Last time, I covered the differences between JMS’ original script for One More Day and the story that Marvel published. JMS’s version would still have ended Peter and Mary Jane’s marriage, would still have featured Mephisto as the antagonist, and would still have included many of the things One More Day’s detractors disliked about it, like Spider-Man’s decision to unmask in Civil War, or how no one in the Marvel Universe was able to wake Aunt May out of her coma. The main difference would be that Peter was able to prevent Harry’s drug problems, which would result in cascading changes, as Norman Osborn never kills Gwen Stacy and Peter never married Mary Jane. Now it’s worth considering the implications.
Quesada was on board with reversing the death of Gwen Stacy, but no one else at Marvel was.
The only thing we kept vacillating on was Gwen Stacy; we had a debate as to whether to bring her back. In the end, Joe and I wanted Gwen back. Several months later, several of my editors and some of the creators spoke to me and lobbied to keep her dead and in the end, much to Joe’s and my disappointment, we had to leave her be. Ultimately, I felt that the arguments I was hearing for keeping her dead were stronger than my reasoning for bringing her back.
The disagreement isn’t about the Gwen thing, but about the effect on continuity of what JMS wanted to do.
In a no longer existent CBR post, Dan Slott summed up the consequences of those changes, and why it would have been a big deal. I copied and pasted it at the time.
I’m sorry, but it would have been WAY more jarring. In the current version, every story for the past 20 years pretty much happened the same way, except for substituting the marriage for a deeply committed relationship. That’s it. Gwen’s death? Civil War? The unmasking? Everything happened.
In the change that JMS proposed, which would have used magic as well (magical time-travel), Peter would have gotten Harry help for his drug problem. Norman wouldn’t have lapsed back into being the Goblin. Gwen wouldn’t have died. And Gwen would have STAYED Pete’s girlfriend (try telling the MJ fans THAT– And keep in mind the teeth-gnashing heard around the web when Pete woke up next to Gwen in HOUSE OF M– an alternate reality that everyone KNEW was going away), and ALL TIME would have been rewritten for 30 years of continuity.
There WOULDN’T have been the “everything basically happened the same way” rule where all the basic events of your comics STILL happening. There would have been a full-blown reboot. And that would’ve affected EVERY book that Spidey was tied into– and, therefore, the rest of the Marvel U. Would it have been Peter and Gwen living in Avengers Tower in NEW AVENGERS? If Norman hadn’t “died” on the night Gwen died, would Harry have ever become a Green Goblin? If Gwen never died, and Harry was cured of his addiction, would HARRY still be dating MJ? What would have happened to Liz? To baby Normie? Would Foggy Nelson still have dated Liz, the single mother with a kid (baby Normie) over in DAREDEVIL? I could do this all night. Let me put it to you this way– I’m not asking WHICH version of OMD you would have enjoyed more– I’m asking out of 2 choices, which RESULT would you rather have: 1. 20 years of continuity where “all the events happened the same way, except Peter and MJ were in a committed relationship instead of a marriage.” or 2. 30 years of continuity being completely re-written with a NEW continuity in place that is DIFFERENT from the 30 years of comics fans had read, starting with Gwen NEVER dying and still being alive all that time, Norman never “dying” and going off the map all those years– creating a vacuum filled by other characters– like Harry as a Green Goblin AND Hobgoblin, and so on. Continuity DRASTICALLY changed in ALL the Spidey comics AND all the comics Spidey has tied into SINCE The Night Gwen Stacy (didn’t) Die.
Some readers assume that JMS’s version would have included a detailed explanation about how all these changes came to be. Had this been the case, it would have needed to be quite detailed to answer basic questions about some of the most important characters. If Gwen Stacy never died, would Miles Warren still have become the Jackal? How would that have affected Spider-Man’s first encounter with the Punisher, which occurred as a result of the manipulations of the Jackal? If Norman Osborn was never believed dead, how would that have changed the Hobgoblin saga, which kicked off with a hoodlum discovering one of Norman’s armories? Should Ned Leeds still be alive, since his death was part of the larger Hobgoblin saga? In that case, would Betty Brant still be his wife?
