The direction in question being bass-ackwards.
On the X-Men & the Mutant Decimation
After those last couple of posts, I looked up precisely what Quesada and his writers had said in interviews about Decimation: why the decision had been made to reduce the number of mutants in the world to a mere 200 or so, and what it meant for Marvel storytelling. I found this 2005 conference call with Quesada and Ed Brubaker, one of the X-Men writers at the time.
Brubaker says that, "the Marvel universe will look more like it did in the 1960’s, where there weren’t mutants around every corner. Readers will see in this story that the government will once again begin to change the way they look at mutants." And a little further on, Quesada is apparently directly quoted as wanting to "put the genie back in the bottle" for Marvel's mutants. "He says they’re trying to make their stories matter more by cutting down on mutants, adding that the thing that makes mutants appealing is that they are a minority, and fans can often relate to that aspect."
Unfortunately for Joe Quesada, mutants are not genies. They're toothpaste, and trying to force them back in the tube is never going to work.
Decimation fails on a metaphorical level because Marvel overdid it - 200 mutants in the world are no longer a minority, they're a statistical insignificance. An endangered species and a minority culture are two entirely different things. More importantly, resetting mutant relations to the 1960s goes against everything the Marvel universe is supposed to stand for. Unlike DC, Marvel has always been about reflecting our own world. Heroes and villains duke it out in New York and San Francisco (even Cleveland sometimes!), not Metropolis or Gotham. Relationships between minorities (virtually all minorities, whether based on race, religion, orientation or whatever) and the mainstream have dramatically changed in the last 40 years. Readers identified with a smaller mutant populace in the 60s, in a time when minority populations were smaller in our world as well, and less open about their difference. Not so today. You can't just shove the mutants back into the closet.
Yet for sheer storytelling purposes, Decimation fails for the opposite reason. They under-did it. If the argument is that the X-Men books have too many characters for readers to follow and care about, then why didn't the Decimation depower or drive off stage more actual X-Men? It's like a TV executive saying that a show's ensemble cast is too large, then firing all the non-speaking extras.
Of course, I'd argue killing or depowering surplus X-Men is a mistake anyway. Every character in the franchise is someone's favorite, however strange, gross, or Rob-Liefeld-influenced. I happen to be a Maggot fan. A cast like this are toys in a toybox - if a writer doesn't like some of 'em, or a lot of them even, they can do what Joss Whedon did. Pick a small, manageable team, tell stories about them alone, and ignore the rest.
On the Erasure of Spider-Man's Marriage
When Marvel finally magicked away Spider-Man's marriage at the end of 2007, I was saddened but not really surprised. Quesada, had been arguing for this outcome for years, not just behind the scenes but also with the fans in the message board trenches. He insisted that marriage had turned Peter Parker into an old man, desperately uncool. I thought this was utterly ridiculous. A married Peter, a single Peter, surely they weren't so different? It wasn't until Quesada had implemented his "Brand New Day" that I realized he'd actually had a point.
The single Spidey of BND and beyond feels like a college student again. He's living paycheck to paycheck, constantly wondering where his life is heading (besides full-speed towards a man wearing a fishbowl on his head). He's in a constant state of free fall. The 1987-2007 married Spidey often lived paycheck to paycheck, changed careers a couple of times, and rarely knew where he was headed either (besides full-speed towards a man with a robotic scorpion's tail protruding from his posterior), but at the same time he had a sense of stability. His wife was a source of strength, and a constant variable in the mathematics of responsibility that Peter spends so much of his mental energy deliberating.
Now the marriage never happened. The entire Spidey ballgame has been changed, and in ways more complex than a simple breakup.Amazing Spider-Man writer Dan Slott, in a reply to a previous post on this blog, argued that the retcon changed very little about Peter & MJ's past: "in the current run of ASM, Pete and MJ still had a life together and all of those past stories still happened (though they happened as a 'committed couple living together' and not 'a married couple living together')."
But there is a difference between a couple in a committed partnership and a married husband and wife, or pair of wives, or husbands. You can debate the philosophical and religious significance of marriage - whether it's "just words," whether it truly changes anything about the way we live and love each other - but clearly it means something to a whole lot of human beings, or else we wouldn't be fighting so stringently these days over its definition and eligible parties.
What's more, it clearly means something to the writers and editors at Marvel as well, or they wouldn't have to use the devil and a sweeping retcon to end Spider-Man's marriage. If marriage wasn't that big a deal, a superhero divorce wouldn't be either.
And for the readers, there's a cost beyond that stability in Peter's life, that little bit of hard-won happiness after all his tragedies. Stan Lee took Peter Parker through high school and to college. His successors allowed Peter to graduate, get married, and even try to start a family. Now he seems stuck in amber, a swinging single unlucky-in-love 20-something forever more. After watching Marvel set Peter's emotional clock back 10 years, how can we expect him to ever move forward again?
When I read Amazing Spider-Man today, it doesn't feel like an ongoing chronicle of one man's epic life. With its star no longer allowed to grow and change, it feels like a series of episodic adventures, no matter how smoothly one blends into the next. It feels more like a great Spider-Man animated series (or DC comic) than a flagship Spider-Man book.
In trying to bring Marvel's two biggest franchises back to basics, Joe Quesada hobbled them. He undermined the spirit of evolution that has made readers love and relate to them for years. Our lives, our politics, our relationships, and our communities move on with time. Stan Lee's original brilliance in developing the Marvel Universe was in giving us comic heroes that grew with us.
I'd like them back, please, Joe.
- JC
[What he said. - RD]
The collection includes the most poignant tale you will ever read about the most useless super-conveyance in the annals of comicdom: The Spider-Mobile. The real story of why a guy who can swing from a web with the greatest of ease needs a frickin' car is seriously and unexpectedly beautiful, and worth the price of the book all on its own.