Time’s Up: One More Look at Spider-Man’s One More Day

With Dan Slott’s monumental 10-year run on Amazing Spider-Man finally coming to an end this month, it’s a good time to look back at the event that kicked off this strange new era for Spider-Man, the immensely controversial and divisive “One More Day” anti-saga. In the Fall of 2007, Marvel serialized the storyline in Amazing Spider-Man #544-545, Friendly Neighborhood #24, and Sensational #41. Hyped for nearly a year, the exact details of the story were not made specific, but fans were aware it was going to accomplish three things: end J. Michael Straczynski’s tenure as writer of the flagship title, set up the new “thrice-monthly” shipping Brand New Day status quo, and somehow change Spider-Man’s world dramatically. Rumors were flying left and right, to the point where even the most naive fan went into the story arc aware that it was likely going to somehow result in the ending of the marriage between Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson. And end, it indeed did.

Along with Straczynski writing, Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada would be illustrating the story himself, and (due to his slowness as an artist) it would ship roughly once a month, making each issue the only mainline Spider-comic on the stands for each given month since 1976. All of this was unprecedented, and hinted that something big was happening; everything seemed headed towards some kind of phantasmagoric finale for the books, of which the Friendly and Sensational titles would cease publication, leaving ASM as the sole breadwinner. Since fandom didn’t know the specifics of what was going to happen, there was a sense that most were willing to see how it played out; trusting that a good story, handled in just the right way, would make whatever outcome awaited acceptable. Boy, were we in for a disappointment. Marvel let readers down by failing to craft an actual coherent, engaging story that set up the new the guard in an acceptable way, putting out instead something more akin to, “Here’s the new status quo, shut up or leave!” And leave many did in droves, taking this as a dramatic jumping-off point. It was the most debated and reviled Spider-Man storyline of all time, perhaps the biggest change in his storied history ever, and it landed with a giant wet fart. But was the quality of the story itself underrated? The whole arc unfairly written off as a wash merely because of the epic fail of an ending, and the resultant media debacle the fallout created?

To understand what happened, one must also understand the context of the circumstances the story was created under. It’s important to note that at the time the story was first conceived, Joe Quesada had very publicly stated that he had been looking for a way to unmarry Spider-Man for quite some time, as he thought this would position the character where he needed to be moving forward. It was also, in his words, a personal preference that he very badly wanted to pull off while he was still E-i-C. Straczynski, or JMS as he is known, has noted that he was looking to cycle out of the writer’s chair on Amazing, and Joe Q and the Spider-editors found it the perfect time to implement the new status quo. This story was supposed to accomplish both, but there was more to take into account on both fronts. For JMS, he was at the end of a successful 7-year stint on Amazing, where he had rejuvenated the character and brought him to new sales heights. This coincided perfectly with the new media attention Spidey had gotten in the wake of the three Sam Raimi movies, which ran simultaneous to his tenure. But JMS was, by his own admission, a bit burnt out on the title, having been for the latter half of his run thrust into crossover event after crossover event, with no relief in sight. Spidey went from “New Avengers” to “The Other” to “Civil War” to “Back in Black,” all with a set of creative directions JMS had to follow, getting further away from the back-to-basics stories he claimed to want to write. Sales, however, continued to climb, so there was a sense of wanting to build on forward momentum. But much like the OJ Simpson trial being preceded by the Rodney King riots, as a precursor for the eventual outcome happening the way it did, there were things going on before “One More Day” was even published that affected it.

This daring tale came on the heels of JMS’ own “Sins Past” storyarc a couple years prior, which perhaps preceded “One More Day” as the most contentious story in Spider-history. In it, Gwen Stacy was revealed, while in her relationship with Peter Parker, to have carried Norman Osborn’s love children to term, who he then artificially aged up to adulthood and used in his latest scheme of revenge on good ol’ Web-Head. Fans were, to say the least, not amused. Straczynski has recalled though that this was never his intention; that he had wanted the kids to be Peter’s, not Norman’s, and if nothing else this would have dramatically simplified the storyline. He was vetoed by Marvel. Would this version of the story have gone over better? It’s impossible to say. But not wanting to jettison the idea completely, it was suggested that the identity of the father merely be changed. And these mandates, as well as suggestion that the father be Norman Osborn, came from none other than Joe Quesada himself. This will be important to remember later on in the context of OMD. Quesada obviously had some very particular notions of what should or should not be done with the character, and controversial changes occurred on the regular seemingly based on whatever Joe himself found acceptable or distasteful. To wit, if the edict from up high was that Marvel could not depict unmarried characters in a Spider-Man title having sex and children, whether we agree or disagree, we can kind of see the company’s interests. But to say all the sexual shenanigans are fine, they just can’t involve Peter himself? That made zero sense to me, and fandom perhaps felt similarly, as the character of Gwen Stacy would be unfairly “tarnished” either way.