With the published version, most elements of the married Spider-Man era stories were preserved. The stories still happened with minor differences: Mary Jane was Peter’s girlfriend rather than his wife, and more people had 21st Century technology in comics released in the late 80s and 90s. Marvel fans are already used to the idea that the comics they read occurred a little bit differently than in the original depiction, just due to the sliding timescale. There is a counterargument than when the backstory is already so precarious, any new changes complicate things too much. However, the changes in One More Day weren’t as far-reaching as what JMS would have done.
Slott also emphasized why it would have been so difficult to implement JMS’s story. It contradicted material that had already been commissioned months earlier. This is also copied and pasted from posts that no longer exist.
We were working on BND pretty far back in 2007. Remember SPIDER-MAN: SWING SHIFT? That issue, which had teases to BND characters and set-ups, came out the first week of May in ’07– and the last issue of OMD didn’t come out till December ’07. We were told all of the story beats of OMD, but we didn’t see the specific script for the last issue till we were well into our own run. This is the nature of publishing a 3 times a month book– and making sure it sticks to a schedule. For example: Before readers ever saw my 1st story arc with Steve McNiven, Marcos was drawing my 2nd arc, and I was turning in plots for my 3rd arc (NEW WAYS TO DIE). When fans ACTUALLY got to see the issues and voice concerns about Harry’s return– my very NEXT arc addressed it (the Molten Man two-parter). For most artists, it takes a good month to produce a penciled issue of a comic. That’s not factoring in the time it takes to write it before hand, the time the inker and colorist are working on a staggered schedule on the other side of that, and you also have to add all the various editorial issues AND the hard work the letterer and the production department have to do. It’s a massive group effort! Schedule-wise, when you triple THAT for a 3 issue arc (or sextuple it for a 6 issue arc!), the editor CANNOT view THAT as three books coming out in one month, he HAS to treat it as one book that has to be ready 3 months ahead of time, a second book that has to be ready 2 months ahead of time, and a third that has be ready 1 month ahead of time. (Now think about THAT for the 6 parter!!!) AND doing that EVERY MONTH. This kind of scheduling would KILL an ordinary editor– but Steve Wacker pulls it off! The plus side: When it all comes together, you get 3 issues a month! (And going by the fan mail, readers frickin’ LOVE that– and want to know why OTHER Marvel comics won’t do this.)
The minus side: Once that “train” is on the tracks, it is HARD to make sharp turns. (That’s why we created side-projects like AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: EXTRA, so we could address fan concerns– and OUR concerns– on a more flexible month-to-month basis. For example, we got a GREAT reaction on Anti-Venom in NEW WAYS TO DIE. We got lots of requests from fans who wanted to see him again– right away– but we were so far into our ASM schedule, we knew he wasn’t going to show up for a while. So I wrote an Anti-Venom done-in-one in ASM: EXTRA #2.
If Joe Quesada had fallen in love with JMS’s version, and insisted on that version of the story, it would have caused some problems in the office.
I’m sure JMS thought that his solution provided more flexibility for the later writers, by turning backstory into a blank slate. But that type of reboot is much harder to pull off in a shared universe, where changing the backstory of the Spider-Man comics affects other franchises as well. It would also have invalidated the sense that the stories in the past have consequences, while making it much more difficult to reference elements of the character’s history, when it’s all vague and undefined. It would also be a different thing if one writer were taking over Amazing Spider-Man for an extended period of time, as we’re seeing with Nick Spencer right now, and saw with Dan Slott. It’s more complicated with multiple writers who each have to worry about the other guys’ plans.
It would have been ridiculously time-consuming work for the writers to come up with Spider-Man’s new history and make it fit with the rest of the Marvel Universe. And then they’d have to spend a lot of time and finite pages filling in the readers on what elements of the backstory are different, all while coming up with Spider-Man’s new adventures in the current comics. This type of approach has resulted in a lot of headaches in DC Comics Post-Flashpoint, as writers receive conflicting information about the histories of the characters.
