Ten Reasons "One More Day" Is the Worst Spider-Man Story Ever
#9 - Haven't We Been Here Before?
Spider-Man made his debut in Amazing Fantasy #15 in August of 1962, celebrating his 45th anniversary last summer. The Web Head's had a multitude of titles over the years as well: Amazing Spider-Man, Spectacular Spider-Man, Spider-Man, Web of Spider-Man, Spider-Man: Unlimited, Marvel Knights: Spider-Man, Sensational Spider-Man, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man and I'm sure there have been others. My point is that there's a veritable cornucopia of Spidey stories out there for the reading. The vast majority of those stories featured the secret identity and the mechanical webshooters. Peter Parker was single until 1987 and those first twenty-five years featured plenty of stories about a down-on-his-luck Parker trying to pay the bills, get a date, keep his identity secret, and take care of dear old Aunt May, all the while fulfilling his responsibilities as Spider-Man. These aspects can be considered Spider-Man's trademarks but they can also be considered Spider-Man's cliches. After all the growth that the character has experienced in the last few years, the changes brought about by "One More Day" seem like a huge step backward. Do we really need to go back to stories that feature Aunt May's poor health, running out of web fluid, and secret identity skulduggery as convenient plot devices? I'm not saying the stories would necessarily be bad, but why try to turn back the clock instead of moving forward? This leads right into my next item...
#8 - This "New" Version of Spider-Man is Readily Available In Other Places
The version of Spider-Man that Joe Quesada sought to establish in the regular Marvel Universe post-"One More Day" already existed, basically, in three other formats. The young, single Spidey not only existed in the first quarter century of Spider books, but relaunched in books like Marvel Age Spider-Man and Ultimate Spider-Man. If this change , as Joe Quesada insists, is what's needed to get more people reading Amazing, then these two books should be outselling the flagship title, right? They're not. I didn't research it extensively, but according to Diamond's sales numbers to comic specialty stores throughout 2007 Amazing Spider-Man was consistently in the top 15 books sold for the month, Ultimate was usually somewhere around number 25, and Marvel Age Spider-Man was usually found somewhere in the low 200s.
1 comment:
Ultimate and Amazing cannot be compared in such a sense. In Ultimate, Peter is still in high school - completely dependant on Aunt May with no other options whatsoever. The character is completely different.
As for Marvel Age, that's an all-ages book that has much happier stories and lacks any real sense of continuity.
Despite whatever you want to call it (it's not really a retcon) the core of Spider-Man's continuity is still there. I have no problem with where they are, I just wish there had been a better way to do it.
That said, I politely, but wholeheartedly disagree with your 8th point.
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