This in actually would be Two Cents Issue Two, but due to the site not being up yet, I just named this ONE MORE DAY, Part One. There will be at least two parts to this, and as time goes on, I'll post it more as an ASK THE GENERAL FN Spidey-esque thread. But for now, a preview for SD.com....
Spideydude’s Two Cent’s
“The One More Day Edition…” Part One
Well, it’s here, done and over with, the ramifications still being felt even now, as the 2000 pound gorilla in the room. Editors don’t want to talk of it, rumors of jobs being destroyed because of it, and overall ending of runs being ruined due to it.
Let’s examine what happened. Mind you, most of this material is mainly a compiling of things from the Brevoort Manifesto, Joe Quesada, and others.
Going back to 2006, we saw the cracks coming.
Spidey UNMASKED… because Tony Said it was right fucking thing to do, despite it making zero fucking sense, and was a dramatic turn for the character. Fact was: It was a new status Quo, that everyone thought was brilliant, due to the uncharted possibility that an unmasked Spidey would be. It was great, as the inner writer was telling me. The only problem was that the way it was done there was only one possible solution:
Spidey would either A) Killed B) Captured or C) someone would go after his family.
And I don’t care what you say, there were only those three possibilities to go with. Even with Stark’s Ivory Tower, May was still vulnerable, be it Doc Ock or Skrulls, she would always be in danger. And while him doing so may look good on paper, it still was so poorly excuted that we ended up with C. Part of what made me mad was yes, it was one of Spidey’s Rouges Gallery that indirectly went after MJ and May in the Kingpin, it was some dude that we never met, or saw before.
So she gets shot. Spidey goes into Black, and wait, it was just good timing for the movie, it isn’t a tie in, but just good timing on our part!
Bullshit. All the Back in Black story was to Spidey was a bridge to One More Delay. I mean, there wasn’t anything new that we had in Back in Black that you needed to read.
So we got this Story, which was so plagued with editorial additions that JMS pretty much saw this coming when he posted this:
Speak of the devil and he shall appear....
For whatever it's worth, the situation is not as clear cut as one
might hope. The reality of any writer workingfor any company, DC or
Marvel or Image, is that when you're handed a franchise character,
you're basically entrusted with something that the company owns, and
the company has final say in what happens to that character, because
as a writer, you're only there for a certain amount of time and then
the next guy has to come in. Spider-Man belongs to Marvel, not to me,
and at the end of the day, however much I may disagree with things,
and however much I may make it very CLEAR to all parties that I
disagree, I have to honor their position.
In the Gwen storyline, yes, I wanted it to be Peter's kids, Joe over-
rode that, which is his right as EIC. I got the flack for that
decision, but them's the breaks.
In the current storyline, there's a lot that I don't agree with, and I
made this very clear to everybody within shouting distance at Marvel,
especially Joe. I'll be honest: there was a point where I made the
decision, and told Joe, that I was going to take my name off the last
two issues of the OMD arc. Eventually Joe talked me out of that
decision because at the end of the day, I don't want to sabotage Joe
or Marvel, and I have a lot of respect for both of those. As an
executive producer as well as a writer, I've sometimes had to insist
that my writers make changes that they did not want to make, often
loudly so. They were sure I was wrong. Mostly I was right.
Sometimes I was wrong. But whoever sits in the editor's chair, or the
executive producer's chair, wears the pointy hat of authority, and as
Dave Sim once noted, you can't argue with a pointy hat.
So at the end of the day, all one can do is try to do the best one can
with the notes one is given, and try to execute them in a professional
way...because who knows, the other guy may be right. The only thing I
*can* tell you, with absolute certainty, is that what Joe does with
Spidey and all the rest of the Marvel characters, he does out of a
genuine love of the character. He's not looking to sabotage anything,
he's not looking to piss off the fans, he genuinely believes in the
rightness of his views not out of a sense of "I'm the boss" but
because he loves these characters and the Marvel universe.
And right or wrong, you have to respect that.
jms
Which tells us that when your writer posts something like this with TWO ISSUE LEFT in the storyline, You know you have problems.
But wait, there is more. Conversation Bits in BOLD.
Having seen Joe's third interview on OMD, I think he raised a lot of fair issues. I think most of it represents accurately our conversations. It does, however, omit some of the main concerns I had with the resolution...concerns not mentioned therein, most probably as an oversight. As you know from my prior email, I was content not to respond to the prior interviews because I don't need to have the last word.
But there are some vital omissions in the interview, including the primary reason I finally threw up my hands on the book, which had mainly to do with how the resolution was handled.
To explain, here's the conversation I had with Marvel, in sum:
"So what does Mephisto do?" I ask.
"He makes everybody forget Peter's Spider-Man."
"Uh, huh. So Aunt May's still in the hospital --"
"No, he saves Aunt May."
"But if all he does is save her life and make everybody forget he's Spidey, she still has a scar on her midsection."
"No, he makes that go away too."
