Ultimate Spider-Man by Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto

[Hurricane Billy]

Can we say Peter's random girlfrind status quo has run its course yet??? He hasn't dated an X-Man!

MJ was at the Hellfire Gala not too long ago right? Close enough, I think.

[Kevinroc]

Can we say Peter's random girlfrind status quo has run its course yet??? He hasn't dated an X-Man!

Did (1610) Ultimate Kitty Pryde mean nothing?

[wyokid]

Did (1610) Ultimate Kitty Pryde mean nothing?

Yes, yes it did.

[Superboy-Prime]

Did (1610) Ultimate Kitty Pryde mean nothing?

I'm talking about depressed incel adult Peter!

[Coop]

I would prefer OMD be undone and the marriage restored, absolutely. But I don't really like the way Peter is written anymore and I doubt that would change much. I'm also open to NOT restoring the marriage if they write him as a more well-rounded, mature character as opposed to this hollow caricature he's become over the years. I don't think he needs to be married to grow or be interesting is my point. I'd prefer he'd be married, but I mostly just want him to feel like an actual character again.

I will say that I don't really like the idea of kids in the book, just because, again, I tend to find kid characters fairly uninteresting and a drag on the narrative. It depends on the character, obviously, but I generally don't find it especially interesting. I never watch something like Star Wars and find myself wishing Han Solo had some kids to take care of while fighting the Empire.

I also agree with you that Peter making a deal with the devil and the current status quo existing as a result of that casts an ugly shadow over everything. I'm not even religious, but it's a bizarre and problematic story element that should never have been introduced. It's a terrible story and I wish it would be addressed and Mephisto's deal nullified, even if the marriage isn't restored. The characters need to be free of it.

OMD is stupid and insane on every level and you'll never hear me argue otherwise.

I agree with you on basically everything. It's the Peter that feels more like the Peter we knew before OMD that I want back more then the marriage.

I don't share your dislike of kids in stories. I actually enjoyed the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels where Han had kids a lot. But I am in no rush to give 616 Spider-Man a kid.

I think there's many years of lost time we could get back just having Peter and Mary Jane married and a Peter Parker that's not a perpetually 20 something screw up who can't do anything right, has no apartment, has no job, no friends, no relationships. We can address all of those over a decade or two before worrying about a kid coming into the mix lol

[Daibhidh]

The only reason I want to see Peter in Earth-616 have children is that I'd like to see Mayday-616 turn up alive.
(She could be happily adopted by parents who don't want to give her up. Or more dramatically, have Peter and Jessica find her without realising who she is, and have Jessica and Luke adopt her.)

[Spider-Tiger]

I'm starting to think that Amazing needs a hard (OMD-free) reboot with a different version of Peter and his supporting cast. The title suffers too much from sales stunts and a high volume output and I really don't see that changing even if OMD is undone. It's a product of both the character's massive popularity and a struggling industry. And the continuity has become ridiculously convoluted and inaccessible. I imagine, for writers, crafting entire runs of new stories around it while trying to maintain status quo is like playing a game of jenga

I think spin-offs and AUs like Ultimate are given better treatment than the main book. I'd like to see a continuation involving the 616 versions, but would much rather they got spun off into another title if it meant getting higher quality content at a reduced frequency. (Like Lost Hunt style minis.)

[Tapioca Blitzkrieg]

I'm starting to think that Amazing needs a hard (OMD-free) reboot with a different version of Peter and his supporting cast. The title suffers too much from sales stunts and a high volume output and I really don't see that changing even if OMD is undone. It's a product of both the character's massive popularity and a struggling industry. And the continuity has become ridiculously convoluted and inaccessible.

I think spin-offs and AUs like Ultimate are given better treatment than the main book. I'd like to see a continuation involving the 616 versions, but would much rather they got spun off into another title if it meant getting higher quality content at a reduced frequency. (Like Lost Hunt style minis.)