More to the point, while few would have objected to Gwen having engaged in a sexual relationship with Peter while they were dating, it was borderline offensive to suggest that she would cheat on him with Norman Osborn of all people. It didn’t even make sense! To add insult to injury, a point was made to insert into the story the endlessly aggravating line that Peter and Gwen NEVER had sex (perhaps JMS being contrarian to editorial by saying, ‘You wanted this so bad, fine, here it is!’), along with the implication that Norman took Gwen’s virginity, complete with the disturbing image of Norman O.’s “O” face depicted. Ugh! This pissed off fandom at large in an unbelievable way, perhaps a hundred times more than if they had just been Peter’s normally-aged kids through a relationship with Gwen, and the storyline used to analyze the nature of buried secrets. JMS had wanted to use the ‘kids’ gimmick as a way to tell a controversial story, but the story ended up being nothing BUT controversy. At what point does it matter that Peter himself stay chaste, if we have ridiculous, artificially-aged love children? Who cares if he fired his web shooter out of web-lock, besides Joe Q apparently?

Consider how DC has used the same scenario to much success and zero uproar, in the Batman titles. Grant Morrison crafted a storyline where Bruce Wayne and Talia had a love child, Damien, after she date-raped him off-panel during a previous adventure. That’s arguably worse! Either way, that storyline was accepted, seemingly because Morrison didn’t bog us down with the minutia of how it happened, and just got on with the Damien-Bruce dynamic. It’s a simple idea; if you accept that Batman has been around longer than ten years, you can accept that he had a ten-year-old son with one of his enemies. It’s an idea full of dramatic potential. In contrast, “Sins Past” was almost entirely focused on the illicit liason, landed with a thud, the kids were rarely mentioned again, and JMS was, if not soured in the eyes of readers, looked upon with more scrutiny as his run progressed. Alex Ross even loudly declared in Wizard Magazine that he had thrown his entire run of JMS’ Spidey in the garbage bin as a result. Nonetheless, JMS carried on with the flagship title in several more successful stories, not punished sales-wise. Joe Quesada however, seemingly not learning from the mistakes of sins past both literal and figurative, took entirely the wrong lesson from the debacle. Instead of figuring they caught a lucky break and not interfering again on an editorial level- based on personal nitpicks that may or may not reflect what’s best for the character- Joe went full speed ahead to enact even more sweepingly dramatic changes he had been itching to pull the trigger on, concocting a grand scheme to Make Spidey Great Again.

Based on a detailed manifesto that Marvel actually published in the back of one of their issues, it became apparent that One More Day/Brand New Day had been in the works since at least 2005, with Tom Brevoort already preemptively creating his own “series bible” for the direction Spider-Man would be heading in after JMS mercifully left, written and distributed to staff in Fall 2006. Quesada was, as mentioned, not shy about his distaste for the marriage; in his “Cup Of Joe” weekly columns on Newsarama, Joe repeatedly (some might say incessantly) brought up how there were three “genies” he wanted to stuff back in the bottle. One was less mutants in the X-Men titles (accomplished with “House of M”); one was Marvel heroes fighting each other to bring a sense of unrest back to the Marvel U (done in “Civil War”); and the last, which he sometimes was coy about, often not, was that he wanted to unmarry Peter and Mary Jane, but didn’t quite know how to do this. In hindsight, Joe probably tipped his hand because he knew he was going to definitively enact this change during his tenure and wanted to prepare fans, so as to not just drop it out of nowhere like a bomb. This is why people were likely well aware ahead of publication that the un-marriage was imminent with OMD, but it put them already on the defensive.

With this in mind, Joe failed to take into account a few things. He had set up the bad precedent of crossovers/events predicated by editorial mandate based on his own whims, which followed no rhyme nor reason, and they often turned out to be hits incidental from the edicts that generated them. But what was the business model for these stories exactly, besides what Joe preferred as a fan? For instance, how does LESS mutants to play with make sense to generate more income for Marvel? Many readers liked House of M, but thought the “No More Mutants” spell at the end that arbitrarily left 198 mutants on Earth, conveniently all the X-Men and their villains, was stupid and clunky. The idea of less mutants may have not actively hurt sales (as far as we know), but certainly didn’t increase them in any way, as the whole endeavor was done to satisfy Quesada rather than some huge demand for “Less X-Men Characters!” The marriage was the same, as there were no mass protests outside of Marvel to “Unmarry the Parkers.”