"Okay...:
"Then he wakes up in her house."
"The house that was burned down?"
"Right."
"But how --"
"Mephisto undoes that as well."
"Okay. And the guys who shot at Peter and May and were killed, they're alive too? Mephisto can bring guys back from the dead?"
"It's all part of the spell."
"And Doc Strange can't tell?"
"No,"
"And the newspaper articles? News footage?"
"Joe, it's been forgotten."
"I'm just asking is that stuff there or not there?"
"Not there. And Peter's web shooters are back."
"Is this the same spell or a different spell?"
"Same spell."
"How does making people forget he's Spidey bring back his web shooters?"
"It's magic, okay?"
"I see. And Harry's back."
"Right."
"And Mephisto does this too."
"Yep."
"So is Harry back from the dead, or has he been alive? If they ask him, hey Harry, what did you do last summer, will he remember? And the year before? And the year before? If he says they all went on a picnic two years ago, will they remember it?"
"It's --"
"Because if he now has a life he remembers, if he's not back from the dead, then you've changed the continuity you said you didn't want to change. Those are your only options: he was brought back from the dead, and there's a grave, and people remember him dying --"
"Mephisto changes THEIR memories too."
"-- or he's effectively been alive as far as our characters know, so he's been alive all along, so either way as far as our characters are concerned, continuity's been violated going back to 1971.
How do you explain that?"
"It's magic, we don't have to explain it."
And that's the part I had a real problem with, maybe the single biggest problem. There's this notion that magic fixes everything. It doesn't. "It's magic, we don't have to explain it." Well, actually, yes, you do. Magic has to have rules. And this is clearly not just a case of one spell making everybody forget he's Spidey...suddenly you're bringing back the dead, undoing wounds, erasing records, reinstating web shooters, on and on and on.
What I wanted to do was to make one small change to history, a tiny thing, whose ripples we could control to only touch what editorial wanted to touch, making changes we could explain logically. I worked for weeks to come up with a timeline that would leave every other bit of continuity in place. It was rigorous, and as logical as I could make it. In the end of OMD as published, Harry is alive and he's always been alive as far as the characters know...so how is that different than he was alive the whole time?
It made no sense to me.
Still doesn't. It's sloppy. It violates every rule of writing fiction of the fantastic that I and every other SF/Fantasy writer knows you can't violate. It's fantasy 101.
It troubled me that it's MJ and not Peter who is the one to actively make the decision.
I'd originally written the first issue of OMD to take place directly after May gets shot, and in fact turned in the first script directly after she gets nailed. Editorial decided to build in a block of issues for One More Day...meaning May would be in that bed for almost a *year* which I thought was just too long to make work.
And yes, I wanted to retcon the Gwen twins out of continuity, which was something I always assumed I could do at the end of my run. I wasn't allowed to do this, and yes, it pissed me off. I felt I was left holding the bag for something I wanted to get rid of, and taking the rap for a writing lapse that I had never committed. Why this aspect was not brought up in the other interview, you'd have to ask Joe.
Mainly, the book was rewritten in the editorial offices to a degree that the words weren't mine any longer, to a certain degree in three, and massively in four. If the work represents me, I leave the name there and take the rap; if it doesn't, then that's a different situation. There's just not much of my work there, especially once you get to the last dong of midnight...everything after that was written by editorial.
Whether my work is good or it sucks, it's mine. What came out of the end of OMD wasn't, hence my desire to omit the writing credit. Joe graciously offered to share it on the last issue. I think that helped. Credit where credit is due.
What I don't want is for this to turn into a public pissing match. Joe did what he did because he thought it was the right thing to do, and as EIC that's his call, not mine. I respect and admire him. I hope this will be the end of the matter.
I just felt that there were some important bits not addressed, that needed to be.
There were no words to describe this story. Any other editor would have thrown this out and let the writer finish his work. That was what brought down Marvel before: In the 90s, the Crossover dictated the story. It happened again with Civil War, and the trickle down effect was huge. Now what parts of Continuity are correct? Anything that references their love and specifically, the Marriage? It makes zero sense. JMS essentially makes this point. And while Bob Gale, whom I admire for his work to the overall science fiction/fantasy community with Back to the Future, He grossly misinterprets us fanboys as “People who will piece this together and put it in a time bubble.” Problem is, as JR Fettinger put it so plainly, you don’t see Soap Operas spitting in their base like they have in this instance. It’s so sad to see this come to it, but the fact is, there has to be a timeline estlabished. Leave it to JR or someone of his high stature to do so.
Bottom Line: This story is terrible. It didn’t even come out on time as promised, (which I think was a diabolical plan to make sure that Brand New Day came out on time.) This story had it all for cases of Bad Writing: A Editor in Chief obsessed on ‘Fixing’ the Spiderverse, A writer who got the shaft, and a another fucking ‘new Beginning’. Sound like something we all take shots of?
More Later, as we get some more info on this.
-Spideydude
