Given Joe Quesada's recent comment that JMS's final storyline will be entitled "One More Day" and will resolve the marriage question once and for all, and the fact that I'm already debating this on three other boards, but not on my second-favorite board, it's time to ask:

Should Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson-Parker stay married?

I vote no, for a few reasons. The first is the lack of a supporting cast, which I believe is directly related to Peter and MJ being married. Folks who are grown up and married tend to become less social. They meet fewer new people, and spend less time hanging out with the people they know. After 20 years (real time) of marriage, the Spidey supporting cast has essentially dwindled to MJ and Aunt May. While you still get the random appearances of some supporting cast members in the satellite books, they're never seen in the flagship title. In the past, major stories grew out of Peter's supporting casts, whether it's his best friend's father, and later his best friend, becoming his greatest enemy (the Green Goblin) , his girlfriend's father, and later his girlfriend being killed (the Stacy's), and many others, from the Molten Man to the Lizard.

Second, there's the influence of other media. In the films, cartoons, and video games, Spider-Man is single (the sole exception being the last season of Spider-Man: The Animated Series). This is the iconic version of the character. Peter being married removes some of the central appeal of the character. Spider-Man was usually an escape for Peter from his everyday problems (problems we all could identify with). Now, he's got a beautiful wife at home, and family who supports what he does. He's got the happy ending.

Lastly, Spider-Man was always the youthful superhero. That doesn't mean he has to be in high school, or even a particular age, but it does mean that being one of the few married superheroes in comics, and the highest profile one after Superman, serves to make him seem like one of the oldest. Getting married is what we do when we grow up and settle down.

So, how should the marriage end (assuming that it should)? I vote for divorce. Split the characters up as quickly and painlessly as possible and write MJ out of the book for a while. Give Peter a couple of months to mope, during which time he decides to take his mind off things by going back to school and spending time with some of his old friends (Felicia Hardy, Glory Grant, Betty Brant, Joe (?) Robertson, etc. He meets new people and soon the divorce isn't mentioned. After a year or so MJ can be reintroduced as part of the supporting cast, with the only mention being that they used to be together once, but now are just friends.

Sources tell me that MJ will be the new M.O.D.A.M.

Mark my words.

I voted Nay to annoy Rob.

I voted No, but take it with a grain of salt because I don't think she should have become that major a character in Spidey's life in the first place.

Great post, Matt.

While I’m “used to” the marriage and don’t necessarily have a great desire to see it go away – some writers have handled it very well, resulting in some fine stories I enjoyed reading – I think Peter Parker is a better character when single, with a wide (but fluctuating) supporting cast. That just seems more suited to the spirit of the character and to the kind of soap opera theatrics I like best in Spider-Man.

But how to end the marriage is a rather touchy situation, because most roads save the very comic booky can introduce as much bad as good.

I suppose you could pull off the divorce thing, but you couldn’t make it ugly. It would have to be MJ being put into danger, Peter freaking out, barely saving her, and filing for divorce to “protect” her. She’s upset, she doesn’t want the divorce, and neither does he. But it’s what he has to do. An “ugly” divorce would just be …. No. So it’d have to be like the breakup in Ultimate Spider-Man. Bendis has handled that well.

Killing off MJ is an obvious choice. You’d be tapping into the pathos at Spidey’s core, and you’d continue the string of tragedies that have helped define the character over the years. But it might be TOO obvious, and you KNOW there would be a fan uproar, and MJ is a good character you wouldn’t want to render unavailable, and all that. A fine choice and potentially a compelling story, but I feel like the backlash would be awful.

Then there is the comic book solution. Memory wipes or time twists or magic or whatever. Doable, not messy, but really not right for current audiences, in my opinion. This would come off as cheap an easy. The level of scorn would be overwhelming.

I say risk the ugly backlash and tell a harrowing, compelling, moving story about MJ being caught in the crossfire. Kill her.

Then bring her back as a clone.

I think they should be friends with benefits.

Like, for instance, if one of them needs someone to fight, say, a villain dressed as a giant anthropomorphic toenail clipper, they could call the other and he would come over and fight that guy.

Or something.

Divorce. I don't understand why Joey is so against a straightforward divorce. If Peter Parker is the original hard luck hero, well, divorce is unpleasant and unhappy ... it's right up Petey's alley and fits the tradition of the character.

It also leaves open the most story options, including their possible reconciliation.

Like that whole thing with the toenail-clipper guy.

Right.

