When do you expect One More Day will be undone?

[Lee]

Maybe just stop engaging with the series until a writer whose take you like comes along?

[PCN24454]

The main problem is that Peter post-OMD isn't a character. He is an action figure. Getting rid of his marriage was just a by-product of that.

Look, if we had character-driven stories that cared about more than just clickbait and shallow sensationalism, fans wouldn't mind as much if Peter isn't with MJ. Everyone loved Zdarksy's run and MJ barely appears in that. The problem is that the ASM book from BND to Wells (with a brief 3-year respite during Spencer) has not had that. All of Peter's new relationships were as shallow and clickbaity as the suit skins used in games and in the MCU to generate buzz. There was literally nothing else to them. Pretending that all the backlash boils down to fan preference on which girl gets to be with Peter is strategic ignorance, and doesn't move the conversation forward in any way.

What made pre-OMD Peter different? He was literally the chosen one in the JMS run.

[marhawkman]

Ends with him evaporating on the roof and MJ noting that Spider-Man talks a bit like her friend, Peter.

Ah, that's the first one. there's a later one with a clone of Hydro-man and........ a LOT of drama O-o'

[Kaitou D. Kid]

What made pre-OMD Peter different? He was literally the chosen one in the JMS run.

Ezekiel's theory. Nothing more than that.

The point was that other people believe it.

[PCN24454]

Ezekiel's theory. Nothing more than that.

The point was that other people believe it.

Even outside of the Spider-Totem stuff, JMS really played into the “Spider-Jesus” angle.

[Kaitou D. Kid]

Even outside of the Spider-Totem stuff, JMS really played into the “Spider-Jesus” angle.

If you're saying that Spider-Man has stuff in common with Jesus, that's true of pretty much any heroic archetype who is poor/not rich, a hippie, and believes in using their powers to help people than to pursue wealth and status. And I guess in the case of JMS, they had the teacher/mentor thing in common too.

Yeah, Spidey is very much a more snarky, deliquent version of Jesus. I can kinda see it.

[Lee]

Spider-Man isn't a Jesus analogue.

[Kaitou D. Kid]

So on the topic of how much Editorial restriction there really is, this is what I suspect is going on.

On paper, I don't think there are a lot of restrictions. I don't even think there is a restriction towards portraying Peter as an adult/competent or having him with MJ. I think the only mandates are that (1) he can't get married and (2) maybe that he can't have the same maturity as JMS' Spider-Man (who is unambiguously 25 or older). Essentially, it's the DeFalco status quo of the 1980's. Peter is a young adult, ambiguously 20-25, who can be competent and mature but is also still figuring some things out, and who can hold a stable long-term relationship if the writer wants.

Is this a bad status quo? No. Can you do great things with it? Yes. In theory, can you have 50 writers in a row like Nick Spencer who portray Spider-Man like that while having him live with MJ? Yes.

But in practice, I imagine most writers don't want to retread the same ground. Most of them probably want to grow the characters and expand on earlier stuff - as shown by the fact that all writers prior to OMD did that in one way or another, except for Wolfman and some Clone Saga writers. So while not a bad status quo per se, it's not one that excites a lot of upcoming writers.

This creates a situation where the only writers drawn to the book (for the most part) are the BND writers. So while there is nothing about OMD that suggests you can't tell good Spider-Man stories, or that Peter and MJ have to be portrayed like in BND/Slott/Wells... in practice that's not the case.

If OMD is still in place by the time the BND writers are no longer working on Spider-Man, it's going to be interesting to see what the book looks like by then. And who knows, maybe the hate towards OMD will die down a bit if writers like Spencer become the norm. But it also depends on how many future writers will be okay with being bound by the Peter Parker of 1986 over and over again.

[Vegan]

Personally I would love for OMD to be fully reversed. But I would be perfectly satisfied if we got Peter Parker who is competent at being a hero, whose screw ups come from having to constantly fight super villains and save people’s lives rather than his own inadequacy, who is likable, and is actually funny (not what Dan Slott considers funny. If you write a line as bad as “crazy town banana pants” you should have your keyboard taken away for a period no shorter than 15 years). Like it will suck a little bit if Spider-Man really doesn’t grow and mature and develop to JMS level and beyond ever again, but I could come to terms with it and even enjoy the book again if it felt like Stern/DeFalco Spider-Man, a version of the character that I could root for and care about again.
If we are doomed to “spinning our wheels in place” Spider-Man forever, why does it have to be a Spider-Man who is so unlikable, so incompetent both in the suit and out?

[PCN24454]

Personally I would love for OMD to be fully reversed. But I would be perfectly satisfied if we got Peter Parker who is competent at being a hero, whose screw ups come from having to constantly fight super villains and save people’s lives rather than his own inadequacy, who is likable, and is actually funny (not what Dan Slott considers funny. If you write a line as bad as “crazy town banana pants” you should have your keyboard taken away for a period no shorter than 15 years). Like it will suck a little bit if Spider-Man really doesn’t grow and mature and develop to JMS level and beyond ever again, but I could come to terms with it and even enjoy the book again if it felt like Stern/DeFalco Spider-Man, a version of the character that I could root for and care about again.
If we are doomed to “spinning our wheels in place” Spider-Man forever, why does it have to be a Spider-Man who is so unlikable, so incompetent both in the suit and out?

I guess it’s time to retire Peter then with MJ. If they get married and then retire together, there’s no way their relationship can get broken up.

It worked for Ash. Now that he’s retired, there’s no way for him to lose the WCS title to some nobody character.

[Vegan]

I understand your shtick is to be as disingenuous as possible, but how in the hell is that your takeaway from what I wrote here?

[PCN24454]

I understand your shtick is to be as disingenuous as possible, but how in the hell is that your takeaway from what I wrote here?

People more like the idea of a “happy life” than the life itself. If Spider-Man ever was that successful, the series wouldn’t last very long. Honestly, when I read the old books, I saw that Peter’s life sucked even when he was “successful”. It made realize that the Golden Age that people were talking about never actually existed.

[Vegan]

That has nothing at all to do with what I’ve written. Still.

[Refrax5]

People more like the idea of a “happy life” than the life itself. If Spider-Man ever was that successful, the series wouldn’t last very long. Honestly, when I read the old books, I saw that Peter’s life sucked even when he was “successful”. It made realize that the Golden Age that people were talking about never actually existed.

There's a difference between a character with a happy life free of struggle and inorganically forcing a character to act like a modern zoomer when, married or not, he should have grown somewhat past that. I don't need Peter to be married to MJ or to have a perfect life. But he has no real development anymore and they seem obsessed with this forced, awkward modern youth version that's just kind of a clown and a sad-sack. It's bizarre to pretend he's still 22 when his college roommate has a 10 year old son. It all just feels so unearned and awkward.

[Lee]

Peter's always been a clown and a sad-sack. That's who he is.