In his earlier work, when he showed events that occurred a generation or so in the future, there would be a major sequence towards the end of the story following up on that. Babylon 5 and Midnight Nation are examples. So it’s telling that he had a few scenes with a fugitive future Spider-Man whose identity was known to the public in Amazing Spider-Man #500, and chose not to touch on that setting during Back in Black and One More Day, in which Spider-Man was a fugitive whose identity was known to the public.
A crucial difference between the other projects and Spider-Man is that Amazing Spider-Man isn’t creator-owned. While I wouldn’t mind reading a Silver Surfer: Requiem type mini-series featuring JMS’s dark future for Spider-Man, he was aware that even an extraordinary writer is probably not going to get the opportunity to tell Spider-Man’s final story. He could always have told Quesada that he’d rather leave it up to another writer to set things up for Brand New Day, and tell his last story a different way.
But he chose to write One More Day. He even ultimately chose to keep his name on the last two issues.
There are still quite a few questions. Let’s sidestep whether One More Day was a wise decision (which would dominate the discussion.) Was a clearer explanation better? If so, should Marvel have still gone with it, even if it could contradict the work the next writers and artists were already doing?
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On the Gwen thing, the very first Spidey story I ever read (at age 5, in the UK’s weekly reprint comic) was ‘The Night Gwen Stacy Died’. I had absolutely no awareness of relationships (beyond my parents, etc) but I grasped that what had happened was somehow “important” and absolutely not what I had expected from this startling-looking comic that I had seen on the shelves for the few weeks previously. It must of shocked the hell out of me, and affected me deeply, because forty-six years later I’m still reading Spidey.
In all that time since, however, Gwen’s sole purpose to me was to give Peter backstory and emotional depth. When I eventually read all the preceding 120 issues, it seemed to me that his ‘origin’ truly only ended in #122. That’s the cap on his first emotional journey, and what makes Peter the person he is. Bringing back Gwen would be like bringing back Ben. She was a vital part of those early years, but surely she had to die.
Yes, you can play around with it all- it’s comics after all, and no matter how outlandish or awkward the story may appear to be, if told well it can work beautifully. That’s one of the reasons why I happen to love the whole Brand New Day arc and all that follows it- there really was a freshness and dynamism to the stories that ASM hadn’t had in a long while (though here I must say that I hadn’t at the time read the whole of JMS’s run, so was reacting to the last time I’d read the title regularly… Howard Mackie… so forgive me if my enthusiasm is greater than yours. I’ve since read all the JMS issues, and blimey the man can write.)
The recent crowbarring of *a* Gwen into the Universe- or multiples maybe (I don’t know as I stay away from Gwenpool and the like)- is one of those times where a truly ridiculous and terrible idea, that should render the whole thing unreadable and cause the reader to throw his arms up and the comic in the bin… has unexpectedly given us some hugely enjoyable stories. Like I say, it’s comics. Anything goes. And that’s why I say that Peter’s original Gwen should always stay very dead… but if she ever gets resurrected I will hold my tongue until I see what the writers and artists give us. Because I also remember when I thought ‘Superior’ was a truly dreadful idea that would kill the character stone dead.
@Andrew C
It still boggles my mind how any Spidey writer (or Marvel employee) in the 2000s could be clamoring to bring back Gwen Stacey of all people, especially when Peter had been happily married for ~20 years. And for them to also think that this is what the readers want, when the majority of them probably started reading the book after Gwen died.
And this is years before the first ASM movie. Nobody had any idea Gwen would have a resurgence with Emma Stone’s portrayal.
Amazingly, JMS’s original plan would have been magnitudes worse than the real OMD… which already is the worst story in Spidey’s canon, so that’s saying something.
@Jack – “Gerry Conway claiming that Gwen was ‘boring’ and there was nothing he could do with her but kill her. That boring-ness was Conway’s fault, not the character’s.”
