Discussion with Tom Brevoort on Spider-Man marriage

[boots]

Let's not go further down this road; he expressed an opinion---no need to provoke.

noted. heading over to the naughty corner...

[boots]

I didn't read that era of Spider-Man. That wasn't what was available when I was a kid. Had I grown up during that era? I may have different feelings about the marriage.

I won't comment about an era about which I know practically nothing.

respectfully (after seeing your edit)- isn't that exactly what you've been doing and defending doing? post omd is an era of spider-man you also did not read.

and info on pre mj is as available on the internet and forums as info on post mj.

just...pointing that out.

[ishikabe]

Not really much a revelation this had pretty much been his view since 2007. Tom has been very consistent in what he believes is best forcSpider-Man. I don't see why Marvel would undo OMD now, sales are the best they've been in years so what's the incentive to go back?

You are right. Marvel is a business. Who cares if the stories are good or not?

[Darrell D.]

Yup. Typical Brevoort/Quesada drivel that basically translates to "I don't like it and screw you if you do."

Man, they sure make it easy for me to turn my back on a franchise that I used to love.

You must have read a different response, then.
It was a well-reasoned statement, not 'drivel'.

[Mister Mets]

Sorry, but I cannot agree with the notion that reading summations and/or talking to friends equals reading a story for yourself and forming your own opinion. EX: if someone told me Bucky Barnes was being brought back to life as the Winter Soldier after 50 years, I would have scoffed at the idea. Glad I read those issues for myself as they are among my favorite comics of the past 15 years.

If you want to make the marriage a "non-negotiable" factor in not buying a comic, go ahead----I won't say "you're missing some great stories". But I will say that googling stories on the internet and chatting with friends is not akin to reading a story on your own when it comes to forming an opinion. Not even close.

I think there's a lot of focus in online discussions about what happens in a story, which isn't as important as how it is told.

[Dan Slott]

You are right. Marvel is a business. Who cares if the stories are good or not?

Well, the readership does.
And since the readership has gone up drastically in the past few years that means there are more and more repeat-readers.
More and more people who are checking the book out, liking what they're reading, and coming back for more.
For those people, they're finding them to be good/enjoyable stories and well worth their hard-earned bucks.
People vote with their wallet, and some vote with their feet.
And, in the case of ASM, the people voting with their wallets have been outpacing those voting with their feet.

After the Mephisto event, I quit trying to read Spider-Man. When I picked up the comic from time to time, the artwork was very nice at least. I read two or three issues of Brand New Day and stopped there.

That might be the problem right there.
If you haven't even given the book a fair shot-- with your own firsthand experience-- in over half a decade, it's pretty hard for your to determine whether a story is "good or not". Fair?
If your only metric is "married stories = good & non-married stories = bad", then that's a pretty easy stance to take and really should only require one or two posts on a message board to get that across, yeah? :-)

[Scott Taylor]

You know, the fact is I agree with alot of what Tom has to say. Except for the part about Batman battling aliens, because that would be awesome.

If they bring back the marriage, the thing is that it has to serve the story and the franchise. Remember when the marriage was originally introduced it was as a big publicity stunt. To this day I really don't understand how it became a permanent thing. The marriage seemed to be a stunt, all the way, that would get undone pretty quickly. In a big way, getting rid of the marriage was also a publicity stunt. It rebooted the franchise to an earlier point, essentially.

Bottom line, I think Marvel would consider restoring the marriage if there was enough bang for their buck in it.

Incidentally - Brevoort's comment about fans moving on from the marriage - wasn't it him who said people would get over it in five years? He seems to not be as sure about that now.

[JKtheMac]

I am always intrigued by this whole issue because I think it goes to the heart of some pretty I'll conceived theories about drama generally and the comic medium in particular.

Firstly there is the idea that having a character get married or otherwise find love brings an end to the story. This idea seems to have come from romantic comedy and other comedies of the sexes and before that fairy stories. In a story where the protagonist defines their goal as a happy relationship this is a perfectly valid story ending but this only works when that is what the protagonist wants.