While I have no doubt that most of editorial shared his views, none of these changes were more than just things they wanted to see happen that had little to do with the broader IP; they were nitpicks, that were frankly beneath the duties of an EiC who should supposedly be trying to generate higher and consistent revenue. In many cases, Joe was actually taking a gamble with sales just to change the characters to how he thought they should be. I don’t doubt that he had the best intentions at heart, but just because he had the power to do whatever he wanted as EiC, should he have? Why roll the dice when, as in the case of One More Day, sales were actually hurt, as opposed to the juggernauts House of M and Civil War turned out to be notwithstanding the initial ideas that birthed them. Is this good business sense? I don’t think even Joe believed that his notions were going to take the books to new sales heights of greatness, but these things apparently nagged at him so much that he used the clout he had to move in the directions he saw fit. Marvel in those days was apparently more laissez faire in their attitude as to what editorial could do with the line; but this meant that what was best for the characters was defined within a few people’s narrow viewpoint, with little consideration given to what would happen to the readership. Nonetheless, Joe went ahead with his grand plan for Spidey, and there was no turning back. JMS was apparently on board- in theory- and the story was off and running, with of course a few major hiccups to get to the finish line.

So what of the story itself? Well, in reading it again- with new context of what JMS intended kept in mind, more on that in a bit- it’s actually not as awful as you might remember. The first three chapters, clunky though they are in usual heavy-handed Straczynski fashion, actually tell a pretty compelling tale that, dare I say, had the potential to be one of the best Spider-Man sagas of all time. Oh, the last chapter written by Quesada is a complete wash, one of the worst comics ever penned, but the JMS chapters are thrilling in their potential of what they seemed to be setting up. This could have been an epic tale of triumph and tragedy, that brought not just JMS’ run, but the saga of Peter Parker himself, Mary Jane, and even old Aunt May, to a bittersweet conclusion. And that is certainly how JMS winds it up, as if this is going to be the LAST SPIDER-MAN STORY ever told, even kind kind of gearing up the future “death” of Peter we saw in Straczynski’s own Amazing #500, where Old Man Pete visits May’s grave.

This was the intention I think he had when he was writing it, as it makes sense that JMS would assume that when he leaves a title, he could set up an ending acting as a de-facto “series finale” should we choose to read it that way. His thoughts on the story afterward, including what he originally wrote for the fourth chapter, frame this as a kind of metaphorical ending of Spider-Man and what he represents. If read in that subtext, that this is the last time we’re ever going to deal with some of this crap before it’s gone and replaced, then some of the story beats and choices seem more understandable, rather than read as simple retreads. I believe Straczynski was headed in the direction of working up a complete Crisis-like “reboot” of the Spider-titles, and thus One More Day was his attempt at a version of Alan Moore’s “Whatever Happened to they Man of Tomorrow” for Superman, which tied up all the loose ends of the old continuity and said goodbye to the Silver Age version of the character. This informs every beat and decision JMS made in parts 1-3, which seem to set up the choice before our protagonist: Peter will either give up and give in to despair; or he must learn the true meaning of responsibility. And once he does, he no longer has to be Spider-Man.

In Chapter 1, we get Straczynski’s attempt at tying up all the loose plot lines from his run, like concluding Peter’s relationship with his mentor Tony Stark, and setting up the stakes and the desperation of the characters. In this regard he absolutely succeeds, as the sense of dread and foreboding is extremely palpable. The momentum he keeps up, carried over from the Back in Black arc, is not exactly fun, but it’s harrowing and propulsive. Peter and Mary Jane learn that May, having been struck by a bullet in issue 538 and lain in a coma for eight months, is at last near death’s door. She is out of money, and since the Parkers are on the run after Peter stupidly outed his secret identity to the world in the Civil War debacle, they have literally nowhere to turn. So Peter heads back to Avengers Tower, and demands an audience with Tony Stark. After a thrilling mid-air battle, with Stark as Iron Man and Peter in his civvies, the two careen down to Earth, and Peter uses every last bit of webbing in his system to tie up Shellhead in an alley.

After explaining the situation, and begging for Stark to help- reasoning he cared for May when they were all living together- Tony declines, as he feels betrayed by Peter’s abandonment of him during the battle with Captain America. But, as a last gesture, he will let Peter go without incident so that he can be with May in her final moments, and sends Jarvis the butler (and May’s sometime Boy Toy) with a check for five million dollars to make sure she gets the best treatment available. Peter mentions about five times how May cannot go to some damn “charity ward,” even though he’s been told repeatedly the old dear is braindead and has days to live. But, Peter is not one to listen to reason, and so after having pursued all material means of saving her, he heads off to find some supernatural means instead, even if it means making a deal with “the devil himself.” Uh-oh.