Seconded. I find myself wondering at what point the Marvel banner of ''we've never hard rebooted and everything is cannon'' becomes mostly cumbersome and more trouble than it is worth. After all, if you wanted to keep a character fresh in that M.O. it's only natural to age him, marry him, give him kids, even if not mandatory. Marvel just seems to want to have it's cake and eat it too by keeping the bloated continuity but not ever progressing the character past a certain point. So i agree, if it means we're bound to have another run remotely as ****ty as this one for the next couple of years then i'd take a hard reboot every time.

[fjmac]

I think that the fixation on marriage and family as being some magical solution is sort of missing the point.

Couldn't agree more. Sure, in my head cannon, MJ and Peter will marry/re-marry/retcon-marry or whatever at some point, eventually Mayday will be born/reborn/restored, eventually Annie from RYV will be born, eventually MJ and Peter will go mysteriously missing and the sisters will be mentored by their uncle Ben (Reilly) while they keep NYC safe and search for their parents. But I don't need that to happen. Also, the whole "let Peter grow and mature" thing is a bit iffy to me.

The way I see it, MJ and Peter belong together. Married? Don't care. Children? Don't care. And they should be a similar stages of maturity: mid to late twenties, able to keep steady jobs, each of them with their own stuff going on, getting things right, getting things wrong and being each other's rock in a non codependent relationship. That's a status quo I think would make the biggest number of people reasonably happy while giving ample room to tell a huge variety of stories.

But regardless of status quo, I think USM succeeds in a very particular aspect: it fixes Peter. 616 Peter has been a catastrophe for way too many years now: a man baby who still acts an reacts as a teenager, barely effective as a hero, a wet puppy who rolls with every punch in his personal life and more than a bit of a a passive-aggressive jerk. What we saw of Peter in USM so far seems to do away with ALL of it. It feels like Peter should feel.

I can't say whether it fixes MJ as well because we haven't seen much of her so far, and fixing MJ is an entirely different endeavor. The problem with 616 MJ is that she keeps being written off and coming back, they keep changing her character trying to find the perfect depiction that will get fans disenchanted with her, her current depiction is the most egregious within this logic, and it's been a while since we had a peek inside her head (save for the Jackpot stuff that did not get her personality at all). What little page-time we got with USM MJ also feels like MJ should feel, but I need to see more in order to say it also fixed MJ.

[Aura Blaize]

I hated what OMD did, but I was hoping to get some new stories out of it, since that was their selling point. Instead we got nothing that couldn't be told with married Spider-Man. My stance on Peter/MJ has always been that they don't NEED to be together, but if you're going to put them together then freaking commit to it. Hell, if you're going to do that with anyone then commit to it. Otherwise it doesn't work.

USM is absolutely making a liar out of Marvel with their "We can't tell stories with a married Spider-Man". That being said, I don't see them undoing OMD now simply because that's one of the things that makes USM special. If I want married, competent Spider-man then that's what Ultimate is for.

[Mercwmouth12]

Just ask Jake from State Farm to fix your problems instead

[Kaitou D. Kid]

I'm starting to think that Amazing needs a hard (OMD-free) reboot with a different version of Peter and his supporting cast. The title suffers too much from sales stunts and a high volume output and I really don't see that changing even if OMD is undone. It's a product of both the character's massive popularity and a struggling industry. And the continuity has become ridiculously convoluted and inaccessible. I imagine, for writers, crafting entire runs of new stories around it while trying to maintain status quo is like playing a game of jenga

I think spin-offs and AUs like Ultimate are given better treatment than the main book. I'd like to see a continuation involving the 616 versions, but would much rather they got spun off into another title if it meant getting higher quality content at a reduced frequency. (Like Lost Hunt style minis.)

From my experience, the continuity is most inaccessible and convoluted when it isn't neatly organized with collections.

