Sins Past vs. One More Day.

[Mister Mets]

OMD is something quite unprecedented in Spider-Man's publication history for the following reasons:

1) Until the Clone Saga, Spider-Man occupied a realistic corner of the Marvel Universe. Characters who were dead stayed dead. There weren't retcons like telling us "last 20 years didn't happen" or something that rewrote the actual stories. The Clone Saga had it stuck would have told readers that the Spider-Man since #150, i.e. the Peter Parker who romanced Felicia Hardy, who married MJ, of the entire Roger Stern, Defalco, Michelinie era, the one in Kid Who Collected Spider-Man was a clone. Now the Clone Saga failed. It didn't take. But OMD basically did what the Clone Saga failed to do, mostly because editorial and executive behind the scenes weren't in total disarray as it was during the Saga. It told readers that the Peter and Mary Jane of KLH (a story its writer said many times simply doesn't have the emotional impact without the marriage), of Michelinie's run, of the Venom arc, of the entire Clone Saga (where them being married and pregnant was the continuous throughline), of Identity Crisis, of JMS' run, of To Have and to Hold, Web of Romance wasn't married. And that doesn't work because the writers definitely wrote a married couple, and them being married was the emotional crux of those stories. And you can't make that into a "live-in relationship" and expect it to have the same impact. And before you go, the Clone Saga did it, why not OMD. The Clone Saga is considered a low-point in Spider-Man, and certainly not something to emulate. It's like saying that the people being the Captain Marvel movie should adapt Avengers #200.

2) Until OMD, every writer on Spider-Man worked on the character and status-quo handed down to him by the previous writer. JMS was handed down the status-quo of Mackie, which included a separated Peter/MJ, a resurrected Aunt May. Mackie got the status-quo of the late Clone Saga, and became the main writer of the Post-Clone Saga status-quo, the Clone Saga had to deal with Michelinie, Michelinie had to deal with the mess left behind by Owsley who fired Defalco/Frenz, Defalco/Frenz followed Roger Stern who followed O'Neill who followed Wolfman who followed Wein who followed Conway who followed Lee-Romita and who followed Lee-Ditko. The result of that strong serialized progression and relay race is that there are no large gaps between runs. Each run basically picks up from before. But Post-OMD starts with a considerable gap of time, much of that had to be filled in by flashbacks. This breaks the relay. Harry Osborn, remember him, he's alive now? How did that happen what blanks did that fill? Find out in some flashback issues no one remembers having read. What happened between Peter and MJ who went from married to "never happened" to broken-up and not speaking to one another and dating other people...wait and find out for some three years for OMIT which even people who like BND said was as-bad-if-not-worse-than-OMD and basically ruined BND and the characters.

3) Dan Slott, Guggenheim and others didn't work on the character and status-quo that JMS wrote and handed down to them. Since Peter as a character by having his personality, character development, and entire story retconned before they got to work on him, and they start with a huge gap in time, and they then proceed to introduce, reintroduce, and in the case of Harry Osborn, bring a long-dead character (dead for more than a decade) back into continuity without explaining the logic at the start...they were essentially creating a version of Spider-Man out of whole cloth rather than working on something built on before.

From the perspective of long-standing publication norms and practices, which are crucial to maintaining continuity and continuity is crucial and essential in maintaining a shared universe, especially one which is consequential like Spider-Man's...OMD destroyed the Spider-Man of AF#15. The one that comes after is a prefab one, literally since the writing team worked on it for 2 years before the publication of the last issue of OMD. Characters like Carlie Cooper and others were designated as love interests before audience feedback which was crucial for elevating MJ and Felicia Hardy into love interests. Now you can say that objectively, Marvel says Post-OMD is 616 and its canon we have to accept it, that's true. But internally from the publication history of the character and establishes norms, which is also objective, the character doesn't have direct ties or continuity to what came before it. And if it doesn't have that, then it is an entirely new and separate thing.

The reason Nick Spencer's run feels more natural and fitting for readers than Slott's is that Spencer is working in a more traditional fashion. His first issue had him unravel and destroy Slott's entire status-quo in a single issue and he did it within the established rules and contexts which is how Spider-Man writers worked on beforehand. JMS for instance didn't like Peter and MJ separated but he had to work with that and slowly built their reunion into one of the all-time great optimistic moments in Spider-Man. The plagiarism thing was something Peter really did and all Spencer did was send the chickens home to roost. Slott never once wrote a street-level Spider-Man and Spencer and later Taylor return Peter to that context where he was last seen in the JMS era where he taught High School.