In Part 2, continuing on his farewell tour, Straczynski seems to tie up everything with Dr. Strange from his run, but also poses a question which he definitively answers: can Aunt May be saved, and should she be? Or should Peter learn to let go of the things he can’t control, just as we the audience should learn to put away childish things, like comics? This is probably the most well-written and and deepest chapter thematically, and it’s rich with meaning if you examine it. Peter goes to the Sanctum Sanctorum of Stephen Strange (Wong is out for the evening apparently), and asks him to help. Doctor Strange performs an incantation to summon The Hands of Fate or some such nonsense, which will simultaneously send Peter’s spirit to many different places at one time, so that he can ask Reed Richards, Doom, Doc Ock, etc, if they have any scientific or magical methods whatsoever to save his aunt. Unrealistic though it may be in a world with vampires and reality gems, to the last person, the answer is no. JMS seems to be doing this for one specific reason- to tell us unequivocally, that May cannot be saved BEYOND A SHADOW OF A DOUBT, and Peter should give up the plot.

Dejected, Peter is unwilling to give up, and while Doc Strange goes to fetch him a drink, he repeats the dread incantation to get the Hands to send his spirit back in time to the day May was shot, to see if he can warn himself. He goes back, but finds he can’t interact with anybody. He can only watch in horror as she’s shot again, and- in a Straczynski-ish twist- CAUSES her to get shot by his ghost distracting his past self. Dr. Strange comes to rescue the weakened Peter, before bringing him back and having a conversation with the Spider-Man from issue 42 who showed up at his door (don’t ask). After JMS is through showing us how clever he is, we get on with it. In the best dialogue exchange in the whole story, Strange gives Peter a bit of advice: he tells him he has lost many people he’s loved during his life, but does not regret that. He regrets, only, that in so many cases, he was unable to say goodbye. He urges Peter to not waste any more time, because if he missed out on May shuffling off for good to the great web in the sky, he would regret that more than anything, and for the rest of his life. Peter, taking all of Strange’s good advice, seems to do the exact opposite, by wandering the streets before coming across a mysterious little girl who says only SHE can save May. Double uh-oh.

In Chapter 3, Straczynski now seems to want to examine the nature of Spider-Man himself as well as one of his favorite themes, that of the road not taken, to explicitly set up the choice that our characters will be faced with in the conclusion. But more than that, he preemptively spells out to answer if Peter should give up his marriage to save Aunt May, and it is a definitive NO. I don’t know if Quesada just let him write what he wanted no matter how stupid it made them look after the fact, or no one was really examining JMS’ scripts that much with a fine-toothed comb, but the context between the lines is very clear. The Little Girl in Red takes Peter to meet three other versions of himself, much like the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. Not exactly JMS at his most subtle. The first is a portly nerd, who seems to be a stand-in for the readers J. Michael holds in such high regards. This Peter is a video game tester who wishes he had done more with his life than just indulge in fantasy, and as a result feels that he never truly lived. The message is that this Peter never lived up to his potential, as he was too afraid. It seems like JMS is drawing upon real life, if not himself for inspiration here, and doesn’t paint a very flattering picture of what he thinks of nerds. You, buying this comic? Fuck you!

The second Peter is a multi-millionaire, who used his scientific mind to create an empire for himself. But he’s also a bitter misanthrope, who still resents all the bullies from his life, and claims he would give up everything he owns just to have the one girl from high school, whom he lost. I assume JMS is implying this is Mary Jane, but since she and Peter never went to high school together, it has to be Liz? Anyway, the little girl turns into a Woman in Red, who lays out exactly what these two represented; that they were paths not taken, had Peter not been bitten by the spider. She explains that she is a possibility “yet to come.” We then get the final visitor, the Ghost of Christmas Future, as the woman morphs into the demonic Mephisto, who has come to offer Peter a gruesome choice: Aunt May’s life, in exchange for his marriage. Yikes. Beyond what a Freudian nightmare that is, he leaves Peter and MJ to decide, as either way they will only have- One More Day! And we are set for either the most heartrending issue of Spider-Man ever; or, what we ended up with.

In Chapter 4, the finale, Peter and MJ make the choice to “sell” their marriage to Mephisto, and the story falls apart, completely ignoring the themes JMS keyed up because Quesada is now at the helm (they share scripting credit). After deciding not for One More Day but for A Few Minutes, Peter and MJ half-heartedly debate the pros and cons before Mephisto returns “at the stroke of midnight,” as a clock comically tolls each chime loudly like The Gong Show. Mephisto explains the specifics: he wants their marriage because it is pure and rare and one that only comes along a thousand years, and he despises it, being the Lord of Darkness and whatnot. So if they agree, he will remove it from “continuity” seamlessly, as if it never happened, then be on his way and go. One wonders why Mephisto would go out of his way to make it so seamless, to the point where the Parkers won’t even remember it happened. One also wonders what Mephisto is even gaining, if he doesn’t get their souls or even make them suffer. It’s almost as if Mephisto is not screwing them over to make a Faustian pact, and is instead acting on an editorial edict! Anyway, Mary Jane explains this won’t change anything, as everyone still knows Peter is Spider-Man, so Mephisto agrees to make everyone forget that too. At this point they probably should have started bargaining for Uncle Ben and Mary Jane’s absentee father, seeing as how Mephisto was feeling so generous. I get the sense he really, really wanted that damn marriage.

