Who is Mary Jane?

Wel,, it’s kind of a complicated question, since it depends entirely on the angle or angles you’re approaching it. For instance, say you want to look at her from a pure textual basis, no outside influence or context. That would mean reading everything that involves her and forming a perspective on all that. Another approach is to try mapping authorial intents, which makes sense to do considering how Spider-Man as a series changes writers quite a lot, and with it the directions for characters can radically alter as well.

However, as you can probably already tell these angles lend themselves to be inter-related, and it’s why most analytical frameworks use a mix of both, mine included. Since Marvel doesn’t do cosmic retcons of continuity the way that DC does, part of the complexity of writing a character for them is to provide an illusion of continuity stemming all the way back to a character’s origin, with new writers generally needing to conform to what was established beforehand along with any new wrinkles or material.

This of course doesn’t prohibit reinventions of established elements, of course. Chris Claremont’s X-Men run was super notable not just for how it took elements from Stan Lee’s original run and made them work, but also introduced wholly new ideas, characters, themes, and concepts across a whole spectrum. Thus, the vast majority of what we conceptualize AS X-Men has its origins here and not with its original creator.

Putting that together, this helps to explain why Stan Lee felt as if sometimes the characters he was writing had a mind of their own, and why more often then not Mary Jane came across as more lifelike then Gwen Stacy. While it’s not literally true that characters have a mind of their own, when grappling with serious questions of perspective and characterization it can feel as if they do because of how disparate elements can have interesting connections.

This presented an interesting problem for Gerry Conway, since while he was very much more interested in writing Peter and MJ as a couple, it would come off incredibly mean spirited and crass to immediately have them become romantically involved so soon after Gwen’s death.

To that end, the remainder of Conway’s run deals realistically with the fallout of Gwen’s death along with a deepening of the main characters and past events. I mentioned before how Conway’s age being so close to Peter’s gave him a new perspective, and indeed a lot of the events that happen here are elements which directly pull from his personal life. From struggles with rent and depression, needing to progress in a career, finding new love, it’s all here and it provides a sense of emotional reality which was missing a bit from Stan Lee’s more idealized representation of young adulthood.

Now let’s get into some text. Despite initially proclaiming otherwise, Peter feels an immense amount of guilt for failing to save Gwen, and lashes out at those close to him. He still has a responsibility to those he loves and to people as Spider-Man, but this trauma weighs heavily and it takes him a long time to get back into the swing of things. To counterbalance, MJ makes continuous attempts to reach out and steer him away from closing himself off to the world. She doesn’t handle things perfectly due to her earlier flirting making her kindness come across wrong, along with her not fully having a grasp on what she truly feels about Peter.

This builds into a short conversation she has with Betty in #131, where she doesn’t want to love Peter because it would mean a true commitment rather then surface level fun. Pointedly, she references a quote from Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind, ‘tomorrow is another day’.

In the context of Gone With The Wind, Scarlett evokes this motto whenever hardships plague her as a way to avoid facing difficult problems or realities. Paradoxically, you can also read the line as her resolving to make changes for the future as informed by the past.

Applying this to MJ creates the implication that her continual seeking out of fun is some form of coping mechanism for what’s happened to her in the past, and for her it feels safer to maintain a status quo of partying and non-committal relationships rather then delving further into her own insecurities. This is a fairly logical writing decision to help justify MJ becoming more rounded, and is rooted in those disconnected elements that earlier writing had alluded to but not elaborated on.

Rounding this dynamic out is Harry, who in part serves as a dark reflection of Peter’s struggles. Due to drug use and his complicated feelings towards his father, he doesn’t feel able to emotionally connect with his friends. Combined with him witnessing the death of his father, and his suspicions being confirmed with him discovering that Peter is Spider-Man, he tragically turns into a metaphorical clone of Norman’s ideals and values.

This is some really solid serialized storytelling, the contrast between Peter and Spider-Man works perfectly and the supporting characters are expanded upon wonderfully, I really feel that Peter and MJ start coming into their own as characters and it helps too there’s some much needed nuance applied to the likes of Liz Allen and Flash Thompson as well. This then builds into a storyline that I think is pretty solid but attained a degree of infamy due to later events: The Original Clone Saga, in which some guy named the Jackal, real name Professor Warren, creates a clone of Gwen Stacy in an attempt to torment Peter for her death, having developed an extreme fixation on her during his biology classes. He even goes so far as to create a clone of Spider-Man to duke it out.

This storyline was initially conceived due to the backlash Stan Lee received towards Gwen’s death that I mentioned before. At the time bringing people back who very clearly died and didn’t like, fall off a cliff or something was not at all a commonplace occurrence, but the reaction to Gwen’s death was so strong that Lee attempted to order it anyway.

While not a direct quotation from Lee, a recollection from Steven Englehart in 1981 pinpointed an editorial restriction that was put in place around 1976.

“ Well, just "don't be so bizarre. try not to progress so fast." There's that famous meeting that happened before the quitting time when Stan said, "I don't want progress; I want the illusion of progress now. We don't want people dying and coming out of the strips, we don't want new girlfriends, we want to try to keep it the same."

The Archetypal Archive "PROGRESS AND PROCESS PART 1"

The phrasing of ‘coming out of the strips’ I think ties into the idea of characters having a life of their own, in that something about them is affecting the cultural milleu in some uncontrollable way. While not a hard and fast rule on Lee’s part, his position as boss certainly had an effect on the writing of the time.

So now not only was Conway faced with continuing a continuity Stan helped start, but he was also having to attempt to backtrack a decision which was being linked back to him fairly or not, and I suspect was in no small part why he stopped writing for the title after this. Percolating on this conundrum, he then realized that there was simply no way to bring back Gwen without undermining the very real emotions people felt with her death.