It's an interesting point on the relay race.

I'm not sure the relay race has always been to the good, as when writers have left in the middle of stories (see Stan Lee twice, Marv Wolfman, Roger Stern and Tom DeFalco.) It's also a bit less accessible when new writers are tying up loose ends.

The end of One More Day did set up a new status quo, although I do get that Brand New Day didn't spend any time on the unmasked era, which was something readers were interested in (due to behind the scenes issues, some of the work was likely commissioned before Marvel came up with back in black.)

The marriage era did have a similar leap, with Michelinie taking over and having Peter propose to someone he wasn't even romantically involved in. This was a bit mitigated by Peter David sticking around to tell a story paying off a plot thread from earlier in his increasingly sporadic Spectacular Spider-Man run, with the release of the Sin-Eater from jail.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

I'm not sure the relay race has always been to the good, as when writers have left in the middle of stories (see Stan Lee twice, Marv Wolfman, Roger Stern and Tom DeFalco.) It's also a bit less accessible when new writers are tying up loose ends.

It's the nature of having serial continuity especially Marvel's since that was something they defined and created. So those are the rules of the game. And the usual sentiment before was finding a way to work with the hand you are dealt with. Geoff Johns didn't like Hal Jordan's death and demise and the state of Green Lantern comics but he managed to use what was done and written and rework that into a new direction. So Emerald Twilight and Parallax and all that stuff still happened and Jordan was missing from GL for a long time. You might criticize him for bringing Hal Jordan back (I certainly do) but he played by the norms and rules of serial continuity for all writers. Roger Stern in Hobgoblin Lives didn't like the way the Hobgoblin mystery resolved in #289, nor did he like Peter and MJ married but he worked both into his story. So every Hobgoblin story before happened and counted, and MJ being married to Peter and not being clued into the shenanigans at the time is an important plot point since she unravels the whole "Ned Leeds couldn't have been the Hobgoblin" part.

The Clone Saga on the other hand worked in a story that ignored Conway's Spectacular Annual 8 which explained and closed the doors to a story that didn't go anywhere and do anything by then, saying Miles Warren never cloned anyone and he merely drugged up made regular people into lookalikes of Gwen and Peter. If they wanted to do the "real Peter" thing you could still have kept that and it would possibly have improved the story, since Ben Reilly could be an actual person drugged and modified with Peter's personality and attributes when now he's a clone and that by its nature makes it harder to revisit him and his story, because the whole "Accepting a clone as a person and human being thing" is now a separate big story in an entirely new genre grafted on top of something that doesn't accommodate it well.

The marriage era did have a similar leap, with Michelinie taking over and having Peter propose to someone he wasn't even romantically involved in. This was a bit mitigated by Peter David sticking around to tell a story paying off a plot thread from earlier in his increasingly sporadic Spectacular Spider-Man run, with the release of the Sin-Eater from jail.

Michelinie took over in a transition era, since the Gang War story was fairly messy and incoherent to start with, so Peter suddenly proposing MJ isn't all that big a leap when Ned Leeds is suddenly revealed to be the Hobgoblin after he died. One side turn after another side turn. The Black Cat romance in Gang War which Owsley shoehorned in also didn't make sense since Peter David had established earlier that the Foreigner and Black Cat were stringing Peter along (in that Spectacular story where Black Cat fights Sabretooth) and David used that to get rid of Felicia in the Spectacular tie-ins that take place chronologically before Michelinie's first issues. And Peter and MJ had strong romantic tension throughout Defalco's run (as in ASM Annual #19 by Louise Simonson) which continued in Spider-Man Vs. Wolverine #1 which was easily reinterpreted as a "road-to-marriage story (against Owsley's intentions) in Marvel Saga #22. And from the longer perspective of Peter and MJ's relationship it wasn't such a leap. And in any case, that mistake was editor error. Jim Salicrup didn't get Shooter's message as to when the marriage would happen so he didn't properly prepare the groundwork, so if there had been better communication it would have happened quicker.

And in any case, editor putting in romance or sudden turns to make the story fit is part of Spider-Man's norms. Stan Lee for instance sped up Peter and Gwen's romance from flirtation to one-step below engagement pretty rapidly.

[WebLurker]

The marriage era did have a similar leap, with Michelinie taking over and having Peter propose to someone he wasn't even romantically involved in.

I have the book with that stuff and I don't think that's the case.

[Miles To Go]

Yeah, even if they weren't dating, Peter and MJ were absolutely in love with one another.

