Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
A divorce he made over his wife's objections and became a worse person for it as everyone in-universe from Miles to Aunt May acknowledges. It's a good point that a married Spider-Man fits the character more than a divorced or single one does.



In the case of Reed and Sue, not all the cartoons had them married. The three live-action films -- the Tim Story FF and the Josh Trank one -- had them as broken-up exes at the start of FF1, while the wedding is something we see at the end of FF2:Rise of Silver Surfer. The Josh Trank one had teenage versions of the FF. But you know, a superhero-superheroine marriage is pretty conventional for Marvel.

Spider-Man and MJ are the only superhero/civilian marriage in Marvel, which is more common in DC, so that makes it more unique and exceptional, and so worthy to maintain.



I think you are confusing or at least not separating, appearances by Mary Jane and stories with the marriage. In that list of 25 [which by the way is separate from an earlier CBR list with (https://www.cbr.com/50-greatest-spid...-stories-10-6/) stories] MJ is there in The Night Gwen Stacy Died, KLH, Spider-Man No More. She appears in those stories in top 10.

Across the entire 25 in that list you put out, the following stories takes place during the marriage (KLH, Coming Home, The Conversation, Back in Black, Marvel Knights: Spider-Man, Venom, Maximum Carnage, Spider-Man Blue, Best of Enemies). That's 9. Spider-Verse is an ambiguous example since as a crossover with different AU Spider-Man, some of the Spiders we see did marry MJ. If you add in just MJ's appearances without marriage you have stories like (Night Gwen Stacy Died, Spider-Man No More, Spider-Island, The Hobgoblin Saga) from 616, with the one USM story (Death of Spider-Man) also featuring an AU version of her. So some 15 stories in that list feature MJ (both single and married). The stories that figure high in that list without her are mostly stuff that was written before her first real appearance (AF#15, ASM Annual #1, If this be my destiny).

Across all of Spider-Man's publication history in 616, Spider-Man's most common recurring characters are Jameson and Mary Jane. That was true before the marriage as well. So yeah randomly you can find Spider-Man stories without MJ, but it's not the case that random is representative. Randomly you can find the Superman comic where he travelled back in time in the Silver Age and tricked the Natives into selling the land that became Metropolis.
Was the divorce over his wife's objections, or was it over a fundamental disagreement neither was willing to budge on?

As for some of the marriage stories, Coming Home was set while Peter and MJ were separated and most of Blue was set during the Lee/ Romita days.