Anyway, they agree, but not before Mephisto reveals that the little girl was, in fact, the daughter they would have had had they stayed married. What a wicked man, that totally makes his lame motivation make sense now! Peter and Mary Jane say goodbye to each other, as she explains to him that it doesn’t matter that they’re being pulled apart, as they love each other, and will always find their way back to one another in the end. Kind of cruel to add, since Marvel clearly had no intention of EVER getting them back together, but I digress. With that, their world evaporates into nothingness, and, seemingly remembering nothing, Peter wakes up in his old house, with Aunt May alive and at her sassy best, cooking Peter- what else?- those damnable wheatcakes! If I were Peter, I would’ve checked that I wasn’t, in fact, in hell after all. Not even Seymour Skinner and his Mother Dearest could cook up as uncomfortable a narrative as a grown man selling his wife to Satan, in order to go back and live with his Granny May.

I don’t know how much of the writing at this point is in fact JMS and how much is Quesada, but JMS revealed in interviews afterwards that he wanted his name taken off the issue entirely, because it didn’t remotely reflect his vision, and wasn’t his words. I asked Straczynski himself how much of it he wrote a couple of years after the issue was published, and while he very clearly did not want to talk about it, his answer was a polite, “Joe (Quesada) wrote most of the issue.” But from the writing in parts 1-3, Peter’s choice is very clear: He should not save May, he should let the fantasy of her go and stay with MJ, as Mephisto is the literal manifestation of despair and the ultimate metaphor for giving up. And we want to see Peter triumph, grow, learn the most important lessons of all, right? Right?

I think that’s why it stung so much when he makes the absolute wrong choice in the last chapter; because JMS did such a good job of setting up which path Peter should go down, and ol’ Web-Head deliberately goes against the storytelling grain, which is a huge no-no in the writing world. There is a path, a hard one, a painful one, but a right one, and Peter takes the easy way out. This didn’t exactly set him up to be the footloose, fancy-free character Quesada wanted going into Brand New Day; instead, it forever tainted him and set up the era of Peter “Pan” Parker: the selfish, immature loser who refuses to grow up or ever move on. Anyway, to make matters even worse, the story ends with Peter going to see a resurrected Harry Osborn- boy, Mephisto was sure having a firesale with all of Peter’s dead loved ones- and he and his supporting cast all make a toast to “A Brand New Day,” while the issue uncomfortably ends with a dedication: “To JMS- from the Marvel gang!” Oh dear.

In the behind-the-scenes chatter that’s become even more famous than the story itself, Straczynski and Quesada clashed, with JMS taking to his online message board to denounce the story. This lead to a back-and-forth between the two in a very public forum about the reviled tale, where J. Michael talks about how he argued with the mechanics of how the story ended, how it followed no discernible logic, and violated Fantasy 101. This culminated with JMS repeating the famous line given to him by Quesada to shut him up: “It’s magic, we don’t have to explain it.” But oh, how they did! And that line may very well be true or just part of the apocryphal info about this misbegotten tale, but it sure sounds like it’s true. What’s funny is that J. Michael actually had a more elegant solution, and nobody involved had the sense to use it. As such, his actual final script has languished in the “Do Not Use” vaults at Marvel, not even resuscitated for a What If? storyline or a trade paperback extra.

To wit: In JMS’ version, Mephisto doesn’t go back and tweak one little thing that changes apparently nothing besides the marriage and things Quesada picked out; he changes everything. The one event altered is that, way back in Amazing Spider-Man #98, Peter drops the dime on the drug-addled Harry Osborn. As a result, Harry and Mary Jane never break up, Gwen is never murdered by Norman, and thus, Peter and MJ themselves never get married. Quesada nixed it, because he felt that it was a “Crisis” level reboot that would have dramatically altered the mythos too much and erased all of the continuity. But see, “Crisis” worked for DC; and it also was preceded by such fantastic “farewell” tales as “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow” and “Crisis on Infinite Earths;” not this, the storytelling equivalent of “Let’s piss in your cereal and call it champagne.”

As legend goes- in an anecdote told by Dan Slott of all people- part of the issue was that the Brand New Day stories were already being written, and the writers were doing so based on a vague outline of what Quesada told them he wanted or EXPECTED to happen, without Straczynski having turned in his final script yet. Meaning they would’ve had to dump whatever they were working on in order to accommodate JMS. And the comic writers, being finicky and inclined to not like change to begin with, predictably said “No.” There was even a funny aside that apparently happened at the final writer’s retreat before the change was implemented: Quesada, trying to politically maneuver so no one would be mad at him, gave the new writers the choice of going in the direction they were already going in, or taking JMS’ route and dumping continuity. And he asked this with JMS in the room. Gee, I wonder how it went? In a vote by show of hands for who wanted to do it Straczynski’s way, apparently J. Michael’s own hand enthusiastically shot up, and nobody else’s, save for Quesada meekly supporting him when it was apparent this would only buy him brownie points with the Mighty One. It clearly didn’t work, as Straczynski quit the Thor title and departed for DC immediately after, in the wake of the slight. And is it any wonder why? I do, however, have to question if the entire mess was avoidable and created by too many egos being involved. Including J. Michael himself, who was pissed and went public probably because his own story was discarded and not hailed as genius by Marvel, rather than him being so in love with the actual idea itself. It made a bad situation even worse and turned ALL the readers against Marvel, as JMS actually did offer the lesser of two evils in this instance. He just shouldn’t have aired his grievances publicly!