Thus, this feeling ended up becoming the story, with the usage of clones being used to explore the nature of grief and memory, and how holding on to the past without letting go is self-destructive and dangerous.

While you can definitely criticize the absurdity of The Jackal being this hyper-competent schemer able to clone people, since even for the time this was pretty out there, if we apply allegorical meaning to him it makes sense. Professor Warren is an idiosyncratic character who serves as a stand-in for an audience and creative forces wanting Gwen back with no regard for the reality in which she originally existed in. Peter’s battles with his own identity as Spider-Man was thrown in sharp relief over Gwen’s death, and it’s only when battling a clone of his from that same period that he realizes he has to accept the unknowable parts of himself and move on.

MJ’s struggles with trusting Peter due to her past as well results in her pushing to be the focus in his life over Gwen, taking those first shaky steps towards truly trusting someone else and fighting for something that she genuinely wants.

It all comes together extremely well despite some messiness of execution and the behind the scenes drama. Gwen’s clone rejects Warren and forces him to see how messed up the situation is, which gives him a brief moment of redemption sacrificing himself to save the captured Ned Leeds. The explosion kills one of the Spider-Men with it left somewhat ambiguous who survived, and the two epilogues do a great job wrapping things up along with providing a look forwards.

While we can certainly debate to what extent Gwen’s clone is herself or the real Gwen, I think she puts it best by considering herself more like Gwen’s sister due to how events have changed her perspective. From an allegorical perspective, this Gwen being allowed to walk away never the return fully knowing Peter’s secret identity and accepting it provides a sense of closure that was missing from the shocking, sad way Gwen died before, and gives her just that small degree of interiority and agency.

The final panels of Conway’s run directly mirroring the…day…Gwen died, only with Peter choosing to stay with MJ this time is a brilliant callback and feels perfectly in-line with what this run has built towards. It’s rare for a comic book writer to be able to forge out an ending to their stories, so it’s to be celebrated that Conway got to end things on his own terms.

Just to help put a nail in the coffin and prevent this type of storyline being revisited in the future, the Archie Goodwin fill-in Issue 150 reinforces that his care for Mary Jane is what separates him from his clone. His clone was created in a lab with Gwen and only received his current memories briefly, and so never had the time to experience in a material sense the emotional connection Peter formed with MJ after Gwen’s death.

It’s a pretty smart way of handling the issue, and after dropping his clone’s body in a smokestack that’s pretty solidly the end of that, but I suppose if you want to be sure then during Conway’s run on the sister series Spectacular Spider-Man in 1988 he wrote a story which revealed there was no actual cloning involved, and instead Warren genetically altered a woman named Joyce Delany to suit his goals, with the clone of Spider-Man being his murdered assistant Anthony Serba. (spectacular 149)

This feels kind of random and a bit convoluted, but it was a tie-in for the Evolutionary War so I guess that was the justification to have Spider-Man involved. Notably, the end of the story again reinforces that Peter loves MJ now instead of Gwen, even saying that he loves her more then he ever loved Gwen.

So, all right, that’s like…a thousand nails in the coffin. Things are very solidly and definitely resolved, and there is no possible way to ever dig up the past and try to do this again. No Dark Gwenpool, no nothing.

Right?



…



RIGHT?-

After Conway’s departure, his then-roommate Len Wein hopped onboard, having already established himself as a writer with his Swamp Thing series at DC along with helping reboot X-Men.

Wein was given a status quo that involves Peter and MJ dating, so he puts in the work maintaining that which leads to some honestly really great interactions between them, a particular highlight for me would be their argument in issue 165. After being left behind so many times during dates, MJ had been teasing Peter by acting very friendly with Flash, something she’s done previously with Peter when dating Harry to try to get Harry’s attention. Unlike the forced circumstantial drama with Gwen and Flash I discussed before, MJ doing this is entirely rooted in her character flaws and gets very pointedly called out and addressed. This peels things back a bit and shows that MJ has deeply rooted insecurities when it comes to long-term commitments, and deals with abandonment in unhealthy ways to cope.

This confirms what I noted before about how MJ puts on a front to the world that often only comes down in intense moments. When pushed by someone she cares about, she is absolutely very sweet and understanding, and it’s this friction between what she appears to want and what she actually needs that lends her and Peter’s relationship an interesting dynamic, although I would argue that Wein’s run has the flaw of keeping things in a holding pattern rather then progressing things further or trying to develop Mary Jane with a stronger psychological profile. Still though, even something more arguably mundane works to compliment the high stakes drama of Conway’s run that led to this.

Now, I’ve already mentioned the sister series Spectacular Spider-Man, and it’s during this run where it first started as a fuller realization of the previous 1968 magazine version.

This created a new testing ground for creators to work on Spidey as a supplement to Amazing not dissimilar to Marvel Team-Up, only having more of an air of legitimacy in terms of canon. This provided space for characters and moments that wouldn’t fit in Amazing, often with events taking place in the gaps between panels there.

This becomes especially important when dealing with the next few runs by Marv Wolfman and Denny O’Neil, since for the first time ideas about characterization and story progression can have multiple interpretations while a run is ongoing rather than only being controlled by whoever the current writer of Amazing is.

You might know Wolfman from his work on Teen Titans and Tomb of Dracula. His run is incredibly interesting for its idiosyncrasies, as he wanted to provide a more back to basics approve evoking the style of Lee and Ditko’s run, while also taking some bolder narrative swings and introducing new conflicts and characters. As you can imagine, the results of this are pretty hit or miss, with a few decisions only working out in the long term due to other writers. For our next discussion, let's dig into the implications of some of the choices here, as this ‘back to basics’ approach to characterization and continuity is something which would come to define most of the creative and editorial decisions that plague Spider-Man as a story now.

