DIY COMIC CREATOR ROUNDTABLE- Spider-marriage, continuity and retcons

[ViewtifulJC]

there's another good example in ASM #642, the opening to the Origin of the Species BND finale. There's a good half dozen pages of "look at how crappy it is to be Peter Parker" strung along like a series of pitiful firecrackers. He has to sell his camera cuz he's broke, but the vendor doesn't care and short changes him. He has to beg money off of Betty Brant. He tries to call Carlie and tell her he's late, but he's got no minutes of course, the phone screechs in his ear about how broke he is. He walks home and sees everybody wearing his shirts, so he runs upstairs and his roommate Michelle is selling all his clothes for rent(because he's a broke loser remember). Only shirt left is an ugly sweater that everybody hated, and its already 100+ degrees outside. He runs down the street in the ugly sweater, people shouting "MY EYES!" because how ugly/stupid/loserish Peter Parker is right now, gets to the Coffee Bean with Carlie who's sitting there with MJ and Harry. They all share embarassing stories about Peter, like Aunt May ironing his tighty whities, laughing as Peter sits there sweating lookin' awful.

Like...I'm not making this up. This is actually how Waid constructed this issue. This is how Mark Waid sees Peter Parker, despite IN NO WAY SHAPE OR FORM has he ever been this much of a pitiful awful loser that the entire world shits on, not even in the cruel Lee/Ditko issues. Its insane.

Love Waid, love his DD, FF, Flash, Kingdom Come...hell he even wrote one of my all-time favorite Spider-Man stories in Unscheduled Stop. But unless he does a complete 180 on his Peter Parker characterization and how the world treats him, keep him off Spider-Man ongoings pls.

[Webhead]

Love Waid, love his DD, FF, Flash, Kingdom Come...hell he even wrote one of my all-time favorite Spider-Man stories in Unscheduled Stop. But unless he does a complete 180 on his Peter Parker characterization and how the world treats him, keep him off Spider-Man ongoings pls.

To be fair, as cringe-worthy as his "PETER MUST BE LOSER ALL TIMEZ" argument is, Waid's Family Business had really good character beats for him and his maybe-sister. Gotta say that for him.

Also, though Brevoort has become adamant in opposing OMD criticism, the Life of Reilly blog showed an instance of him not wanting to shut down the Parker baby storyline:
http://benreillytribute.x10host.com/LifeofReilly17.html

[Venomous Mask]

there's another good example in ASM #642, the opening to the Origin of the Species BND finale. There's a good half dozen pages of "look at how crappy it is to be Peter Parker" strung along like a series of pitiful firecrackers. He has to sell his camera cuz he's broke, but the vendor doesn't care and short changes him. He has to beg money off of Betty Brant. He tries to call Carlie and tell her he's late, but he's got no minutes of course, the phone screechs in his ear about how broke he is. He walks home and sees everybody wearing his shirts, so he runs upstairs and his roommate Michelle is selling all his clothes for rent(because he's a broke loser remember). Only shirt left is an ugly sweater that everybody hated, and its already 100+ degrees outside. He runs down the street in the ugly sweater, people shouting "MY EYES!" because how ugly/stupid/loserish Peter Parker is right now, gets to the Coffee Bean with Carlie who's sitting there with MJ and Harry. They all share embarassing stories about Peter, like Aunt May ironing his tighty whities, laughing as Peter sits there sweating lookin' awful.

That's bad but it's not quite as bad as during the early reboot period when MJ died, Peter was fired from his industrial job, Jameson wasn't buying his pictures, he got kicked out onto the street for lack of rent money and his costume was stolen by a hobo. Then again, Waid's take had a cruel humor to it while Mackie just seemed to wallow in the doldrums.

[ViewtifulJC]

Speaking of Breevort, guess somebody should go ahead and post his big manifesto on the character from the Swing Shift issue that started off BND...part 1

[ViewtifulJC]

part 2!

[boots]

people shouting "MY EYES!" because how ugly/stupid/loserish Peter is

hahahahaha i am actually crying from that.

i think there’s room for peter to have days like this, those days where nothing goes right- where you feel like you’ve walked into a sitcom- but it’s not his central characterisation, leave that to kick-ass.

funnily enough, i want to read this now.

[Darkspellmaster]

Two things, and I hope they work.

The first is from Jim Sterling in regard a letter that mentions the Marriage annual in it: http://www.jimshooter.com/2011/09/something-groovy.html

The other one is a quote from Howard Kleinman's blog (he's a freelance writer):

I believe that, without the marriage, at some point Peter just wouldn’t have had enough love for himself to live. At some point he would break from the guilt, the inability to be everywhere at once, the fact that he couldn’t hold a job and had lost pretty much everyone he loved. Mary Jane freed him from that to a degree. She knew what she was getting into. She knew that she would put herself at risk by getting closer to him. At the same time she believed in him and what he was trying to do. He couldn’t pay the bills but she could with her modeling career.* There was a give and take. A partnership. It was a natural progression of all they had been through. She made it possible for him to not have to do it all by himself. She allowed him to have enough happiness and support as Peter Parker than he could be the hero he needed to be without falling apart. Every heroic act Peter would perform during their marriage was possible because she made it possible.