If it mattered so much to Joe to un-marry Spider-Man, then he sure as hell should’ve done the work to get there, instead of assuming everyone would be on board with the easy way out. Re-doing the continuity at least signifies that Marvel is serious, and has the courage of their convictions to state: we believe in this idea so much, that we’re doing no take-backs. But they wanted to have their cake and eat it too, which was Joe’s fatal error. Re-doing the past forty years would’ve been a verbal acknowledgement that, yes, we upended a lot, but we sympathize with you; we’re all in and we’re going to do the work of getting you to keep reading. Because we wanted to do away with the marriage so badly, that we’re now willing to put our money where our mouth is. In other words, we ain’t fucking around. But Joe underestimated how few people agreed with him, and assumed we all shared his opinion that the marriage was toxic. And that the best way to do away with it was by an asinine in-story method that screws over the characters, and upends the continuity anyway. Joe was essentially throwing the poker table over, then putting it back up, reconstituting everyone’s hands how he saw fit, then switching out the aces for twos and wondering why everyone was mad at him for doing this.

As far as alternatives: Quesada was quite clear in interviews that while he wanted to unmarry Spider-Man, he didn’t think divorce was the way to do it. He thought this would age Spider-Man even more (since the goal was apparently to make him seem young, young, young!), and wouldn’t make him a good role model for fans, since it implies he and Mary Jane gave up on their love. Now, breaking it down, on one hand I see his point; on the other hand, I don’t see it making a terrible amount of difference in the long run compared to what happened. If you’re going to unmarry Spider-Man, and you’ve already tried killing MJ off twice, which did not work; that pretty much leaves you with ONLY divorce or an annulment, as your two options. For myself, if we absolutely had to split them up come hell or high water, I think an annulment was the only way to go. It’s offensive, but at least keeps their history intact without disrupting the continuity, and makes the marriage as non-existent as they clearly wanted it to be behind the scenes. Why this route wasn’t taken, by having say Mysterio claim he posed as the pastor who wed the pair, and they were thus never legally married, I have no idea. Is it because then they would have had (gasp) pre-marital sex?? I wouldn’t have been thrilled with a divorce, but it would have at least validated the long history of Spidey and MJ, and been a part of the long tapestry of their lives. Onto a new chapter, so to speak. If the argument was that this meant Petey and MJ were, in effect, giving up on their love; how were they not, as published in One More Day anyway? How were they not abandoning their love if they end up single regardless of how they got there, based on a decision they made in the story that sparked this?

Joe’s downfall was in trying to find a third option, magical retcon by way of deus ex machina plot device, or in thinking that this third option even was on the table as a valid, acceptable choice. In going down this route he committed an even greater sin, which was taking away from the believability of Spidey’s grounded world and undercutting the continuity completely. By going in such an absurd direction he made the title (and the company) lose credibility, which is arguably worse than just a bad decision the character makes that will be remembered by readers. Joe didn’t want it to remembered; he wanted to sweep the marriage under the rug as soon as it was taken away, implying it never happened in the books and never existed, and expected fans to go along with it. But you can’t make fans forget twenty years of real-life stories, so in doing such, Joe made the book silly, and earned the wrath of fandom at large by basically rendering the character and his world pointless. We could write off a dumbass move on the part of Peter and the creators, but this was a giant middle finger to fans, even if Joe was unaware of it, and that was the terrible mistake that ruined the story before it happened.

There was talk, as mentioned, of resurrecting Gwen as a kind of consolation prize, which editorial nixed. Bringing back Gwen would’ve been something new at least, to replace the loss we had suffered in-continuity of holy matrimony, and it would’ve opened the fun exploration of a Spider-universe we weren’t familiar with and had to re-learn all over again. There was even precedent; Ultimate Spider-Man completely rewired the continuity from scratch, and we bought it, because our stories still COUNTED. I would argue it would’ve even been better to just replace the mainline continuity with the Ultimate continuity completely, as we had seven years to get used to it by that point anyway, and the movies were already taking their cues from that side of Marvel. What Quesada refused to see was two-fold: they kind of insulted the readers by not calling a spade a spade while throwing the baby out with the bathwater anyway; and in doing such a dramatic upheaval as getting rid of the marriage, upending the continuity was not only warranted, it was kind of necessary, and would’ve acted as a kind of palate cleanser for the readers to soften the blow of the figurative annulment. If we’re getting rid of twenty years of marriage between two characters, let’s at least call it for what it is. And if not, let’s pack the stories away where they belong, in a prior continuity where our memories will not be sullied, and just say the entire last forty years didn’t happen at all to make it somewhat easier to swallow, like JMS proposed.