The biggest signpost for this would be the marriage proposal Peter gives to MJ in #182, motivated by a very sick Aunt May pushing for them to be together. MJ somewhat coldly rejects the proposal and breaks up with Peter, and more or less exits the series for nearly four years (barring brief cameos) in #193 after being stood up on a last chance date.

This gap in appearances far exceeds what happened to promote Gwen over her back with Lee and Romita. Tellingly, just one issue after MJ exits and the Betty relationship collapses, Black Cat is introduced along with April Maye who you probably already forgot, both of whom take an immediate romantic interest in Spider-Man. It’s like all the single ladies in this series sensed the power vacuum and swooped in, it’s hilarious.

While I’ll talk in more depth on all that later, it’s important to keep in mind that Wolfman didn’t entirely make this decision in service to the story or characters, he chose to break them up because of his belief that MJ had been ‘altered’ into a caring person, which goes against her initial characterization that he ironically feels lacks in depth. While he does think Peter wants to get married, he also thinks he's best characterized as a loser who works hard, and thus he shouldn't be dating someone who looks like a supermodel and doesn’t believe MJ wants to be married.

In other words, Who Mary Jane Is to him is just this original appearance of hers during the Stan/Romita run, which is incredibly telling not just for how it doesn’t factor in her actual characterization during Issues 42 and 43, where she’s not only full of personality but also has the goal of being an actress and easily gives Peter an excuse to fight Rhino, but also motivates Peter to be more independent thanks to seeing MJ live on her own.

This perspective also doesn't factor in her characterization during Ditko’s run, which was quite a bit different then the party girl persona we ended up seeing.

If you combine those teases and the instant chemistry her and Peter have when they finally meet, it certainly seemed like there was plenty of untapped potential to explore which ended up manifesting in both Conway and Wein’s runs, which includes MJ thinking about marrying Peter by the way.

It's perfectly understandable for Wolfman to read these writing decisions for MJ as alterations to her character, since that is definitely the case, but it comes across hypocritical to apply this lens as a negative to MJ when you consider that in the same run he pushed Peter into graduating college out of the fear that if he didn't write it Peter would be stuck there for potentially even longer.

Notably, Wolfman tends to be rather contradictory in his reasoning for having this graduation take place, since while he did fear him being in college forever he also planned to just leave him in graduate school and try to forget how old Peter actually is.

I read this as Wolfman acknowledging the very real frustrations that fans and creators were having over how long it was taking Peter to graduate college in comparison to high school, a scant 28 issues vs. a lengthy 154, and so caved on something he personally believed in service to the story, something he was in the unique position to do at the time since he was both the writer and editor, and thus couldn’t be overruled outside of Stan Lee or Jim Shooter.

This makes it telling that he caved on this in service to progressing the character of Peter, but doesn’t do the same for MJ and actively ignores any growth she’s experienced up to this point to get her out of the picture. Wolfman is entitled to his interpretation of MJ, but he is not the only interpretation baked in here.

With all that being said, I actually think this decision worked out for the best in the long term despite being a pretty sudden shift at the time. With Spectacular Spider-Man #21, Bill Mantlo interprets the breakup in a much more sympathetic way that accounts for MJ’s character growth, having her explain how she still loves Peter but doesn’t feel ready for marriage. This reframes her initial reaction not as her laughing in his face about the prospect, but moreso trying to provide a fun spin on the conflict and uncertainty she feels in a way that is unintentionally hurtful. She still has a lot of growing to do, and this acknowledgement helps paper over what would otherwise be a regression.

Mantlo’s writing also help reinforce why MJ leaves when she does in #193, it’s not just the fact that one specific date was broken so much as a continual pattern where she is regularly not the focus of Peter’s life, and so she decides to take steps to advance her own career rather than continuing cycling around with no end. To Wolfman’s credit, he does provide at least a little nuance as well, possibly realizing how harsh her proposal rejection came across, with MJ clearly holding the torch for Peter still and a stray thought bubble revealing that her parents are divorced.

The other good thing about the breakup is it provides an opportunity not just to develop other romances, but also to highlight things about these other people who do provide things for Peter that MJ doesn’t, but ultimately are less compatible with him for one reason or another.

This is shown with the Betty Brant storyline, where Peter and her have a romantic fling for comfort to cope with the respective issues with their partners. It’s clearly set up as a codependency, with Betty being on the brink of extreme depression and lowkey kind of emotionally manipulating Peter to stay with her, along with providing genuine support with Aunt May and their friend group. While Peter ends up doing the right thing and breaks up with her when things come to a head, he does it in a way that is too harsh which causes further friction.

I personally don’t like this storyline, but it shows how you can’t just go back to the past after something goes wrong in your life, reigniting old flames in this way just hurts everyone involved.

Many of these romances were explored in Spectacular Spider-Man once Peter starts graduate school, which helped give it an identity beyond being just more Amazing per month.

Things start off more then a bit rocky, with April Maye being a Gwen Stacy clone, no not literally, before morphing into a Lois Lane ripoff and disappearing after like, 5 total appearances.

Marcy Kane, while slightly less of a Stacy not-literally-clone, ended up being the victim of multiple writing changeovers and never really had a solid foundation to build characterization from. The most she gets beyond being serious with school is the fact she’s actually a brunette, and when that fails to win him over she turns out to be a space alien and disappears forever. No, I’m not kidding, that actually happened. Comic books!

