Spider-Man: One More Day - what other choices were there?

Cafe Society
1

Well, it’s official: As of April 30, 2014, Peter Parker is back in the saddle as the iconic red-and-blue webslinger. I’ve lived with the comics industry long enough that nothing it does surprises me anymore, but I can’t help but be a bit disappointed that Otto Octavius’ superior incarnation couldn’t have lasted a few years longer. I was intrigued by the idea of a savvier, better prepared, better equipped Spider-Man who was tired of being a loser, and I can honestly say that Superior never disappointed.

Anyway, it’s been a long, bumpy path to reach this part, so I figured now’s as good a time to weigh in on by far the most contentious moment in this superhero’s recent history, the much, much, MUCH maligned One More Day.

Okay, cards on the table (thanks again, Moviebob!): It was okay. I liked reading it. It was a moving story, another chapter in the eternal Greek tragedy that is Spider-Man’s life, it was a legitimately big shakeup, and the villain’s motives were very plausible and well-handled. Yeah, Peter Parker exercises really lousy judgment and gets screwed over, but that’s kinda his thing. I mean, maybe not up there with, say, US War Machine or Born, but for the purposes of advancing the life of one of Marvel’s icons, it adequately served its purpose.

Now remember, what started all this was Peter casting his lot with Tony Stark at the beginning of Civil War. As shown in the excellent Prelude to Civil War, Tony not only served as an emphatic, wise, and likable father figure, he actively did everything in his power to prevent registration from happening. Even after the tragedy at Stamford made that lost cause, Tony tried to make the transition as painless as possible, even reaching across the aisle to Captain America. So when he asked Peter to commit fully by unmasking, there wasn’t much doubt that he’d eventually say yes. Sure, that makes two people targets, but the now have the protection of a law enforcement division backed by an industrialist and weapons expert with nearly limitless resources; they’re as safe as two people could expect to be. And Peter can now get in that worthless J. Jonah Jameson’s face and tell him exactly where he can stick his newspaper; he has a real job now. Oh, and if Scorpion or Venom or Electro or Sandman or that new Mysterio guy want a piece of him, they’d better be ready to fight a lot of well-trained, heavily-armed buddies as well. For someone as dumped on as much as Peter Parker, he must’ve been thrilled to finally get to be on the winning team for a change.

And then, the unthinkable. The Negative Zone prison. Which, as Tony reveals, keeps unregistered superhumans. Indefinitely. Now, if he showed a little of the empathy he had at the beginning, that’d be something. “Yeah, I know. It’s horrible. It’s eating me alive. I can’t believe that it’s come to this. I’ll do what I can to improve conditions here, but that’s all I can promise. I’m sorry, Peter. I’m so very sorry.” But not only doesn’t have the slightest problem with this, he actually makes a thinly-veiled threat that Peter better not step out of line or he’ll be next. He never could have seen that coming. Tony Stark may be flawed, but he was always one of the good guys, and now here he is endorsing a concentration camp.

So Peter bails. Which means that he now has the worst of all worlds: everyone knows he’s Spider-Man, he has no protection from SHIELD, and he’s completely out of work.

And that’s why I don’t have a problem with him giving up his marriage to the Devil…what else was there for him? Even if has the maturity to accept his aunt’s death and move on, that doesn’t re-hide his identity, that doesn’t protect him from the many, many supervillains who want him dead, that doesn’t give him a home or money, and that certainly doesn’t stop J. Jonah Jameson from pushing ahead with the 5 million dollar lawsuit (remember that?). Basically, he’s screwed. So now he gets to hit a big reset button, get his life and his aunt’s life back, and the only price is that he’s lonely again and won’t have a daughter he can’t afford to raise anyway? Heck of a deal, if you ask me!

Honestly, what else was there for him, or Marvel Comics, for that matter? (And yes, I understand that comics are weird [Hi, Moviebob! :slight_smile: ] and that there’s a lot of leeway here, so, you wanna go nuts, fine.)

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I liked the idea of Peter growing up, getting a real job, and moving beyond the need to keep a secret identity, which has always been one of the more questionable conventions of the genre (Look at how few other Avengers at the time even kept a hidden identity anymore at that point). Shifting the genre to a point where its hoarier elements are no longer necessary would be a great way to force it to grow.

Instead, we got a story where Peter gets out of his problems by doing something he’d never do, make a literal deal with the devil. And while he saved poor old Aunt May, she hasn’t been all that important a component of subsequent stories, and Mary Jane still is.

