Valentine's Day Special: Comics' Worst Couples With Cougar Town's Kevin Biegel

Recently, we spoke with Cougar Town co-creator and executive producer Kevin Biegel about comics. That may sound like an arbitrary conversation to have, except that Biegel is a comics fan himself, having chimed in on Joss Whedon's Marvel future when that relationship was still pretty new and then seen his TBS sitcom do an Avengers-themed episode recently. So, since Jules Cobb is newly-married in the series and the relationships on Cougar Town are profoundly entertaining comedy fodder, we thought, "Why not pick his brain for a piece?" And what came out of it was this: five of the worst comic book couples ever to spend way too much time in each other's presence for their own (and the readers') good. Biegel provided us with his picks, and we're providing the analysis. Enjoy! NOTE: We're probably wrong about some of this, which is alright because Biegel did just tweet that he'd check it over and get back to us. Anyway, we think our reasons hold up even if they aren't the same as his.

Peter Parker & Mary Jane Here's the thing--I'm not 100% sure what Kevin meant by this, so maybe he'll correct me if I interpret it incorrectly. We did talk about the One More Day fiasco briefly, with Biegel's response being "Peter is with MJ. All this break up/other girl stuff is just jibber jabber." And I'd be inclined to agree: After two decades as a married couple, they've entered the "official couple" stage, along with Lois and Clark, Hal Jordan and Carol Ferris, etc. But (like Hal and Carol), Spider-Man and Mary Jane have had just INSANE amounts of needless drama, not least of all because there had been so many abortive attempts to break the couple up even before One More Day. There's also a sense on the part of many fans that the marriage shouldn't have ever happened; after all, hard-luck Pete is hardly someone you can pity when he gets to go home to the leggy, red-headed supermodel. And there's the fact that the marriage was a hastily-assembled production, designed to coincide with what was going on in the syndicated newspaper strip and not actually driven by the comic book writers themselves. And the fact that they sold their marriage to the devil, which doesn't seem like healthy behavior. And the super-icky fact that she's recently been spotted making out with the Superior Spider-Man. Let's not even get started about the terrifying sexual dysfunctions caused by that storyline. Rogue and...everyone While many fans think of Rogue as being "Gambit's girl," there was a period in time where she dated so many of her co-workers that she became to comics what Andrea is to AMC's The Walking Dead. There was a stretch of time where, instead of actual character development, it seemed as though writers just felt that shuffling her from boyfriend to boyfriend and therefore keeping the "will-they-or-won't-they" of Rogue and Gambit alive kept her somehow vital. They were wrong. It just made her seem schizophrenic.

Spawn & Violator These two have a kind of creepy relationship; Violator can't kill the Hellspawn, but exists basically to mess with him, meaning that as long as he remains functionally immortal, it's his lot to spend an eternity in the company of his enemy. It's kind of an odd, twisted marriage that takes the typical relationship between archenemies (as seen most recently, an alluded to romantically to boot, in Death of the Family) and kicks it up a notch. A really, really icky notch. X-O Manowar and his suit (we'll include Spider-Man/Venom/Carnage here, too) Anytime a character's powers are derived from their suit, it makes giving them a functional civilian life practically impossible without taking much of the drama out of the story. But when that suit is a living thing or sentient in some other way, it's a whole other thing. Take all those times that Green Lantern and his ring would banter back and forth and dial it way up, because you've got a guy who's basically forming a long-term, personal relationship with his clothes. Which is...odd.

Reed & Sue Richards This has been covered before, in any number of forums, but Reed Richards is a pretty terrible husband and father. Even if you take away his activities with the Illuminati and the whole Civil War thing, when he allowed his "family" team to be pulled apart for what was basically a political fight, you're still stuck with a guy who designed and implemented a ray that was meant to put his son into a coma when he decided the little tyke was too powerful. This was not, as physically and psychologically traumatizing your firstborn ought to be, a family decision. That's not the kind of thing that's an isolated incident, either; Reed neglects his family to attend to his scientific genius and perceived role in the world so often that Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo actually made that realization by the Fantastic Four's leader the centerpiece of their run on the book. Also, while Hank Pym catches no end of hell for having slapped his wife in a fit of rage (partly because, let's be honest, most people don't know much else about him), Reed seems to have gotten away with the time he did it.