Things improve with Deb Whitman, Dr. Sloan’s secretary, who is very shy and withdrawn due to abuse she’s suffered thanks to a husband she’s now separated from. I actually really like Deb a lot, she feels like a real person and has a lot of emotional depth, which makes it all the more awful when Peter continually leaves to do Spider-Man stuff while she’s struggling, to the point she actually starts dating someone else that she might not feel necessarily as compatible with, but treats her well and is there for her when she needs it.

I would say this comes across the worst during O’Neil’s run, which itself I find to be fairly mediocre besides the annuals.

This isn’t because O’Neil is a bad writer since that is far from the case. He worked on that Green Lantern series I mentioned previously along with a plethora of now-classic Batman stories which helped shaped his more modern interpretations. Really, it came down to his writing style not really vibing with Spider-Man, which unsurprisingly led to a pretty brief run.

Anyway, part of the issue is that O’Neil lacks interest in Peter’s personal life in favor of superhero shenanigans, so Deb ends up being very out of focus, and when she is around she gets ignored. Peter comes off incredibly rude and dismissive, which ends up being accounted for thanks to some random supervillain messing with his emotions, but all that really means is sidelining a potentially interesting character in the mainline for what amounts to forced, uninteresting drama.

Heck, even when the mind control wears off all Peter can think of is what Deb can provide for him, without a care in the world for what she’s struggling with. Unlike with MJ or even Gwen, Deb never really calls Peter out for this shitty behavior, which makes it all feel very uncomfortable.

Speaking of MJ, even she catches a random stray, with O’Neil writing it so Peter still hasn’t moved on from Gwen, framing his relationship with MJ as a ‘rebound’, a further regression then even Wolfman dared go to.

Deb never fully emerges as a strong supporting character on her own, so seeing the writing on the wall and the positive response to Black Cat, Deb ends up being written out of the story once Stern hopped on Amazing. Basically, Deb ends up seeing Spider-Man swing off just as Peter disappears and in a shockingly realistic turn of events figures out he’s Spider-Man. Took someone long enough!

However, due to that aforementioned abuse she ends up feeling as if she is confusing reality with fiction, and so after Peter gives a form of metaphorical shock therapy by dressing up as Spider-Man, Deb concludes that Peter couldn’t actually be him which gives her the motivation to divorce her husband and move on.

Now, I have very mixed feelings on this as someone experienced with abuse, since a lot of the writing plays uncomfortably close to media stereotypes and misinterpretations about abuse. The main problem for me is that we never really get an elaboration on how Deb herself feels about her ex-husband, we are only told Biff’s perspective on events.

While contextualized as characters in a story who don’t have a nuanced perspective on abuse and its complexity, the lack of Deb’s side of the story ends up leaving these assumptions unchallenged, which is certainly not helped by Peter oh so conveniently not coming clean and leveling with Deb that he is indeed Spider-Man. Part of that is an issue of that elusive status quo mandating that nobody can know Peter’s identity, but it ends up turning a moment where Peter is taking responsibility for the harm he caused someone into a moment where he avoids responsibility in service to himself.

That being said, I still think this works even if unintentionally. For me, the reason why Deb thinks Peter can’t be Spider-Man isn’t some shock therapy reverse psychology nonsense, it’s because when actually confronted with an idealized icon being this flawed human being she realizes how constructed the ways in which she thinks about people truly is.

To cope with abuse she felt like she had to idealize her abuser as a saint despite reality not matching. To cope with Peter being negligent of her vs. her very dedicated and real boyfriend Biff, she used an idealization that Peter must be Spider-Man as a way to excuse his overall crummy treatment of her.

Obviously Peter is literally Spider-Man, but this serves as a critique of his character by showing how he hasn’t been living up to the mantle. It doesn’t make sense for him to BE Spider-Man, because he isn’t being responsible as Peter.

So yeah, needless to say this is very messy. While Deb does show up like 25 years after this during Civil War and seems to be doing fine, it amounts to a supplemental cameo and due to later events that we’ll get to she’s sort of trapped in a canon limbo where this conflict with Peter is forever unresolved. It’d be cool to have a writer revisit her at some point since hey I’d like that.

But as one door closes, another opens, and with it we get the reintroduction to who I would argue is Peter’s second greatest love interest: Black Cat.

Introduced in that 2-parter spanning issues 194 and 195, followed by a second one closing out Marv Wolfman’s run that’s so terrible we all collectively pretend it didn’t happen, Felicia Hardy starts off as an anti-hero, turning to cat burglary and petty theft after spending years reading about her father’s exploits. Her and Pete cross paths after she breaks her father out of prison so he could die at home, and she apparently dies herself only to keep popping up. Nine lives, after all.

What makes Cat stand out compared to other love interests of the time is how she flips her expected role. Instead of being in love with Peter Parker and hating Spider-Man, she instead loves Spider-Man and is at best ambivalent towards Peter, since part of why she values The Spider is the freedom and romance he represents from the constraints of the day to day grind. In a lot of ways, she constructs her ideals from media depictions of heroism, so she reflects some of the wants and desires of the audience with how she just wants the escapism and not the reality.

Peter in turn knows that Black Cat might not be the best for him, but falls for her regardless since it feels good for once to be validated in what he’s doing as Spider-Man, and for a time their love helps deter Felicia from crime.

This romance story arc spanning from Spectacular 76-100 is where I would argue Spectacular goes from a decent sister series to a genuine rival to Amazing’s quality. Combine this with Stern’s concurrent run and this gets Spidey back in full swing after a bit of a slump.

That said, while Black Cat provides a sense of fun and adventure that's been missing in Peter’s life for so long, it was ultimately doomed to fail thanks to all the secrecy and lack of acceptance Cat has for the whole of Peter’s identity. When they break up, it's notably Peter calling out this behavior, which is kind of ironic considering how much he hides from everyone else he loves. Sometimes the mirror hurts.

