Frankly I'm tired of high priced writers doing just plain stupid stories to pump up sales. You want us to guy your books then write good stories. Funny how Marvel's current editor is taking such a hands on aproach. Last time was Shooter and people still bitch about him. Has the industry learned nothing from the implosion of the 80's-90's. The only difference now is that instead of gimmick covers we get gimmick storylines.

Uncle Ben can never come back, but appearently Aunt May can never die?

There is just one HUGE problem with that comparison: Huck Finn is a single stand-alone novel, and Harry Potter is a series of seven novels that still have a definite ending.

In comparison, Spider-Man is an ongoing monthly serial that never ever ends. Which means that Peter Parker can never complete the journey and truly come of age. Because once he does, well, he's no longer the same guy. Which, as Omar Karindu so accurately articulated, results in the writers & editors furiously backpeddling to return Peter to the point he was at in the late 1960s, when the status quo of the charater really became set in concrete.

Obviously, when the readership turned over every three to five years, and the availablity of trade paperbacks & back issues was minimal, very few in the audience would notice it, because for them the then-current crop of stories were full of all-new ideas. but now, when you have readers who have been following the character for two decades and who have easy access to even older stories, well, at that point you realize just how much treading water the character has doen since Stan Lee left the series.

This is a horrible, hacky solution to cowardly writing. Joe's said time and again that the marriage makes it impossible to do love triangles without making Peter look like a cad. Maybe. But am I the only one who thinks there's the potential for some really bold, interesting stories in there somewhere? That is, if you insist that love triangles have to be involved every eight issues or so?

Plus, by ending the marriage now, they're throwing all kinds of interesting potential right out the window. Mary Jane is a minor celebrity in the Marvel U. And now, it's out of the bag that her husband, this whole time, has been Spider-Man right under everyone's noses. Think of all the crazy tension that's there to play with - someone the public adores married to public enemy #1! There's YEARS worth of stories there. The post-Civil War Parkers had tremendous potential for any writer with the balls to explore it.

But instead, they're going with Mephisto's divorce court. So they can go back to doing stories from thirty years ago. That they're already riffing on in Ultimate and Adventures. Marvel probably considers themselves 'bold' for this move, but it's anything but.

Furthermore, they already tried splitting Pete and MJ up. She was missing from the books for years, and it was terrible! In time, that dumbass decision was undone, just like this dumbass will be undone. It probably won't be Spider-Clone bad, but it's not gonna stick.

Hmmm ... I dunno ... What about the three-part "drug storyline" with the Green Goblin (who, ironically, is the enemy in the Death of Gwen storyarc)?

And what about "Spidey Cops Out"? Gwen tells off Aunt May, who promptly runs away. Pete spends several issues searching for her, during which he meets HAMMERHEAD —— and lands in the middle of Hammy's gangwar with DOC OCK! Man, I was a kid, and this was the first SPIDER-MAN comic I ever got, and it still holds up well today (no rose-colored glasses here).

Which is actually why I have a near complete collection of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN through issue #122 ... and then it stops. With great power came great responsibility ... and THIS was how Fate repaid him. As an adult, it just seems like that's the perfect issue to end the series. At this point, he'd say, "I've done my part," and hang up his web-shooters. Eventually, a romance with MJ would blossom. And they'd live happily ever after ...

I'm wondering if, in the course of debating what age Spidey works best at, we're not overlooking something rather obvious: Peter Parker was a kid (originally at least) more than forty years ago.

Of course human nature is what it is in any era...but it seems like what's at stake here is a particular time and place.
Can you (would you) write the same young Spider-Man today that you could back then - let alone the idealised version his grown-up fans remember? The same innocence, exuberance, melodrama?

I don't read USM, so I may be way off-base here...but my best guess would be no. At which point you have to kind of wonder why you'd need to try. The Everyman aspect has endured for many decades past the melodrama; I think it's also more universal. Going by that alone it can be argued it is at least more worth the salvaging.

I disagree with the notion that the everyman angle overshadowed the kid hero angle, though- so much of Peter's melodramatic nature (and, on his better days, his exuberance at being a superhero) came from the fact that he was in his teens. Ideally, Spidey's not a child OR an adult, he's an adolescent.

I've enjoyed some stories where Spidey is an adult, sure, and it's the era I grew up with, but I think he's most 'iconic' as an adolescent.

Undeniably, there is an aspect of "kid hero acting without an adult hero" to the earliest Spidey tales. However, it's so overshadowed by the "everyman" aspect that it almost renders the "kid" angle moot.

If they undo the marriage, there's no way in hell I'm going to read ASM again, because it's undoing twenty years of stories I grew up with. But I think that's kind of the point- removing continuity that distracts from the core concept, and making the flagship title accessible to new readers again.

A "cultural icon" must be maintained as a vehicle for only a narrow set of extremely familiar stories.

Arguably the one factor that makes Spider-Man unique is that, aside from the spider-powers and goofy villains, he has always been written to be as human as you or me. He's felt bad about keeping secrets from loved ones, worried about whether he'll have enough money to pay his rent and bills, mourned deceased friends, juggled a hectic schedule with his responsibilites as a married man, etc. Very often, the problems he encounters are a direct consequence of decisions he made and these problems can't be solved credibly through a convenient deus ex machina.

Spidey works because he is a reflection of us. Our love for the character has transformed him into an icon. However, if you WRITE Spidey as an icon, you strip of him everything that drew most fans to the character in the first place.

Spider-Man is certainly a "cultural icon", but unlike other cultural icons, his iconic status is better maintained by continuing to write him as a credible, ever-changing human CHARACTER.

Quite frankly, I'd much rather see Peter and Mary Jane move forward (if just to show readers, many of whom are old enough to know better, that life doesn't end when one says: "I do.") than take a giant, magical leap back to a story setting that had more than run its course twenty years back.

Now, maybe teenage boys might theoretically prefer an unmarried Spider-Man, but didn't the fickleness of teenage boys result in both the sheer awfulness of 90's comics and the industry crash? Do we really want to go back to that? Because I have to say, to the average teenage boy, it's probably not Spider-Man being married that keeps him from reading. It's that he'd rather be playing video games, and so has no interest in Spider-Man until you give him a Spider-Man game to play.

Glori O'Breen. Like many of Matt Murdock's ex-girlfriends, she's dead.

OR

Until my aunt's on her death bed.

Those young readers can read Ultimate Spider-Man or, if they're even younger, Spider-Girl.

So let's say they reverse the clock, and make Peter more like his Ultimate, Marvel Adventures, Loves Mary Jane self. Hell, we can even make him more like Spider-Man J. That could work, because it's been working all along. I'd prefer it wasn't because of frickin' Mephisto, but whatever. Just get the damn stories in so we can move on.

Of course, they could always go forward instead. There's already been a comic about Peter Parker, Spider-Dad for about a decade now. Look at where some other heroes are these days. Superman has a son. Batman has a son. Flash has two kids. Wolverine has a son and essentially a teenage daughter, only one of whom should never be used again. Black Canary had a kid for a bit there. Even *SPOILERS* Captain America has a kid on the way. *END SPOILERS*.

So why not let the Parkers have a kid? They can bring May into mainstream continuity - she never was confirmed dead, after all. On the other hand, why not have the Parkers adopt Normie Osborn? As the son of Peter's late best friend, it's quite likely they're in line to get custody in the event of Liz Allen's death/coma. His only living relative is Norman, whose a bit murderous to get custody. It would certainly make visitation interesting.

Oh, and having a kid? Very everyman.

I love you You posted just about everything that I was thinking while reading this thread. Saved me a bunch of typing!