In serialised drama the very concept of genre and concerns about "what the protagonist wants" can be constantly changed to suit whichever story you want to tell.

The other side that this argument brings up is the premise of Spider-Man. It is very easy to encapsulate it with the whole Churchillian line about responsibility (No, Stan didn't come up with that) but that is not a full dramatic premise. Not every Spider-Man story is about power & responsibility. Each story told will have a different premise. No doubt some powerful stories do tie back to this idea, but it is such a flexible vague idea that it can't really be considered a premise except prehaps thematically.

So we are left with what kind of stories do Marvel want to tell about Spider-Man, and it is apparent they don't want to tell stories about a married Peter and MJ. I don’t think they can categorically state the reason as ‘sales suffered last time’. Maybe the sales suffered because the writers didn’t know what to do. Maybe at the time the older readers still looked back fondly at Gwen (some readers still hate MJ for this very reason), maybe they were just bad comics.

I suspect the real reason is because the biggest selling stories in super-hero history have been adolescent wish fulfilment fantasies and Spider-Man conforms to that most clearly when he is young and single. That seems like a sensible thing to aim at. Some people sneer at ‘adolescent wish fulfilment’ (Alan Moore for example) but at its best the formula is pretty wonderful.

[oldschool]

I think there's a lot of focus in online discussions about what happens in a story, which isn't as important as how it is told.

Absolutely and that is precisely my point. Put another way, when discussing a vacation road trip oftentimes it is the journey and not the destination that makes it worthwhile.

I think the "Disaster" storyline from ASM #53-56 is one of Lee/Romita's finest story arcs. But if someone said to me "yeah, Spidey gets amnesia and is tricked into working with Ock",that wouldn't sound very appealing to me. And I would miss out on one of the best story lines of that era.

[DT Winslow]

whole Churchillian line about responsibility (No, Stan didn't come up with that)

Voltaire, since we're being pedantic.

[Thor8607]

I didn't really expect Renew Your Vows to bring back the marriage, because I have no faith in Marvel's willingness to give me anything that I want, comics-wise.

I haven't touched a comic with "Spider" in the title for seven or eight years. I won't until the marriage is back and Peter even vaguely resembles the character with which I grew up again.

So, this isn't "Goodbye" for me. It's just more of the same. Marvel continues to show me they don't want my money, and I'm only too happy to go on not giving it to them.

I feel your pain Thor8607. Let's just keep on ignoring this crap until someone in Marvel comes along with an interest in giving us what we want.

I'm afraid that they will never bring back the marriage now my friend, marvel has made it clear they don't want fans like us around anymore. The golden age of spiderman where he was a happily married man is gone forever, now there remains only ruined dreams, sadness, and memories of what once was. Tragic, just tragic.

[Dan Slott]

I'm afraid that they will never bring back the marriage now my friend, marvel has made it clear they don't want fans like us around anymore. The golden age of spiderman where he was a happily married man is gone forever...

For starters: It's "Spider-Man", with a hyphen.

And call me crazy, but I always thought the "Golden Age of Spider-Man" were the Lee/Ditko & Lee/Romita years. But what do I know? ;-)

[DT Winslow]

For starters: It's "Spider-Man", with a hyphen.

And call me crazy, but I always thought the "Golden Age of Spider-Man" were the Lee/Ditko & Lee/Romita years. But what do I know? ;-)

My man. Horsehead Spidey, make it happen.

[Frontier]

You know, the fact is I agree with alot of what Tom has to say. Except for the part about Batman battling aliens, because that would be awesome.

If they bring back the marriage, the thing is that it has to serve the story and the franchise. Remember when the marriage was originally introduced it was as a big publicity stunt. To this day I really don't understand how it became a permanent thing. The marriage seemed to be a stunt, all the way, that would get undone pretty quickly. In a big way, getting rid of the marriage was also a publicity stunt. It rebooted the franchise to an earlier point, essentially.