That Joe could not come up with a believable way to dissolve the marriage was his problem; his sin was in forcing a half-baked implementation to get to point B anyway, assuming fans wouldn’t care as long as the future held good Spidey stories. It backfired, and a large segment never forgave nor forgot. I would argue that the fans who hung on and the ardent Dan Slott faithful (who we could nickname ‘Slott Machines’?) did so not because they finally jumped on the bandwagon after the marriage went away, but because they were either not bothered by the new direction, or didn’t care about the marriage in the first place. Many who defend the Brand New Day stories may not have liked a married Spidey, but I would argue the vast majority were already reading the series and were just not affected on a personal level. For those of us who preferred the marriage and jumped ship, we were hurt and wounded in a big, bad way by the insulting way the changes came about. In his zest to make sure a marriage or divorce would never need be referenced again, Joe did the very thing he said he didn’t want to do, which was blow up twenty years worth of stories and fans’ collections. This was the overriding reason why many dropped the title, as opposed to ‘I just hate that One More Day story so much!’ We couldn’t find any reason to it, and thus never got closure. It felt too weird to accept that the titles had any point to them, if the last twenty years of reader investment meant absolutely nothing. And Quesada never got that, and likely still doesn’t, which is why many of us are still smacking our heads.

So where do we go from here? Bringing back the marriage does not seem in the cards, but if it were to happen? It would not just be reinstating a beloved status quo, but would also be reinstating the Spidey some of us loved from 1962-2007, acting as a kind of apology and public acknowledgement of what was done at long last; kind of like what the public hungered for from Nixon after Watergate. Under the current regime at Marvel, I would argue the latter is the reason why a reinstatement will likely never happen, as they don’t think what they did was ever wrong enough to be in a position to apologize in the first place. So here we are, with some fans never forgiving Marvel for what they did and what was taken from their history, as we instead enter year ten of a seemingly never-ending run of stories that enact all kind of goofy changes, based on the hollow notion that Spidey had to be single in order to get there. I don’t buy that for a second, and I don’t think the end result was so glorious, nor took them to new heights sales-wise, that it was worth it. Let alone required a single Spidey who wasn’t divorced, if not one who was still married. Alas, that’s where we stand now, and it’s unlikely to change. Que sera, Quesada; whatever will be, will be, I suppose?

So with all that said, putting legacy aside, what could One More Day mean to someone on a personal level? Well, it’s a bit complicated, but it actually means a lot to me, for reasons I can’t quite explain. The issues themselves came out at the same time I was going through great personal change in my own life, and what in hindsight I realize was the end of one thing, the beginning of something new. Not to get into it too much, but let’s leave it at: I failed in a spectacular fashion, and had to start over in my life. I would be lying if I didn’t say that this somewhat informed my reading of it, and I had a more positive reception because I knew what to expect. I was still outraged, to be sure, but I also was at a place in life where I was perhaps looking to jump off the monthly grind of the Spider-books, and this was nothing if not a perfect jumping-off point. So I looked more kindly at it because Peter’s desperation and struggle, his longing to just give up or find an out, was mirroring a lot of what I was going through myself, and gave some small comfort to me. Art imitating life is never a bad thing; it’s when it’s the other way around that you run into problems.

And so I thought the first three JMS issues were absolutely compelling, and I soaked up the themes, knowing we were coming to a conclusion one way or another, both for Spidey and for my collecting of the title. I would like to say the story ended triumphantly with Spidey becoming a man and learning what responsibility meant, and it inspired me to triumph; but instead, he just gave up. He got an easy way out with Brand New Day, not having to handle any of the problems he created for himself, and just reverted into an immature man-child. And life isn’t like that, you know? It pointed out the uselessness and futile nature of the thing, and how the soup was made, which should never be on a reader’s mind. I can honestly say a full reboot would have been less offensive. Marvel clearly misread the audience by withholding an “endpoint” for the titles, in a desperate attempt to not shed readers; but that’s exactly what they did.