So with all of these love interests I've talked about, the core problem remains that none of them truly love the entirety of Peter as a person, picking and choosing aspects to love and making excuses for the parts they hate. He isn't being seen as a full person, and there's no foundation in there for a healthy long term relationship.

But you know who does see both Peter and Spider-Man as a full whole? In fact, someone who’s been struggling with seeing him like this the entire time?



Face it tiger, it's Mary Jane Watson.

Yeahhhh let’s get into Stern’s Amazing run, which in many ways helped to rectify some of the flaws of Wolfman and O’Neil’s tenures. A lot of the supporting cast is back in prominence, and there’s a greater balance when it comes to Peter’s social and professional life, which leads to a run that is overall really engaging, able to handle new material like Hobgoblin and reinventions of what was established cleanly and elegantly.

All that stuff I was talking about with Black Cat for instance only happened because Stern had taken elements from her initial stories and reshaped them to make sense from a psychological basis. He doesn’t break or discard what came before, but instead works with it to the benefit of the narrative and characters on the whole.

Thus, after setting up Betty Brandt, Black Cat, Vulture, and so on with a more solid foundation, Stern turned his sights on Mary Jane, wanting to provide her with a backstory to help consolidate her various character traits.

Stern reintroduces Mary Jane in Issue 238, the same issue Hobgoblin is introduced, apparently having moved to Florida for a while with her aunt.

While Stern wasn’t on the title for long enough to fully develop his plan for MJ, he did provide notes to Tom DeFalco which he followed accurately, and we can see from MJ’s various interactions here how meticulously thought through this development is.

The largest example of this would be issue 246, “The Daydreamers”, a personal favorite of mine. This one’s a loose series of vignettes across four characters all dealing with their perspectives on the world and themselves via daydreams which blur the line between real and fiction.

Mary Jane’s segment is particularly noteworthy, as it’s the first time in which it’s made explicit in the text how she puts on a front for the world in order to hide her real self, framed through the use of film and stage acting. The academic term for this would be masking or social camouflaging, and is commonly done by victims of trauma in order to perform specific social roles. In Mary Jane’s case, having her life story presented as something she needs to perform, and performing oh so perfectly, indicates that her masking was something she started doing from a young age.

This is also the first time we learn anything about MJ’s sister, Gayle, a living ghost whose dreams died so she could take care of her kids. Considering MJ’s incidental thought about her parents being divorced in Wolfman’s run along with how she a bit callously manipulates men around her when she doesn’t have their attention, we can understand that MJ’s fear of commitment comes down to abandoning her own past for a future of all surface.

This soon comes to a head with DeFalco’s run.

After a fierce battle with Puma trashes Peter’s apartment, the emotional intensity of the situation causes Mary Jane to reveal that she knows Peter is Spider-Man, and in fact had known for years.

This is a game-changer of a moment, and what's funny is this particular revelation came as a surprise to DeFalco, who felt that MJ herself had said it, an interesting phrasing calling to mind what I was saying before with Stan Lee feeling like MJ took over his writing.

Issue 259 lays all this out. After resolving not to run away again, MJ provides an extensive monologue that details her history with parental abuse and how much it informed her perspective on the world, going from broken home to broken home before finally having enough and abandoning her sister Gayle so she can try to live life the way she wants. I particular love the use of 9-panels by Ron Frenz here, creating a visual callback to Ditko’s run which makes sense seeing as how many of these events are implied to be concurrent with then.

Similar to how Black Cat idolizes old Hollywood and stylizes herself after archetypes she sees in that media to help deal with the absence and loss of her father, MJ idolizes the concept of ‘masks’ and keeping up a specific aesthetic in order to hide the pain of rejection and loss. This provides multiple thematic parallels to Peter’s story and it absolutely works to help build up Peter and MJ’s relationship as deeper than just sexual attraction. Despite MJ’s reservations with him being Spider-Man, she is the only person who truly sees Peter in his entirety rather than in part, and Peter in turn now shares that with MJ.

This is far and away one of the deepest changes to a character we’ve seen so far, and despite many of the events still to come is something which has permanently influenced all of MJ’s later characterization. There is no going back after this point.

Now, what makes this particularly interesting is that Roger Stern never intended to have this development lead into MJ and Peter being married, he intended them to be close friends once MJ told her backstory and have her set him up on terrible dates, which sounds pretty hilarious.

He also planned to introduce a new love interest in a small cameo appearance before developing her in full later, someone he felt more closely aligned with Peter’s interests although we can only speculate what that would entail. Cross-referencing his outline notes, I suspect that person was intended to be Shirley, whose only appearance is in these two pages of #249. You can see here she was intended to show up again in issue 264, but plans being changed along with editorial problems quashed that.

Stern’s spoken negatively about the relationship with Peter and MJ, even going so far at one point to say that they’re oil and water together, which is a strange assertion to make when you consider that it was him consolidating already established information about MJ that made their compatibility more obvious, which DeFalco and other writers ran with.

Similar to MJ’s first full appearance in the narrative during Romita’s run, Stern’s work developing MJ’s psychology and DeFalco adding the wrinkle of MJ knowing Peter’s identity ended up creating a development which surpassed the intentions of both of them.

But hold on, I pretend I hear you asking. Mary Jane said she knew for years that Peter is Spider-Man, and yet throughout this explanation of her backstory she doesn’t say WHEN exactly she found out.

Well for that, we can look to Spider-Man: Parallel Lives written in 1989 by none other than Gerry Conway, which takes MJ’s backstory and shows how it runs parallel to Peter’s with new scenes explaining how and why she avoided him in the early days.

