Deal-breaker

You know, no matter how much I hear about Brand New Day, I just can't get into it. From what I hear, it's no great shakes to begin with, and even though Chris Sims says that Dan Slott is doing good stuff... the Mary-Jane stuff really is a deal-breaker for me.

Spider-Man 3 had no deal-breakers for me, although deus ex butler was a little much (I just handwave that as saying he didn't know about Harry being the New Goblin until he found Harry in the lab). Even after the dancing sequence, I was still engrossed in the story. I repeat, EVEN AFTER THE DISCO DANCING.

In JMS' run, mystical totem Spider-Man wasn't a deal-breaker for me, joining the New Avengers wasn't a deal-breaker for me, Goblin babies weren't a deal-breaker (although that story was just JMS being a wanker in every sense of the word)... the public unmasking was a bit of a deal-breaker, just because it was so contrary to who Spider-Man was that it was enough to make me stop reading until shit got put back together.

But this Mary-Jane thing? Deal-breaker. Big fucking deal-breaker. Because just the identification of Peter Parker as Peter Pan, a young schmuck everyman who is eternally single and eternally miserable, just so falls afield of my conception of the character. It's like hearing that Warren Ellis is doing a series about a Superman who saves people because he's being paid by the US government. That's just not Superman to me.

And even 9-to-5 Superman would be at least intriguing as a deviation from the norm, as a commentary on the real Superman. But this MJ-less Spider-Man is supposed to be taken as the real Spider-Man, as if the Spider-Man of the last several decades were some fever dream, a mutation, a perversion from what is right and true about Spider-Man that is at long last being cured by Quesada and his puppets. And, really, there's no other word for them at this point. The mandate can't be "tell cool stories about Spider-Man" because for me and for a significant portion of fandom, a story can't be cool with One More Day in its DNA. It'd be like reading a Batman story in which Batman randomly sets a hobo on fire and then goes to solve a Two-Face crime. No matter how good the story of him fighting Two-Face is, you can't forget that he set a hobo on fire for no reason. So the mandate is "tell stories about Spider-Man being a swinging bachelor." They don't have to be good, the fans don't have to like them, they just have to be about Spider-Man without a ring on his finger.

I'd really rather have cool stories. Because bringing Mary-Jane back and playing out her and Peter being wacky swingers again is... icky. Like, she's in a relationship with a new guy and he has to compete for her affections again, forced laughter. Dude. That's... really... really... fucking gross. Is there any way you can bring back the marriage and then not acknowledge "oh, by the way, while we were broken up we kinda cheated on each other." And not even by choice, because at least, at fucking least, willful adultery would have some drama to it. The details of it, how it came to happen, how they dealt with it, those at least would have some literary potential. This weird mix of mystical date rape and infidelity is like the old splinter in the mind's eye, a nigh-Lovecraftian core of darkness perverting any story it appears in. Reading a story about Peter with another woman or Mary-Jane with another man in this context is like reading a news article on trepanning... you're skimming it, trying to avoid the gory details, waiting until the bad part's over like a little child covering your eyes.

So if you were to import any given BND story into a different continuity, call it Spectacular Spider-Man or Marvel Adventures Spider-Man, it would automatically be revitalized by having this fun-sucking parasite pulled out of it. It's sorta a younger brother to the feeling you get watching a Roman Polanski movie, knowing that he fled a child molestation charge. Or the feeling you get watching a remake of a movie you liked and always comparing it to the original. It's just awkward and weird and uncomfortable and this forced glee, this Griswaldian tone of "AREN'T WE HAVING FUN! JUST LIKE THE OLD DAYS, HUH!? WEEEEEEEE!" that extends from everything from the attitude of the creators to the narrative itself (via those forced "you know, for kids" captions. Really, is there anything more pathetic than a bunch of fortysomething men trying to seem hip to the kids? Anything at all?) just adds to the horror of it.

So... not a fan.

Marvel-time

On the plus side, I had a great idea for a creator-owned comic series. Basically, it's There Will Be Blood with superheroes. Set over about a decade, but with the proceedings in Marvel-time so that the story falls over the RL seventies, eighties, nineties, and aught-aughts. That's basically so I could play with cameo appearances from the Professor Hulk, black-suit Spidey and his partner Black Cat, the Claremont X-Men, the Byrne FF, Simonson Thor, Miller Daredevil (is it just me or did the eighties fucking rock?)... Plus, it'd make the series pretty much immune from company-wide crossover events, unless you want to see the subjective future version of the heroes (that would be cool too, though. "Wait, how did Dick Dig-Dug get that scar? Who's that chick in the power armor and why is he so friendly with her? WAIT, IS THAT A WEDDING RING!?").

So, over the course of ten years these two heroes -- one's a quippy, light-hearted trickster like Spider-Man and the other's a moody, angsty billionaire like Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark -- set out to clean up the city of... Townsville or whatever, and go from being outlaw vigilantes to pillars of the community, get married, have kids, and so on. And the very first cover, in the vein of Action Comics 1 and Amazing Fantasy 27, would be the trickster saving a girl. That's his first heroic act, this seed he plants. It's Year One, he's seventeen, she's thirteen or so. And as time passes, she grows up, goes to college, takes the experience as an inspiration and eventually (with a lot of hard work and trial and error) becomes a hero herself and joins the "family". In effect, creating her own stories.

By contrast, the villain wants to relive his "glory days," so he keeps sabotaging the heroes. Framing them for crimes so that they'll go back to being fugitives from the law, gunning for their significant others so they can be single again... that kind of thing.

I hope I'm getting across the subtle metacommentary here.

PS. Every time I see a long post of recs in a fandom I'm in, I feel the irrational urge to comment and say "Hey, why didn't you rec anything I did?" just to make things really awkward and uncomfortable. I don't, though, because I know the answer will be "Oh, you write gen/het/femslash? How bourgeois."