One More Day Too Many, by Mike Gold
Damn. They blew it.Pulling off those universe-shattering “everything you knew yesterday will be wrong tomorrow” budget-busting bookshelf-breaking crossovers is a bitch. Few of them prove to be worth anybody’s effort, most of them are contradicted within a few weeks of their conclusion, and there have been way, way too many such “events” for any of them to be actual events.
Marvel’s Civil War was different. For one thing, it was actually about something – it took on issues and concerns that were metaphors for what has been going on in the so-called real world. For another, it had at least three really, really interesting story-threads: the devolution of Tony Stark’s humanity, the death of Steve Rogers (as opposed to the death of Captain America, which didn’t happen), and the outing of Spider-Man and the resultant impact it had on Peter Parker, his career and his family.
I was left with a degree of personal involvement that had been much greater than previously. Marvel had instituted real change, and while we all know change is a constant and that at some point some of it would be contradicted eventually – somebody, at some point in the future, will probably resurrect Steve Rogers, although I hope not – the “event” ended with my being more curious about what would follow than any other such mega-crossover. Silly me.
O.K. Now we get to the spoilers, so if you haven’t read the last few Spiders-Man, and you haven’t seen any of the covers or house ads, and you haven’t listened to the hubbub at your friendly neighborhood comics shop, and you’d temporarily gone deaf and blind after seeing Alvin and the Chipmunks, you might want to stop right here. Or you can view this as a public service. And now, back to our regularly scheduled rant.
The Civil War sequel “One More Day” took a publicly exposed Peter Parker and gave him the worst of all Sophie’s Choices in comics history: either save his long-suffering Aunt May from certain death (for which he blames himself), or continue in his rewarding, beautiful marriage which has brought him happiness, grounding and the prospect of offspring.
OK, the situation sucks but there’s nothing wrong with the plot device. It served William Styron well. But from the context of Civil War, it takes on a different dimension: it was the choice becomes staying on this dangerous and exciting new path, or reboot back to status quo.
Mind you, comics marriages do not fare well. Superman and Lois Lane came off as a corporate-ordered afterthought following in the wake of an attempt to energize a television series that wound up being cancelled anyway despite a two-year commitment from the network. It should have been the biggest event in comics history; it wound up a fart in a blizzard. It also stopped a highly successful and well-produced run of Superman comics dead in its tracks.
Barry Allen and Iris West? Please. Next time, just drink the damn Flavor Aid (note: Reverend Jim Jones actually used grape Flavor Aid and not Kool-Aid). Even in the strips, marriage usually brought the storyline to a halt. It turned Li’l Abner into a parody of itself. Only The Phantom’s marriage seems to have worked out well, and since Mandrake The Magician was at the wedding, we have cause to doubt.
So what choice did Marvel’s masters make? Observe, I distinguish between the chiefs and the creative talent as I do not know what role these gifted people played in the decision. I do know that they didn’t try to sneak this one past the powers-that-be.
Here’s the spoiler: when faced with the choice between continuing on an exciting yet unproven new path and retreating to status quo, corporate America almost always chickens out.
The commercial comics mantra has become when in doubt, reboot.
The next Marvel event is going to be about the long-standing Skrull invasion. Maybe this will be the autobiography of the bureaucrats who hijacked Marvel’s Civil War.
Mike Gold is editor-in-chief of ComicMix.
Actually, Clark Kent and Lois Lane were going to get married before LOIS & CLARK went on the air. I like them married, but that's just because a marriage between two people who not only love each other, but their shared careers, is such a rarity in pop fiction.
I said it SEEMED like a corporate decision — it really destroyed the momentum of the series.
Am I recalling correctly (it's been some time since I've read the old issues) that Lois and Clark's relationship was strained, and then very abruptly (perhaps because of the possible corporate mandate to have them married both in the books and on the show) patched back up?
Like Nick and Nora Charles?(Now it's in the right place!)Please ignore the comment below, sorry.
From the interviews with Joe Q. at Comic Book Resources he states that they revealed Peter Parker as Spider-Man in Civil War precisely because they knew they were going to do this reboot. Joe Q. has always hated the marriage between Peter and Mary Jane. He likes a single Peter Parker. I'm surprised they just didn't reboot him all the way to high school while they were at it.Not even knowing that they were going to do this terrible thing, I decided to not order Amazing Spider-Man after this storyline anyway. The creative talent that I was following was leaving, so I felt it was a good time to drop the title. The whole new scheme of having it three times a month with the same creative team during the month and another the next month turned me off. If they were going to do that, they might as well have just made a single book three times as large. Seeing this reboot plot device made me more satisfied with my decision.Neil
Well you're smarter than me. With the series going near-weekly, I've already ordered the next six issues.I'd read Joey's comments about his dislike of the marriage. After 45 years of continuity, there's probably a few things to dislike — but, like the dreadful Spider-Clone arc, Marvel's technique has always been to work with it and do better stories to validate their weaker stories.Otherwise, folks in the Marvel universe would have been drinking Skrull milk since 1961.