Notably, one added scene shows MJ discovering that Peter is Spider-Man the night that Uncle Ben died thanks to her looking out the window to try to avoid dealing with the pain Aunt May is feeling.

This particular retcon is subject to a lot of debate by both creatives and the fandom, with some going so far as to declare it non-canon or argue it makes MJ come across much worse under the assumption that she loved Peter only for being Spider-Man.

I don't believe either of these are the case, but let's just take it slowly.

First, both Untold Tales of Spider-Man #16 and One Moment In Time acknowledge this detail as factual and accurate, and since both of these are definitely canon since details introduced there were in turn referenced by later writers, that therefore pulls the details of Parallel Lives into canon as well.

For the sake of argument if we just act as if Untold #16 is the canon version of events, we can still see how MJ struggles with a lack of understanding of Peter BECAUSE he puts on a brave mask as Spider-Man. She can't reconcile the contrast between the dutiful nephew and the soulful superhero specifically because of how it reflects her own conflict between her public and private personas. She can relate to the idea that nobody knows the real Peter, because she feels nobody knows the real Mary Jane. Thus, she avoids Peter for years until she sorts out her feelings and resolves to take that leap.

With that in mind, let’s examine one negative critique from Dan Slott, who compares Parallel Lives unfavorably to One More Day and One Moment In Time due to how Parallel Lives doesn't walk us through each moment that has now been altered by this change or provide an explanation, arguing that there is clearly evidence of MJ not knowing for hundreds of issues and this directly contradicts MJ’s explanation in 258, which was written more to account for why she left after the marriage proposal during Wolfman’s run.

While I’ll get into the issues with OMD/OMIT and a deeper discussion of Slott as a creator in later sections, I want to provide the note that those stories absolutely do not walk us through every changed moment, and Slott has stated he prefers Mary Jane’s initial characterization in the Romita run and feels that later additions were ultimately subtractive.

Broadly, Slott’s concerns over how this affects continuity without explanation is on the surface fine since MJ knowing was more than likely not intended by previous writers, however I would argue this doesn’t ultimately end up being a big deal in terms of what we’ve already discussed. This rarely if ever affects the stories as originally written, and in reality provides a lot of interesting nuance and complexity.

To show why, let’s lay out MJ’s appearances up to 258 in Spectacular Spider-Man and Amazing Spider-Man. This comes out to 111, and breaking it down by era gives us these numbers here:



Ditko: 2
Romita: 28
Roy Thomas: 1
Conway: 28
Wein: 24
Wolfman: 15
Stern: 10
DeFalco: 3




Like we’ve discussed previously, MJ was already a marginal presence during the Stan Lee/Romita era in favor of Gwen, she has I think two thought bubbles across 70 issues and is otherwise a cypher to Peter and by extension the audience.

Even with this period though, MJ stands out because of how she is NOT defined by a dislike of Spider-Man, she’s one of very few characters who consistently shows support despite attempts by the media to treat him like a menace.

The most notable story affected by this would be the fakeout identity reveal in 87, and as you can see it still works since after some initial shock MJ mostly plays things like a joke, even going so far as to compare the drama going on to a movie serial. She’s not shown wondering if Peter is lying or not, it’s just surprise and sarcasm which makes far more sense if she already knows his identity then if she didn’t, since we’ve already seen in issue 60 that during situations she considers actually serious she immediately seeks out authority figures to try to help resolve things.

With pretty much every other storyline involving MJ, such as the fallout of Gwen dying and when Peter and her were dating, the drama was already rooted in how many emotional barriers both MJ and Peter have with each other they were slowly growing past, which has friction due to Peter always running off as Spider-Man and leaving MJ behind. This is a conflict which would be the same if she already knew he was Spider-Man or not, since either way he is abandoning her and making up lies to cover it. You can certainly interpret this as selfish on MJ’s part since Peter is working for a greater good, but this isn’t that different from dating a firefighter or whatever in real life.

As for the implications of what 258 presents, I also don’t think it matters either way when exactly MJ learns Peter is Spider-Man since the reason they broke up initially was down to trust issues regardless. If Peter wasn’t willing to share his biggest secret with her and still proposed, then that’s a huge red flag. Why would it matter if MJ learned from the start vs some random point when they were dating or something when the emotions at play here doesn’t take that into account anyway since it’s irrelevant?

The most this really does which you could extrapolate as a negative is contradict some incredibly unimportant details or random thought bubbles, which were often symptomatic of repetitive, formulaic writing rather than being core tentpoles of the narrative. If literally every single moment that is referenced later on still works just as well if not better with this in mind, then why pretend like this is a big deal other then disliking a character becoming more complex and interesting?

Conway added in the detail of MJ knowing Peter’s identity alongside his other retrofitting because he loved Mary Jane as a character and felt that her backstory was still too thin otherwise, and felt it was a natural extension of something Stan had already done. Despite Conway supporting the concept of the “illusion of change” and not agreeing with the marriage, he still built upon the scaffolding DeFalco and other writers had set up.

Now if you think all of this is over-analyzing and adding on meaning where there previously was none, then I would argue that when we’re discussing a story on the whole, particularly a work shaped by a veritable cavalcade of writers, artists,editors and so on, all with conflicting ideas and interpretations, then it heavily reduces a work to pretend as if later contributions don't matter as much if not more then prior ones.

Like I said at the very beginning, comics are built on the inter-relation between panels, pages, issues, and runs to form closure.

Peter and by extension Spider-Man was never a fully realized concept from the word go, the growth he experienced as a character took time until aspects became permanent fixtures of how his stories are told. It would be incredibly selective reasoning to acknowledge and accept this with the main character, and then turn and argue it doesn't apply equally as much to the supporting cast.

