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One More Brand New Day - Pulping Comics
So on the topic of the Spider-Man stories "ONE MORE DAY" and "BRAND NEW DAY", wherein Peter Parker's marriage with Mary Jane Watson Parker is annulled by Mephisto, the devil, Peter and she bargaining to save Aunt May's life in exchange for wiping their marriage out of reality. That's a marriage wiped out to save the life of an 80 year old woman.
What follows is a completely clean slate continuity as the erased marriage spontaneously gestates a completely different Spider-Man history in pupal form, which is opened and explored in "Brand New Day", a "fresh start" that "allows" for fun and freewheeling old-school stories to be told once again, no longer "bogged down" by "aged" characters with lives that resemble, even minutely, life.
One guy on a message board wrote, in defense of BND:
So yeah, well it doesn't bother me, I could see how these stories might upset older fans. But if it's been thirty years since the actual issue came out, I'm more inclined to think people would look on the new direction with nostalgia.
The problem is that it shouldn't be an issue of choosing sides. There shouldn't be a divide between old fans and new fans in the storytellers/editors eyes. Is there really no good Spider-Man story that doesn't rehash the past? Sure, the newer fans will never know, and older fans might be nostalgic about it, but why do a thing that's a) obviously unfaithful to everything already established, b) runs the risk of unnecessarily alienating any part of a readership (note the "unnecessarily" part of that statement, meaning anything already PROVEN time and again to alienate), and c) is the embodiment of a bad cliché in an already frowned-upon medium, frowned-upon for cultivating just such clichés?
Could Spider-Man stories really not be fun and old-school melodramatic without ending a marriage and erasing decades of continuity in order to establish some arbitrary new history which is still, for all intents and purposes, "continuity", only now fans don't know what the hell it is and so everyone on the creative side has an "out" to do whatever they please, at least until enough new continuity is established at which point Mephisto (or some other diabolus ex machina) will just have to come back and do it all over again, because "it's just not possible" to write good stories with any sort of (heaven forefend!) restrictions, like, you know, established character, and actual points of...what the hell is that thing called again? Oh right: plot.
Spider-Man is a professionally published book, with skilled professionals at the helm, both editorially and creatively. The fact that "no writer could write the marriage convincingly" is bizarre. How many writers outside of comics do you think can't write a convincing marriage? Not many, because think how limiting that would make the possible stories they could tell. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy: it doesn't work, we can't do it, we have to reboot, start over, the only way to tell a good Spider-Man story is to have nothing to care about all over again! It's like an arbitrarily selected religion, a decision made and never doubted again, but that doesn't make it god's own truth, that just makes it a religion, sycophantic bull-caca that says there's only one answer, one truth, one way, and everyone else is damn well damned. Screw that.
BRAND NEW DAY claims to be something it's not: a brand new day, and also, good storytelling. Nothing that rewrites or ignores good storytelling practices in order to be good storytelling, can in fact be called good storytelling. That's ridiculous. I understand any dude or dudette off the street can pick up BND and like it, knowing little or nothing about the "controversy" surrounding its existence, but let's be honest here: bad storytelling isn't effing controversial. It's prevalent, it's the norm, and the fact that a good story could "only" come out of bad storytelling is an arbitrary choice on Marvel's part and a poor one. They could have done this professionally, with integrity, with intelligence, consideration, and - most importantly - SKILL. Yes, it would take talent to write a good Spider-Man story without altering the material to suit personal whims. It takes exceedingly minimal talent to write from a blank slate, with a built-in fanbase, a built-in flavor, and apparently even built-in plot points stolen from out of the past. Sure, it won't bother everyone, but why the HELL would you do it if it could be done in other ways, ways that would be respected and treasured rather than scorned or (at best, with the people that even like BND) shrugged-off or ignored?
Everything good in BND could have been good without - no, not OMD, but without BND. This story of Slott's could have been by-and-large TOLD and told well without any of it. Especially the parts that are actually resonant, or fun, or thrilling. In fact, nearly every virtue of BND that Sal extols has, of course, nothing whatsoever to do with OMD or BND, but is just a part of a fun Spider-Man story, that could exist with MJ still present as wife, all characters and continuity points right where we left it, maybe just Peter's identity needing to be secret again, which could have been fixed with a fun and dramatic, clever little story. Any plot point is possible and possible to do well and while maintaining the integrity of what has come before and therefore the integrity of the actual creators.
This? And things like OMD and BND? It's not necessary. And everything in existence has good points, so of course there will be things to enjoy about OMD and BND, no matter what. Just because fun/interesting things are present doesn't mean you have to support a thing in order to support its good bits as though the simple fact of having good bits was by itself worth supporting. And supporting a thing is supporting a thing. If you do it, then you're doing it. You're all free thinking individuals, able to ignore AMAZING SPIDER-MAN or ignore me for the rest of your lives if need be, and be richer for it either way. It's called addiction and obsession to do otherwise. Though it's no surprise we comic buyers are afflicted by both, to our core. Money-making potential in Hollywood aside, we’re not a respected medium precisely because we support this kind of s***. Actual comic books still don’t turn a profit, hardly a one. This, literally, is the only thing holding us back anymore, so my patience with it is done, as should be (I suspect) anyone who wants to see the medium survive and not fade away like the pulps, which even in its resurgence of popularity today, we’re not exactly seeing actual pulp magazines again, just a series of homages. The pulps died because they refused to change. So too will comics, if they don’t.
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