"Buffy lost her way in a similar manner -- the last 2 seasons were unrelentingly dark."

I think some suits at WB have anonymously tried to take credit for "brightening" Buffy and point to the UPN years as evidence.

But that does seem to be a trap that continuing fiction falls into, where the creators come to believe that the only meaningful sort of drama revolves around more and more horrible things happening to the characters.

Mike

I've been checking in on this thread a bit and it just got me to wondering if anyone here is looking forward to the "Brand New Day" ASM relaunch? 

Personally, I'm cautiously optimistic about it, and hoping it gets Spider-Man back to a wise-cracking, struggling everyman (married or otherwise), and leads to some fun Spider-Man stories.  The major sticking point for me is that I don't know if my budget can handle the addition of a three times a month comic.

Andrew, I totally agree with you about DeZago and Wieringo's Sensational being a blast.  I'd love to see the new Amazing title have a similiar vibe (Much like I was hoping Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man was going to).

How many others can anyone think of who were married before the mid-80s period that Brendan just mentioned? The Richards, The Dibnys, The Allens...any others?

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Jan and Hank, Vision and Wanda, Crystal and Pietro readily spring in mind.

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SER: I think married superhero couples can be interesting but the problem is that in most cases, the marriage removes a unique element from the character. Vision and The Scarlet Witch's marriage basically removed the tension of the "love that could never be consummated," for example. Spider-Man was also a character who had diverse romantic interests -- the same as any teenager. He was never meant to have a "Lois Lane," but that's what MJ became.

Marrying Superman and Lois Lane removed the classic love triangle of Clark/Lois/Superman. What we got in return was not a better deal.

Also, marrying of superheroes usually involves revealing their secret identity*, which takes us a step toward the loss of the secret identity as a whole. By that, I mean that if Aunt May and Mary Jane (the people closest to Peter Parker) know he's Spider-Man, there's really no "double life." Heck, when his "boss" (Tony Stark when he was in the Avengers) knows, there's even less of a double-life.

*There are also conventions to marriage that make it hard to write appropriate superhero-related tension. I recall that many fans were upset that during the Mackie/JB Spider-Man run, Peter was briefly Spider-Man again without Mary Jane's knowledge. This, of course, was never considered a negative thing when he was *dating* Mary Jane or Gwen Stacy. However, the situation changes once Peter and Mary Jane married.

Another thing sprang to mind as I was thinking about married superheroes today. In the real world, marriage is very often followed by parenthood. If these serial characters are allowed to get married, it isn't too long before readers and writers start to wonder why the marriage has not yet produced any kids. Which gives us the Vision and Scarlet Witch as magical parents and a pregnant Mary Jane. And you'll notice that all of those kids have been removed from the mythos.

Marriage and kids make sense for the Fantastic Four, as the "family" aspect of the book is part of what makes it special. But for the most part, every superhero marriage I remember has been a bad idea in the long run. That's serial fiction!

Yeah, that bugs me to hear folks say "Gwen had no personality." Like you said, even some of the great Spider-Man creators have echoed those sentiments, but I don't believe them to be correct. Just because she's not as outgoing as MJ doesn't mean the character lacks depth.

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The problem is that people don't understand what Lee and everybody mean when they say that. They always make a point of comparing Gwen to Mary Jane in interviews. They are NOT saying that Gwen had no personality. They're saying that in comparison to Mary Jane, Gwen's personality was far less dynamic and interesting.

But today's fanboy culture takes that to mean that Gwen had "no personality", and thus was boring and bland and needed to be killed.

But both of those scenarios took place during the same time, Bruce.  In that light, it's incredibly hard for me to separate the two.  Peter's been married to MJ nearly two decades, our time.  Spider-Man has been dark and depressing instead of being light-hearted and fun for nearly as long.  I'm not saying there's a correlation between the two, but it's all part of the same wrong-headed editorial thinking where I'm concerned.

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I totally get what you mean. It just seems that in the context of today's stories, the marriage is the lesser of two evils (the other evil being the tangled web of gloom, doom, magic, etc.).