Peter and MJ got married because Stan was writing the newspaper strip as soap opera, not action/adventure, and he thought a marriage would add something to that. Shooter ordered the Spider-office to follow Stan's lead, in large part because DC had recently done a fake-out with Superman and Lois getting married that had generated a lot of Real World publicity. It was a flashback to the pair on Earth 2, but the civilian press mostly didn't pick up on that. Shooter's plan landed with a dull thud, as the relationship between Peter and MJ had nothing like the cachet of Lois and Clark. A civilian told that Spider-Man was getting married was likely to respond "You mean he's not already?"

Unfortunately, once the marriage was in place, we were stuck with it.

Even after she was introduced in the early years, MJ wasn't even that big a part of the Spider-Man series.  Her appearances were sporadic, and her sole function was to be a shallow party girl who made her boyfriend Harry's life miserable.  She and Pete were made an item shortly after Gwen's death, but she was written out of the series for a few years with no discernable effect.  I think it was DeFalco who made them a more serious item, and it's only fans that came in during the nineties that harbor the illusion that they were "made for each other."

*edited for spelling

All easy to spot in the clarity of hindsight, of course. I've been responsible for the deaths of a few characters myself, during this period of short-sightedness. And the problem is that marriage, birth and death are events that create permanent marks, permanent dividing lines, and really need to be thought out long and hard before any of them are implemented in this kind of serial fiction.

Unless I'm not thinking clearly, it seems (and seemed to me at the time) that "switching" Alicia as the love-interest from Ben to Johnny was an unnecessary re-defining time-marker. Not that the way JB told the story was poorly done -- it wasn't. And it certainly didn't have industry-wide repercussions as with the Gwen Stacy's death, inter alia. But even if the story of Alicia leaving Ben for Johnny could be told not merely plausibly but quite well (and, again, it was), I just didn't care for how it turned away from established relationships that I believed worked so well for so long and could go on indefinitely.

Was Alfred's death in the Batman comics of the 1960's the first major death of a supporting character? I'm leaving Bucky out of this because he had been out-of-service for much of fifteen years before Captain America was brought back in the early 1960's. Reading the Alfred death for the first time in the first Showcase Batman volume, it struck me as being quite bizarre -- even moreso once the Outsider storyline finally came to a conclusion. And the death of Alfred predated the TV show, as far as I recall, and so wasn't mandated by the producers of the show.

Cheers, Jon

I think the results were presented almost as tragic.
-------------

Was there ever one What If story that didn't end in a laughable, pessimistic fashion?

••

The one I did.

Was it a bad decision? Maybe, maybe not.

It was the first HUGE mistake Marvel made. I'm not big on "slippery slope" arguments, but in this case, it fits. Once you begin to age Peter Parker (and make him better looking, popular with beautiful women, a motorcylce rider), you make him into something other than what he started out as.

Peter Parker began as an Everyman that the average reader could relate to. He soon thereafter became what the average reader wanted to be.

On a sidenote, there's a peculiar mentality among some fans who look at a certain character and go, "I love Captain Fonebone! But I'd love him even more if they made him into something completely different!"

Spider-Man and Wolverine are probably the two most glaring examples.