The questionable fate of Spider-Man’s marriage is hardly a new topic around the blogosphere, looking anywhere over the last few months, you’ll find a lot of people with very strong opinions about the matter. That doesn’t mean, however, that people aren’t saying new interesting things about it.
At his blog, Mike Sterling relates an anecdote and considers his own perspective about Spider-Man’s marriage:
You know, pondering that, I realized that I’ve been selling the funnybooks for about as long as Spider-Man’s marriage has existed. And, in all that time, I don’t think I heard word one from anyone who really did not like the fact that Spider-Man was married. They objected to dumb storylines, they objected to the Spider-Clone story after it dragged on for its sixth or seventh decade, they objected to multi-part storylines that bounced back and forth among the several monthly Spidey titles…but no one objected to Spider-Man having a wife back home. I don’t recall any extensive discussion on the merits, or lack thereof, of said nuptials.
Livejournalist Phillipos Fourty-Two thinks that it’s a swerve:
That was in 1987. Since then we’ve seen Marvel stick the “Peter & MJ are destined to be together” meme in our faces to the point of retcon. And now there isn’t just a newspaper strip to consider. Now there’s Ultimate Spidey, MC2, Marvel Adventures, Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, & I guess that thing with “cute Doc Ock” that I don’t quite get; plus movies & whatever else.
When Quesada talked about ending the marriage, the best he could come up with is that Pete could now, “have sex, or download porn.” OK, granted, Joe’s a penciler, not a writer, but that’s particularly unconvincing. Has it occurred to anyone that Joe could be pulling our legs to drive up sales?
Blogger Notintheface responds to Phillipos’s post with a bit more pessimism:
I just finished reading Part One of the “One More Day” arc, and it establishes Aunt May early on as the front-runner in the “which woman in Peter Parker’s life is going to die” sweepstakes. In popular fiction, that often means it’s going to be someone else.
So what’s your take?
September 15th, 2007 at 10:38 am
Personally, I really don’t care whether Spidey’s married or not specifically. Just don’t have strong feelings one way or the other. What I DO care about is characters who move forward in their lives. That’s an important part of what being a Marvel character means, to me–and what makes me care about Marvel characters more than more iconic characters. So un-marrying Spider-Man seems like a small step backwards for Peter Parker, but a giant leap backwards for Marvel as a whole.
“Has it occurred to anyone that Joe could be pulling our legs to drive up sales?”
Yeah, it’s all a bit too “we’re gonna kill off Speedball!” for me. Although, half the people who were protesting against Speedball’s death now probably would have preferred that, so it’s not really a reassuring thought.
September 15th, 2007 at 11:01 am
I want Peter and MJ to remain married, AND I want the missing child to reappear. It’s high-time that the MC2 Spider-Girl (Mayday Parker) be accepted into official canon. The idea that Peter is a struggling parent and husband would add to the everyman aspect of the character that everyone knows and loves. JQ doesn’t have the guts to do that, however. Shows you he’s been hanging out with the likes of Kevin Smith too long if he is interested in Spider-Man downloading porn and sleeping around. What a perverted thing to say.
September 15th, 2007 at 11:22 am
If they get rid of the marriage, 20 years from now readers will claim it was the best thing that ever happened to Spider-Man and they’ll scream at any editor who suggests otherwise.
September 15th, 2007 at 11:31 am
I think marrying him off was a horrible idea, and I think part of the reason most of the last 20 years have sucked is that a married late twentysomething Spidey isn’t interesting.
I also think that whatever retcon/ fix idea they’ve got in store (assuming there is one in store and it’s not a Speedball-esque swerve) is likely to be really contrived and stupid. It may, however, make for better stories in the long run, if it creates a better status quo.
Kind of like ripping off a band-aid.
September 15th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Spiderman”s marriage was a natural progression of the character. People need to move on and stop living in the past.
September 15th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
The basic problem with spider-man is that he never really evolves because the character has no ending. He will keep fighting the same villains for another 20 years. The reason the MJ marriage is now a problem is because he is never going to be middle-aged spidey and old spidey and finally the series will be ended with a fantastic send off.
No, the character must stay young to keep the dollars rolling in. So since they can’t go forward, they can only go backwards, so he’ll stop being married. Then when that gets old, he’ll get married again! Maybe another kid for a while? When that gets boring the kid will go too. Maybe a girlfriend will die? Maybe another will come back to life?
Whatever it takes to keep people reading.
I remember the last spidey issue I picked up, he was fighting Doc Ock, you know what happened? Spiderman won and Doc Ock went to jail.
I never read another spiderman book again.
AE.
