David Michelinie On Peter's Conversations With Dead People In "The Wedding"

[Miles To Go]

A fan on another forum asked 80s/90s ASM writer David Michelinie questions about his early plans for "The Wedding", which included scenes where Peter is engaging in conversations with the people he had lost over the years and ultimately being hospitalized and conversing with Gwen's ghost about facing his future with Mary Jane. Here are his responses...and he also has something to say about the two different opinions of Jim Shooter to the original outline

Virtually nothing of my original plot made it into the published comic. I wanted to do something different for a wedding story, not the usual bad-guys-crash-ceremony-and-hero-has-to-suit-up-to-save-the-day. So at one point, after a Spider-Man fight at the beginning, I was going to have a troubled Peter Parker walking down the sidewalk talking to an unidentified someone about his concerns for Aunt May, and how she would feel about Mary Jane and Peter maybe “drifting away” from her. During the conversation we’d swing the camera around to show that Peter is talking to Uncle Ben, who’s walking beside him. At another point Peter would be on a park bench, discussing the possibility of putting MJ in danger by being married to a super hero, and of her worrying about him not coming home alive some night. And we’d see that he was discussing the matter with Gwen Stacey. Towards the end would be another action sequence with Spider-Man, after which Peter would collapse and be taken to a hospital, where he would be diagnosed as having a concussion from the opening battle. Then we would learn that the conversations with dead people were hallucinations, Peter trying to work out his own doubts and anxieties about the very big step of getting married. Through monologues with his “memory” friends he would have convinced himself that life with Mary Jane would be worth the risks and would be welcomed by others in his life. But editor-in-chief Jim Shooter took me into his office and told me that the wedding was going to get huge publicity and Marvel was hoping it would bring a lot of non-comics people in to read the story. Therefore, Marvel wanted something more standard, something that “civilians” could more easily gets their minds around. So I turned the plotting over to him and the story became something very different from what I was going to do. On a side note, when in Jim’s office he privately told me that he appreciated what I was trying to do and liked my story, but that Marvel wanted something more commercial. However, a number of years later he was quoted in a Wizard Magazine interview as saying he thought my original plot was “lame” and “inappropriate”. So I guess a LOT of things changed over the years…

[Frontier]

That actually would've been a pretty cool and fitting development to see play out, though at the same time I think I also appreciated the mundanity of the original annual .

Oh Shooter .

[Mister Mets]

He ended up using the hallucination in ASM 350, which was pretty good.

[WebLurker]

I think I like the original idea better than the final product (at least on paper).

[RD!]

That sounded awesome. For a marriage fan like me, 21 is already a classic but if that had be happened it would probably be a classic to all fans