Spider-Man is Marvel‘s most popular hero and for very good reason. The Marvel Universe was a revolution in superhero comics. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had brought superheroes to the people, creating characters whose personal lives were often as tumultuous as their superhero lives. However, Spider-Man was this idea distilled down to its essence and perfected. Peter Parker was a teenager, dealing with high school, lack of money, and his aging parental figures. He got to go out and fight crime, but he still got bullied in school and had to worry about where his next nickel came from. Spider-Man was real, and he grew alongside the readers.
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Spider-Man’s growth was an important part of the formula, but many at Marvel believed that too much growth was a problem. Spider-Man had to stay at a certain level — unmarried, relatively poor, unlucky at love — and could never go beyond that. This has presented a problem for Marvel readers, as The Amazing Spider-Man has fallen from its lofty post at the top of the sales charts, replaced by The Ultimate Spider-Man, a book that presents the exact opposite take on Spider-Man. Marvel has a Spider-Man problem right now, but it’s one with a solution.
The Regression of Spider-Man Kills a Key Part of the Character
Growth is one of the things that makes Spider-Man such a great character. Superman and Batman, the only two other heroes who are consistently on the same cultural level as Spider-Man, don’t really need to grow. They have reached such levels of perfection as characters that growth is just icing on the cake. Spider-Man started out as a teenager and aged in front of, and in a way with, the audience. Seeing Peter growing as a person was always a key to what made it so easy to relate to Spider-Man. The audience learned alongside Spider-Man. Now, obviously, this was going to mean that eventually Spider-Man was going to be having problems that the younger portions of the audience wouldn’t completely relate to, it was still entertaining.
Joe Quesada and Tom Brevoort, the former being Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief from 2000-2011 and the latter being Marvel’s long-tenured Executive Editor, decided that a married Spider-Man was too unrelatable to audiences and hurt the character — an ironic statement since the bestselling periods of Spider-Man’s existence were during the era of the Peter/MJ marriage. So, they did away with the marriage and basically trapped Spider-Man in the same status quo forever — a sad man who messes up constantly, is poor, and unlucky at love. He’s basically an eternal college student, and this loss of character growth has proven to be a major detriment to the character.
Look at the long run of Dan Slott. Slott’s run gets a lot of flack that it doesn’t deserve, because Slott wrote some of the defining Spider-Man stories of the 21st century. There are some great Spider-Man comics from Slott’s run — the concept of Spider-Verse is a Slott concept — and Slott continually did interesting things with Peter’s status quo. However, everyone knew that nothing really meant anything; everything was going to go into a little box at the end and Peter would be back to being sad, lonely, poor, and unlucky. There were no stakes to following Spider-Man anymore, nothing to really relate to. For younger readers who started reading Spider-Man while he was married, it was interesting not because they related to it, but because they got to watch this relationship and how it survived Peter’s life as Spider-Man. This got readers invested. Now? There’s only the most milquetoast and frankly boring Peter ever.
Marvel has a very hard task in front of them. Spider-Man’s editorial offices, as well as Brevoort and current Marvel EIC C.B. Cebulski, have a devotion to this hindbound conception of Spider-Man. The upcoming resurrection of Gwen Stacy feels like a test run for another resurrection down the road in The Amazing Spider-Man. Marvel keeps Spider-Man circling the same drain. However, the thing is that they have everything they need to break out of this repetitive cycle and do something positive and interesting with the character and it’s simple: they just need to move forward.
Marvel Needs to Leave Behind the Past to Move Spider-Man Forward
Marvel wants a Spider-Man that can always reset to the same status quo, allowing the next group of creators to do what they want forever down the road. The marriage between Peter and Mary Jane isn’t coming back; Marvel gave readers The Ultimate Spider-Man so there’s no reason to do it in the main universe. However, Mary Jane is always around and that’s a part of the problem. Marvel wants to do a young Spider-Man with no attachments? It’s time to get rid of the attachments.
Marvel needs to drop some kind of change into Peter’s life. That is definitely not going to be change to Peter himself, so it needs to be somewhere. The best thing to do is to go in completely new direction. The only reason Mary Jane is still around is to keep readers who want to see Peter and MJ together, but that reason is gone. It’s time to break Spider-Man away from this portion of his life and move him into a new one. The Amazing Spider-Man needs to embrace the new. Give Peter an all-new supporting cast, an all-new job with new characters. Give readers a young Spider-Man in places they’ve never seen before. Spider-Man needs change somewhere, and this seems to be the best way to get that. When Marvel erased Peter and MJ’s marriage, they wanted a reset but they never actually created one. If they truly want to fix their existing Spider-Man problem, they need to commit to the bit and genuinely start fresh, giving readers a chance to grow along with the character once again.
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