Noted Internet
reviewer and critic, Lewis “Linkara” Lovhaug, recently savaged the
much-maligned Spider-Man story, One More Day, for the two hundredth episode of his web series, Atop The
Fourth Wall, and rightfully so. Throughout
the course of the seventy-five minute view, he exposed a number of plot holes
and contrivances that bring the quality of the story into question but I find
this criticism of particular interest: Spider-Man is the most irresponsible
hero in any universe. A curious notion considering the axiom, “With great power
comes great responsibility” defines his very motivation for becoming a
superhero in the first place. However, I have difficulty disagreeing with Mr.
Lovhaug who notes that Peter Parker always uses his alter ego as an excuse for
his personal failures and repeats the same mistakes. One example Mr. Lovhaug
uses is that Spider-Man did not even have life insurance to ensure his family’s
well being in the event of his death at the hands of a supervillain. As Mr.
Lovhaug says:
“He never learns from his mistakes. Never takes into consideration how his life as Spider-Man affects everybody else.”
What would
happen to his family if he were to die from an “occupational hazard?” What does
he do if his gallivanting as Spider-Man negatively impacts his family and
friends?” He rarely takes those questions into account and lets his personal
and professional life suffer because he refuses to make the necessary
sacrifices. This becomes especially egregious when you take Peter’s age into
account. Peter became Spider-Man after he turned sixteen and at least ten years
passed since then according to Marvel’s “floating timeline”, which would make
him at least twenty-six years old. Most adults around that age try to find some
balance in their lives between work, love, and recreation but Peter’s approach
to the world is still that of a teenager. That has to make me wonder if Peter
Parker’s irresponsibility and immaturity is indicative of a deeper malady
afflicting the comic book medium: the refusal to believe that even fictional
characters are, in fact, mortal.
The
problem with the comic book medium is that it is a serialized form of fiction
with decades worth of continuity to draw from (seventy-five years for DC
Comics, and fifty years for Marvel.) Very few formats, aside from the waning
daytime soap opera, can even brag to have that kind of history. However, the
problem Spider-Man poses is that these characters static because the perception
that character development destroys the long-term marketability of the Big
Two’s major trademarks. Joe Quesada, current Chief Creative Officer of Marvel
and main architect One More Day,
justified the magical annulment of the Peter/Mary Jane marriage with the
following assertion:
“We worked too hard to get Peter to this point. I can understand why some of you want to see the characters grow old, but we have to manage these characters for the future – a future beyond you and me. A married Peter Parker – as cool as that may seem – from a creative standpoint, it handcuffs the character. It’s a very problematic thing for Peter because it cuts him off and makes Peter the oldest person in the book.”
I
can understand Mr. Quesada’s standpoint. Our lives unfold in phases: we are
born, go through childhood and adolescents, accept the responsibilities of
adulthood, marry, raise children, and ultimately die. As reviled as the Clone
Saga is to this very day, Peter Parker
already passed several milestones by the mid-nineties. He married the love of
his life, Mary Jane Watson, Aunt May passed away in the memorable Amazing
Spider-Man #400 (a very nicely crafted
story by J.M. DeMatteis where Peter was finally able to let go), and it
appeared that he was going to accept the responsibility of fatherhood. Though
Marvel erased the latter two events, it left the character with two options
from Mr. Quesada’s perspective: retire or die.
Almost
all stories since the days of antiquity are finite in scope. Both principal
characters of the Illiad, Achilles and
Hector, died by the epic’s end and the Norse gods would meet their end in
Ragnarok. Every character aside from Horatio died at the end of William
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and even
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series came to an end with the Death
Hallows. However, the very nature of comic
books rarely allows for meaningful conclusions or happy endings for their
characters. Mr. Lovhaug’s tone in his One More Day review seems to indicate that he wants character
development but the truth is that comic book fans are a very conservative lot
and very attached to their characters.
Convoluted
storylines aside, Marvel could have given Peter Parker a happy ending in the
Clone Saga; he could have handed the mask to Ben Reilly and rode off into the
sunset with his wife and unborn child without the question of, “who is the real
Peter Parker?” However, could the fanbase or Marvel’s marketing department have
accepted it in the long term? I sincerely doubt it for one important reason: Spider-Man
became part of the public zeitgeist as the “everyman” hero. He had appeared in
at least three animated series by the nineties and the crossover between
mediums insured that Peter Parker would always be synonymous Spider-Man in the
same way Clark Kent is synonymous with Superman and Bruce Wayne is synonymous
with Batman. So struggle does not become so much as the “the man vs. the mask”
as it is “the man vs. the icon.”
Characters such
as the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and the Atom are the exception to this
rule because there had been no crossover to other mediums in the interregnum
between the Gold and Silver Ages. According to some accounts, editor Julius
Schwartz created a new Flash (Barry Allen) instead of using the original Flash, Jay Garrick, in Showcase
#4 because or a perceived turnover in the
fanbase. Barry Allen became an icon of the Silver Age and many concepts of that
era, namely the foundation of old DC Multiverse where his predecessor existed
on a parallel Earth, are tied to him. The beauty of Barry Allen’s death in Crisis
on Infinite Earths is that DC gave it a
sense of finality. I have the “last” Barry Allen issue of the Flash (Flash
vol. 1, #350) where he had his “final”
battle with the Rogues and reunited with his long-thought-dead wife, Iris
West-Allen, in the thirtieth century to have his happy ending, at least until Crisis
on Infinite Earth #8. The beauty of his
death is that DC gave the character a proper sendoff and effectively ended the
old Silver Age status quo in 1986. Similarly, DC Comics gave the Silver Age
Superman his own ragnarok with the Alan Moore-penned Whatever
Happened to the Man of Tomorrow that closed
that chapter of the character’s history and wiped the slate clean for the John
Byrne reboot.
