Spider-Man: Brand New Day is coming to theaters next year, a brand new big-screen adventure starring Tom Holland as our favorite wall-crawler. But even that movie can’t distract from the comic book series One More Day, which preceeded the storyline that inspired the new movie. It may be almost two full decades since One More Day released, but fans are still irritated about the conclusion of that story, in which Peter Parker makes a deal with the satanic Mephisto to save the life of his beloved Aunt May. All it cost was his marriage to Mary Jane.
Those disgruntled fans include Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, who expressed his irritation to Popverse. “I do have frustrations with it, too, I have to admit,” he said. “I don’t like retcons. I don’t like reboots. You know, I’m watching, I’m following a character or a superhero or something for years, sometimes decades, and then they come and say, ‘Oh, no. None of that stuff happened. We’re just going to start the whole thing over again.’ That always annoys the hell out of me.” And when asked for an example, Martin offered just one: “Peter Parker married Mary Jane.”
One More Day definitely came out of an impulse to say “none of that stuff happened.” The most immediate problem that Marvel needed to deal with was the fact that Spider-Man had unmasked on live television during the Civil War crossover, revealing to the world that he is Spider-Man. Although that made for some fun beats in which people who hated Spidey but loved Peter or vice versa had to deal with the reveal, the decision undercut the essential blue-collar nature of the character.
Yet, for Marvel editorial at the time, Spider-Man’s identity reveal was just the latest in a long line of bad decisions involving the character. Originally created by Steve Ditko, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby, Spider-Man was a gangly teenager who had to balance his superheroing with high school, social calls, familial obligations, and work. That dynamic more or less stayed in place as Peter graduated and went to college.
