A Long Belated Opinion on the Spider-Man/MJ thing.

I never got around to blogging my opinion of the whole Spider-Man, One More Day, un-marriage fiasco before, but since the topic's come up again, particularly since JMS posted some thoughts about it.

I haven't really talked about it because I'm not much of a Spider-Man fan. I've never cared for the comics or the cartoon show. I rather enjoyed the movies, but not out of any real fondness for the character. I did read the newspaper comic strips occasionally, and Peter and Mary-Jane were already married there, so that probably affects my perspective.

I guess I have mixed feelings about it, really. On one hand, I do think it's important to have editorial/corporate control over a character like Spider-Man. Don't get me wrong, I also support author-owned material as well, of course, but I do think when it comes to multi-franchise, multi-author characters, there ought to be some overhead keeping the portrayals consistent and appropriate.

Well, as much as can be expected at any rate. On the other hand, it might be a notable sign that you've gone a little too far with some aspect of the storyline when your writer wants to pull an Alan Smithee.

I admit, I've never really understood a lot of the justification behind the end-of-marriage choice. I mean, okay, being married to a supermodel's a bit beyond the average fellow that Spider-Man's supposed to represent. Though most of the average fellows probably aren't as clever as Peter and certainly don't have powers.

Moreover, Peter's not a teenager anymore. What's "average" for a teenager may not be for a man in his early to mid twenties. I know personally, while I used to know a lot more predominantly single people, after having entered law school, I was genuinely surprised how so many of my classmates were actually married. Some even have KIDS!

I dunno, on some level I can see the reasoning, it just seems to me that Peter's reached the age where marriage doesn't have to preclude the everyman thing. The supermodel/actress part's fairly new, but the rest doesn't have to be completely alien to normal experience.

I guess it's just disappointing because Flash has been so good lately at telling stories starring a relateable protagonist with a wife and kids and actually using that to tell NEW stories. Wally's circumstances are much stranger than Peter's in general, but I think they've done a really good job at making the character relatable as a young person with a family.

I guess I'm just disappointed because while I can see running low on inspiration involving a man and wife, perhaps, there are a lot of ways to stir things up without taking a step developmentally backwards. Children, for one. That's a little drastic of course, but I think Spider-Girl's proven that we can actually conceive of Peter as a father. It'd be interesting to see what Marvel/JMS (who, for all my occasional gripes, I think would be very good with this sort of theoretical domesticity-meets-action stuff,) would do with that. ((Sure, Flash is doing it too, but it's not like DC and Marvel haven't had parallel developments before. Besides, JMS is very different as a writer than Mark Waid, so there's no reason to believe it wouldn't end up a very different animal.))

And if kids are a bit drastic, I'm sure there are other ways to stir the pot without wiping out the marriage altogether. Oh well...