Spider-Marriage Blues: Defending Your Bad Decision Just Makes It Worse

{image source: “Spidey Kicks Butt”}

At some point Tom Brevoort should just shut up.

Right now, as Bounding Into Comics has been documenting, Brevoort, current Executive Editor at Marvel, seems to be working to execute his own sales when it comes the main Spider-Man comics versus Ultimate Spider-Man mark 2 (probably volume 85 the way Marvel renumbers everything whenever a new creator takes over) and the continuing war by the Spider-Writers on the Spider-Marriage. As fans see the marriage returned to that version of Peter Parker, they’re starting to use that as proof they should get back together in 616.

That will never happen with the current writers.

Oh, they’ll tease you with it now and then in the hopes of suckering you in, but as Brevoort has been saying on his Substack, they have no intention of restoring the marriage. We know that. He will gladly use dumb excuses why, but he won’t do it. The Spider-Writers have been trying to undo that since the 1990s and they’re thrilled Joe Quesada found a way to retroactively remove it from continuity no matter how stupid and how damaging it was to Peter’s reputation, and they love that Mary Jane’s character could also be ruined. So now Brevoort is pulling a Zac “I don’t know my job is making fantasy worlds” Snyder and continuing to defend their decision in a way that actually makes their changes worse received instead of better.

Let’s look at the arguments listed just in the latest collection of nonsense Bounding Into Comics pulled from his Substack and BlueSky postings.

Pressed by one reader as to whether or not there existed “a threshold that a book like Ultimate Spider-Man (or Renew Your Vows, or Spider-Girl, or any of the other ‘Peter and MJ are a married couple’ projects through the decades) could reach that would cause editorial to say ‘Okay, Amazing is losing to this other book, clearly the thing the audience is responding to is married Spider-Man, we should bring that back into main continuity’?”, Brevoort unfortunately confirmed that not only were there no relevant metrics for reuniting the fan-favorite couple, but also that the publisher had absolutely zero interest in ever giving their relationship another chance.

“If I was a smart man, I would let this deadly fastball go by untouched. Make new mistakes, right?” he began. “You never say never, Brandon, but I don’t believe that there is any such threshold because that’s not what publishing Ultimate Spider-Man or Renew Your Vows and the like is all about. Those aren’t test cases, they are alternatives for those who desire those alternatives.”

The Parkers in happier days…of the newspaper strip.

Clearly he isn’t a smart man or he’d just say “we don’t want to write a married Peter Parker because we want to write a total loser who fails at love and we think that’s more relatable to you losers who couldn’t get a girl that doesn’t charge by the hour”. Just be honest about what you’re doing and you’re low opinion of your own fans. You already had an alt timeline Peter do that in the One More Day storyline. In one of the many timelines Mephisto showed to Peter, the hero saw himself as a rich, lonely, loser who complains about how terrible it was for him to focus on geek stuff essentially. We already know what current Marvel creators think of us comic fans. Just admit it.

“But I believe that we’ve concluded decisively that the best platonic ideal of Spider-Man is one that is unattached, and that conclusion isn’t going to be changed by a particular alternate interpretation momentarily performing well,” he then revealed. “And Amazing Spider-Man has been consistently our best-selling regular title for a decade and a half, so another book selling better than it isn’t cause for concern, it’s cause for celebration. But ASM sales continue to click along just as they’ve consistently done, so pointing to Ultimate and concluding that the one and only factor contributing to its success is coincidentally the one factor that those fans would like changed about ASM is working backwards from a desired conclusion.”

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“First off, the difference in sales between Ultimate Spider-Man and Amazing Spider-Man is relatively slim,” he argued, his assertion unfortunately true. “It’s not like Ultimate is doing twice or three times the business or anything. And secondly, I don’t think that the success of Ultimate at the moment is just down to Pete and MJ being married within it. I think it has a lot more to do with the quality of the work that Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto are producing.”

Sophia “Chat” Sandoval. The only not-MJ love interest I got invested in because in her reality there was no MJ. There was a Gwen, because of course there was.

