The 1990s Spider-Man from Fox Kids and Saban Entertainment, often referred to as Spider-Man: The Animated Series despite two of the previous three shows with Spider-Man alone in the title ALSO being animated, is my favorite adaptation of Peter Parker and company. It’s too bad “neogenics” didn’t become retconned into the comic origin, though the effect the symbiote had on Peter was, most reinterpretations of the characters were spot-on (why is every so afraid to do Electro properly and what was with Doctor Octopus’ outfit?), and the only thing keeping Christopher Daniel Barnes from being my favorite Peter is Spider-Man Unlimited breaking out Rino Romano. Remember, this isn’t the show I grew up on. I’m an 80s kid. I had reruns of the first cartoon (we never got the 80s cartoon in my area) and Spider-Man & His Amazing Friends on NBC, plus USA Network would do a marathon of the US live-action series (the one without the robot) every Thanksgiving. I miss “Spidermania”.

The show unfortunately ended on a cliffhanger thanks to Sony being a pain in the butt when they got the media license that I assumed was just the movies, but I hear this is what got Spider-Man replaced with Spider-Man Unlimited, which was the better animated show with the best Peter but went in some odd directions to avoid Sony’s issues, a stunt Sony pulled again with getting Peter into the proper MCU. In the show, Peter marries Mary Jane Watson, but it turns out to be a clone created in the manner of Hydro-Man as part of his obsession with MJ. This also would have set up the cartoon’s own version of the Clone Saga (bullet dodged, I guess), but before then the real MJ had fallen through a portal into another dimension. Peter’s quest to find her was interrupted by Madame Web insisting he work with Spider-Men of other realities, with her promise to help find MJ once the multiverse was saved. As Peter leaves on his quest, the show ended.

Fans have always wanted to know how Peter rescues Mary Jane, though I guess today would be the question of if he did. My head cannon has him crossing over to the DCAU for an animated version of a Superman/Spider-Man crossover because I really want an animated Superman/Spider-Man crossover with Tim Daly and Christopher Barnes resuming their roles. I don’t care if they’re alternate comic companies by alternate animation studios both owned by alternate media super conglomerates, if the comics can do crossovers again, I can dream! Well, I’m not getting that, but Spider-Man ’94, a four issue miniseries inspired by the X-Men’s animated return and the cameo with the show’s cast in the finale, does promise to answer whatever happened to Mary Jane Watson.

Except the show’s head writer, John Semper Jr., is not returning.

I certainly have nothing against J.M. DeMatteis. Dude wrote my favorite of the Spider-Man and Batman crossovers and some really good Spider-Man stories. Semper even says DeMatteis did some work for him but I couldn’t find evidence of him writing an episode (or rather Google AI didn’t and looking at the Marvel Database didn’t turn any up). He didn’t even work on the tie-in comic to the show. I see this going…iffy.

Wish I had a better clip of this but I don’t want to spend forever trying to find it. Long story short, Green Goblin has a time dilation device that allows him to create portals between realities. During one battle, MJ falls into a portal and vanishes. Not knowing this, Peter is sure MJ died, the cartoon doing it’s own take on Gwen Stacy’s death. Fox Kids wouldn’t let them kill anyone, and X-Men tried its hardest with Morph. The next story arc was Peter’s grief, leading to a darker, more vengeful Spider-Man, until Spidey fangirl Felicia Hardy, gaining superpowers as the Black Cat, was able to help Peter recover from what happened. Then Mary Jane returns. Peter and MJ marry and she proves to be a good thing for Peter, like when the comics are written properly. That doesn’t last.

Yeah, turns out MJ didn’t return from her trip after all. In this version Hydro-Man has been stalking MJ, a former boyfriend who couldn’t take no for an answer. So he got in touch with this reality’s version of Miles Warren, who used Hydro-Man and stolen DNA of Mary Jane to create a clone, who turned out to have water powers and a very short lifespan. This is when Madame Web shows up and says she can help Peter find the real Mary Jane, but first he needs to team with other Spider-Men across the multiverse because another one fuzed with Carnage and now wants to destroy the multiverse.

Yeah, I had to include that clip. This leads to a rarity among Peters. After saving the day he gets to meet Stan Lee, everything he’s gone through leading Peter to finally be happy with his life and ready to rescue the real Mary Jane Watson. That’s sadly where the show ended. Now with the success of not only the 90s X-Men revival on Disney Plus, and similar continuations of the good movies and shows being done by DC and Marvel, comes this miniseries. It would be fine if Semper had been called in to give notes on his original plans for MJ and a reunion with Peter, but he wasn’t consulted. He didn’t even know it would happen.