Bottom line, I think Marvel would consider restoring the marriage if there was enough bang for their buck in it.

I'd say that it serve the story and the franchise if you look at it from the perspective of Peter growing and developing both as a hero and a person into an adult, rather than remaining perpetually in his youth, and that getting into a committed relationship with someone and marrying them was a byproduct of that.

The marriage was a publicity stunt yes, but it's not like there wasn't a deep history between Peter and MJ as friends and a couple that helped justify it. And one could also look at it as taking both the characters and furthering their own personal character development, with Peter taking up a new responsibility as a husband and settling down and MJ getting past her commitment issues and the trauma with her family.

Marvel's already milking the marriage fans for money through the heavy advertisement of RYV, despite however unlikely it is that they'll really bring it back, so there's that. While I think that removing the marriage and everything that came with it negatively regressed Peter and a lot of the cast, even if there have been good stories that have come out post-OMD (even if they could've happened regardless), I agree Marvel has no incentive to bring it back since they're still making money off Spidey. I don't think that's related to his young and single status quo, but they probably feel otherwise and see no reason to change it.

I am always intrigued by this whole issue because I think it goes to the heart of some pretty I'll conceived theories about drama generally and the comic medium in particular.

Firstly there is the idea that having a character get married or otherwise find love brings an end to the story. This idea seems to have come from romantic comedy and other comedies of the sexes and before that fairy stories. In a story where the protagonist defines their goal as a happy relationship this is a perfectly valid story ending but this only works when that is what the protagonist wants.

In serialised drama the very concept of genre and concerns about "what the protagonist wants" can be constantly changed to suit whichever story you want to tell.

The other side that this argument brings up is the premise of Spider-Man. It is very easy to encapsulate it with the whole Churchillian line about responsibility (No, Stan didn't come up with that) but that is not a full dramatic premise. Not every Spider-Man story is about power & responsibility. Each story told will have a different premise. No doubt some powerful stories do tie back to this idea, but it is such a flexible vague idea that it can't really be considered a premise except prehaps thematically.

So we are left with what kind of stories do Marvel want to tell about Spider-Man, and it is apparent they don't want to tell stories about a married Peter and MJ. I don’t think they can categorically state the reason as ‘sales suffered last time’. Maybe the sales suffered because the writers didn’t know what to do. Maybe at the time the older readers still looked back fondly at Gwen (some readers still hate MJ for this very reason), maybe they were just bad comics.

I suspect the real reason is because the biggest selling stories in super-hero history have been adolescent wish fulfilment fantasies and Spider-Man conforms to that most clearly when he is young and single. That seems like a sensible thing to aim at. Some people sneer at ‘adolescent wish fulfilment’ (Alan Moore for example) but at its best the formula is pretty wonderful.

I think it depends on how you look at Spider-Man as an "adolescent wish-fulfillment fantasy." Is it because he's a young guy (late teens-early 20's), who fights bad guys and deals with normal everyday stuff? Or is it because he's Superhero who fights colorful and entertaining bad guys on a daily basis, save the day and numerous lives consistently despite his own faults, and deals with normal everyday stuff?

Because, growing up, I couldn't really relate to the Peter Parker in Spider-Man: The Animated Series cartoon because he was way older than me and in college, yet he still become one of my favorite Superheroes and I became heavily invested in his story because of his character and that he was just really cool to watch. I also enjoyed watching his love life progress, but his getting married to Mary Jane certainly didn't ruin my enjoyment of the show as it continued. By then their getting together just felt right by the time it happened in the show .

Same with Batman, who was even older and far less relatable, but still managed to achieve that "adolescent wish fulfillment fantasy" aspect as a Superhero.

I mean, I get how Spidey being young and doing what he does is wish-fulfillment and that people can enjoy it, it's just for me he was able to achieve that without taking his age or youth into account.

[Thor8607]

For starters: It's "Spider-Man", with a hyphen.

I know, but I'm just too lazy to use the hyphen LOL!