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It occurs to me that what I’m most worried about is not so much the possible end of Spider-Man’s marriage, as much as it is the end of his romantic relationship with Mary Jane Watson, and her knowledge of his secret identity, because those things would spell the return of a Silver Age Superman-style “love triangle†- between the hero, his would-be girlfriend and his alter-ego – to the Spider-Man status quo, and I’m sorry, I don’t care how many superhero comic book fans love the shit of such “love triangles,†because they suck cocks and are Made Of Fail, and they always have done and been.
With Superman, the “love triangle†was at least borne out of an understandable desperation – by the 1950s, the comics had turned him into a character who could literally do anything, living in a world that, natural disasters and supervillains aside, was nigh-perfect, so since the guy’s only remaining weaknesses were glowing green rocks and a snoopy female reporter who somehow couldn’t see past a pair of glasses as a disguise, it was a safe bet that every other story would eventually wind up being about Kryptonite or Lois Lane almost discovering Superman’s secret identity, yet the fuck again. You can’t have drama without problems, after all.
The problem with this is, when Spider-Man made his debut, he already had nothing but problems – he was attending school, dodging bullies, maintaining friendships, chasing girls, worrying about his aunt’s health, feeling guilty about his uncle’s death, and pinching pennies just to make ends meet, all at the same time that he was working as an on-call superhero, 24 hours a day and seven days a week, with nary a Fortress of Solitude or a Batcave to afford him even a temporary respite from it all. Moreover, unlike Superman’s Metropolis, Spider-Man’s New York was a city where archvillains such as the Kingpin couldn’t simply be locked up in jail, like Lex Luthor almost always was in the end, if only because Stan Lee included just enough of the real world in its fictional counterpart to acknowledge that it wasn’t a perfect place.
Superheroes, like any other heroes (or other protagonists, for that matter), need problems to deal with, but part of being superheroes is that they also need reasons why their fans would want to be them. Superman was denied Lois Lane’s love for decades, but having the powers of a god was surely not an insignificant consolation prize. Batman saw his parents get killed and he lives in a city that seems, on occasion, to be an almost incurable cesspool of crime, but his costume, arsenal of gadgets and non-superhuman skills are among the most awesome around. Spider-man … well, we’re told a lot of times that he’s really smart, and his superhuman abilities would definitely be fun, but other than the fact that he gets to make fun of people (and started doing so back in an era when most superheroes seemed almost inherently incapable of intentional humor), there’s not that many reasons why anyone would actually want to be this guy, unless he ultimately gets the girl.
In the X-Men comic books, no matter how bad things have gotten, often implausibly so, for mutants as a whole, and even when Xavier’s mansion has been a swirling cauldron of interpersonal drama, there’s usually still been a distinct undercurrent of, “The whole world may hate and fear us, but at least we’ve got each other to lean on.†Considering that the larger Marvel Universe is now a thousand times worse for superheroes in general than it’s ever been for mutants in particular - parallel universes and alternate futures notwithstanding – just being a regular superhero would surely be bad enough that it would require the compensation of having someone to serve as your shelter from the storms, and Spider-Man is the original hard-luck superhero, which means that, as Marvel is so wont to remind us, things should be going even worse for him than for everyone else. Again, though, there still needs to be some upside to being Spider-Man, or else, what’s the point? If Marvel wants a Spider-Man whose life is nothing but endless pain and despair … well, that’s what they’ve got Daredevil for.
So, Joe Quesada and company, if you want “drama,†then stop trying to split up Spider-Man and Mary Jane, and start focusing on the fact that they both have plenty of other problems to generate drama, both superhero-related and non. Besides, reverting their relationship to the moth-eaten cliché of “Oh noes! How can I has costume change into Spider-Man, without Mary Jane finding out MY SEEKRIT IDENTITY!!!111eleventy-one†kind of goes against the whole “realistic†flavor you’re going for … but then again, so does writing Der Iron Führer as though his traitorous fascism makes him a hero.
Hey, here’s a fuckin’ thought; if you want “realism†and “drama†both, do like Stan Lee always said was the point of the Marvel Universe, and look outside your window, because unless you’re blind, you’ll see that, even for a superhero, just trying to exist in a world that’s anything like our own would be the source of plenty of problems. No, not every problem can be solved, but counter to what Civil War would seem to assert, not every problem is unsolvable, either. There’s a huge world of untapped potential, between the bright-and-shiny contrived “drama†of the Silver Age Superman’s “love triangle†and the grim-and-gritty, but no less contrived, “realism†of superheroes’ (and superhumans’) civil liberties and most basic human rights being oppressed in the name of might makes right registration, and YOU FUCKING FAIL for not recognizing the rich spectrum that exists between those two extremes.
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