Did anyone drop Spider-man when he got married?

**RDMacQ** · 11-07-2009, 06:07 PM

I wasn't that regular of a comic reader then, so that would be a no for me. I remember seeing ads for it in the various Marvel comics, and was actually kind of intrigued. I didn't know who the person he was marrying (I think my only Spider-Man comic at that point was a reprint of an early Stan Lee/ Steve Ditko comic featuring Spidey's rematch with the Vulture), but I know it certainly didn't cause me to run screaming from the series. I got into the books much later when Bagley was on the title and he was a big part of why I got into the books.

**CloneSaga** · 11-07-2009, 06:25 PM

I bought norwegian Spider-man comics from 1980 to around 1987 (they were translated and a few years behind).

At that time ('87-'88) I expanded to also buy the american copies (and loads of backissues). I will not claim that my increased interest in Spider-Man was because of the marriage, but it certainly did not diminish it. I thought the spider-marriage was surprising, but it made the Peter Parker character even more real to me than it had been before.

**Tommy Vercetti** · 11-07-2009, 06:29 PM

Nop, I've never dropped Spiderman and I think I'll never drop it. I was seriously tempted at Mackie/Byrne's era and at the beginning of BND, but I finally continued reading old Spidey and I haven't regretted it.

**Gabe De Los Muertos** · 11-07-2009, 07:50 PM

Originally Posted by Tom Daylight

It was 22 years ago - after a period that long (with the internet only having sprung up in the intervening decades) I don't think you're going to find many of those people on a Spider-Man message board.

The point was that they may have came back after OMD.

**The Shadow** · 11-07-2009, 08:02 PM

Originally Posted by RDMacQ

I remember seeing ads for it in the various Marvel comics, and was actually kind of intrigued.

I remember the ads too... but the only thing that intrigued me was the two covers! That was my first experience with two covers... one direct store (the tuxedo version) and the other the newsstand (costume version).

**RDMacQ** · 11-07-2009, 09:48 PM

Originally Posted by DetectiveDupin

The point was that they may have came back after OMD.

That may be true. But we don't know how fans who were gathered in the interim left because they disliked OMD. Some of those die hards may have come back, but they wouldn't exactly be "new" fans nor would they be of an equal number to perhaps replace those who have left.

**Burning_Pumpkin** · 11-08-2009, 06:26 AM

I think Ed Brubaker might have

.

I didn't drop it due to the marriage, but my first foray into Spidey was when Gwen was still alive, so while I never really thought about it at the time, in retrospect, the marraige definatly killed an element of Spidey that I'd previously enjoyed in the title.

The marraige was always just a non-entity for me, and because of that, I don't believe that it was at all worth it. It took while giving nothing back.

**Farmernudie** · 11-08-2009, 06:52 AM

I was excited when it happened...it made sense....was something else, in a long list of things i could relate to. The marriage made total sense!!

That's one of thing things spidey is missing, and the writers are painfully missing currently, is that they're making him very unrelatable, imo, more and more so. OMD/BND paints Pete in a way that i don't recognize him or respect him...which is annoying...because this has been my role model...and now he is like this low down hobo jerk....i dunno..Marvel is painting him in a bad light for my tastes.

Removing the marriage, and HOW they did it, makes no sense, nor is it relatable to me.

I can't relate to throwing my wife under the bus to the devil, making that deal, to save my elderly aunt. It seems like what a total loser would do, and letting ultimate evil win, with no consequences even, or care. It seems shallow. Then the drunken sex after it that Pete can't remember, and illegally breaking into hotels to have sex with a thief, among other things, doesn't feel like the Peter PArker I grew up reading at all!

**BlackToe** · 11-08-2009, 07:17 AM

I didnt quit right away after, just when I noticed the title starting to slide drastically. By then I was already sick of Spider-man, stressed out MJ and the direction they were taking him. So I transfered over to Venom minis, then Dark Horse entirely eventually.

I havent read much Marvel anything consistently until Planet Hulk and BiB.

**whiteshark** · 11-08-2009, 11:30 AM

I just thought it was a boring development to Spider-Man at that time.
Spider-Man adventures is what i look in the stories,and not the boring developments of a maried couple.

And after Peter Parker and Mary Jane got maried i never enjoyed so much the Spider-Man stories as i have been since the start of BND.

**Minihorse** · 11-08-2009, 11:44 AM

I like that he is not married now. I think the stories are filled with life and you can tell by just reading the writers are having so much fun with this character now. What I like now is that they focus on pete and not just the life of spiderman. I still believe what we are getting now is so much better than what we had been getting. The stories like sins past, the other, chapter one, and many more just weren't appealing to me at all. They are spoiling us by giving us three to four issues a month.

**stillanerd** · 11-08-2009, 11:49 AM

Interestingly enough, I was only following the comic sporadically at that time, and my exposure to Spider-Man came from other sources, mainly reruns of the 1960s cartoon, Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, the newspaper strip, and Secret Wars action figures (which how I first learned about the black costume). So when I first learned that Spider-Man got married, it was from Kraven's Last Hunt and not the Annual, and my initial response was "Hmm, Mary Jane...she looks familiar." And then I remembered who she was because the one of the first Amazing Spider-Man "comics" I had was this:

In which she was Peter's girlfriend. So, I figured "Well, if he's dated her before, I guess that makes sense" just kind of rolled with it. And besides, it was still Spider-Man with the same cool powers, fighting bad guys, and what not. Once I actually began to get into comics more and understand more of the history of the characters, it made me appreciate Peter and MJ's marriage all the more. In truth, I was far more annoyed about Marvel making Peter a clone and Ben Reilly the original Spider-Man that anything else. That and, my reaction to Ben as Spider-Man was "Geez, they changed his costume AGAIN!"

**BrightestDay** · 11-08-2009, 01:59 PM

^^^
Yeah, the Ben is the real Peter reveal, among other problems I had with the whole Maximum Clonage era crap, is what drove me to drop Spider-Man for the first and only time. I didn't start reading again until JMS's run. As unnecessary as OMD was, it's still not nearly as bad as the mess they managed to create back then with all the clone overkill.