Let's Talk About The Psychology Of One More Day

Hi, I'm David Harth, and if you're still here after me telling you to hold Marvel and Disney to higher standards, then thanks for sticking around. Part of me wants to write about MCU stans hating on Villeneuve again for making perfectly valid criticisms about MCU, but you know what? I can take care of it all right now- he's right, but it doesn't matter. If you like the MCU, then it doesn't matter if the movies are a pastiche of things from different movies written in a formulaic manner.

Anyway, let's talk about the psychology of One More Day.

I'm sure if you're a comic fan of any stripe, you know about that story. Written by J. Michael Straczynski and Marvel Editorial with art by Joe Quesada, then Marvel Editor in Chief, it took place in the aftermath of Civil War. Spider-Man's identity was public and Aunt May had been shot. She was holding on for dear life, and Spider-Man was desperate for help with that and getting his identity under wraps. The four-issue story saw him asking all kinds of people for help until finally turning to Mephisto, who said he could undo it all if Peter traded his marriage to MJ for it. Peter and MJ agreed, and then BOOM! Peter's marriage never happened, Aunt May was fine, and no one remembered Peter Parker and Spider-Man were the same person, except the people who already knew. I think. I'll be honest, I noped out pretty quick.

I'm a big believer in character development. Comic characters don't age in real-time, but they do need to grow in some ways. Growing up in the '90s, I always had a married Peter Parker, and that was who he was to me. I learned about sadsack teenage Peter Parker, but he was in the past. He had grown past that and was married. That was who he was, and I had no problem with that. I didn't need him to be like me.

Joe Quesada felt differently. I think it all began with Ultimate Spider-Man.

That book was a powerhouse, and I think Joe saw it as vindication of his opinion that Spider-Man had to be single. This ignores the fact that Stracynzski's Amazing Spider-Man was doing a great job of getting fans back after the sales doldrums of the post-Clone-Saga era. To Quesada, the only reason it was so popular was that Spider-Man was young and single, no other reason. That had to be it. Nothing to do with the fact it was easily got into Spider-Man stories without years of continuity. Nah. Couldn't be that.

So, it took a while, but Quesada finally was able to get his way and find a way to get rid of Mary Jane and the marriage. Straczynski was onboard but not how Quesada wanted, which is why I said that Marvel Editorial was a co-writer on the story. That's a nice way of saying Quesada. As far as I know, the whole Mephisto plot was his idea, and when I say that it was terrible, I'm not being controversial. For some reason, Quesada didn't want Peter to divorce, and Doctor Strange couldn't heal a gunshot wound. Oh, and Wolverine couldn't talk Rachel Grey or Emma Frost or Psylocke inot using Cerebro to mindwipe Peter's identity from the world either. Yep, the only way to get it done was Mephisto.

Let's not even bring up One Moment In Time.

Anyway, now that's out of the way, let's get into the psychology of the whole thing. See, for some reason, Quesada decided that the best thing to do was to have a grown man choose his elderly aunt over his wife AND then have said wife totally go along with it. It's just kind of asinine. I remember when it was coming out, I legitimately thought that this was going to be about Peter coming to grips with the loss of Aunt May. I really thought that was what was going to happen. God, was I wrong.

So, this book took Peter Parker and infantilized him to a ridiculous degree. This is a man who had battled just some of the most dangerous villains ever. He had survived everything thrown at him, and yet he just couldn't give up his aunt. And look, speaking as someone whose parents died before I was forty, I understand what loss can do to a person. I get the desire to do anything to keep them alive, but this book took it way too far. Given the choice of my wife and family I have right now or my parents, I'm letting my parents rest. There's no way I'm making that choice and Peter even considering it was completely out of character for him.

See, Peter's whole thing is selflessness. A selfless person would never make such a selfish decision. One can look at his decision as selfless because it was sacrificing his happiness for his aunt's life. Look a little closer, and you see what he's really doing is saying that May's life is more important than Mary Jane's happiness. It's a selfish act because May isn't exactly a spring chicken. He's not saving her for years and years of extra life. Realistically, May probably only had a decade of life left. This isn't some altruistic moment of saving someone who had their whole life in front of them. This is keeping an old woman alive so that Peter can have her around for his own peace of mind.

Now, sure, you can always bring up that everyone forgetting Peter's identity is a big deal, but then again, does that really matter all that much? Most of the Avengers have public identities, and at this point in time, Peter and MJ were in hiding anyway. Beyond that, the fact that there's no one that could make the world forget, even though characters like Doctor Strange or the X-Men's many telepaths could do it. The Illuminati had the Mind Gem. Was it really impossible for everyone to make the world forget about Peter Parker?

