It’s Never Going To Happen
This, Dan Slott explains, is why the Spider-Man marriage will never happen again. Could Mary-Jane become Peter Parker’s main love interest again? It’s very possible. Could they wind up living together? Certainly. But Peter Parker is an unlucky underdog, and he’s never going to wind up marrying a stunning supermodel again.
Many fans daydream of a future in which someone who loves the marriage gets a job at Marvel, and slowly works their way up in the House of Ideas, until they finally have the power to reverse this decision. I can understand that seductive logic, but Slott insists that it cannot possibly happen. Marvel invested over a quarter of a century in trying to work out how to undo the marriage, and in Slott’s view, there’s a “lockstep all the way up to infinity” that will stop anybody being able to bring the marriage back.
What’s more, he goes on, with every passing year this scenario becomes ever more unlikely.
“Every 18 year old who started reading Spider-Man at the age of 8 has grown up with a post-OMD Spider-Man. For them, the marriage was undone, and they’re cool with that. Those post-Marriage stories are the ones they grew up reading. Those are the Marvel college interns cycling in now. Those are the assistant editors of the future, who will one day become the editors of the future, and the editor in chiefs in the future. And every year that gets set further into stone. There is no 30 year old or 40 year old who’s going to magically pop into Marvel editorial from the side. And year after year, the people who’ve grown up who feel as strongly as you do about the 1987 marriage status quo are further and further away from Marvel editorial positions.”
In other words, the writers, editors and artists of the future grew up in a world where the marriage was undone. That’s the status quo they’re used to, and it won’t even occur to them to change it – they’ll have other battles to fight.
Ten years on, we’re now the closest we’ll ever get to the Spider-Man marriage again. Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows gives us a glimpse of an alternate reality in which the marriage was never dissolved, and introduces us to Peter and MJ’s daughter. It’s a wonderful series, and fans of the Spider-Man marriage can head to that book for satisfaction. But if Dan Slott is right, we’ll never see that marriage in the mainstream continuity again. Given he’s been writing Amazing Spider-Man for a decade now, I suspect he knows what he’s talking about.