I didn’t give up in life myself, but I dropped all the Spidey-titles, which I had collected every single one of for over ten years. It was inspired partially by the story JMS set up in parts 1-3, but I also just couldn’t do it anymore. I could not follow along with a bastardization of a character who had grown with me and had meant so much to me and whom I identified with so personally, and for the first time in my life, was now less emotionally mature than me. He regressed to a state he hadn’t been in since before I was born, and I collected Amazing Spider-Man every month since I was 6 years old. I could not bear to read Peter this way, instead preferring to remember him the way he was. This was crushing, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a bit of a relief, to just kind of be done with worrying about Peter’s problems. I was at a crossroads in life, and sort of didn’t need him anymore; whereas he made the wrong choice for himself, when at a similar crossroads.

Peter gave in to despair and took the easy way out, which he would never, ever do. This was a betrayal of the Spider-Man I knew in my heart, so I kind of had to stop reading to be true to him and my own principles, in a way. I’d be shocked if others readers didn’t share the same sentiment. But JMS did such a good job gearing it up (I think), that I absolutely knew what choice Peter was supposed to make in Part 4, and what should have happened, and how that would have signaled the end of Spider-Man anyway, and that was sort of enough for me. The finale I had in my head was so clear-cut that I knew where the character really was headed, and I kind of knew where I had to be headed as well, so I was ready to take the first steps alone, for the first time without Peter by my side every month. I know it sounds silly, but if you spend that amount of time with any fictional character, it can’t help but affect you personally. And this was what I think I learned, that it was unhealthy to have this kind of attachment to a made-up comic character, so I should perhaps be thanking Joe Quesada for very obviously slapping me in the face with this reality.

What it really boils down to, if I may, is that the true theme was completely missed. The story as-is has no discernible theme, literary or otherwise, other than: if you keep whining long enough, a magical devil will solve all your problems. I would like to think that to anyone, the real theme was quite clear. And that is that sometimes in life, we fail. And it’s okay to fail. The victory comes in accepting that defeat and learning from it, and growing as a person and marching on. From this comes maturity and wisdom. Peter doesn’t do that in this story because they clearly don’t want him to mature and grow up, but it robs him of so much emotional resonance. And as stated before, I think this is the ending JMS wants you to imagine in your head, as it’s so freaking obvious.

Had Peter turned down Mephisto and let Aunt May die, it really could be read as the last Spider-Man story, because it’s literally the perfect closing of a loop, bringing his entire history full circle. Uncle Ben died because Peter acted rashly as a teenager and used his power irresponsibly, motivating him to become Spider-Man in the first place. Now, Aunt May dies DUE to him being Spider-Man, and there was literally nothing he could have done on heaven or earth to stop it. So he had to realize that some things were out of his control and concede to being powerless; accept failure, in a way he couldn’t the first time, and deal with it as a grown man by forgiving himself for his role in his Uncle and Aunt’s deaths. As a result, he can see that Spider-Man was a child’s reaction to grief and not an adult’s, so he can therefore put away the costume and stop chasing ghosts. See that his greatest responsibility is to those that he loves that still live- like his wife. Thus, Peter moves on for good, and Spider-Man is finished. The end. PERFECT dramatic irony, and the perfect end for the entire saga. It’s such a shame they didn’t use it, because that was the exact direction the whole misbegotten tale was pointing to in bright neon lights! I think JMS realized this, and it never even occurred to Quesada. But wouldn’t that have been such a great finale? Besides the fact that, you know, no one would have to read any more Spider-Man comics ever again!

So I would say the story overall is bittersweet to me. Bitter in what it represented and how carelessly it was done; sweet in that it meant something to me, and I got what JMS was trying to say and it affected me, even if he never got to write that conclusion. I still love the scene where Peter and MJ say goodbye to each other as the spell sends them into the unknown blackness, as they’re really saying goodbye to the readers. Their tears are indeed ours. I hope one day we will get to see his original, unabridged script for Part 4; I’d love to read it. It may not live up to the story I imagine in my head, and that’s okay. It’s possible that the creators did not intend one iota of the extra thought or passion I’m getting from the story personally, and that’s okay, too.

But I know, wherever he is, the Peter Parker I followed for decades, who lived as a consistently written character for forty-five years, is off somewhere having made the right choice, living in that same twilight realm as Superman living happily ever after as Jordan Elliot in our head-canon. I know he’s still married to Mary Jane Watson-Parker, and they love each other, and they found each other again. In a life where perhaps he doesn’t need to be Spider-Man anymore, and understands his biggest responsibility of all is to be true to those he loves. I miss him. But most of all I want to thank him for what he gave to me and what he meant to my life, and the lives of so many other readers. That’s why we’re mad at Marvel; not because of some stupid deal with the devil or creative change. It’s because that guy’s gone, and we didn’t quite get to say goodbye. So we had to say goodbye on our own terms, and choose to leave him behind. I did, at least. So to the old Peter Parker, I say take a bow and enjoy your retirement, you’ve more than earned it, and you’ll always be in our comic collections as well as our hearts, where you shall forever hold a place. As Uncle Ben says very simply to Peter, on the cover of the final issue of Ultimate Spider-Man: You did good, kid.