THE "SINS PAST" OF JOE QUESADA AND WHAT HE DID TO SPIDERMAN

Lest you think I only have problems with the goings-on at DC Comics, let's backtrack a few years to when J. Michael Straczinsky was writing a successful run on AMAZING SPIDERMAN. It all started with an important life changing four-parter called "Sins Past," in which we discover that the most beloved dead girl in all comicsdom, gave birth to two children. Yup, can you believe that Gwen Stacy had children? Years ago I unfairly blamed JMS for writing this travesty of a strory, because it turned out the children were not Peter Parker's but those of his arch-nemisis Norman Osborn a.k.a. the Green Goblin. Well, it turned out that JMS all along had intended these children to be the by-product of Peter and Gwen's love, but Marvel Editor-In-Chief, Joe Quesada quickly nixed the idea because he felt that having children would age Peter and JMS was forced to do a rewrite of his plans with the patently ridiculous idea of Norman being the dad, thus sullying the memory of one of the most loved girlfriends in the medium. Can you believe this crap? Well, it turns out that this is not Quesada's only major screw-up in the world of Spiderman. Oh, you know what I'm talking about, but before we get there, we have to bring in the events of Marvel's CIVIL WAR, in which among other things, another mandated idiotic move occurred when Spiderman revealed his identity to the entire world. PETER PARKER WOULD DO THIS??

CIVIL WAR was a major Marvel Comics crossover event in which superheroes now had to become mandated by the government. Not a bad idea given the political climate of the times because even storywise, those repercussions are making for some interesting stories in today's Marvel Universe which had threads in SECRET INVASION and the current DARK REIGN. Now, I'm going to digress here before I get back to Spiderman, and write about the famous delay that CIVIL WAR underwent because of its artist Steve McNiven. Lateness in comics will be the subject of another column. Suffice to say, an entire months worth of Marvel's books were delayed because of the company-wide crossover, in which reatilers suffered with "make-up" comics to fill the gap. Series Editor Tom Breveroot made some of the most disgustingly insulting comments to readers and artists that I've ever read. Instead of taking the blame for a bad choice of a slow artist ( McNiven is a great artist, but too slow to hinge a company crossover on), or getting another capable artist to pick up the slack to keep the book on time, Breveroot used this as an opportunity to slam DC by comparing the lateness of WATCHMEN, DARK KNIGHT to CIVIL WAR. To be fair, DC has had similar problems, but not like what happened with CW and Breveroot's choices for comparison were uneducated because the DC titles he mentioned were not in-continuity titles that affected an entire line of comics. Furthermore, Breveroot insulted any artist in comics who ever worked as a fill-in artist by stating that comics readers don't want them. Hey Tom and Joe, has it ever occurred to you to maybe make sure your comapny wide crossover was given to an artist who could work on time, or to make sure that maybe you scheduled your event when all the issues were actually drawn and done? Kind of a no-brainer, don't you think?

Ah, but Breveroot still has his job when he should have been fired for his insults, or at least reprimanded, but such was not the case. Maybe Quesada has a liking for bad attitudes, considering his own. Ever been to a comics convention? It amazes me that DC panels are always more attended than Marvel panels at these conventions, considering that Marvel supposedly outsells DC. The DC panels are lively, fun, and its attendees are given enough teasers to whet their appetites for what's to come, without the big reveals, making fans eager for what's to come. Does Quesada do this? Does Joe Q appreciate the fact that people pay money, and stand in lines in all sorts of weather conditions to attend conventions? No, he tells his fans nothing, and that he "wants their money, and that they should buy the books,"... literally. He gives fans who attend conventions nothing to come home with and crassly tells them he wants their hard earned bucks. Nice.

It doesn't end there. So JMS continued writing AMAZING SPIDERMAN, already peeved at the editorial changes mandated by Joe Q, and then something even worse happened. Joe Q has always felt that the Peter-Mary Jane marriage was detrimental to the Spiderman character and he wanted to put an end to it. Again, he felt it aged Peter and somehow prevented better stories from being told. Hmmm, okay, I'll give him some points on this. MJ has never been more than a shallow character, no matter how many writers tried to give her a backstory to explain her flightiness, and quite frankly, MJ was a runner-up. She only moved into first position because Gwen Stacy, the TRUE love of Peter's life had been killed off years ago. Yet another column will deal with death in comics and go into Gwen there. If you don't believe me, just read Jeff Loeb and Tim Sale's SPIDERMAN: BLUE to see how true this is. So, I was in agreement and quite happy when I heard that the Peter/MJ union would bite the dust in the contraversial "One More Day" storyline. How it got there, was one of the worst ideas in the history of Marvel. Once again, JMS had one idea to put an end to the marriage, but was overriden by Joe Q again. You see, Quesada for some reason believed that divorce was wrong for a comic character like Peter Parker. Why? Peter has always been the most "relatable" hero, and since the divorce rate is so high, I bet many would have felt empathy for him; many because maybe they've been there too, or their parents have. That would have been the way to go, but no, Joe Q comes up with this infintely stupid idea that MJ and Peter make a deal with Mephisto (the devil, essentially) for the life of Peter's Aunt May, and that the marriage gets "magically" disolved and so does Peter's unmasking in CIVIL WAR. HA! Joe Q pulled a DC continuity gaffe that made anything done by their competition, in terms of continuity problems, look like nothing! So, JMS once again was pissed about Quesada's editorial meddling, that he requested his name be removed as writer of the last two chapters of "One More Day." Moreover, when Joe Q took heat for this, He said something along the lines about the story that HE wrote, that it wasn't Peter who acted out oc character by making a deal with the devil, but it was MJ. Uh, did Joe even read his own story. PETER WENT ALONG WITH IT!

And now we're in the present, where continuity is a mess in the current slew of "Brand New Day" storylines which among other things has the decades dead Harry Osborn alive and well with no explanation... and Gwen is still dead... and Joe Quesada is still running Marvel.