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No story arc can hold a candle to the rottenness that was the spider-totem storyline. One more day is like Shakespeare compared to that.

4

Become a Supervillain.

An “ethical” one, perhaps, using his skills only for personal gain and safety—think “Peter Parker, Gentleman Thief.” He might even gather together similarly “professional” followers—nicer, or at least more honorable—into his own gang. “Parker’s 11,” if you will. For mutual support, protection, and even, in a way, at least channeling their criminal activities towards goals that’d be less likely to hurt innocents.

Or he could become the henchman of a supervillain—one who had at least a nominally sympathetic cause (Magneto?), and/or one who could have saved May’s life, and protected his family. As I recall, in OMD, one of the people Peter went to for help about Aunt May was Doctor Doom—who was supposedly unable to help him. At least one reviewer I’ve seen noted that this is a problem he’s be perfectly able to solve—albeit perhaps at the cost of making May into a cyborg, or something—and he’d probably be delighted to have Peter in his debt. Perhaps forcing him to become his minion, or trading May’s life for a single favor to be called in at some point in the future, at Doom’s discretion.

If you want to get REALLY silly, a little research indicates that a vampire—or at least, one with a similar physical condition to Vampirism—was once cured of his condition by drinking Spider-Man’s blood under exotic circumstances. Perhaps Peter could try and cure May’s condition by “turning” her—getting a sample of Vampire blood, somehow—and then curing her…only something goes wrong, and for a few months, we have the Amazing Spideracula!

Hey, stupid as hell, but the same company did do Franken-castle a few months later—the teamup possibilities are obvious.

After the novelty—I mean, the story’s run it’s course, maybe you could get Peter/May cured, then claim that he was never really Spider-Man. He’d been bitten by a Spider-Vampire or some damnfool thing like that, and made an arrangement with his buddy Spider-Man to claim his identity, while the real hero went underground to find a cure. Maybe you could cement this with a big public battle in New York, where a “depowered” Peter fights the undead big bad du jour, and is “rescued” from the same by the “real” Spider-Man (Kaine? Deaged Drag-King Daywalker-May? Random Clone-Man?).

In any case, I maintain that ending the storyline with Spider-Man fighting a giant Dracula perched on the Empire State Building is no more horrible an idea than what we got.

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Here’s an idea: don’t make a deal with the devil.

In any deal with the devil, somebody is going to get screwed. If you’re not smart enough to make sure it’s the devil, it’s going to be you.

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Tough call. I like the idea of moving on past the secret identity thing, but I also think it is kind of an integral part of the Spider-Man story.

If I had to make the call, I guess I’d leave his identity known.

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I think Mephisto is the not-devil like Morbius is the not-Dracula.

I think the movies screwed that one. In the McGuire films, he would reveal his identity to ever larger groups of people.

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I think the better choice is better writing.

So yeah, there has to be a return to status quo for Spidey – in this case having a secret ID, having his civilian life reestablished, and getting rid of MJ (not what I would want in this case, but that was the editor’s call).

Here’s where it absolutely fails though, a hero should never make a deal with the devil. Bad guys do that, victims do that, an innocent bystander might do that, but not a hero. No matter what befalls a hero, he is supposed to step above giving into something like this (Unless he can beat the devil – more on this later), so this reestablishment of the status quo was tainted from the get go.

So how do you do this? Time travel is one possibility, Peter goes back in time and yoinks his past self off the podium or something so he doesn’t spill the beans. How does that reestablish this status quo and remove his marriage without making it a divorce or something? I dunno, he overshoots his mark at some point and nudges something that creates a butterfly effect? That’s one idea. Maybe the other is that Spidey goes through a bigger story arc where he revisits much of his past and that’s where the discrepancy is cleared up or the marriage is removed.

Or maybe he beats the devil. Granted, I didn’t read One More Day and I never may but they way it sounds is kind of like this:

Pete: Help me, Mephisto, my dear old sickly, frail, octogenarian always-at-death’s door Aunt is at death’s door.
Mephisto: OK, I’ll help you but then I’ll take away your marriage.
Pete: Okeedokey.

Again, written better or not, this is not a hero’s choice. If he were to bargain with the devil, the only way that this should happen is if Spidey makes the bargain and wins – outsmarts the devil. Spidey is smart enough so he should be able to do it. Somehow. This is where a good writer would be able to wow us. Peter wins, but at what price victory?

