Despite all that, the Spider-Man I grew up with had money problems, school problems and work problems along with the problem of super powered lunatics constantly trying to kill him. Even though for much of the time I was reading about him, Spider-Man was happily married, his writers still managed to put him through the wringer by doing things like killing his best friend, reintroducing his long-lost parents and then revealing that they were fakes and even replacing him with a clone. Oh, and then there was the time one of his bad guys buried him alive and ran around brutalizing people while dressed like him.
In short, even though some of the worst things ever done to Spider-Man happened before I was born, like the death of Gwen Stacy, the love of Peter's life, I was around for plenty of the other stuff, so I know it's a proud Marvel tradition to basically torture Peter Parker.
In the 2000s, though, the torment started getting mean-spirited. In 2004, right after a really stellar run by J. Michael Straczynski and John Romita Jr., Straczynski penned the truly awful, utterly superfluous retcon "Sins Past" which intercalated in the history of the (still dead) Gwen Stacy a sexual tryst with Norman Osborn which resulted in the birth of two children. It was an abomination, but one so skillfully embedded into Spider-Man's lore that it would be nearly two decades before it was retconned out of canon.
But Marvel were just getting warmed up: in the nearly universally-reviled "One More Day," Marvel undid Spider-Man's marriage of 20 years (in real time, not comic book time) to Mary Jane Watson by literally selling it to the devil. I don't think anything more needs to be said about that.
After "One More Day," though, Marvel seemed to figure out ways to make Peter's life miserable that seemed more in keeping with what had been dubbed the "Parker luck." Body-swapping with Doc Ock and then dying and coming back to life? Check. Becoming a billionaire only to lose everything? Check. Getting hoodwinked by a supervillain roommate? Check. These stories were consistent with the notion that Peter Parker was a hard-luck character, and that his good nature has often made him vulnerable to other people doing bad things to him.
This latest story, however, departs from that completely and has far more in common with arbitrary, idiotic decisions like the ones that spawned "Sins Past" and "One More Day."
Before the relaunch of the book in 2022, we last saw Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson getting ready to move in together, only to be interrupted by a blinding flash of light. One relaunch and just a few months later, they are very much apart, with MJ living with a husband named Paul and...two kids?!? The inevitable question arose: surely they're her step kids, right? After all, how could she have had kids who look anywhere between 6 and 9 years old in the course of a few months, right? Who is this guy and how did she end up with him? And so a mystery box story was born, using the lazy, hackneyed in media res formula that is meant to shock and awe rather than earn the audience's attention the hard way: through compelling storytelling.
Well, the mystery box is almost entirely opened. and we've learned that thanks to yet another lazy storytelling device, that of "alternate dimensions where time moves differently" the children that MJ has with Paul (who looks suspiciously like writer Zeb Wells, incidentally) are indeed HER children, whom she conceived and raised in something like ten years that passed in the alternate dimension while mere days passed back in her home dimension, where Peter was busy burning bridges with his fellow heroes just to get back to her because Wells had decided to write longtime allies like the Fantastic Four and Captain America like they were federal agents in a Die Hard movie.
Marvel has been consistently hyping up the upcoming issue #25 of this abhorrent new status quo with the question "what did Peter Parker do?" to basically deserve to be where he is now, which is basically further away from MJ than he has ever been in their publication history.
What did Peter do? HE went to the wall for Mary Jane, doing anything and everything he could to get back to her, knowing she was trapped with an all-powerful, mass-murdering being. He did this only to find out that her devotion to him was nowhere near as strong as his devotion to her.
The thing is, one cannot fault Mary Jane for anything she has done either, because it was really Zeb Wells' brilliant idea that his thinly-veiled, bland-as-fuck avatar should cuck Peter. His story feels grossly illogical as it is now premised on the notion that MJ and Paul, trapped in that other dimension without any particularly special abilities, spent ten years (or so) fighting off the all-powerful Wayep and/or his murderous, also-very-powerful disciple Rabin, only to reach the end of their rope at the exact moment when Peter showed up. I'm sure Wells has exercised some kind of storytelling gymnastics to justify this conclusion, but in the end it all feels as nonsensical as Kathleen Kennedy's mutilation of Star Wars lore with the recent sequels. There, it didn't matter if Rey's ridiculously amped-up Jedi abilities were basically nonsensical and without any precedent; what mattered was that the Force was female. Here, what seems to matter most is that Peter gets cucked by Zeb Wells' avatar, storytelling logic be damned.
It is true that the idea of screwing Peter over is nothing new. Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and John Romita did it all the time as did the talented writers and artists who followed them like Gerry Conway, Ross Andru and a whole host of others. This present-day writing by Zeb Wells, however, feels especially mean-spirited to the point of being downright cruel. It feels below the belt and quite honestly beyond the pale. It makes use of writing tools resorted to by the truly lazy to justify its conclusions. Worse still, Marvel's latest creative debacle has a tinge of intellectual dishonesty about it. I am fairly sure they knew they had a hateful, polarizing story on their hands, so rather than lead up to it naturally, Marvel wrapped it up in a mystery box, contriving a sense of urgency to finding out what really happened to keep readers interested. It seems clear that Wells, a reasonably talented writer who never quite made his mark the way his contemporaries like Dan Slott did, decided that the best way to get the fans interested was to dial the hate all the way up to 11.
Damn you, Marvel; it wasn't so long ago I was celebrating how you found the nerve to undo the hateful "Sins Past" storyline, and now you go and crap out something ten times more despicable.
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