
Originally Posted by
Xenon
Honestly, and this may be delusional, i think he knows what he's doing at this point, but there was a major change early on.
A poster on another forum spoke with Wells around #15 at a convention, before this all hit the fan, and from teh other poster's description, there seems to be some acknowledgement from Wells that he may have made some mistakes. I also listened to him on a Podcast in January and while he's not exactly apologetic, he makes an offhand comment about people being "too confused".
Combined with other comments he's made, i tend to think that there was a plan in place when he first got on the book, say the first six issues. The plan was to shake up the title, tease some grave mistake that Peter made, and isolate him from everyone as a result. Mary Jane was dating a guy with kids, other heroes hate him, he's working for Norman. For whatever reason, either he or someone higher up didn't like where it was going. Maybe they saw the reaction that MJ got and decided to focus more on that, maybe editorial nixed his original sin that he was going to have Peter do, maybe he decided it was bad, maybe all of the above or something else entirely. Whateve the case, by the time we hit 900, the plan is changed. You see some subtle shifts around that time. You get a lot of Paul and MJ in the first arc, you get a lot less after that, but the one big appearance you do get from MJ ends with the scene that is the strongest evidence she is not happy and more is going on. In the first arc MJ is hiding in a closet while speaking to Peter, as though Paul would be upset, and you have a hint of a fight between Peter and Paul that has never materialized (but has been hinted to be changed). IN issue 2 or 3 (memory fails me) Paul goes looking for Peter to talk to him, but this is never followed up on. That same scene is the one time we hear either of them say "love" to the other (we only get Paul's side). So it feels to me that that's about when it changed, and the result has made this whole thing take forever and take a bit of scrambling to try and make sense of it.