Devilish Annulment

After graduating college, I started thinking about the future. I had (what I thought was) a decent job, and I had a girlfriend, and priorities started to change. I saved what I didn't spend, and what I didn't save I spent on her. I was already feeling claustrophobic from the thousands of comic books that stacked up in my room over eight years, and I had plenty of excuses to break the habit. Comics were soap operas for guys. Stories went on for decades, and we followed it intently. Characters grew up and became husbands, wives, and parents. They mentored a younger generation who also dealt with life's challenges and treacherous social navigation when they weren’t battling villains. Characters lived and characters died, and Marvel stood out as a company where change lasted. DC, a company roughly three decades older, has gone through many revisions in their history over the years, explaining stories as “imaginary” or alternate realities, and many times starting from scratch. Marvel editors such as the late Mark Gruenwald championed continuity, making sure events in each series agreed with each other, as well as all that had gone before.

When I arrived at my turning point, in addition to all the factors I listed, something called Heroes Reborn made my decision a lot easier. Several major series were “canceled” as their characters were supposedly killed off, and they began starring in new series with new #1 issues in a brand new reality. The basis of this stunt was to lure back former talents like Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, and Whilce Portacio, who along with other creators left Marvel en masse a few years prior to form their own company, Image Comics. I had already dropped all Spider-Man titles during the Clone Saga, a mess of an epic that revealed the real Spider-Man had been replaced by a clone years ago and the guy we thought we were reading about was actually walking the Earth or something. It was an attempt to get back to a simple, single Spider-man, by explaining the original never married his longtime love Mary Jane Watson. Fans hated it, and eventually they revealed that Peter Parker was always who we thought he was, while the newcomer Ben Reilly was in fact the clone.

Over the years, I've still peeked in on comics from a distance. Of course I've been enjoying the annual batch of movie adaptations, and I'd read various summaries and previews online. If something was praised enough or piqued my interest, such as The Ultimates, I'd even pick up the stories reprinted and collected in trade paperback form. One of the fringe benefits of my old job was the occasional free sample. Like any addiction, it was hard for me to be completely clean. One story I followed with interest this past year was an ongoing theory that Marvel's editor-in-chief Joe Quesada was once more targeting Spider-Man's marriage, and seeking a way to break up the Parkers without killing MJ or having them get divorced. Fans feared his continued remarks about how the marriage limited their stories and aged the character meant a Retcon was on the horizon. Stop reading now if you don't want SPOILERS, but it's probably clear where I'm heading.

Various events last year led to Peter publicly unmasking, a controversial move that was topped with the conclusion of the One More Day saga this past week. His wife and his elderly Aunt May became targets, and when their home was destroyed they moved in to the headquarters of the Avengers, Marvel's core team of heroes. It was an exciting and dangerous time full of new possibilities and avenues writers had never explored.

Then Aunt May got shot.

Even a casual fan of the web slinger knows how guilt motivates him. It was the loss of his Uncle Ben at the hands of a burglar he once refused to detain that made Peter learn that “with great power comes great responsibility.” Guilt and respect for his elders fuels the core of Spider-man beneath his quips and emotionless mask. For Aunt May to be in the line of fire because his identity was public, that he might lose another loved one because of his own bad decision was more than he could take. So, he set about obsessively trying to find a way to save her, from money to magic, and finally settling on an unlikely and unsettling source, Marvel's devil Mephisto.

Killing Aunt May would have been a bold move, even though they had killed her once before and later said that was only a robot double. Cheesy status quo restrictions like that are the nature of comics, and why I didn't see any point in following stories that future writers might erase. It's a natural part of life that we lose our parents, marry, and become parents ourselves. Marvel already publishes an Ultimate version of Spider-man in which Peter is still in high school, so there was no need to revert any development and growth of the mainstream character. They might have killed Aunt May, might have justified the name “One More Day” to describe the story of his final 24 hours with his Aunt. Instead the devil appeared and offered Pete and MJ a choice: May or their marriage. They had 24 hours to decide, and that was the significance of the tale's title.

Back in the day, I was a fan of Joe Quesada's artwork. And from what I've read of his tenure as E.I.C., his bold moves have put his company in the spotlight, gained them mainstream media attention, and generally created excitement even about stale characters. I give him a lot of credit for banning smoking in his books, though people feel he was taking the loss of his father to lung cancer and applying his personal feelings to business. Perhaps he was, but I think kids start smoking because they see someone cool doing it, and adults keep smoking because they've become addicted. He was nipping a potential problem in the bud, and not worrying about how others perceived him for it. He was conscious that, as role models, his fictional characters had influence. I never perceived a married Spider-man as broken, and he was already wed by the time I was collecting his adventures. Quesada felt otherwise, and in a universe where heroes didn't smoke, one made a deal with the devil.

So what's the message here? Are we never supposed to get married, supposed to live with our elderly relatives forever so we have disposable income to spend on comic books? Is Quesada a brilliant tactician? Of course Peter couldn't let his Aunt die because of him, so of course he and his wife accepted the deal. He might have spent his life with a beautiful woman destined to give him a daughter, and instead chose to buy his elderly aunt a few more years. So Mephisto altered memories, and seemingly reality. Exactly 20 years after the wedding, it was erased. No one remembers they were married. They were never married. Peter never told the world he was Spider-Man. By the time Mephisto was finished, Pete was not only unemployed, single, and back living with his Aunt, but his friend Harry Osborn was still alive. They hit a giant reset button and wiped out 20 years' worth of stories. A lot of key decisions were made with or because of his wife, and with her out of the picture a lot of things now played out differently. Would Peter have joined the Avengers? The strange thing is, he still appears in that book so either they haven't caught up yet, this tale that everyone is so upset about is a classic alternate timeline scenario, or Marvel simply isn't worrying about continuity. Their explanation of “It's magic; we don't have to explain it”, is now sold on t-shirts.

Putting things in perspective given the number of fans calling Quesada “Joephisto” and even wishing him bodily harm, I'm reminded of a recent exchange on The Simpsons between Bart and Comic Book Guy Jeff Albertson. Albertson points out that a story about one of their favorite characters was imaginary, that it never really happened, to which Bart responds, “It's a comic book, dude. None of this stuff ever really happens.” Good or bad, Spider-Man will follow this path until another writer or editor decides to undo the mess or have Pete and MJ wed all over again. It is upsetting though that the company sends this message about marriage in a hostile world. What would The Happy Husband say if he were still blogging? It's a shame to see this character go backwards. More importantly, if Mephisto only altered memories then these two are still married, and any other relationships they enter could technically be considered adulterous. If he altered reality, it creates a dizzying time paradox trying to figure out how this affects other comics and how past events now unfolded.

I enjoyed the stories during the years I was reading them, and I liked reading about a guy in his 20s with a wife and a career even though I was still a teenager. Marvel thinks young people couldn't relate to the character anymore, but I always thought he created a goal, sort of “this is where I want to be in 10 years and webslinging wouldn't be too shabby either.” From a writing and storytelling standpoint, saying “we couldn't think of new stories so now all these other ones never happened” is a lame copout. Departing writer J. Michael Straczynski reportedly disagreed with his editor on how his final tale would end, though it seems the final result would have been no marriage. I'm certain a better solution than annulment by devil exists, but then I'm not convinced marriage was a problem to begin with.