Every single part of it was out of character for Peter, and it all makes him look terrible. He's choosing his own happiness over Mary Jane's, putting Aunt May through more suffering because old age is no picnic, and actively dodging taking RESPONSIBILITY for his own actions of revealing his identity. Remember responsibility, Joe? It's an important part of the character. Probably the most important.

And all of that doesn't really get into Mary Jane going along with it. Honestly, Mary Jane is way more selfless than Peter in the whole thing because she's the one who makes the final decision. That doesn't mean it's right, though. The fact that she's enabling Peter's selfishness is pretty terrible and also completely out of character for her. Maybe MJ changed at some point, but I don't remember her just indulging Peter's nonsense without a fight. MJ just rolling over and letting Peter infantilize himself is pretty disgusting in a lot of ways, but, really, we can't really expect anything else from Quesada's little hit piece.

And that's really the biggest problem with the story. One can go back and read interviews with Quesada and Stracynzski and see the different approaches they wanted. Straczynski wanted to do a massive retcon, bringing Harry Osborn and Gwen Stacy back, changing Spider-Man history drastically. An argument can be made that this wasn't the best way to go about things, but it's interesting, at least. Quesada, on the other hand, didn't want that big of a retcon. This is actually a valid argument because retcons like that are more of a DC thing than a Marvel thing, so bully for you, Joe. You were only mostly wrong. In Quesada and the other writers and editors' minds, everything still happened the way it did originally, but MJ and Peter just weren't married. Okay, fine.

The thing is that Quesada's way was very much out of character for Peter and MJ and was basically an anti-Spider-Man story. To Joey Q, Peter and MJ divorcing was a bad thing because it was them giving up on their love and all that. To him, them sacrificing their marriage to save a life was something noble, but it was the exact opposite of that for the reasons I outlined above. The entire story stemmed from Quesada not liking married Spider-Man and wanting to revert things to when he was young and reading Spider-Man because that's what he thought worked the best.

Quesada did that thing that all older people do, something my forty-one-year-old self is guilty of on occasion, and thinking that what he liked when he was young is the best stuff and that everyone else would like it. Now, yes, Ultimate Spider-Man sold well, but as big a part of that is the fact it didn't have nearly as much continuity baggage to it. Spider-Man in the mid to late '90s didn't bleed readers because Peter and MJ were married. It did so because the stories weren't great. Straczynski did an amazing job of telling quality stories with the character, but Joe could keep pointing to USM and saying that was what readers wanted.

In fact, one could looking at Quesada's entire tenure as Marvel EIC as him trying to recast Marvel in the image of the comics he read when he was young- making the Avengers the center of everything, pushing the X-Men into their little corner and making them as unimportant as possible, and transforming Spider-Man into the character he remembered Spider-Man to be. Quesada was all about infantilization with Spider-Man. In fact, one could even say that Spider-Man in OMD was Quesada's self-insert character because Joe was doing exactly what Peter and MJ was- making a choice for his own happiness.

Now, the resulting Spider-Man stories were a hit, but would they have been a hit with MJ as Peter's wife? None of the respective love interests they saddled Peter with worked. In fact, nothing about those stories really hinged on Peter not being married. Fans might love those stories, but beyond Dan Slott and Joe Quesada, I don't know anyone who thinks the loss of the marriage was a good idea or a good thing.

Marvel has been dangling getting Peter and MJ back together for years. It probably won't happen until Quesada goes completely away but their latest Spider-Man retcon, getting rid of "Sins Past" (which I kind of liked and never really understood the uproar against it; it wasn't great, but it actually made sense), got me thinking about OMD. The story isn't just bad because it did away with something we all love- the marriage of Peter and MJ- it's bad because of what it says about the characters. It's terrible because it's entirely out of character for both of those characters. It's bad because one man enforced his will on readers and told us the version of Spider-Man we liked wasn't as good as the one he liked.

I think that's part of what makes it such an interesting story. It is not a good story at all, even if it does have some cool moments, like when Spider-Man and Iron Man fight in the first part of it. Lately, I've been revisiting a lot of stories I didn't like before and seeing if they are as bad as I thought they were, and some of them haven't been. I don't think that would be the case with OMD, but I find the underlying issues of the story and what it says about the people involved intriguing. If you read the Wikipedia entry on the story, you'll say that multiple people worked on cracking the story- Bendis, Brubaker, Slott, and more. It makes one wonder just how much of it was Joe forcing his will and how much was it a bunch of writers who agreed with him.

Anyway, I think I've said all I'm going to say about it. I planned on writing about how Marvel has kind of messed up Thanos's character arc since Starlin left years ago, but this idea hit me when I was writing for my other job, and I wanted to talk about this. Next time will probably be that Thanos thing, or maybe it will be something else. I suddenly have a hankering for writing about fandom and how people let it define them in ways they shouldn't after writing that first paragraph about Villeneuve and the MCU.

So, that's all for now. Follow me on Twitter or something. See ya next time.