Another Day, Another Dollar

Something said in Ferrett’s discussion of the latest twists in the Spider-Man comics resonated with me for some reason. What was said was that Spider-Man was no longer a character in his stories, but a commodity. Ultimately it would mean that he could never advance as a character the way we usually think of it; Marvel has too much invested in making sure he stays the same, year-in, year-out. The glacially slow advance of time isn’t enough (as some estimates put real years to comic years at around 7 to 1), things have to actually remain static.

Which is apparently why Spidey had to have his marriage to MJ undone.

What I find more interesting is the lamentation that there was not a big, mainstream media pick-up of the story. From said lamentation:

Also, while there was much mainstream media surrounding the unmasking of Peter Parker, the death of Captain America, and even the new Captain America, the mainstream coverage of this event has sparse to nonexistent, with almost all of it merely reflecting what’s being said by fans online. Why hasn’t or didn’t Marvel take this story out to the major press outlets, especially if accessibility to Spider-Man was one of the goals of One More Day?

Seriously? There’s a simplicity to those storylines, and none to the current Spider-Man crap. For it to make the media, there has to be something easy and essential to grab onto and the consequences have to be intuitive and yet profound. Death is obvious, unmasking nearly so, since the concept of a superhero secret identity is practically universal in Western culture.

But Lucas Siegel needs 2800 words to start to break down the implications of Spidey and MJ’s marriage going away (but not the actual time since, and most other things will have happened, except the things that explicitly relied on them being married, other than the living together bits, and…) That’s, what, almost four newspaper columns? At least ten, twelve newscast reports. And none of it is intuitive, none of it makes sense. For the average shmo, nothing like what Mephisto has done here resonates with the popular images of Spidey and what he can do. Those kinds of powers might as well come from the writer’s ass (as maybe they did) to the casual reader, and thus be less compelling.

Unlike unmasking, unlike death, unlike rebirth. All powerful memes in the culture, apart from comics. All things easy to understand.

Of course, the end of a marriage is easy to understand too, just not in the way this one ends. By never having happened. Magically.

Which… there might be something interesting there to develop in terms of a story, as a sort of pointed commentary on how our society views marriage and all that. But that’s not what this sounds like. This sounds like getting more mileage out of a character. This sounds like trying to reintroduce that old-timey flavor of tension into a modern setting at the expense of decent storytelling. A money grab that, nonetheless, manages to turn off the casual reader and fails to engage the newbie. And enrage much of the core.

Of course, the core will mostly continue buying, until that one magical day that something done in one of the titles manages to push them over the edge. But I doubt it’s this.

The trouble for me is that there’s an exciting storytelling vision for superhero comics, one that builds off some mini-series I’ve seen where, for example, old heroes get old, and new heroes replace them. Sometimes it’s their kids, sometimes it’s sidekicks and apprentices adopting their identities, and sometimes it’s just entirely new superheroes. Amazing, eh?

But, somehow that kind of storytelling just doesn’t work for comics. Or, rather, it doesn’t work for comics executives and merchandising deals.

Crossposted with klech.net