[Snoop Dogg]

Mary Jane before the marriage was the friend who knew the identity. They would dip by each other's apartments, and maybe they were banging? It was definitely too vague to declare anything like that they were in love until the Wolverine one-shot where they did the Gwen thing again because Peter had to cope with breaking another woman's neck.

Clone Saga, for its many faults, does not lose points for retconning Conway's retcons of his own story, because those retcons were 10x dumber and more contrived than the cloning.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Mary Jane before the marriage was the friend who knew the identity. They would dip by each other's apartments, and maybe they were banging? It was definitely too vague to declare anything like that they were in love until the Wolverine one-shot where they did the Gwen thing again because Peter had to cope with breaking another woman's neck.

Jim Owsley/Christopher Priest said that he wrote that story to make them out to be this doomed impossible love but it got reinterpreted as them being passionately in love and it ended up transforming to a "road to marriage" story when Marvel Saga #22 used panels from it (curated by PAD) as a lead-up to the wedding.

Owsley said that this was one of his reasons for leaving Spider-Man since they misread the intentions of his story. Well, he didn't leave right away at any rate. He wrote the Honeymoon Annual with the Puma. A fact that he keeps forgetting or refusing to acknowledge.

Clone Saga, for its many faults, does not lose points for retconning Conway's retcons of his own story, because those retcons were 10x dumber and more contrived than the cloning.

How? Conway's retcon in Spectacular Annual 8 closed the lid on the fact that Miles Warren, a low-rent ESU professor with a crush on a coed, discovered human cloning.

Human cloning as a premise has no place in Spider-Man since it deals with a bunch of stuff (is a clone a person and all that Blade Runner nonsense) that Spider-Man isn't equipped to deal with. It goes against the grounded personal story of Peter and his supporting cast. Conway's Annual 8 returned the story to that grounded context, and having ordinary people altered by drugs into lookalikes is a more poignant approach then clones created from labs. Among the many reasons why the Clone Saga is a terrible story, that's one of the big ones. It makes Peter and his world into an arcane stew of shadowy conspiracies with bizarre clones and figures coming out of the woodwork all knowing his secret and his personal life, and it takes away from the grounded nature of his story and world.

Like Peter and Ben Reilly's "Friendship" was always hard to get into since basically the subtext is that Peter's a narcissist. The only close male friend who gets him is a clone of him which is absurd. I actually do think that deep down Peter Parker is a narcissist at least of a milder and more human kind, but this goes too much in the other way. If Ben Reilly was a legit person who was altered and transformed by Peter's memories then that's meaningful and it would fulfill that line about someone getting a walk in Peter's shoes that Slott put at the end of Spider-Island.

[Snoop Dogg]

Miles figuring out cloning is contrived. However, it's not that contrived in the Marvel Universe, because in the MU cloning isn't an impressive feat. It's commonplace. Even if the goal of the retcons was to temper down the contrivance, Conway failed because the replacement, the idea that Miles discovered genetic super viruses, is equally as contrived and creates a more confusing and stupider arc. The retcon isn't needed, doesn't succeed, and the stories which sprung from it weren't worth it.

Cloning is a concept Spider-Man can tackle. There are no concepts Spider-Man can't tackle, because he is a flexible character who can work in any type of story for a limited period of time. The more grounded stuff takes precedent, which is the Clone Saga's failure in letting all that stuff take over his life and become a mess. Cloning is a common sci-fi concept, and sci-fi works for Spider-Man better than politics or fantasy. The character and 95% of his rogues gallery have their origins in sci-fi, particularly biology. Cloning is also starting to become less of a thing of fiction, which actually makes it even better for Spider-Man. Real-world cloning science is bringing with it a storm of ethical questions, questions which are essentially about... the great power... and the great responsibility... So in many ways, Spider-Man is more suited to tackle this stuff and other biological themes like human enhancement in a way that other Marvel flagships aren't. You just have to do it, uh, well, and can't let it overshadow the characters. And that's what the Clone Saga did.

[Mister Mets]

I have the book with that stuff and I don't think that's the case.

This may be an argument about definitions more than anything else. They weren't exclusively involved with one another. They weren't even dating. There was the possibility that they would hook up, but they weren't together yet.

[Miles To Go]

This may be an argument about definitions more than anything else. They weren't exclusively involved with one another. They weren't even dating. There was the possibility that they would hook up, but they weren't together yet.

You don't need to be consistently dating to come to the conclusions Peter made about wanting to be with MJ.