I had no problem getting into 2000's comics because all the JMS and Paul Jenkins stuff is neatly collected. There are some one-shots or miniseries here and there (Marvel Knights, Blue, To Have and To Hold, etc.), but they're easy to keep track of.

I had (still kinda do) a much harder time reading 80s-mid 90s comics. Everything post-Stern and pre-Clone Saga is harder to collect and keep track of, especially JMD's run which doesn't have an Omnibus.

The only reason I want to see Peter in Earth-616 have children is that I'd like to see Mayday-616 turn up alive.
(She could be happily adopted by parents who don't want to give her up. Or more dramatically, have Peter and Jessica find her without realising who she is, and have Jessica and Luke adopt her.)

Couldn't agree more. Sure, in my head cannon, MJ and Peter will marry/re-marry/retcon-marry or whatever at some point, eventually Mayday will be born/reborn/restored, eventually Annie from RYV will be born, eventually MJ and Peter will go mysteriously missing and the sisters will be mentored by their uncle Ben (Reilly) while they keep NYC safe and search for their parents. But I don't need that to happen. Also, the whole "let Peter grow and mature" thing is a bit iffy to me.

The way I see it, MJ and Peter belong together. Married? Don't care. Children? Don't care. And they should be a similar stages of maturity: mid to late twenties, able to keep steady jobs, each of them with their own stuff going on, getting things right, getting things wrong and being each other's rock in a non codependent relationship. That's a status quo I think would make the biggest number of people reasonably happy while giving ample room to tell a huge variety of stories.

I go back and forth on whether or not 616 Peter should have a kid. Sometimes I don't care either way, and sometimes I go "Eh would be kinda cool". Whichever one of those I'm feeling, it's not a rush for me. A lot of that probably is informed by how I currently feel about about my own life, haha.

If 616 Peter ever does a kid, I do think Peter B. and Hickman Pete have to be more of the foundation for what "Dad Peter" is like than MC2 and RYV, even if his kids are still Mayday and Annie. My only critique of MC2 and RYV is that I don't think they have a fully formed take on what Peter would be like as a dad. By that I mean that he is kinda written like a generic parent (even on the conservative side). And that's fine for what those universes were. It's just that I can't see 616 Peter saying "generic dad stuff". I think stuff like The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man and the JMS era discredits the idea that Peter would be a generic parent figure. The way Peter B. and Hickman Peter act with their kids is more in-line with 616 Peter IMO.

[9AlphaOmega1]

The only reason I want to see Peter in Earth-616 have children is that I'd like to see Mayday-616 turn up alive.
(She could be happily adopted by parents who don't want to give her up. Or more dramatically, have Peter and Jessica find her without realising who she is, and have Jessica and Luke adopt her.)

The order of kids I want to happen is May and April as twins, Annie May and last Benjy, a blend of MC2 and RYV mixture of kids.

[phonogram12]

I will say that I don't really like the idea of kids in the book, just because, again, I tend to find kid characters fairly uninteresting and a drag on the narrative. It depends on the character, obviously, but I generally don't find it especially interesting. I never watch something like Star Wars and find myself wishing Han Solo had some kids to take care of while fighting the Empire.

I think it can work, but I've only really see it work in team books like FF. And that's mostly because there are other characters for the book to focus on other than the parents and the children.

[Daibhidh]

Telling stories with children is difficult. Firstly, there's getting the voice right: often it ends up too mature or too young and cutesy. It is especially tricky in that children's voices change quickly, so as you try to get a handle on the voice at a particular age it shifts. Secondly, outwith children's fiction which is its own special genre, children don't need to make consequential decisions unless their parents are abdicating responsibility. It's a parent's job to be a safety net for any adverse consequences of the decisions the child makes. Also, it's hard to get the child's grasp of the stakes and ability to assess options right for their age, as above for the child's voice. That makes it hard to write children as agents within the plot. As a result there's a tendency for children in heroic narrative to gravitate towards being peril monkeys, and peril monkey is a thankless role.