SPIDEY'S MARRIAGE PROBLEMS

Initial Post here
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Nuff Said.
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Joe Quesada, Editor-In-Chief of Marvel Comics, on the whole Spiderman/Mary Jane Marriage thing and its problems:

Sometime around 1986-87 the Spider-Man daily newspaper strip was losing some steam. Stan Lee, who was writing the script was asked to do something to spike it and get people interested. Stan thought that the best thing to do was to marry Peter and MJ in the strip. He supposedly called Jim Shooter (Then Editor-In-Chief) leaving Jim a message saying that Spidey was going to get married in the papers within the next few months. Shooter not wanting to see this happen in the strip before it happened in the comics tore up Heaven and Earth in order to get Peter and MJ together and married as soon as possible. Remember, at this point in time in Spidey continuity Peter and MJ weren’t even dating, as a matter of fact she wasn’t even living in New York. So, within a matter of issues, she was back in his life, engaged instantly, and married just as quickly.

For years after they were married they were never really portrayed as truly happy, I don’t understand in a way why that was done. I believe it was an attempt by the creators back then to bring back a much-needed tension to the relationship side of Peter’s world that was now missing because he was no longer single. It was an attempt to bring back the soap opera.

Some characters should not be married while I believe it’s okay for some. Batman should not be married, no if, ands, or butts, Spider-Man should not have been married. As a property that is attractive to teens, having him married matures him too much and puts us in a bad position. There’s nothing wrong with portraying marriage, but Peter is supposed to be perceived as one of our youngest characters, marrying him makes him feel older.

By the way, if he and MJ had kids that would have just compounded the problem, and Marvel dodged that bullet some time ago. But all that said, divorcing, or annulling the marriage compounds would only be worse, that would only serve to make both Peter and MJ seem even older. So while marriage for a character is not a “bad”, it can be a bad thing from a story and property management sense if the character was best suited for being single.

Divorce would be simply horrible, a 1000% worse.

What am I going to do about it? What can I do about it? Folks here at Marvel have been wrestling with this long before I took over. How do you fix it, how do you fix it without saying that years of Spider-Man books didn’t count? That’s been the lingering question.