I’ve had this argument on this site before (it may have actually been with you) but Gwen’s boringness was not a fault of Conway’s (or any current writer at the time) writing ability. It was the character. Conway and other Marvel writers/editors/etc at the time have all said that no one knew what to do with Gwen at that time except (a) have her marry Peter, or (b) kill her off (and at that time nobody at Marvel wanted Peter to get married).
She was a boring character – every other issue Peter was saying how she was a perfect girlfriend and how much he loved her. The only interesting thing about her was how she and Peter would break up every few issues because of some misunderstanding, and then get back together again. It really got repetitive. And I think (?) that sort of died off (no pun intended) after her father’s death. Once she came back from London, and Conway took over the book, I think they were no break-ups (although the Conway run pre-death is hazy for me).
Meanwhile MJ was right there, being interesting and fascinating. It’s no wonder that Conway and Marvel realized that Gwen was boring and that unless they fundamentally changed the character, there was nothing else interesting to do with her. Stan had made her “the perfect girl” for Peter, and Conway/Marvel was stuck with that.
The funny thing is that Ditko era Gwen (and *very* early Romita Gwen) did not have this problem. She had a stronger personality, wasn’t completely defined by mooning over Peter, stood up for herself, etc. If *that* character was still around, Conway could have done lots with her.
“try telling the MJ fans THAT– And keep in mind the teeth-gnashing heard around the web when Pete woke up next to Gwen in HOUSE OF M– an alternate reality that everyone KNEW was going away”
Was this really a thing? I remember Spidey’s House of M mini-series. Everyone understood this was part of an X-Men/Avengers event, an alternate reality that would be gone soon, just like when the X-Men books got rebooted in Age of Apocalypse. I don’t remember any readers at the time up in arms because Peter was suddenly married to Gwen here.
Could Dan Slott be … (stay with me here folks, I know this sounds crazy) … misrepresenting what actually happened to fit his own narrative?
“In the end, Joe and I wanted Gwen back.”
As someone who’s been reading Spidey since the last 70s, I cannot understand how anyone reading (or writing) Spidey at the time of OMD could be *that* interested in Gwen coming back. I mean, she had died in 1973. Peter had dated other women since then. He got married, for crying out loud. He had been married to MJ for ~20 years. Who was reading Spidey at this time and saying “Man, I wish Gwen would come back, *that’s* what this character needs!”
Gwen had been mentioned now and then, but those occurrences were rare, and usually were either (a) part of a montage of “the floating heads of guilt” so she’d only be one of many people Peter was thinking about, or (b) Peter remembering how much he loved Gwen in a reflective story. But in these occurrences Peter was never thinking “Man, I wish Gwen was still here, then my life would be better!”
Two people working on the book wanting to bring back a girlfriend who had died ~30 years ago just makes no sense to me. Who do they think wants this?
MJ was always more popular with the readers than Gwen, which frustrated Stan a bit. John Romita Sr related how Stan had him make Gwen more MJ-like for a while, in the hope that would attract reader enthusiasm. But killing Gwen was also a failure of imagination — Gerry Conway claiming that Gwen was “boring” and there was nothing he could do with her but kill her. That boring-ness was Conway’s fault, not the character’s. These are fictional constructs, they could anything with them. So the message I keep getting from these IRL Marvel stories about Gwen *and* the marriage is how unimaginative and hacky a lot of Marvel writers were, and are.
I’ll never be convinced the relationship between Peter and MJ was “exactly” the same as if they were married. MJ and Peter had overcome their struggles and difficulties, and their vows as husband and wife were what binded them together and encouraged them to get through even tougher times.
Spencer’s current run even has Peter come to understand and value MJ as a wife more than a girlfriend, hence why he wanted to propose to her before she headed off to shoot her movie
Reading that explanation I’m almost happy they went with what we got. Norman being cured means no clone saga, no gathering of five, no dark avengers… just that *one* plot point has insane direct ramifications… That’s disregarding everything else you mentionned in the article.
However I still believe that if they ABSOLUTELY wanted to fix what wasn’t broken there was a thousand better ways (Divorce, protective custody etc.) ESPECIALLY since the identity stuff was retconned without the help of Mephisto.