Brand New Day, Brand New Opinion

Ok, it's been one month now. One month since Marvel decided to toss out twenty years of stories rewriting the entire Spider-man mythos with little to no explanation other than "It's Magic! (*jazz hands*) We don't have to explain it." at the end of the One More Day storyline . My reaction to the story was tempered greatly by the fact that I hadn't really read a run of 616 Spider-man comics in years. Ultimate Spider-man has been the best Spider-title published in the last decade, owing much to the talents and dedication of Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley... who together set a new record in American comics by putting out an uninterrupted run on USM for 111 issues. ( Yes, that's right, 111 issues. Many of them produced much more frequently than monthly.) It's by far one of the best runs of comics of all time. It features a teen-aged Peter Parker much as he was when he was created in the 60's; a teen aged hero with nothing but problems.

Anyway, Joe Quesada (Marvel EIC) didn't like the Parker marriage. He, as do many other writers, to be fair, feels that a married Peter Parker loses much of what makes Spider-man an interesting character. So he decided to chuck it. By having the Parkers make a deal with the Devil (ok, Mephisto, but same thing in the Marvel Universe). Yes, that's right, in the world where no one smokes because that's bad, it's ok for the hero to make a deal with the Devil. Mephisto saved Aunt May's life in exchange for the Parkers never having been married. But they don't remember it either, so it's not like they know any different, right? Oh, and Harry Osbourne is back alive. And Peter never had organic web shooters now. How did the deal to break the marriage affect those two completely independent things as well? You want an explanation? "It's magic! (*jazz hands*)" There ya go. Count me among the eye-rollers.

Now, however terrible that plot device to destroy the Parker marriage may have been, at least the results aren't that bad. I just finished reading Brand New Day, the first storyline in the new Spider-man status quo. And I admit, it feels kinda right. Peter can't get a job, isn't a registered hero, lives with Aunt May, and apparently the only people who actively like him now is the mob. That certainly sounds like Spider-man, even though my entire comic reading life has taken place during the marriage (it originally happened in the early 80's). My initial reaction to the decision was that we already had a perfectly good book about an unmarried Spider-man in USM. I see now that the result is different enough such that it doesn't matter; each maintains a separate identity still, and I can live with that.

I do somewhat miss the marriage from an idealistic stand-point; Peter Parker was a true nerd hero, he married the super-model! Of course, I haven't needed that kind of inspiration for a long time, but the 14 year old inside me is screaming.