Throwdown: Renew Your Vows VS Spider-Girl's First Appearance

[Mister Mets]

I'm a bit surprised that What If? won this one (as of two years ago.) The character did clearly have staying power.

[Miles To Go]

Spider-Girl clearly has the advantage here. A decade long presence, heavy involvement in Spider-Verse and Spidergeddon in our current decade, 130+ issues of her older runs with a cult following.

Annie may be a teenager now, but she's barely out of the nursery with RYV, which has only been around four years now.

[Jekyll]

A tad bit late to this poll
For me it’s RYV and it’s not close. After hearing great things about Defalcos Spider-Girl I picked up the first trade and I couldn’t even make it beyond the first two issues. The dialogue was cringeworthy, the voices for the characters seemed off, and I did not enjoy it at all.

I enjoyed every issue of Renew Your Vows and I thought each writer provided solid arcs and character growth from Slotts mini through the final issues of Houser.

[Miles To Go]

A tad bit late to this poll
For me it’s RYV and it’s not close. After hearing great things about Defalcos Spider-Girl I picked up the first trade and I couldn’t even make it beyond the first two issues. The dialogue was cringeworthy, the voices for the characters seemed off, and I did not enjoy it at all.

I enjoyed every issue of Renew Your Vows and I thought each writer provided solid arcs and character growth from Slotts mini through the final issues of Houser.

Mayday had solid arcs and character growth throughout...you should have stuck with it.

And I don't see how you thought the dialogue was "cringeworthy" when I've read worse in modern issues of Amazing Spider-Man.

[Jekyll]

Mayday had solid arcs and character growth throughout...you should have stuck with it.

And I don't see how you thought the dialogue was "cringeworthy" when I've read worse in modern issues of Amazing Spider-Man.

That is a fair point. It just wasn’t for me.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

I think Spider-Girl and the What If is more original and since it came first it has the advantage of novelty. And fundamentally Mayday Parker is a really well designed character, clearly the daughter of both her charismatic parents but also looking original and unique and not just a clone of either of them. Whereas Annie Parker, while a terrific character is basically Kid MJ, and especially obvious in Ryan Stegman's oriignal series where he doesn't consistently draw Annie as a young girl and at times it becomes hard to tell mother and daughter apart. I am in the minority for favoring RYV after Jody Houser took over and made Annie into a teenager and gave her new threads and a hairstyle. In fact, I think RYV was really at its best in her run. Though I like Slott's original series and Conway's work too. But RYV #19 is one of the best Spider-Man stories since before OMD and RYV#15 has one of the all-time greatest speeches by Peter about power and responsibility.

Both Spider-Girl and Renew Your Vows originated as off-shoots to stories (Clone Saga and OMD) that wanted to end the marriage and return to a "single Peter".

1) In the case of Spider-Girl it was about the fact that the daughter Peter and MJ nearly had at the end of the Clone Saga going on to becoming the heroine. In the case of Renew Your Vows it's a sop to people who disliked the end of the marriage status-quo. Spider-Girl is about a future that could have been and someday could be...since Peter and MJ were still married in the regular continuity so readers of Spider-Girl saw it as a potential and possible future.

2) Renew Your Vows is about the longest lasting status-quo in Spider-Man continuing and working...which yeah we all know it would continue to work and flourish if editors and writers allowed it to. It did for 20 years and some 810+ issues and so on. So it's whole raison d'etre isn't grounded in any real sense of enterprise but basically as a stop-gap and PR move and it's still grounded entirely and primarily in bad faith. Like Slott promoted the entire thing and then in chapter titles as "Why We Can't Have Nice Things" and painting the marriage as some impossible thing. When in fact it was never any such thing. You have more stuff with Peter and MJ together than Clark and Lois in Post-Crisis Superman, and more content with the marriage status-quo than Fantastic Four's entire history (and as such Reed and Sue's marriage).

Spider-Girl ultimately became the longest lasting serially continuing book with a female superhero published by Marvel, a record that maybe Carol Danvers and Kamala Khan might break but then they had to be rebooted into multiple volumes, whereas Renew Your Vows was a low-stakes AU comedy series about Peter and family. it's main appeal is that it's about the only all-ages high quality version of Spider-Man published in that time with some sense of the spectrum of Spider-Man. And seeing Peter and MJ and Annie together was a blast. I am not sold and convinced on MJ as Spinneret but the comedic and light tone makes it work.