Three years ago, Marvel’s Spider-Man comics introduced the ill-fated Paul Rabin. It’s been almost 20 years since Marvel editorial broke Peter Parker and Mary Jane up in the controversial “One More Day” storyline, and the two have been in a frustrating will-they-won’t-they status quo ever since. Finally, three years ago, the inevitable happened: Mary Jane moved on. She fell in love with a man named Paul Rabin, and because these are comics… it wasn’t exactly a conventional relationship.
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The cliff notes version is more than a little mind-boggling. Mary Jane was left stranded in another dimension, where time runs differently. By the time Spider-Man got into that dimension to rescue her, she’d spent betweenfour years there, and she and Paul had gotten together. They’d even adopted two kids, who were later revealed to essentially be imaginary (again, because comics). Paul became the most hated Spider-Man character of all time, and he recently died when Marvel decided to move on. Unfortunately, that’s just stirred the flames of controversy again.
Marvel’s Desperately Trying to Fix the Mary Jane Mess
After Paul’s death, Marvel is keen to move on. Part of that involved an open conversation between Peter and Mary Jane, which took place in Venom #258 (Mary Jane currently being host to the Venom symbiote). Paul’s funeral became an opportunity for writer Al Ewing to address the elephant in the room, the awkwardness of the whole relationship with its many twists and turns, and he did a fairly decent job. The story presented Paul in the kindest possible light (which, to be fair, is in keeping with a funeral; people tend to think the best of the recently departed).
To be fair to Ewing, he provided a neat explanation for why MJ moved on. After two years stranded in this other dimension, she realized there was only one reason Peter wouldn’t have come back for her: if he was dead. She grieved, she mourned, and she chose to move on with her life. It’s a smart retcon, straightening out a lot of the weird narrative back when the Paul Robin relationship first began. There’s just one problem: it opens up a major twist, one with very dark implications for Paul’s character and the whole relationship story.
Spider-Man Fans Know the Story Better Than Marvel Do
According to Venom #258, Mary Jane never realized time dilation was a thing. The problem, though, is that this was baked into the original 2022 story – and Paul Rabin, a scientific genius, has several lines of dialogue nodding to it. It’s not hard to join the dots; Paul knew there was a simple reason Spider-Man hadn’t returned to save Mary Jane, and he never told MJ. That deliberate lie of omission is the reason she chose to move on and be with him in the first place. Suffice to say, the fans are not impressed.
Marvel editor Jordan D. White has just been asked about this over on AiPT Comics, and the response is more than a little awkward. “Definitely not our intention to make it seem like Paul was hiding something from her,” he explained. “I think Al (and I) just didn’t remember that Paul apparently knew this fact. In addition, we’ve seen in comics before that these time differences are not always stable. Sometimes a place whose time moves faster than ours suddenly is moving slower. The whole thing is that their time and ours are not fixed together, so anything is possible.”
Ewing’s retcon is a smart one, and it largely fixes the problems with the Mary Jane arc. But it doesn’t quite work in terms of Paul Rabin, because it raises very uncomfortable questions about his own character; it introduces an element of deception into their relationship at its most fundamental level. Naturally, those fans who dislike Paul are outraged, seeing this as a further justification. Some want this to be addressed again, for Mary Jane to realize she was deceived so she can reflect their own reaction.
Maybe this will happen. More likely, though, Marvel will simply move on. Paul will be summarily dismissed, thought of about as much as the awful storyline that revealed Norman Osborn had children with Gwen Stacy (yes, that happened). Venom #258 very much feels like an attempt to tie a bow on this so it doesn’t need to be considered again. And sadly, that may be for the best with this very ill-considered idea.
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