But only until that John Byrne FF Annual in the 80s where they end up visiting that little town in upstate NY again and the Skrull cows are still there making their Skrull cow milk…I read that original FF Skrull story as a little kid in some reprint and always wondered how people accepted the ending where they were just hypnotized into thinking they were cows again. I wondered how Reed Richards could be so smart but he didn't see that solution backfiring.That ending was was up there with the JLA's Superman defeating the diamond alien by turning him back into coal. How? "He rubbed him the wrong way!"Good grief.
People need to realize that aside the golden, silver, obsidian, etc ages of comics, there were two other ages of comics.The first age was when comics were being written by professional writers and drawn by professional artists whose job was to fill a book with comic stories every month. They didn't worry about continuity, or whether a story made any damn sense at all; they were writing for kids, the stories were entertaining, get it done and move on to the next one.This age lasted until well into what we call the Silver age, when the people who grew up reading those comics got into the business. They treated comics not as a job but as a calling. They added continuity into the mix, they started trying to make all those earlier "silly" (nonetheless entertaining) stories make sense. At its extreme, this mindset resulted in Crisis where they simply got rid of all the Mopee-the-Elf-esque stories. And it also spawned the comics fan who complains that stuff like Bizarros have no place in the comics since they're so silly. These are the same people who thought C-3P0's behavior in Jedi was unacceptably out of character. ("I'm not much of a storyteller", don't you know)I'm not even gonna go off on OMD here (I've been doing it to death on the 'rama) other than to say it was a hammerhanded way to get rid of a situation that as far as anyone can see, only one person actually saw as a problem in the first place.As for marriage in fiction, the problem is when the marriage/first kiss/getting back together is the ONLY thing that people were watching/reading/listening for, once it happens, people are happy…and they leave. Marriage is often the Jump The Shark moment for a series, but not if there's more going on in the strip. Superman IMHO has not suffered at all by getting them married; I didn't think it ground to a halt at all. I've used this example elsewhere, but when everybody found out who killed Laura Palmer on Twin Peaks, they assumed the show was over. If you make ONE thing the ONLY thing people care about, you pretty much can NEVER give them that thing.
Yep. Behold! The Gilded Age Of Comics!My disappointment in the Superman wedding is not that it happened but that it happened so fast that – in my opinion – it undermined the momentum of the series at that point and that it wasn't conceived editorially with the timing and precision that would have made it what it should have been: the biggest comic book event of all time. Just my opinion.As for Laura Palmer, well, heck, I stopped caring about Twin Peaks long before we found out who killed her. I liked the donuts, though.
It comes down to the question of "What is Sacred Screed, and what is negotiable?" How far can the re-invention, or the seemingly likely evolution, of an established character go before the Powers That Do Be dictate a market-pandering reversal? A line comes to mind from Alan Moore's yarn "Whatever Happened to the Man of Steel?" — heralding a forced retirement for the Great God Namrepus His Ownself as a prelude to reboot: "This is an Imaginary Story … aren't they all?"
Not the Bizarro stories. Certainly not up here in Fairfield County Connecticut.
Oh, yeah, I've always figured that Howard Lovecraft's Arkham, Mass., and DC's Bizarro World must be documentary representations of the Texas Panhandle.
Good points, Michael; as it happens, this is pretty much what I'll be talking about in my column on Wednesday.
Always a fascinating topic, Elayne. I'm looking forward to your insights.Particularly so, because I'm dealing just now with some similar concerns of continuity in the script for a new PROWLER yarn — tying up threads left dangling at the close of the original 1987-88 run, while developing complications consistent with those of Tim Truman's and my earlier stories. Nowhere near the back-story convolutions of a franchise like SUPERMAN or SPIDER-MAN, but nonetheless worth the striving for consistency of narrative attitude and individual characterizations.
Whenever (insert publisher's name here) does this kind of thing it's about as sleazy as when bringing Bobby Ewing back from the dead with no explaination other than it was a dream.What does that say to all the viewers who faithfully watched Dallas during the No-Bobby season? 'Thanks, but your faithful viewing is being rewarded with a really dumb turn-about'.But this is worse. Besides being a lame 'solution' (like Crisis) that creates more problems than it solves, or hero is now dealing with the devil.Soap Operas come up with more plausible plot twists than this.I'll REALLY be interested in their 'solutions' to this turn of events.On second thought…no I won't.
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