Greetings Crawlspacers and welcome to “Web of Love”. As most of you know, most of us here at the crawlspace love and think that Peter and Mary Jane should always be together. This feature shows examples on how genuine and real this relationship is and my retrospects.
Years ago, before I was an active columnist on this webpage, I belonged to our “now retired” message board and posted a topic on what Spider-Man meant to me. George Berryman found it very interesting and passed post to Brad and he thought it deserved to be featured on the front page. Now here I am, paying it forward to our discord member, SpyrotDog. Recently we were talking and he mentioned that it was what the Spider-Marriage meant to him and how it helped get through a troubling time when he was ten years old!
I found it very interesting. It also proves ONCE AGAIN, that Joe Quesada had no clue what he was talking about when he claimed a youth couldn’t look up to a “Married Spider-Man.”
Here’s what our member SpyrotDog had to say.
“I remember the first comic book I ever read that my dad got me a kid. It was Spider-Man fighting his clone Kaine in the sewers to rescue his wife Mary Jane. Reading that issue was my first step into the world of Spider-Man and comics in general, but didn’t know at the time would help me through a dark time in my childhood. At first as a kid you read Spider-Man and you think he’s so cool and funny and then because he wears a mask all the time that you could imagine yourself as if you were him fighting bad guys and saving people. As a kid I wasn’t fulling aware of the deep relationships he had with pre-existing characters such as Uncle Ben, Aunt May, Harry Osborn and more specifically Mary Jane Watson. It was a relationship between to people I would learn and read more about that helped me through my parents’ divorce.
I was ten when my parents got divorced and my mom, brother and I moved to an apartment away from my friends and it was hard making new friends for long while so you find things to help you get through it. Like watching TV, games and comic books. The only ones I would read were Spider-Man and I just remember maybe seeing Spidey cracking a joke or being up the Green Goblin would help, but I started to noticed a relationship that I started to connect to that I felt a connection that I loved seeing because it was a much stronger force that I loved seeing as it was the exact opposite of the love that I saw fall apart with my parents and that was the love I saw between Peter and Mary Jane Watson!
I saw the love they shared a truly inspiring and it felt real to me and I was thankful to see this with one of my favorite characters and I felt that I could be a better man than my dad someday when I meet ‘that’ person I could connect with and share the same kind of love Peter and MJ have. Would I loved was also they we’re supposed to be the couple they were today, but it was series of accidents and a love so powerful that sometimes words can even describe it. It’s just a feeling of joy and happiness I get whenever I see them together. Even after OMD which did the exact opposite of what was intended. It didn’t feel like a divorce it felt unnatural and even then found their way back to each other. To mean what they have is true love and it concurs all and made me happy and ready to have the same kind of love they share with that special person in my life.”
There you go Crawlspacers! Just another shining example of how the marriage between Peter an Mary Jane felt REAL, even to a ten year old at the time and not to take a sip out of Quesada’s “Cup of Joe” when it concerns Spider-Man.
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You have a point.
The lack of growth on Peter’s character, and sometimes his regression, is wearing me out.
So much so after having read Life Story and since I’m reading all his issues from the beginning.
My vanity enjoys the fact that I have helped push a thread. But does anyone think I have a point, or am I yelling at kids on my lawn.
The real tragedy is that Spyrotdog’s first Spidey book was with the ’90s Kaine. Poor child!
I smell a class action lawsuit…
We’re a bunch of losers whose lives are so bad that there is no hope that we actually do something with our lives and will never have something approaching a healthy relationship?
WHY are you describing my life?! LOL
Wait, are you saying it’s all Marvel’s fault I screwed up?
When I first started reading comics in general and Spider-man in particular, one thing I liked was that the past mattered. My first Spidey was Amazing 135. The first appearance of the Tarantula and the second appearance of the Punisher.
I knew nothing of the previous year, but Marvel had footnotes explaining the past. I became amazed that they killed his girlfriend. (Yes, I am old.) But I liked MJ. I remember thinking I better keep reading or I will miss out. I also remember thinking that Superman 1974 was the same as Superman 1964 and 1954. They even had the same artist – Curt Swam – drawing the character. No offense to Swan, who was a wonderful man and a dedicated artist who truly loved drawing Supes, but it made Supes look stagnant and unchanging, therefore dull. It didn’t matter if we read Supes in the 50s, 60s or 70s. Which in turn, meant the stories didn’t matter. Everything would stay the same.
Having Peter be a loser doesn’t show Marvel respecting its readers, especially its young readers. We are supposed to empathize with a guy who can’t pay rent. A guy who is henpecked by his maidenly aunt. A guy who can’t keep a girl because he treats them like trash or that they have pheromonal rape powers? Is that what Marvel thinks of us? We’re a bunch of losers whose lives are so bad that there is no hope that we actually do something with our lives and will never have something approaching a healthy relationship.? Screw you Marvel.
I say editors have a lack of imagination. Can’t imagine a married Spidey? Imagine harder. The Pete MJ relationship in the last movie really hit with fans, especially female fans who wouldn’t normally have anything to do with a comic book character. Something to think about Marvel.
Obviously Joe Quesada thinks he knows more about the character than an actual READER of the book.