Better Ways To End One More Day

January 5, 2008

Amazing Spider-man #545

Amazing Spider-man #545

Spoiler Warning if you haven't read Amazing Spider-man #545, the conclusion to the "One More Day" storyline. But there has to be a moratorium on this sort of thing.

The Spider-man storyline has been rebooted. The marriage, an institution in the book since 1987, is no more. Harry Osborn, dead since 1993, is now among the living. Spider-man's web shooters, replaced with organic web-shooters since 2005, have returned. How did this all happen? Magic.

I understand what they were trying to accomplish. I actually quite like the idea of a single Peter Parker. Harry Osborn is a great foil. Mechanical web-shooters are... also good? But the bizarre act-of-god (or devil as the case may be) resolution was garbage. Especially after a suspenseful four issue lead-up. But of the possible outs, they had few options:

  • They didn't want to kill Mary Jane. Widowers are, traditionally, old - and Peter Parker needs to be young and exciting.
  • They didn't want a divorce since Catholics would never support a fictional divorcee and everyone who reads Spider-man is a Catholic.

I really don't understand the divorce thing. Divorces happen quite frequently and it's just the sort of shitty luck Peter would have. "Spider-man gets divorced" would make a much more likely newspaper headline than "Spider-man marriage never happened, undone by faux devil". Come to think of it, I haven't seen a single mainstream article about this major event! The New York Post covered the fan reaction not even the event itself.

So, rather than upend twenty years of continuity, how could Marvel have constructed the story (no marriage and no exposed secret identity) in a less... retarded way.

1. Skrulls!

  • Mary Jane was a Skrull. Right before the wedding, she was replaced by an alien doppleganger.
  • With rampant Skrull paranoia, everyone's identity is suspect - including an unmasked Spider-man. A staged media event could explain that photographer Peter Parker was set-up to prevent him from exposing their nefarious plot. The Skrulls discredited him by revealing their Spider-man imposter's identity to be Parker's. This is all baloney - but the public would believe it.

2. Witness Relocation

  • Since Peter's enemies know his secret identity, Mary Jane is forced to enter the witness relocation program. Their marriage is dissolved. On Spider-man's 75th Anniversary, the marriage and divorce will be a minor footnote, like Captain America's tour as Nomad or Batman's broken back.

3. Clones

  • Spider-man unearths dozens of Peter Parker clones, unseen remnants of the Clone Saga (which was infinitely better than this wreck). One of them is revealed to be Spider-man - just not our Peter Parker.

4. Publicity Stunt

  • Spider-man's unmasking is revealed to be a publicity stunt, a fraud perpetrated by J. Jonah Jamison and his staff, to boost the Daily Bugles circulation.

These all require a suspension of disbelief but they're plausible in the Marvel Universe. And they're surely better than magic. How would you end the story?

Comments

  • Dark Midnight 11 months ago

    They should have gone with Straczynski's original ending: A change in the timeline, back on the day of the wedding.

  • unicron 10 months ago

    Reading these alternate endings (and trying to come up with a few of my own) I'm suddenly struck by what a corner they wrote themselves into. I'll give you the Mary Jane Skrull and/or clone idea - just not sure what the motivation for that alien replacement would be. The unmasking is probably the tougher of the two tasks. But since they're doing their big Skrull invasion plotline, I would make sense if both could be resolved with the same method.

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