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I refrained from commenting on last week's Civil War #2 and the big news event about Spider-Man unmasking. If you read Amazing Spider-Man 532, you would have seen it coming two weeks in advance: an entire issue laying out Peter Parker's justification to unmask. No matter how great it is that Aunt May and Mary Jane encourage him to reveal his identity, it's still pretty dumb. Peter can't rationally say, well, they are living in Avengers Tower now, they'll be safe. They've already been attacked living there (by Morlun during The Other) and I can't imagine they'll have Sentinels for bodyguards out on the street. And didn't Peter take notes on what happened to his buddy Matt Murdock? Whatever, this event fulfilled Joe Quesada's goal to get people talking about Marvel Comics. Civil War is a megahit on the stands, selling in excess of 300,000 copies. Joe Q's Fridays at Newsarama have stoked the fire with talk about how boring Peter's marriage is to Mary Jane, which leads us to believe she could die. I seriously doubt it, but it's good for Quesada to make us think so.
Something's bothered me about this decision--something even worse than making Tony Stark into a Machiavellian creep. I couldn't put it into words myself, but Jeff Lester wrote it down beautifully over on the Savage Critic:
If you ask me, what makes Spider-Man work in the first place is how Stan and team approached the whole Pete/Spidey duality. Unlike the relatively binary set-up of secret identities for superheroes (usually hero is lauded, secret identity is dumped on--the Superman/Clark Kent blueprint) which makes them such satisfyingly simple ego-fantasies, Stan made that duality more complex: the happier Peter Parker would be in his personal life, the more fucked up things would get for Spidey, and vice-versa.
Seriously. Check out the first hundred or so issues of Amazing Spider-Man. What makes the title work isn't that Peter is a miserable bastard, or that Spidey is a shat-upon superhero, it's that the two rarely happened at the same time. As Pete gets a girlfriend and a life, Spider-Man becomes a hounded superhero (and when Pete was more miserable in high school, Spider-Man actually had a stronger public following). Part of that--the miserable super-hero--is what we think of as "Spider-Man," but it's really that distance that's so archetypal, because it taps into the universal frustation about how the distance between one's fantasy life and one's real life always stays constant.
Over on Newsarama, I read many interesting fan responses:
That's gonna be hard to fix when they undo it in five years.
Mary Jane dies. Marriage ended by death. Mary Jane comes back from the dead. Ta-da, the single status quo is restored by her death while we also get MJ back---without ever using divorce as a plot device.
They can't get a divorce. Mary Jane can't die. So what do you do to put the genie back in the bottle? You kill Peter Parker!
Scarlet witch will turn everything back to normal next summer in HoM2...
Who knows which of these things will be true? For comic-book fans, we're so jaded that we can anticipate lots of different outcomes. Non comic book fans may be drawn in temporarily, just like they were with the Death of Superman. Marvel still has Ultimate Spider-Man where Peter will stay a geeky out of luck kid forever. And we still have those first 100 issues of Spider-Man, which are looking more and more like sheer genius. Nuff said.
I think the test of whether or not a person can write comics well is not what they do if they completely ignore all the traditions of the character and create their own thing, its whether or nor they can still write something interesting that when they adhere to the traditions. Anybody can take a wrecking ball to a popular character( Miller's All Star Batman, Stracynski's Spdey stunt)and call it "creativity." Let's see them try to write within the confines of what's been established like the rest of the writers out there and then see how creative they are.