Spider-Man’s a swingin’ single again – and his fans aren’t too happy that he’s back on the market.
In a highly controversial move, Marvel Comics has wiped out the friendly neighborhood wall crawler’s longtime marriage to Mary Jane Watson, reverting the perpetually put-upon Peter Parker to a 20-something bachelor who lives at home with his elderly Aunt May.
The wife-out took place in the pages of the Amazing Spider-Man No. 545, which hit comic-book stores yesterday.
In it, the publisher’s devil character, Mephisto, offers to save the life of Peter’s always ailing ancient aunt if he and Mary Jane turn their back on their love and history together.
“You two will no longer be married. Because you two will never have been married. It simply never happened,” Mephisto tells the pair, who tied the knot back in 1987, or about five years ago in comic-book time.
The devil also throws in a promise to make Spidey’s secret identity secret again, since May had been put at death’s door by an assassin looking to take out Peter Parker, who went public with his alter ego last year.
Mephisto said he was offering the your-marriage-or-your-aunt deal because Spidey’s relationship with MJ “is the rarest love of all. Pure, unconditional and made Holy in the eyes of He who I hate most. A love like yours comes about but once in a millennia and to take that away from Him . . . is a victory like none other imaginable.”
While the move wipes out their past, MJ predicted they’d find a way to have a future.
“We’ll find each other again, and we’ll be together again. I know we will, and I’m always right about these things, right?” she tells her hubby before the deal is consummated.
Fans who’d invested decades in the relationship were outraged by the supernatural annulment.
“So,” reader “jdniu197” wrote on a marvel.com message board, “every single [issue] that I have ever read never happened? Thanks alot [sic] guys. I really appreciate having a company that I’ve given a lot of money to over the years crap all over me. I guess I’m not the ‘target demographic’ anymore. . . . Good luck on future spidey stories.”
Another, “jeffgamer,” wrote: “The Spider-Man I’ve loved and read about for 34 years is dead now.
“No matter how well written or well drawn what comes next may or may not be, it is being built upon the corpse of something that I, and many other readers, cared about deeply.”