New Spider-Man storyline

Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada has been saying for years that the Spider-Man status-quo should mean he’s single, despite the fact Spider-Man’s been married in the main continuity for 20 years. Quesada’s solution? Erase the last 20 years of Spider-Man comics.

Madison Carter, an official Marvel historian and author of the Marvel Handbook wrote, “This story/arc/retcon is the biggest mistake Marvel has ever done.” A Newsrama poll, which are typically pretty neutral, had 65% voting it “Worst. Thing. Ever.”

Here’s an explanation from Newsarama:

How it Happened
Peter Parker made a deal with the devil.
I’ll let that really sink in.

Mephisto, the Marvel Universe’s Devil, saved Aunt May’s life. He came to both Peter and MJ, and told them that if they would give up their love, their marriage, he’d save May. The catch, as there always is with the Devil, is they would both feel some pain of loss from losing their marriage, and the knowledge that they also essentially killed their unborn child by wiping her from the possibility of existence.

What this Changes
Well, for starters, we see at the end of Amazing Spider-Man #545 some of the immediate effects. Harry Osborn is back from the dead (won’t Norman be surprised?). Peter no longer has organic webshooters, which implies that the heightened version of his Spider-sense and the “stingers” are probably gone, too, as they were all gained through a shared experience. Of course, Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson are no longer married. They still dated, of course, and we don’t know yet how/when/why they broke up. May is alive and well, although there was never any guarantee or indication of for how long. Peter’s identity is back in the realm of secret, and this is the thing that causes the most problems. That’s what we know so far.

Nagging Questions
Did JMS’s entire run get retconned? Is Amazing Spider-Man now being told several years in the past? What was new Peter’s role in all the major events that have happened since his original wedding day? For Example: Maximum Carnage, the Clone Saga, House of M, his joining the Avengers, Civil War… aren’t these stories now fundamentally changed? Mary Jane provided a sense of balance to Peter, and also had interactions with just about every major super-hero in the Marvel Universe; how does this butterfly effect harm/advance them? Shouldn’t some characters have died or not have died as a direct result of never having been exposed to MJ? Didn’t Peter stop wearing the black costume because it frightened his wife (who was reminded of Venom)? Will Peter have repercussions for making a deal with the devil? How does “with great power comes great responsibility” fit in with making a deal with the devil in the first place? What if Mephisto gets bored and tells MJ? Or Peter? Or May (“What have you done Peter…what have you done”)? And of course, what did Mary Jane whisper to Mephisto, and is it just a Deus Ex Machina for this Deus Ex Machina? These are really just a handful of the questions of the volumes and volumes that are possible that fans have to ask now that this story has gone through. Bendis has said that Pete will still be on the Avengers, but like many fans I just don’t see how – after all, did he move into Avengers Tower pre-Civil War with just Aunt May? Who was Wolverine hitting on then? (Of course, that’s a whole other ball of wax, as we’ve been shown recently; Wolverine’s brain has this issue with being toyed with, and fights – hard – against manipulation.)

It gets worse. Straczynski, who’s had a pretty popular run on the book, had the chance to write the retcon as his swan song. But changes in the last issue almost caused him to take his name off the book, something very rare in comics.

JMS then clarified his problem:

To explain, here’s the conversation I had with Marvel, in sum:

“So what does Mephisto do?” I ask.

“He makes everybody forget Peter’s Spider-Man.”

“Uh, huh. So Aunt May’s still in the hospital —”

“No, he saves Aunt May.”

“But if all he does is save her life and make everybody forget he’s Spidey, she still has a scar on her midsection.”

“No, he makes that go away too.”

“Okay…:

“Then he wakes up in her house.”

“The house that was burned down?”

“Right.”

“But how —”

“Mephisto undoes that as well.”

“Okay. And the guys who shot at Peter and May and were killed, they’re alive too? Mephisto can bring guys back from the dead?”

“It’s all part of the spell.”

“And Doc Strange can’t tell?”

“No,”

“And the newspaper articles? News footage?”

“Joe, it’s been forgotten.”

“I’m just asking is that stuff there or not there?”

“Not there. And Peter’s web shooters are back.”

“Is this the same spell or a different spell?”

“Same spell.”

“How does making people forget he’s Spidey bring back his web shooters?”

“It’s magic, okay?”

“I see. And Harry’s back.”

“Right.”

“And Mephisto does this too.”

“Yep.”

“So is Harry back from the dead, or has he been alive? If they ask him, hey Harry, what did you do last summer, will he remember? And the year before? And the year before? If he says they all went on a picnic two years ago, will they remember it?”

“It’s —”

“Because if he now has a life he remembers, if he’s not back from the dead, then you’ve changed the continuity you said you didn’t want to change. Those are your only options: he was brought back from the dead, and there’s a grave, and people remember him dying —”

“Mephisto changes THEIR memories too.”

“— or he’s effectively been alive as far as our characters know, so he’s been alive all along, so either way as far as our characters are concerned, continuity’s been violated going back to 1971.

How do you explain that?”

“It’s magic, we don’t have to explain it.”

And that’s the part I had a real problem with, maybe the single biggest problem. There’s this notion that magic fixes everything. It doesn’t. “It’s magic, we don’t have to explain it.” Well, actually, yes, you do. Magic has to have rules. And this is clearly not just a case of one spell making everybody forget he’s Spidey…suddenly you’re bringing back the dead, undoing wounds, erasing records, reinstating web shooters, on and on and on.

What he doesn’t explain, since he’s emailing a web site for the comic nerd community, is the big elephant in the room: this is Marvel’s solution to the storyline you might have heard about last year, where Spider-Man went on TV and unmasked. Now, everyone in the entire world has forgotten.

What’s particularly annoying is that Marvel made this mistake almost exactly a decade ago. After the popularity of DC’s “Death of Superman” and “Batman: Knightfall,” Marvel decided to shake up Spider-Man. Their solution was the Clone Saga, where it was revealed that a Spider-Man had been a clone for the past 250 issues. This proved so massively unpopular that Marvel had to change course mid-storyline and put things back the way they were, which caused the story to last years. According to the Wikipedia entry,

The decision to replace Peter with Ben as the regular, true Spider-Man met with a massive outcry from many readers and was also unpopular with many of the creative staff of the day. The decision was soon taken to undo this and restore Peter as the true Spider-Man. However, this proved a difficult decision to implement and many schemes were devised, including one proposal to reveal the entire confusion as having been spawned by the demon Mephisto as part of a struggle with Judas Traveller and Scrier. This was rejected as being widely out of Spider-Man’s league.

Marvel canceled most of their Spider-Man titles and is releasing the main one, Amazing, with three issues a month and four creative teams. Before I found out how the story would play out, I was excited. Now I’m not sure I’m ever going to buy a main-continuity Spider-Man book ever again.

This honestly feels like one of the most insulting serial storytelling gimmicks in the history of pop culture.