... Yet the fuck again.

Here's the deal; I have serious issues with J. Michael Straczynski's run on Amazing Spider-Man. There were a few genuinely good ideas and well-executed scenes in it (Aunt May finding out Peter's secret, Peter becoming a high school teacher, Mary Jane returning as his wife, the fact that Straczynski actually did a decent job of selling me on the "New Avengers" as a team - something Brian Michael Bendis has never managed to do - and Peter as a peer of great minds like Tony Stark), but they were mired in a muck of potentially interesting ideas that were executed without any redeeming virtues whatsoever (every aspect of the "Spider-Totem" saga) and shit that was patently indefensible, no matter how it would have been handled (retconning in two hyper-age-accelerated super-children by Gwen was jaw-droppingly retarded, regardless of whether Peter or Norman was intended to be the father).

However, in spite of the fact that yet another fucking retcon is the ABSOLUTE LAST THING that Spider-Man needs - since virtually every single significant story arc from the "Clone Saga" forward, through John Byrne's "Chapter One" reboot and the "Spider-Totem" to Gwen's kids, has already added up to nothing but one, big, long, never-ending attempt to retcon Spider-Man's history, and all of those stories have wound up being the WORST ONES IN SPIDER-MAN'S HISTORY as a direct result - I will say this; if you're going to do a retcon anyway, you might as well do it well, and again, while I'm opposed to retconning Spider-Man's history on general principle at this point, if you have to do it, Straczynski's option is ... well, it's still bad, but it's vastly superior to that of Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada, whose dick Straczynski has once again knocked in the dirt, for all the world to see:

ONE MORE (MORE) DAY? JMS EXPLAINS HIS ENDING - NEWSARAMA

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 I wanted to do was to make one small change to history, a tiny thing, whose ripples we could control to only touch what editorial wanted to touch, making changes we could explain logically. I worked for weeks to come up with a timeline that would leave every other bit of continuity in place. It was rigorous, and as logical as I could make it. In the end of OMD as published, Harry is alive and he's always been alive as far as the characters know...so how is that different than he was alive the whole time?

It made no sense to me*.

Still doesn't. It's sloppy. It violates every rule of writing fiction of the fantastic that I and every other SF/Fantasy writer knows you can't violate. It's fantasy 101.

It troubled me that it's MJ and not Peter who is the one to actively make the decision*.

I'd originally written the first issue of OMD to take place directly after May gets shot, and in fact turned in the first script directly after she gets nailed. Editorial decided to build in a block of issues for One More Day...meaning May would be in that bed for almost a *year* which I thought was just too long to make work.

And yes, I wanted to retcon the Gwen twins out of continuity*, which was something I always assumed I could do at the end of my run. I wasn't allowed to do this*, and yes, it pissed me off. I felt I was left holding the bag for something I wanted to get rid of, and taking the rap for a writing lapse that I had never committed. Why this aspect was not brought up in the other interview, you'd have to ask Joe.

Mainly, the book was rewritten in the editorial offices to a degree that the words weren't mine any longer*, to a certain degree in three, and massively in four. If the work represents me, I leave the name there and take the rap; if it doesn't, then that's a different situation. There's just not much of my work there, especially once you get to the last dong of midnight...everything after that was written by editorial.

*[Emphasis mine.]

Not only does Straczynski do a better job than I could have done, of explaining from a calm and rational point of view why this story and its resultant status quo are failures on every conceivable front, but he also calls bullshit on Quesada's assertion that this story was not editorially-driven.

And in a medium (comics) and a genre (superheroes) in which female characters seem to have been transformed into whipping-posts for straight male nerd entitlement rage, I have to give Straczynski props for realizing how creepy it was that Quesada basically came up with an in-story justification to blame Mary Jane herself for the new status quo, in a none-too-subtle callback to Eve listening to the serpent, and leading Adam out of Eden.

I think I've used this analogy before (which wasn't really mine to begin with, since I stole it from What Would Tyler Durden Do?), but at this point, the only way Quesada could be PWNED any harder is if he was being eaten by a shark, while a bear was simultaneously punching him in the face.

ETA: And dear God, WHY would Quesada want to keep Gwen's kids by Norman in continuity? You'd really have to be actively committed to intentionally producing bad stories, in order to exclude such utterly worthless and irreparably damaging characters from the effects of such an otherwise all-encompassing retcon.

I used to like American Comics. Still do, in fact - as HH will attest (I spend more time reading his comic collection than anything else when visiting...).

But this little piece tends to make me glad that I have stopped reading them full-time, let alone collecting them.

I mean, different Manga series can be screwed up by different adaptations, but nothing at all like this. Sometimes there is something to be said for not having a shared universe.

I'm not a fan of either of their plans-- honestly, a deal-with-the-devil retcon is a very, very bad idea-- but at least JMS looked at it as a story, whereas Joey Q looked at it as a means to an end that hopefully no one would look at too carefully. This being comics, of course, an industry built on nerds, his plan fell apart.

... Is the difference between walking out into a snowstorm completely nude, and walking out into a snowstorm completely nude except for a pair of boots. Technically, one is a better idea than the other, but, yeah ...

The differences are minor, inconsequential. And yet these two supposed pros are engaging in an online feud so stupid it makes me wonder if its just another way to drum up publicity for OMD. I mean, do either one of them really want to be mayor of this metaphorical leper colony?

... I'm trying to tell myself that this is actually good news for me, as someone who wants to see the marriage restored, because everyone at Marvel who wants to retcon it away is acting like an idiot and pissing off the audience, to the point that even a majority of the people who WANT to see the marriage go away consider this story and status quo to be even worse than the Clone Saga.

Of course, it will do decent sales at first, because people will be curious, but then again, so did the first issues of Ben Reilly as The One, True Spider-Man, and we all saw how well that turned out. This will fail at least as badly, if not worse, and Quesada will either change it back, or be fired, and because it was such an overt attempt to end the marriage, only an EiC who's even stupider than Quesada will dare to try and undo it again.

joke!



Al B.