September 15th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
“Spiderman’s marriage was a natural progression of the character. People need to move on and stop living in the past.”
And in a few years you’ll be complaining about the end of the marriage and people will tell you to stop living in the past.
September 15th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
There’s no real reason to end the marriage that isn’t incredibly cynical in nature. It’s not like it’s hurting the character when he’s still one of the most well known corporate icons in the world. The truth is the real reason the stories have been sucking is because they can no longer take any risks with him without risking the wallet. It’s the same reason you never see Disney take any risks with Mickey Mouse. He’s so tied in with the image at this point that him doing ANYTHING is potentially damaging.
What Marvel doesn’t realize is that Spidey’s marriage IS the status quo to the vast majority of comic readers. I know I grew up with it. I understand their reasoning for wanting the marriage over, I just think it’s crass and wrong headed. But I’ll be ok with it because like I said I grew up with the marriage as the status quo and when it’s ended I can move on to something else. It’ll be like the story came to it’s end and I won’t need to see anymore.
Not sure that’s what Marvel wants, but given they’re more concerned with their iconic status quo then they are with the desires of fans, the creator of the character, or the organic progression of the story, I really could care less. As far as I’m concerned, Spider-Man will always be married.
September 16th, 2007 at 6:02 am
The sad fact is that whichever thing they do, it won’t last and it won’t matter. There is no plot in superhero comics that can’t and won’t be undone by the next generation of creators.
September 16th, 2007 at 7:52 am
I wonder how many folks who see Spidey’s marriage as a natural progression even read the book at the time he was married. There was no natural progression at all. MJ wasn’t even in the book, and hadn’t been for years. Peter & MJ were getting married in the newspaper strip and the comics decided to sync up. They hurriedly brought back MJ and, within a few issues, she and Pete were married. It was a stunt.
That’s leaving aside the problem, as well, that the only point of “progressing” Spider-Man is if he’s progressing *toward* something. Spidey is not doing that. He’s a corporate icon that Marvel intends to keep in print indefinitely. His story isn’t heading toward some grand climax - like most DC and Marvel superheroes, he exists in a perpetual “now”.
There’s a reason why virtually every other treatment of the character casts him as single. He’s more interesting that way. There are more stories to be told about him that way. Marriage should be an endpoint for Spidey, a happily ever after moment, not a point in the middle of the journey.
September 16th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
See matches I completely disagree and feel like that attitude is just another example of the how immature our culture’s outlook on marriage is. If you can’t mine the partnership between two people and the journey involved with marriage for quality stories then you have no business writing. And it’s not like we haven’t gotten quality stories in the last twenty years or like Spidey is the only character to get crappy stories in that span. Plus you can’t compare the original Spidey to the other treatments because the other treatments all feature different personalities and storylines for virtually the entire cast! That’s like saying Captain America should make more jokes about France because it made Ultimate Captain America more interesting. And complaining about the marriage happening because the comics wanted to sink up with the strip (being written by the character’s CREATOR!) doesn’t excuse lazy storytelling, whining, or trying to rip a character’s life apart because he isn’t like he was when you were ten.
But you’re right in that Marvel wants him to perpetually live in the middle of the story and not progress, which is totally their right. Just as it’s our right to say that the story end the way we want, when we want. I have no doubt that if they end the marriage they will ultimately continue to make more money out of Spidey and will make what they claim will be more interesting stories and yet seem really familiar and will be carbon copies of all the other treatments you pointed out. Yay for originality.
September 16th, 2007 at 9:53 pm
I think they would be better off to kill Peter Parker, Mary Jane, and Aunt May and be done with it. Then they could bring back Ben Reilly as Spider-Man and have a completely blank slate to screw up.
September 16th, 2007 at 11:41 pm
They hurriedly brought back MJ and, within a few issues, she and Pete were married.
Uhm, no. MJ came back in 1985 and they got married in 1987, over two years later. You’re also neglecting the fact that the reason she was out of the book in the first place was that she ran off when Peter proposed to her. I realize Joe Q. has tried to retcon the real Spider-history to make it seem like she was rushed back just for the marriage, but that’s not what actually happened.
October 21st, 2007 at 3:57 pm
What Dweeeze said. I was reading Spider-Man in the two years before the wedding, & MJ was in the book. Not to mention that people knew her from “Spidey Super Stories” & the newspaper strip, which were not blatantly a different character with different continuity, but stories of questionable continuity about the same character (unlike “Ultimate Spider-Man” today).
There was a lot of backstory for those characters; there was setup going back two years of issues; it was very much a logical progression. Even though the engagement proper was really fast (about three months of ASM), it was with the knowledge that these characters had known each other for years.