However, my
problem with the Post-Crisis DC Universe is that DC never properly gave its
Pre-Crisis status quo a proper farewell. Most DC’s “history” remained intact
aside from the fact that the surviving Earths from the Crisis folded into one
universe and former Kid Flash, Wally West, took his mentor’s costume and became
the third Flash. While I have no problem with legacy heroes in theory, the very
act of putting on Barry Allen’s costume at the end of Crisis on Infinite
Earths #12 symbolically crippled Wally West
as a character. Granted, the lasting appeal of the character is that Wally grew
from a womanizing, self-centered jerk into a responsible and respected hero
much like his uncle from the Baron run to Messner-Loebs to Waid to Johns' run at
the end of the second volume. Unlike Spider-Man, DC Comics let Wally West
develop as a character by letting him overcome his insecurities of living up to
his mentor’s example. What made Wally’s growth problematic is that he grew up
in a universe full of icons.
DC went to great
pains to state that there could only be one Superman and Batman in the Death
of Superman and Knightfall story arcs. Though DC presented its audience with
four “Supermen” in Reign of the Supermen, none of them could ever be the genuine article, and Azrael proved to
be a poor substitute for Bruce Wayne. If Barry Allen’s uniform became the
“iconic” look for the Flash then would Wally West be slightly more than a
substitute for his predecessor? I concede that Greg LaRocque redesigned Wally’s
uniform in 1991 but it was still too aesthetically similar to Barry’s to truly
distinguish the two. Wally West fell in love with and married a television
reporter, Linda Park, as Barry did with a newspaper reporter, Iris West. Both
had twins in Don and Dawn Allen (The Tornado Twins of the 30th
century, long story), and Jai and Iris West. Wally took Barry Allen’s position
on the reformed “Big Seven” version of the Justice League, and though he had
his own unique Rogues, Wally West inherited Barry Allen’s enemies during Geoff
Johns first run on the Flash. Wally West essentially became “Barry Allen-lite.”
Even Bruce Timm and his production team had to radically transform the
character from his personality to his motivations to make Wally viable for Justice
League.
I own a few
issues of the original Barry Allen run (mostly those with the Firestorm
backups), and while the Geoff Johns writing was more sophisticated Cary Bates,
I have trouble seeing what makes Wally distinct from Barry in terms of
personality. I would go as far as to say that the focus of the title moved from
Wally to Captain Cold and the Rogue during Johns’ first run, and then to Jai
and Iris West during Mark Waid’s third run. The fact that Bart Allen’s “death”
and Wally’s return coincided with the just-as-maligned Countdown probably did not help either. Between Marvel’s mishandling of
Spider-Man in One More Day and
DC’s mishandling of the Flash franchise from Infinite to Final Crisis, I have got to wonder why the Big Two simply do not give their
universes a complete reboot. After all, the 2003 re-imagining of Battlestar
Galactica kept no continuity from the 1978
original and it was successful. It comes down to the fact that DC and Marvel
kept their characters in continuous publication in the almost twenty-five years
whereas Battlestar Galactica had been off the air. The fact is that we, as fans
of DC and Marvel’s characters, want our beloved characters to grow but yet we
tend to grab our pitchforks and burn Joe Quesada and Dan DiDio in effigy that
idea of making too radical change. The fact is that we cannot have our cake and
eat it too. If we want our characters to grow and change, we have to accept
that their stories have to end as Barry Allen and the Silver Age Superman’s did
twenty-five years ago.
That is my
fundamental problem with One More Day: Joe
Quesada believed that he could “magically” erase twenty years of continuity to
reorder the fictional cosmos of the Marvel universe to suit his whims. That is
simply amateurish and reads like horrible fan fiction written by an
eleven-year-old with a “D+” in English. (I must apologize to all
eleven-year-olds now. They could write much better stories than One
More Day.) Moreover, One Moment
in Time essentially made One More
Day even more pointless because Peter and
MJ were still “together” for those twenty years but just not “married.” At least DC tried to bring their
character back to formula after Crisis on Infinite Earths and The New 52. Sure, they failed spectacularly with how you need a scorecard to keep
track of the history of the DC Universe but at least they tried to simplify
their universe. I do not want to figure out how Emerald Twilight,
Green Lantern: Rebirth, Sinestro Corps, Blackest Night, and Brightest Day “happened” when many of the principal characters
like Firestorm did not “exist.” I am not interested in seeing the
pre-Flashpoint DC Universe or Peter Parker’s marriage return. I would much
prefer to see the Big Two grow a pair of stones and do what Julie Schwartz did
back in 1956: sweep out the clutter and start over with a clean slate. Comic
book fans are essentially the hoarders of popular culture fandom; we cling onto
every obscure scrap of continuity and complain whenever the big two deviate
from it. After almost three decades of grandiose “events” where the Big Two
claim that, “nothing will be the same again,” only for the characters to revert
to their standard modus operandi because writers, editors, and fans cannot “let
go” of the stories of old, I have serious doubts whether the industry has much
life left in it.
