Messing With 'Reality'

A couple weeks ago I blogged about how quickly the Internet coined the label "One More Delay" for the not-exactly-timely "One More Day" storyline currently running through the Spider-Man titles. Last week (while I was away), the third part of the big Spider-event came out, and tonight I finally got a chance to read it. Spoilers ahead for anyone who cares about such things.

Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Joe Quesada has made no secret, over his tenure at the comic company, that he really and truly hates the fact that Spider-Man is married. Hates. It. Another thing Quesada wasn't fond of was the proliferation of mutants within the Marvel Universe, which lead to 2005's House of M mini-series, after which there were only 198 mutants left (down from the millions there'd been before that). So the second-most famous marriage in comicdom shouldn't have been buying any green bananas, if you know what I mean.

But Quesada's dilemma was clear: if the two characters simply split up, he'd have an icky divorced guy as his leading man, possibly with an adulterous affair in his backstory (either on his part or MJ's). On the other hand, if MJ was killed off, the fans would scream bloody murder (especially after what was done to lovely Gwen). So what to do, what to do?

With the penultimate chapter of "One More Day" now public record, we've gotten a good indication of what Joe Q's solution looks like. Aunt May lies dying from a bullet wound (suffered because the world now knows that Peter is Spider-Man) and our hero can't come to terms with her impending demise (despite the fact that, as one Internet blogger put it, Aunt May's gotta be about 150 years old by now!) so he's therefore primed to make a deal with the devil. At Marvel, the devil means Mephisto, and sure enough he pops up to offer Spidey a simple choice: give up his marriage, or lose his aunt to the grim reaper (not to be confused with the Grim Reaper, the Marvel supervillain)! Although the details won't be revealed until the final part of "One More Day" comes out (at some point in the distant future, if its publishing history to date is anything to go by), it sounds like Parker's life will be reset such that he never married Mary Jane.

And here's what bugs me about that idea: how are we really to believe in - or at least, willingly suspend our disbelief toward - a world where things can be so randomly rewritten? First of all, the ripple effect of such a huge change ought to invalidate all kinds of other stories, involving the vast majority of Marvel's characters, and yet that aspect will likely be ignored. Plus, if things can just be undone whenever the editor-in-chief wants it that way, what's to say that everything happening now won't just be revised by the next guy or gal to hold that position after Quesada? Maybe Civil War will be un-fought! Possibly Hulk never beat the crap out of everyone in World War Hulk? Perhaps it's all just make believe crapola with no attempt whatsoever to keep it internally consistent? When you start wondering that sort of thing, you know something's awry.

Just when I thought DC had cornered the market on revising their continuity, along comes Marvel to join the fun. When it happened in Crisis on Infinite Earths back in the mid-80s, I sort of bought it because it was such a fresh approach. Nowadays it just seems lazy and arrogant. And when I read that J Michael Straczynski, who wrote "One More Day" (from a direction by Joe Q), commenting publicly about how he doesn't agree with a lot of it, I really have to scratch my head.