Monthly archives: December, 2007

Thursday night, Doom DeLuise gave me a call to ask if I had read my comics for the week yet. He said there was one issue in particular that I’d find quite interesting. Unfortunately, he thought I’d find that issue interesting because it would annoy the living hell out of me and hopefully get me blogging again. Well, it got me blogging again, but it didn’t elicit the reaction Doom DeLuise probably expected it would.

Sensational Spider-Man #41 is part three of “One More Day,” the final story arc of J. Michael Stracynski’s landmark run on the character. The story has been about Peter Parker’s quest to save his Aunt May’s life, which is hanging in the balance because she took an assassin’s bullet meant for Spider-Man. When all natural means of recovery are exhausted, Mephisto shows up and offers Peter and Mary Jane a deal: he’ll save May’s life in exchange for their marriage.

Okay, first of all, that’s a really bad deal. If Mephisto saves Aunt May this time, she’s got maybe five years left before she kicks the bucket of natural causes. Quite frankly, it’s amazing that she’s made it this far. That woman’s been older than dirt since Amazing Fantasy #15. So in exchange for maybe five more years of life for May, Peter and MJ give up a lifetime of happiness with each other? During the issue, Peter was visited by two alternate versions of himself, and both were unfulfilled because they never found their one true love. Did Pete learn nothing from this? Even if May is alive, he’ll be miserable without MJ. Plus, no one in the history of the world has ever made a deal with the devil and decided in retrospect it was a good idea. Seriously, Pete and MJ would have to be the biggest idiots in the world to take this deal.

So when it’s revealed in the final chapter that Peter and MJ are indeed the biggest idiots in the world, you’d expect me to be uset, right? After all, I’ve railed on Joe Quesada for his obsession with ending the marriage more than once here on doomkopf.com. I even created the Joe Quesada Award to highlight my hatred of Joe’s hatred of the marriage. But as it turns out, I think this little bargain is about the best thing that could have happened to the marriage.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

Twenty years ago, Alan Moore was working for DC, and had recently written a little comic called, “Watchmen.” In the wake of that, he wrote a proposal for a 12-issue series called, “Twilight of the Superheroes.” His argument for it was that the DC superheroes could never really become fully realized “legends” unless they had an ending written for them, since their serieseses are ongoing. Frank Miller had recently written an ending, of sorts, for the Batman, in “Dark Knight Returns,” so Moore’s pitch obviously had support from lots of different angles. Unfortunately, contract disputes got in the way, Moore quit, and “Twilight” never saw the light of day, until years later, when “Kingdom Come” came out and did something very similar to Moore’s original pitch, though not similar enough to be considered even remotely plagiarized. Just the general idea, I suppose. (more…)