Here’s an archive if the tweet goes down. Here’s the relevant parts, as transcribed by Bounding Into Comics:

I got a text message this morning from my good friend, Matt Dunford, telling me that Marvel is ‘continuing’ my Spider-Man animated series in comic book form in a four-issue limited series called Spider-Man ’94. Since I will no doubt be asked about it by fans of the series: NO, I am NOT involved with this comic book and no one at Marvel approached me to be involved in any way. Matt’s text message was the first I heard of it, the internet tells me that J.M. DeMatteis is the writer of the comic book, and I have nothing but the greatest respect for him. His amazing body of work over the years in both animation and comic books speaks for itself, and I’m positive this new comic is in great hands. I hired him years ago to participate in writing one episode of my series (which ran for 65 episodes) and I thoroughly enjoyed working with him. Where he now chooses to take the series story-wise is entirely his decision. But for the record, they are NOT my creative choices, nor do they represent any oversight by me.

I’m not surprised. It’s modern Disney. Still, Semper made that show work and it was Sony shenanigans that led to its ending. I have nothing against DeMatteis’ writing anything Spider-Man due to past evidence of knowing the character in comic form, but you’d think at least he would have contacted Semper for any notes or memories he might have on how he wanted to end it. This was Semper’s vision of Spider-Man that fans want more of, though we were hoping for a cartoon. I say “we”, but I’ve heard mixed info on the X-Men cartoon and I wasn’t into the original, plus with Marvel Animation’s…

Knock-Off Spider-Man approves

Somehow this is the better adaptation.

…recent takes on the wall-crawler, I have little hope they know what they’re doing and would probably ruin it even with Semper back in charge. Executive meddling chases the X-Men head writers off, and I know it would happen here, too. In other words we aren’t getting the “true” answer to where MJ went and if Peter was going to get her back. For all we know she actually did show up in the DCAU, but whatever we get won’t be Semper’s version unless DeMatteis found it online somewhere. Maybe Marvel/Disney was worried about paying him a consultant fee or something and they only spend money on stupid things like flops. Also, Semper makes this note:

“Yes, it would have been nice (some might even say, respectful) if Marvel had reached out to me at some point as a courtesy. But I have long ago abandoned all expectation that Marvel would acknowledge any of my contributions to the Marvel universe – like, for instance, my creation of what is now known as the ‘Spider-Verse’ [as debuted in 1998 during the first half of the series’ two-part finale, Spider Wars Chapter 1: I Really, Really Hate Clones].”

A dig at Marvel and possibly Sony? Maybe, but he’s right. People assume the Spiderverse started with the Sony animated movies with Miles Morales, or maybe they remember the whole “Web Warriors” stuff with Morlan and crossing over the other Spider-Man cartoon (the one where Peter is actually contemporaries in a genius school with Otto Octavius and Miles Morales–or was it the Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon that had Spider-Man training with Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and the Wundagore version of White Tiger as teen SHIELD agents?), but the first crossover was the “Spider-Wars” storyline which was just different paths Peter’s life could have taken shown by various variant costumes over the years? One version was actually an actor, who led Peter to meeting Stan.

(Madame Web’s design was based on Stan’s wife. Bonus fact: Peter’s looks a lot like Nicholas Hammond, the first live-action Spider-Man not part of a promo event, though I don’t know if that’s intentional.)

Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not saying it’s going to be a bad story or a bad continuation. I’ve only read a few DeMatteis stories but if you see my reviews you know I enjoyed all of them. I trust him to write Spider-Man. The problem is that this is a specific version of Spider-Man he has been exposed to professionally but never really wrote for, trying to come up with his own answer for what happened to Mary Jane and how other Spider-Foes would have been translated to the Fox Kids series, as more of Spidey’s rogues gallery will be translated into that style. It would have been better to get the head writer’s thoughts on how to approach both, since he best knows what the show would have done…hampered by years of professional evolution and age so even then we’ll probably never have the ending that would have been planned. Maybe we’d be better off without this at all and imagine our own reunions, and thinking that in this reality a happier Peter Parker and Mary Jane could live in married bliss and still protect the city.

JUST DON’T GIVE US FOX KIDS PAUL!

Don’t let us down, J.M.!