Understanding who Mary Jane is requires accepting her as a figure who is worthy of analysis on par with Spider-Man, and not simply discarding information that is inconvenient.



With all that out of the way, DeFalco’s run for the most part portrays Peter and MJ as good friends who grow closer over time.

This is most clear with Annual 19 featuring this incredible cover, which was written by Louise Simonson and has a lot of inner monologuing from MJ over her romantic feelings. This story has her coming in direct conflict with a villain mistaking her for Spider-Man, and she manages to help solve the situation by tactically lying and assisting Peter in her own rescue.

One ongoing storyline through DeFalco’s run is Peter having extreme doubts on continuing to be Spider-Man and looking to give up the mantle, and it's often MJ who tends to push him to not give up for the sake of other people, most notably in Issue 275. While MJ has very conflicted feelings on both Peter and Spider-Man which can lead to some contradictory advice, you can see how MJ works as support for Peter despite not having any powers, and is given interiority and perspective which is informed by all that backstory we talked about before.

So this brings us to the lead-up to the marriage, which is fairly complicated due to the overlapping nature of multiple plotlines, which includes MJ’s growing feelings towards Peter, but also a scheme with Black Cat after Peter accidentally messes with her powers and the ultimate reveal of the Hobgoblin’s true identity.

Let’s build out a quick timeline.

Comic Con July 1986, Jim Shooter and Stan Lee were asked on a panel when Spider-Man and Mary Jane were going to get married. After Lee applied some pressure with the crowd, both him and Shooter agreed to do it with both the newspaper strip and comic simultaneously in June 1987. The release timing there got slightly scuffed since Shooter was on the outs, but it was close enough so who cares.

While this may be a bit surprising to comic fans, the newspaper strip Lee was writing for was far and away more popular than the comics ever were, and Peter and MJ were already a couple which certainly impacted public perception. During this same period in the comics, Peter and MJ were not exactly dating, so a logistical challenge would be building things up to lead into a marriage in the span of less than a year.

What complicates matters further though is that Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz are on record stating that they intended a version of the wedding already in which Peter is left at the altar, before the mandate imposed by Shooter was ever a factor. In fact, they initially believed their original plan was the reason why the story even happened, which Shooter corrected.

A lot of other writers were already taking the relationship into the romantic realm, and so their plans were a validation of that writing. So yeah, this means two events which both involved Peter and MJ at the altar just so happened to be in the works at the same time. Messy!

Now, professional comic books have a production period of roughly 3-4 months between conception and publication, which means we can reasonably assume that any story released before lets say November 1986 would therefore be on the road to that initial wedding plan before being retrofitted into the second one.

Spectacular Issue 117 in May 1986 has the start of a plotline in which Felicia agrees to work with a villain banally called The Foreigner in order to get revenge on Spider-Man. Issue 119 in July 1986 expands on this and notably highlights MJ’s romantic jealousy towards her.

Both these issues definitely predate the mandate, and considering how this sets up Cat and Peter’s second relationship for failure already, we can assume this was a way to bring to the forefront the issues with their relationship and why at this point in time Peter was more compatible with Mary Jane, closing the book in time for the wedding.

Bear in mind, this is not me saying Black Cat is a worse character or anything since I actually do like her a lot, and her being a double agent with complex feelings for Peter after everything definitely makes sense. I’m just drawing conclusions from what is textually here. I don’t care about your ships, ship who you want!

As for the Hobgoblin storyline, in extreme broad strokes there were disagreements on his eventual identity and bad blood between creators, which resulted in DeFalco and Frenz being fired and Christopher Priest working with Peter David (RIP) to write a storyline revealing Ned Leeds as the Hobgoblin months after Priest wrote Ned’s death in Spider-Man vs. Wolverine, with some rando nobody cares about running around as another Hobgoblin afterwards for a decade before Roger Stern stepped in with a miniseries and sorted that nonsense out.

Priest personally denies his involvement in this mess, which is contradicted by no less than four other creatives saying otherwise. That forces me to conclude barring any new information that this reveal was deliberately botched to everyone’s disappointment. A four year mystery ending like this is pretty terrible, and would foreshadow some of the later editorial messes down the line.

That’s a wash, so let’s set that to dry and go back to that Wolverine one-shot. Notably, the opening and closing pages of the story focus on Peter and MJ’s relationship, with Peter taking what he views as a step too far and kissing her before leaving for Berlin. Priest tends to bring up in various interviews that the point of these scenes was to show how they could never get married because of how different the worlds they occupy are.

While Priest is certainly entitled to his intentions, and I do want to note that despite my issues I find Spider-Man Vs. Wolverine to be a gripping tale that’s easily in my top 10 for the whole series, upon close reading this story again I don’t really agree that’s how it comes off, especially factoring in the context provided by other writers of the time.

The fact that even after such an awkward moment MJ still returns to Peter to help him cope with his trauma over accidentally killing someone shows that they are compatible on a deeper level than it initially appears, and they’re capable of working through it.

This bookend creates an important thematic contrast between Peter and Logan’s personal lives, and contrary to Priest’s intentions actually argues that Peter IS capable of love and romance despite the things he puts up with as Spider-Man BECAUSE he is not a born killer, BECAUSE he experience grief and regret.

While it was certainly inevitable for Peter to accidentally kill someone, it also has become equally inevitable for Peter to find a new love after Gwen and get married, which implies a level of growth past grief into something else. While Gerry Conway is not a supporter of the marriage and thinks Peter shouldn’t age at all, the fact remains his run had Peter and MJ grow closer in the aftermath of Gwen’s death, since it’d be borderline nonsensical to have Spider-Man quipping and being funny when he’s not over something as traumatic as his girlfriend dying, and any attempt to sweep said trauma under the rug by not realistically doing something about it would’ve cheapened the emotional texture that’s been woven into the comic from the very beginning.

