Public Letter to Marvel Comics:
Dear Marvel,
You seem to be under the impression that readers need to be reminded of Mephisto and his connection to
Spider-Man. In theory I can understand. This is an allusion to a storyline that ended 11 years ago. Your corporate philosophy of "the illusion of change" takes for granted that readers have the attention span of goldfish. However increasingly it becomes apparent that perhaps it's you who need to be reminded of a few realities since the thought-destroying cliche of the ''illusion of change'' has ultimately revealed that it's the House of Ideas that's run by goldfish:
1) The Internet was invented between the 1970s to 2007-2008, it continues to operate 10 years since. Any story published before the late '90s or before Social Media, sure, you can assume fans are sheep. The fact that the Spider-Marriage was an editorial stunt, totally forgotten and unknown to all but the paltry few comics fans until Joe Q and others came out of the woodwork, is proof of the powers of oblivion and embalming bliss of ignorance.
One More Day was published in the internet era and as of
2019 Spider-Man and One More Day generated 403,000 results in 0.54 seconds.
2) One More Day is widely considered to be the all-time worst Spider-Man story, one which has tainted the Spider-Man reading experience going forward.
3) It was the demonstrable intent and corporate interest of the artist and editor Joe Quesada that we forget and move past this story, as well as that of other writers who worked on Spider-Man after this storyline.
Do you see the problem here Marvel? Doing (3) proved impossible with the existence of (1) and (2). But the fact of (3) also leaves you in a bind, because since you wanted everyone to forget and move past this, you never bothered to have an actual story/idea/answer to give readers for the proverbial moment of reckoning. Instead what we have are a bunch of teases and promotional ideas, which as (1) and (2) show are unnecessary, which at this point have reduced Mephisto, whose mystique is a central part of Roger Stern-Mignola's classic
Triumph and Torment into an annoying and banal D-list sorcerer in a story and setting that the recently departed co-creator Steve Ditko once explicitly said would never fully tolerate incursions of supernatural because, and I quote, "A mythological demon made the entire Peter Parker/Spider-Man world a place where nothing is metaphysically impossible."
So at this point, Marvel please stop with the teases. None of us have forgotten this story. You don't need to remind us of the story that made your former EIC and current Chief Creative Officer the laughing stock of the comics fandom. Give us the story when you are ready. Either way, none of us will forget and get past OMD. Many of us will never forgive it.