I liked seeing Peter and MJ married but I can also see why maybe someone wouldn’t want that. It kind of seemed that they got married because Superman and Lois got married as well as the thought that being married ages a character and makes him or her unrelatable to the younger audience (allegedly). being married may work for some characters, but hard-on-his luck Parker marrying a beautiful supermodel does become a bit of a stretch.

9

How about Mephisto graft Zarathos onto him and give Johnny Blaze a break? (Ketch and those other imposters don’t exist) The Spectacular Ghost Spider couldn’t have been any worse than what followed. And Spidey knows Blaze and knows how he got screwed! I don’t see it as a choice he’d have ever made. 'course Civil War was a an entire Rube Goldberg device of stupid choices.

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Actually, MJ is the one who struck the deal.

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That reminds me, didn’t MJ whisper something secret to Mephisto about the deal? What did that turn out to be?

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“Face it, tiger. You just hit the jackpot!”

:smiley:

13

Yep.

It would have been a lot better if it had been a entirely a Mary Jane story with Spiderman/Peter as a supporting character.
Turn it into MJ seeing the toll trying to protect her is taking on Peter. Make her believe that the best thing for him is to be without her. And/Or make it also her being fed up with the day to day danger and maybe seeking her own way out.

14

I can understand the objections to Peter Parker bargaining with an evil being (Moviebob’s problem was that looking at it objectively, Mephisto actually got the short end of it, but that’s another issue). But what I’m more interested is in if he doesn’t reset the status quo, how does he, quite literally, live. Remember, he’s a highly vulnerable target now and has no resources. With all the enemies he’s made over the years, I can’t see how he survives more than about a month, much less provides compelling stories.

Honestly, other than outright villainy (which would be unthinkable), I think pretty much the only other option would be a complete, pathetic sellout to Tony Stark. Crawl back on his hands and knees, beg for a second chance, and accept whatever vindictive beatdowns Stark feels like dishing out. I can imagine that ever going over well with the fandom.

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In the equally crappy sequal (“One Moment In Time”) it turns out that MJ’s sooper-sekret deal was that Mephisto will never bug Peter again.

And in regards to the OP, I agree with Intergalactic Gladiator wrote: The problem was better writing.

You don’t have Spidey reveal his identity without a) an exit route or b) the balls to commit to the course of action for your tenure as writer/editor. You don’t just say “Eh…we’ll magic it away 4 months later before the storyline even gets started.”

16

Mephisto doesn’t deal in marriages, he deals in souls, but is probably smart enough to know that Peter wouldn’t fancy eternal damnation.

So instead, he tricks Peter into selling MJ down the river in exchange for a couple more years with someone who has been at death’s door for like 30 years. I’m guessing God doesn’t take this sort of thing lightly, so Peter put a stain on his character that means he is now Hellbound, and doesn’t even know it.

Also, if Mephisto was able to revive a dead Aunt May, does this mean her soul was already in Hell? And now she is revived, is she Hellspawn? That would make an interesting storyline.
As an aside, Aunt May is probably the character I hate most in all of comicdom. Next time she dies, I would bury her so deep that even Mephisto can’t find her

17

I wonder if this will turn out to be Peter’s “Original Sin”? This Silk character doesn’t sound any too interesting.

18

Forget about the money for a second…

Is there really no way that comics, or the bosses at Marvel and DC, can fully and completely transform an iconic character and make the changes stick? I’m talking about changing Spiderman or any of those comics into something else. A real progression. Character development that sticks. Maybe even an actual death?

What’s wrong with making Spiderman not a hero but someone on the run permanently? Why does he have to basically relive his entire life over and over with all the same drama? Hell, move him out of New York, make him a fugitive like Bruce Banner.

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Not really. The problem with iconic characters is that the quality that makes them iconic is impossible to distill. Lee and Ditko were at the top of their game when they made Spider-Man, to be sure, but there was no way for them to know, when they first created this character for a story in Amazing Fantasy, that’d he be an internationally recognized figure fifty years later.

So, if you want to come up with a change to an iconic character that’s going to stick, you need to come up with a new concept for one of your most popular characters ever, that’s even more popular. It’s trying to capture lightning in a bottle twice. It’s almost never going to work, and you’re going to revert the character to form once the novelty of the change wears off, and the readership starts to drop.

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Wasn’t this essentially the premise of Daredevil: Born Again?