My guess: MJ is OK
(I posted a partial version this on 27 August, but kept it private since it was unfinished. Now "One More Day" is coming out, so I'd better finish it--& we'll see if I'm right.)
There's a lot of noise about how Marvel are going to somehow break up Pete & MJ in Spider-Man.
I don’t buy it.
Because Spider-Man isn't just the regular Amazing Spider-Man comic book. There are other presentations of the character to consider, & Pete & MJ are connected in most of them.
Marvel Age #54, Sept 1987:
Actually, the idea for the wedding originated with Stan himself. Stan recalls how he came up with it: “In doing the SPIDER-MAN newspaper strip [which Stan writes for newspapers across the country], I haven’t been checking with Jim Shooter and he hasn’t been checking with me. He’s been doing the comic books, and I’ve been doing the newspaper strip my own way. One day, I found out that in the comic book, Mary Jane knew Spider-Man’s secret identity, which surprised me. I figured it was silly that she didn’t also know it in the strip, so I decided that she’d discover his identity in the strip too. Then I figured that if she knows who he is, he might as well marry her!
“I’ve been using Mary Jane as Peter’s permanent girlfriend in the comic strip. He’s met other women, but he keeps going back to Mary Jane. I’d wanted to marry them off. So when Mary Jane learned Peter’s secret identity , it was the perfect excuse!”
When Mary Jane first appeared all those years ago, did Stan ever suspect that she and Peter would tie the knot someday? “I thought that they might,” he admits. “But when John Romita and I had Gwen Stacy in the book, we thought Gwen might make a better girlfriend for Peter. Gwen was more serious and caring, and Mary Jane was a fun-loving hippie-type then. We wanted Gwen to be the heroine of the book, but no matter how we wrote it, Mary Jane always seemed more interesting! We used to joke about it: ‘We can’t even control our own characters!’ ”
”I think everybody ought to be married at least once in this lifetime,” Stan says. “I was kind of cruel to give Peter all of that frustration all those years. I’m glad to have the opportunity to make up for it all now.”
reported by Sholly Fisch
That was in 1987. Since then we've seen Marvel stick the "Peter & MJ are destined to be together" meme in our faces to the point of retcon. And now there isn't just a newspaper strip to consider. Now there's Ultimate Spidey, MC2, Marvel Adventures, Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, & I guess that thing with "cute Doc Ock" that I don't quite get; plus movies & whatever else.
When Quesada talked about ending the marriage, the best he could come up with is that Pete could now, "have sex, or download porn." OK, granted, Joe's a penciler, not a writer, but that's particularly unconvincing. Has it occurred to anyone that Joe could be pulling our legs to drive up sales?
I suppose he could really be sick of editing & want more time to write, so is trying to get Stan to drive him out of Marvel...
If you ask me, it’s a swerve.
Tags: joe quesada, mary jane, spider-man, stan lee
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