Also, they went out a good few times in between Peter getting with Felicia. They even went out on a date in Spider-Man vs Wolverine.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Miles figuring out cloning is contrived. However, it's not that contrived in the Marvel Universe, because in the MU cloning isn't an impressive feat. It's commonplace.

At the time, the people who did cloning was the High Evolutionary, the Space-Wizards in Adam Warlock's corner, Mister Sinister, pretty arcane and select guys, so in no way was that commonplace around the time of the 80s and the Clone Saga. In fact that was the whole point. Spectacular Annual 8 was a tie-in to a forgotten crossover called Evolutionary War which was about differing cloning wizards coming together, and they needed to know what Miles Warren or Jackal's place was in that, since the choice was to elevate Warren/Jackal to god-level scientific genius and that didn't work, the option was to make him a mere pretender.

The fact is that for most of the time the Marvel Universe as a shared universe was a house of mirrors and a maze. It was something that existed but it was acknowledged by editors/writers and others that each superhero existed in their specific corner.

There are no concepts Spider-Man can't tackle, because he is a flexible character who can work in any type of story for a limited period of time.

There are some stories Spider-Man doesn't tackle and not regularly. For instance, Spider-Man occupies a fairly sanitized part of the Marvel Universe even compared to Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and the Punisher. His stories don't deal with rape, with molestation, with prostitution, and I don't know if there has ever been a single scene in a strip club in Spider-Man's stories. On one hand that's kind of nice since the women in Spider-Man, for all the other problems and issues over the years, seem to exist in a bubble where you have a kind of equality. On the other hand, that kind of highlights the fact that Spider-Man's stories aren't built to deal with certain kind of stories. After all you can't have Peter whining about "Parker Luck" when he comes across rape victims or deals with that, because he'd come across as an insensitive narcissist even more than he already does. How can you sell Peter as unlucky when the absolute worst hasn't happened to him or anywhere close to that? And nobody in superhero comics has ever done "if you kill him you'll be just like him" thing with a rape victim taking revenge on their rapist. The closest anyone has dealt with that is Alan Moore's story about Vigilante that he wrote for DC (really obscure but check out The Collected DC Stories of Alan Moore for that). So editors/writers and others have wisely kept that stuff out of Spider-Man.

At heart, Spider-Man's genre is comedy. It's supposed to be humorous. There are serious stuff but it can never be too serious or dark, or it stops being Spider-Man. Conway's First Clone Saga for instance is a comedy and a love story. The entire point about that is "Gwen drools, MJ rules" the whole point is that Miles Warren/Jackal is the embodiment of Gwen's fandom who couldn't accept she's dead or Peter failed her. Hence his fixation on Gwen only because she died (painted as necrophilia), him blaming Peter for Gwen's death rather than Goblin. And the entire climax where Peter realizes that since he's in love with MJ and the clones are fixated on Gwen, it means he's the real deal since he has moved on and found love.

The second clone saga totally didn't understand that or ever comprehended the violence it did to the story and continuity.

Cloning is a common sci-fi concept, and sci-fi works for Spider-Man better than politics or fantasy. The character and 95% of his rogues gallery have their origins in sci-fi, particularly biology.

The Lizard altered his body chemically. Green Goblin took performance enhancing drugs and became a superhuman. And that's it. Most of Spider-Man's villains are tech-based or physics based like Sandman or Electro become energy beings not animals. Rhino and others wear super-suits. Kraven the hunter is a normal person who takes herbs and stuff from the wild and also has ties to African shamanism or whatever. Vulture is also tech-based, as is Octopus and even Goblin is tech-based with the glider stuff. Venom and Carnage are exceptions as actual alien beings and in any case that has always been a problem many writers and others had with them. And that in any case is the exception.

So again, your argument is invalid.

[boots]

man, this thread reminds me of wizard magazine

so happy that publication is dead

[WebLurker]

This may be an argument about definitions more than anything else. They weren't exclusively involved with one another. They weren't even dating. There was the possibility that they would hook up, but they weren't together yet.

Until it happened. Seeing as that was a logical outcome based on what had come before, I don't really see the problem.

[Mister Mets]

Until it happened. Seeing as that was a logical outcome based on what had come before, I don't really see the problem.

But can you understand that someone can think they weren't romantically involved in the beginning of Amazing Spider-Man #290?

[Miles To Go]

man, this thread reminds me of wizard magazine

so happy that publication is dead

Those dipsticks were instrumental in setting Spider-Man back by years.

[boots]

Those dipsticks were instrumental in setting Spider-Man back by years.

i hope they didn’t have that level of influence but man, did they try. and encouraging the speculator market

some of the toy captions were fuggin’ funny though