Mackie was correct in claiming that things for the story took a turn with Gwen’s death and kind of made the marriage to Mary Jane inevitable, but I don’t see that as a bad thing at all so much as a testament to the work of so many people giving that concept real life.

Prioritizing acts of violence over things much more long-lasting and emotionally resonant is part of the hole comics fell into in the service of appearing more dark and gritty without the texture to make that work.

Spider-Man vs. Wolverine is a story about Peter trying to escape being in a comic book and failing, with his only consolation being his connections to others.

I would imagine me and Priest would have similar views on the state of comics currently, but that’s a topic for another time.

So now we can get into the big one: Peter and MJ’s marriage. After all that creator chaos, David Michelinie hopped on board and was given the unenviable task of leading into the wedding annual in the span of 3 issues. Some creators and fans point to this sudden jump as proof of the marketing driven nature of the marriage, which is certainly at least partially true but I think it’s laughable that if given more time the creative teams could’ve led into things more naturally, since by this point it’s been literally 25 years since Spider-Man was created and he still isn’t married. Plus, we just saw how the long-term Hobgoblin storyline was botched right before this, so I have serious doubts another wrench wouldn’t have been thrown in there.

Having someone bite the bullet and just let him get married already is refreshing, and Michelinie’s handling of it is very well done with Mary Jane going back to her sister and resolving things with her and her father. This is not only a great way to follow up her backstory and give it further material reality in the text, but it also helps demonstrate exactly why MJ is a good fit for Peter. She is more than willing to accept help from him when she needs it, but is otherwise fully capable of taking decisive action and even helps repay his kindness by saving him as well from the Z-list Spider-Slayer. Her agreement to marry Peter after finally resolving years of trauma and guilt is absolutely understandable, and the subsequent wedding annual does a great job showing their fears and doubts over it before accepting it’s what they truly need.

I think the two versions of the cover art exemplify what’s so radical about this marriage. One depicts Peter and his friend group, the other depicts Spider-Man and his many enemies. The only constant between these covers is the presence of Mary Jane, wearing a beautiful dress designed by the late great Willi Smith.

Monica Gerrafo wrote an essay in 2021 titled ‘One Moment In Time’ noting how Willi’s influence on the annual is part of why it was so successful. I encourage you to read the essay yourself since she makes a lot of great points about Willi’s career and philosophy and I don’t want to boil down his life to just what he did for a superhero comic. He did a lot more than that, and the fact his death from AIDS-related complications in 1987 was only superficially acknowledged by Marvel is a tragedy.

Highlighting an important section from this essay’s closing paragraphs:

“ It is significant that Peter Parker marries Mary Jane dressed as Spider-Man because it marks a pointed convergence of the two personas into an intersectional one, rather than an alter-ego and/or a disguise. The conservative tendencies of comics have historically left disenfranchised readers to hunt for alternative readings between the panels of stories that reflect real-world hopes without real-world resolutions; Willi Smith’s presence within the comic gives visibility to a role model for black and queer readers, but only Parker, a straight, white man is able to find public acceptance for his public and private facing selves, all of which adhere to masculine social norms as a “hero,” “scientist,” “newspaper photographer,” or “husband” within the narrative. There remains a rather large disconnect between a singularly progressive action (the inclusion of Smith) and the absence of any narrative resolution or detailed PR statement that would have honored Smith’s legacy for more than the work he provided in his incredibly sick final months. We’ve had to actively look beyond MJ’s wedding dress—the only representation of Smith’s work found in the pages of Spider-Man—to find Smith’s commitment to “fashion for all” in undrawn panels of Mary Jane running to work in Smith’s diverse runway presentations, in the minds of Marvel higher-ups who see the designer’s popularity on the streets of their New York City commute, and in the minds of future designers who are more likely to own comic book paper dolls and McCall’s patterns than off-the-rack WilliWear. While the influence of Smith has been quite literally marginalized in Spider-Man, the fact is that his democratizing approach to fashion uniquely resonates with the accessibility of the comic book superhero. Smith’s involvement is still incredibly important because it remains far and beyond that of any other real-world fashion designer in Marvel comics. In the years following, there have been many other celebrity cameos and many other comic book weddings, but none have matched the PR campaign created for Spider-Man and Mary Jane. Smith is depicted by Marvel as doing either Mary Jane or the comics company a favor, but the hyper-visibility of his dress, the PR framing of his name and likeness, and the revolutionary influence of his design philosophy on the fashion industry seem much more inclined to suggest that without his participation “The Wedding” would not have ultimately become as memorable an event in Marvel’s history. “

the middle spaces| Monica Geraffo "One Moment in Time: Designer Willi Smith and Mary Jane’s Wedding Dress"

This type of philosophy is what I’ve been talking about with the space between panels and closure, and it’s this type of reinterpretation that is so valuable and needed to help build things beyond the scope of what presumed middle class 12 year olds are marketed to want into something that is genuinely resonant with people who need these stories the most. The genesis of characters such as Miles Morales came from the alternate readings presented by the inclusion of characters like Hobie Brown and what he could represent beyond the panels, and Willi Smith’s unique positioning both in fiction and out for this event creates a complex web that is forever mapped with the characters of Peter, Spider-Man, and Mary Jane.

Things will never be the same after this, this change is permanent, and after 25 years of stories it was high time it happened. But a marriage and event is not an ending, things go on from here.

So what comes next, and why did things fall apart?