I was seven years old when Spidey got married, and I remember how excited I was. For all the talk about how the marriage "doesn't work," it has nevertheless survived and lasted for twenty years, which, in the world of comic books, is no small thing. I think the marriage has been and can be handled well. I thought Michelinie did a good job with it, and JMS, for the most part, has also done a nice job with it. I'm in the minority on this, but I'd rather not see it go away.

MJ should leave Peter. She thought being married to a superhero would be a turn on, but it turns out she's just worried about him all the time. She used to have fun! Now she just mopes. She wants to go back to being the girl she used to be.

Peter gives her the divorce she wants (or thinks she wants, anyway). He swears off women, while women pursue him right and left. Eventually a woman shows up he can't ignore, which brings him back to life, but MJ never quite disappears, just to keep things complicated. That would be a good couple years of stories.

I have no idea if any of that is consistent with the way the characters are written now.

The problem with the divorce is that you risk making MJ unlikable depending on the reasons. But let's say a malevolent force creates a rift between MJ and Peter that otherwise would not have taken place, manipulating them for his or her own ends. Only before either party can discover they were duped, the duper is wiped out by another menace. They break up, believing untruths about each other and the only person who could correct that is gone. Divorce and likability.

Hire me, M****l!

I have no objection either way, when written well it works married or no, however, at this point, they've been married nearly as long (longer?) than they weren't. It's hard to imagine a good way to dissolve the marriage and still have Peter and MJ seem young. If they killed her off, he's a widower, which ages you automatically. If they get divorced, he's a divorcee, with the same problem. I think given all that, and short of a mindwipe/reboot, they HAVE to be a young struggling couple. None of that supermodel BS, for instance. They need to be relatively newly married "a few months" or "about a year". At that point, you still have most of your single friends and still go out with them a lot. No mention of the kid ever (they've already done a good job here).
Reintroduce the supporting cast, get Peter OUT of teaching and back to freelance photography and grad school. Kill two birds with one stone and make Aunt May have a heart attack or stroke, recover, and remember nothing of Peters secret ID. If she has recently had a heart problem, you get to reintroduce the worry about Aunt May running subplots again.
Now, you've pretty much fixed Spider-Man, other than the elephant in the room of his public unmasking. Not sure HOW you fix that now.

I believe that's what's called a "Dr. Strange-us ex Machina."

Young Sentry pounding on the walls of the multiverse?

Maybe that's why they brought Wacker on board, he'll edit a weekly Marvel Crisis miniseries involving Dr. Strange and Young Sentry. And when all is said and done, the MU is reset to 1985.

No love for The Scarlet Spider in this thread? Ben Reilly could fix a lot ...

Peter's already using the ID at the moment.

I think what they are going to do is have Peter pull a Fugitive, he'll go underground and roam the country one step ahead of the law, which will force him and MJ to split because she's too famous to hide and if they are divorced she won't be as big of a target for the Feds.


Peter will take a new name, too. "David Banner"

I like married spidey..he got hitched right when I was really getting into comics and it worked for me (i was about 12 or 13). Michelinie made the marriage fun and i could still relate to Peter Parker the character.

The problem with different storylines in Spidey-Widey-Man isn't that he's married, but about the writing.

Sure, in lots of marriages, the circle of friends gets smaller resulting in a smaller cast of characters (I love equating real life to funnybooks). But not all the time, and it certainly isn't necessary where there are no kids involved.

I like 'em married. To me, it means that Spidey is one of the few funnybook characters to have ever actually accomplished something with his life. Lots of arguements can be made about how superheroes should remain in a kind of stasis, with the stories they are involved with simply being about how they interact with the things around them (and, thus, their supporting cast could change but they fundamentally won't). However, while this may work with lots of different heroes, I think it's kinda cool to have one or two who may be do change, at least in funnybook-time slow motion.

Compare this to, say, Batsy-Watsy. Only in alternate universes did he ever actually do anything to change his life (marrying Selina). In the main universe, the only real change was him getting grumpier, becoming Psycho-Ninja-Batman. His supporting cast, however (well, the other Bat-family members) have all done different things (Dick became Nightwing, moved a couple of times, for example)(The whole Oracle thing - not Linda's fave storyline, I understand, but at least it shows folks trying something different. To bad they did it to something that, at least at one time, already worked really well), but Bat-Groin is really just stuck in a stasis, unable to move out of his established role (I guess Alfred is stuck there with him, anyway).

And, going back to the Oracle thing for a moment, isn't it kind of cool when a superhero is allowed to change, but in a positive way? Hey, he got married to a supermodel! That sure beats getting a bullet through the spine, doesn't it?

Besides, there is always Ultimate Spidey. And, let's face it, the Peter/Kitty relationship is one of the coolest relationships to ever happen in mainstream funnybooks

No.