The writer, J.M. DeMatteis, did an excellent job of making the marriage a dramatically necessary part of the story. Nowhere was this more apparent than during the Harry Goblin Saga that culminated in Spectacular Spider-Man #200, probably my favorite issue of any comic I’d read during those years. Mary Jane was absolutely central to that storyline. The fact that she was Harry’s girlfriend first, but ended up married to Peter stoked the inferiority complex that drove him to villainy. Mary Jane is in that issue almost as much as Peter and Harry because DeMatteis wrote her as an essential part of the story.

You see, when DeMatteis was writing her, Mary Jane wasn’t just a support character for Spider-Man, she was a person who had relationships herself. She didn’t exist purely subordinate to Peter even if he was the main character. She played a significantly large role in Kraven’s Last Hunt, which is arguably the best Spider-Man story ever, which also happened to have been written by J.M. DeMatteis.

As an 8-year old kid, I didn’t have any problems reading stories about or relating to a married man. I did have a problem reading a story where the guy I’d been reading about for several years turned out to be the clone of a guy I hadn’t been reading about for seven years. The attempt to recreate a young, hip Spider-Man drove me away. The destruction of the marriage through a deal with the devil kept me away.

Kids aren’t dumb. They know all about young Peter Parker. He’s in all sorts of movies and cartoons. They’re also capable of picking up new stories with long continuities and respecting the history of their progressions over time.

But the idea that nothing is allowed to change or evolve in a meaningful way makes it hard to care about new stories anymore. And anytime I get ship teased with a Mary Jane he’s not allowed to marry again, I just get really, really annoyed. The guy in the comics now is a different person. He’s a Peter Pan who will never grow up or change in a meaningful way. I’d prefer for Marvel to just give him a happy ending and reboot things, but what about all those other comics that actually are progressing? Why does Cyclops feel like he’s 40 when Peter Parker is still 28? They were both teenagers in 1963.

If the great strength of Spider-Man was in the fact that he was an every-nerd that strength is gone. Even his youngest readers age and move through time. People can’t undo the terrible things that happen in their lives, but Peter Parker will never have to live with his for too long. If he fails to save Aunt May from an assassin, so what? Make a deal with Mephisto! His best friend dies? Nope. He was on vacation in Europe! I expect Gwen Stacy to come back from the dead any day now just so the writers can shill another woman who isn’t Mary Jane as a love interest, hoping that FINALLY we will get over Mary Jane.

For a lot of awkward kids, Spider-Man represented hope. Hope that we could fight our way through suffering. Hope that we could cope with too many demands without sacrificing our values. And hope that, yes, maybe we wouldn’t have to do it alone. To an eight year old kid, Spider-Man was real. I knew he was made up, but he was real just the same. Mary Jane was real, too. The possibility that there was someone out there who was capable of putting up with all my mischegas and not only love me despite it but because of it was a powerful notion.

The irony that I was saving up for an engagement ring when One More Day happened will never be lost on me. Peter Parker was a model of adulthood for me. He’d been the geeky, awkward, ostracized kid, but, without sacrificing the best parts of himself, he’d managed to become a man someone other than his adopted mother could love. I still find hope and beauty in that. And since I got married, I also discovered that there was truth to it as well.

[Confuzzled]

JMS clears his own stance on his FB page, in an exchange with former Spider-Editor Steve Wacker:

I have always made it very clear that when I came aboard ASM I brought Peter and MJ back together because I liked writing them as a married couple. I made equally clear that the decision to unmarry them and, in the same brushstroke, eliminate virtually every story I’d written during those eight years was an editorial mandate, not my choice. I would’ve been happy to continue writing them married until the sun went out. Marvel wanted to unmarry them. That’s your choice, and your right. At no point did I duck out of anything.

[Confuzzled]

I do agree with Tom Beland (who wrote one of my favourite marriage stories) that the quality of a marriage story is directly proportional to the independent characterization of Mary Jane.

The formula is really THAT simple.

[Darkspellmaster]

I do agree with Tom Beland (who wrote one of my favourite marriage stories) that the quality of a marriage story is directly proportional to the independent characterization of Mary Jane.

The formula is really THAT simple.

Very true. I honestly think that the better written MJ and the supporting cast is the more interesting Peter is. Peter's story is not just his story but the story of every person that is in contact to him. There's also the aspect of the hero's journey and how someone like MJ plays a role in that.