Wednesday, December 12, 2007

One big bluff?

I'm beginning to wonder if this One More Day stuff is all a big fakeout.

Short recap if you don't know the story: Spider-Man is faced with the choice of letting Aunt May die (again) or having his relationship with his wife, Mary-Jane erased.

Now big boss of Marvel, Joe Quesada has been saying how he wants to undo Spidey's marriage for a couple of years now. J. Michael Straczynski, who wrote the story, has expressed how unhappy he was with writing it. Everyone, but everyone in comics fandom is aware of this, even if they, like me, haven't read a Spider-Man comic in ages.

So I'm just thinking this has to be the least unexpected twist in the history of comics, coming at a time when the publishers are so desperate to misdirect readers about significant plot developments that they will lie in interviews and even post fake solicitations for comics that will never be published. There's also the matter of the proposed change being universally condemned by fans, and the fact that there are plenty of flavours of Spider-Man already available in unmarried form.

Oh yes, and don't forget that this would also be taking the core titles away from the movie version in a year when Spidey suddenly started wearing his black costume for no reason that makes sense other than to strengthen the ties to the movie franchise.

I cannot see anything positive in cancelling the marriage at this point, and a lot of negatives. Which doesn't mean they won't go ahead with it; both Marvel and DC have made some amazingly boneheaded choices lately. Of course if they do pull the big twist on us, they might gain some kudos for not doing the thing nobody wanted them to do, but they'll have also made it impossible to trust their word about anything, and you'll get some fans assuming that they changed the ending at the last minute due to fan pressure, so to a degree it's a no win situation.

1 comment:

Sleestak said...

I predict MJ will make the choice to save May because she knows Petey will die of guilt if she dies and he is a big Mama's boy.