Spider-Man is the most popular character in the Marvel Universe, and has been the bestselling character from the publisher various times over the decades. However, over the last 19 years of the character’s history, the Wall-Crawler hasn’t exactly been beloved despite starring in a book that routinely outsold everything else. We all know the reasons for this: “One More Day”. This derided story was the brain child of then-editor in chief Joe Quesada and his main hatchet man Tom Brevoort. The two of them believed that Spider-Man comics were better and sold better before his marriage with Mary Jane (ignoring the massive sales success of the ’90s and ’00s), so they had the character trade his marriage to Mephisto to save Aunt May.
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“One More Day” has been controversial for years, but there’s an interesting aspect to the story that most fans don’t realize. Those of us who really hate OMD have studied up on its creation and know that the ideas in the story were worked on by basically every A-list creator at Marvel, including one Mark Millar. Mark Millar came to the company in the year 2000 and quickly became one of the most important creators at the House of Ideas. He played a large role in throwing ideas into the mix (for example, he was the person behind putting Wolverine and Spider-Man on the Avengers to make it more like the Justice League). This wasn’t the only DC idea that Millar brought to the company, and it would mold OMD into what it was.
“One More Day” Took a Massive Idea from the “Superman 2000” Pitch That Mark Millar was a Part of
“Superman 2000” would have changed Superman forever. At some point in 1999, Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Mark Millar, and Tom Peyer pitched a Superman run to DC. The story was meant to bring the character back to the Silver Age conception of Superman being the real person and Clark being the disguise. They wanted to shake up the ideas behind the Man of Steel, and one thing that they wanted to get rid of was the marriage between Superman and Lois Lane.
Luthor and Brainiac would end up attacking the hero, and reveal his identity to the world as part of their attack. Brainiac would turn the sun red, and Luthor’s attacks would become so grand they would threaten space-time, and Supes would be forced to team up with Mr. Mxyzptlk, defeating the two of them. However, Brainiac would have poisoned the memories of Lois, so that her memories of her life of their life together would kill him, and Superman turns to Mxy to use his reality-altering powers to erase the memory that he was Superman and that they were married from the minds of the world.
The whole thing was a seismic change for the Superman comics, and DC didn’t go through with the pitch. It was eventually talked about online and in Wizard magazine, but most fans stopped thinking about it eventualy. However, for those of us who knew, and knew about Millar’s role in the creative side of Marvel, it seemed like “One More Day” took a big idea from “Superman 2000” — saving someone by giving up a marriage — and Millar gave them the idea. This is all circumstantial, but it fits Millar’s role at the House of Ideas to a tee.
Millar didn’t have a problem with taking ideas from unpublished stories — his Wolverine story “Enemy of the State” took the idea of Wolverine as a Hand assassin from Chris Claremont’s aborted plans for Uncanny X-Men #300. Fellow “Superman 2000” pitcher Mark Waid was also part of the whole thing, so the chances that the two of them recycled the idea and gave it to Quesada makes a lot of sense. It’s one of those interesting little pieces of comic history that most fans don’t realize.
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