl problems that secretly fought crime as the flamboyant Spider about town.
The powers that be at Marvel had been quoted for some time as being against the current reality. They wanted to reboot him to that original continuity, strip away the trappings of the adult and make him a kid again. Quesada met with the Spider-man editors. He laid out his long standing plans, ones that he had held since he had been a freelancer. He wanted the marriage ended. He thought Spider-man needed to be single and younger, more reflective of the losers who had taken Peter Parker to heart for over 30 years. Quesada thought divorce for Spider-man would create a darker undercurrent and wouldn't free him of the last 15 years of continuity, so instead, he sanctioned this even darker monstrosity: One More Day.
In One More Day, Aunt May is threatened for the umpteenth time with death. Having already lost his Uncle Ben, Peter is unwilling to stand by a let her succumb to old age and injury. He realizes that his powers alone can't fix the situation so he calls on Mephisto, the demonic ruler of the Marvel underworld, and he requests an audience. He bargains with him for Aunt May's life. Mephisto agrees but in payment he requests to strip from him the love that he has for Mary Jane and vice versa. He brings back Peter's life, the life he once had as a struggling photographer at the Daily Bugle. He brings back his best friend, the deceased Harry Osborn, and Peter wakes up the next day alone, Mary Jane has disappeared to Hollywood again and his Aunt May is alive. Finally, to contradict both Civil War and post-Cival War continuity, Mephisto takes all memory away from every character in the Marvel Universe that remembered that Peter had ever been Spider-man.
In this bastardized continuity Peter had never married Mary Jane. They had a long-term relationship that he barely remembers but sometime in the past instead of marrying they broke up. He never developed the organic web-shooters that the movie continuity referenced. Everything else remained the same. Every story counted, except for this one small piece of the puzzle. Peter Parker had been a clone, he fought the Beyonder and even brought back a symbiotic alien with dental problems, but the one regret for the company that publishes his comic is that he got married? That was the irreparable harm they wanted to fix with Spider-man? Joe Quesada wanted him to be more accessible to new readers, a lighter hero with less emotional and physical baggage. He wants Peter to be more like the kids who read his comics. So he has him make a deal with Satan?
This is what you get when "pencillers" make creative decisions. When Joe Quesada took over as Editor-in-Chief at Marvel he brought with him the experience of a an assembly-line drone. They handed him keys to the Marvel Ferrari and he has succeeded sure, obsessing over the engine or the transmission, the technical details and the surface sheen, but he hasn't been able to create something new. He doesn't know how to redesign the Ferrari. That is what artists do. This is the legacy of Image Comics. What is also clear to me is that Joe Quesada doesn't understand Spider-man at all. The vitality of the character is that despite its age, he's been able to grow and change with the times while always maintaining his dignity and the core of what makes Spider-man a hero. By returning him to a kinder simpler time, a more innocent one referencing the early issues of the title and specifically the Steve Ditko run in the 1960's, he has taken the character outside of Marvel continuity, stranding him in a thematic cul-de-sac, a curiosity but nowhere near the vibrant and important character he was before this travesty of a storyline began.
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