I admittedly don’t have the sales figures, but there’s a reason Marvel has been throwing these bones. Renew Your Vows had an alternate timeline where Peter and Mary Jane stayed married and had a daughter named Annie. Reviews were positive until it started to seem like Peter was being pushed aside in favor of the female characters, a complaint that showed up a few times in the main comics, like when Peter was wearing Mockingbird’s “ask me about my feminist agenda” shirt while sleeping on her couch, another example of Peter being written like a total loser. Remember, Otto Octavius in his body was called the “Superior” Spider-Man. It’s no surprise many people are convinced they want to ditch Peter Parker for Miles Morales. Some days it doesn’t look like they want Peter at all.

Then Brevoort pulls an “example” out of his spinnerettes.

A few days later, Brevoort would throw further fuel onto the spider-fire when he began personally – and combatively – engaging with a number of readers who both disagreed both with his anti-Spider-marriage stance and his dismissive attitude.

“Let me ask you this, Fam,” he addressed one critic. “Is Batman cratering? Absolute Batman is consistently outselling it, right? Is Batman in the toilet? Do they need to bring Martha Wayne back to life in the main series? Seems crazy right.”

Attempting to explain his disingenuous comparison, Brevoort asserted, “Martha Wayne is an element of AbBats that’s different from the regular book. So it’s analgous to Peter and MJ in USM. I don’t think it’s responsible for those sales either, but this is the sort of argument you guys are marking. Correlation isn’t causality.”

As everyone else has been pointing out, which is why I haven’t bothered going over this stupidity, that isn’t the same thing. Martha Wayne dying is part of Batman’s backstory along with Thomas Wayne. Nobody is commenting on Uncle Ben being in the new Ultimate Universe, since this is a reality where Peter got his powers as an adult so Iron Man can push back against The Maker, an evil version of Reed Richards. Mary Jane had a long character arc of being Mrs. Peter Parker and fans liked it even if the Spider-Writers didn’t. Whether they’re pro-Gwen Stacy (and given “Sins Past” clearly she’s hated too, but there’s a reason they keep bringing in clones, alternate reality takes, and so many adaptations keep dragging her in whenever possible) or just don’t think Peter should ever be happy, misunderstanding how Peter juggles his responsibilities between his two identities, they clearly hated the marriage. Nevermind that the fans wanted to see it. Nevermind that part of Mary Jane’s character arc was making peace with her daddy issues so she could marry Peter. Nevermind how events brought them together when she was originally there as tension for the Peter/Gwen romance. The writers didn’t want to write it, and we know what happens when they don’t want to write something or someone.

“Jack, I’m in business, part of my job is to sell Marvel comics. You seriously think that if there was an easy way to make sales skyrocket, I wouldn’t do it?”

Look, kids, MJ being USEFUL!

Yes. That’s why Marvel Comics is failing and Marvel Studios has been losing fans. You have told them off, told them you know better, written characters horribly, replaced or tried to replace legacy characters, and basically made a mess of everything. Why do you think your industry is failing, comic stores are closing, and Disney only cares about potential IP that they put in the hands of people who only want to use the branding to push their “better ideas”? It’s why your writers tease a reconciliation or even a proper undoing of the “devil deal” with Mephisto. Even the Ultimate 2.0 version isn’t a proper restoration like Renew Your Vows was at the start. You clearly let writers keep doing this. You keep undoing it with the next writer. You want to get rid of Mary Jane altogether, but like with Roger Stern and Black Cat you keep trying to ruin her character, like making her the one who pushed for the deal to save Aunt May (a character with only three plot lines), or setting her up with Paul, currently the most hated character in the Marvel Universe.

If you wanted to bring fans back you’d have a story that undoes the devil deal, restores the Spider-Marriage to 616 history instead of just a new marriage, and find writers who want to tell their story, showing how MJ benefits Peter in both identities, like writers did before the 1990s tried to kill her off or send her off with a clone. We’re not going to get invested in any of Peter’s romances any more than we would (insert 80s TV action hero here) because we know they’ll be gone soon, we know nothing is going to happen, and we’re like that child whose mommy has a different “uncle” every few months.

“Or that I’m lying about information that I have access to and you certainly do not?” he concluded. “At this point, why are we even talking?”

Why are you talking? You aren’t admitting the real reason you won’t do it, because YOU hate the Spider-Marriage, not the fans. Every time Zac Snyder tries to defend his DC he just makes me hate it more because he clearly doesn’t know what made DC popular. The same happened with Dan DiDio. Jim Lee is smart enough to not bring it up and to ignore complaints. Maybe take a lesson from him instead of Snyder and stop making yourself look worse.