Marvel Comics Exec Editor Pushes Back Against Fans, Says Publisher Has “Concluded Decisively That The Best Platonic Ideal Of Spider-Man Is One That Is Unattached”
In the latest development in the ongoing debate regarding the topic of the wall-crawler’s marital happiness, Marvel Comics Executive Editor Tom Brevoort says that despite the fact that readers overwhelmingly want to see Spider-Man and Mary-Jane back together again, the publisher has “concluded decisively” that the hero is at his narrative best when he “is unattached.”
The Marvel Comics exec offered this insight into the company’s current creative direction, as always, while answering fan questions for the March 23rd entry of his personal Man With A Hat Substack blog.
Pressed by one reader as to whether or not there existed “a threshold that a book like Ultimate Spider-Man (or Renew Your Vows, or Spider-Girl, or any of the other ‘Peter and MJ are a married couple’ projects through the decades) could reach that would cause editorial to say ‘Okay, Amazing is losing to this other book, clearly the thing the audience is responding to is married Spider-Man, we should bring that back into main continuity’?”, Brevoort unfortunately confirmed that not only were there no relevant metrics for reuniting the fan-favorite couple, but also that the publisher had absolutely zero interest in ever giving their relationship another chance.
“If I was a smart man, I would let this deadly fastball go by untouched. Make new mistakes, right?” he began. “You never say never, Brandon, but I don’t believe that there is any such threshold because that’s not what publishing Ultimate Spider-Man or Renew Your Vows and the like is all about. Those aren’t test cases, they are alternatives for those who desire those alternatives.”
“But I believe that we’ve concluded decisively that the best platonic ideal of Spider-Man is one that is unattached, and that conclusion isn’t going to be changed by a particular alternate interpretation momentarily performing well,” he then revealed. “And Amazing Spider-Man has been consistently our best-selling regular title for a decade and a half, so another book selling better than it isn’t cause for concern, it’s cause for celebration. But ASM sales continue to click along just as they’ve consistently done, so pointing to Ultimate and concluding that the one and only factor contributing to its success is coincidentally the one factor that those fans would like changed about ASM is working backwards from a desired conclusion.”
For the uninitiated, while Spider-fans have been banging the war drum regarding a retcon of One More Day pretty much since the day the event’s final issue, The Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 1 #545, hit shelves, the discourse surrounding the fact has seen a massive resurgence in recent months thanks to Jonathon Hickman and Marco Checchetto’s Ultimate Spider-Man Vol. 3, an exceptionally good book which features a married Peter and MJ as one of its major narrative elements.
To this end, Brevoort found himself becoming a party to the current conversation on March 9th, courtesy of that day’s edition of his aforementioned Substack blog.
Asked whether he thought the “recurring idea that the success of the new Ultimate Spider-Man (with a married Peter Parker) is an indication that the regular 616 Peter’s marriage to MJ should be reinstated, and that it is a fault of the editor(s) over there for not recognizing that and thus reaping similar sales success”, the editor waved off the fan. “Yeah, I’ve been hearing from a couple of yahoos whose idea of a good time is to send us the same form letter about MJ and Paul every single day. But here’s the thing: I think the point of view that you’re talking about is simply incorrect.”
“First off, the difference in sales between Ultimate Spider-Man and Amazing Spider-Man is relatively slim,” he argued, his assertion unfortunately true. “It’s not like Ultimate is doing twice or three times the business or anything. And secondly, I don’t think that the success of Ultimate at the moment is just down to Pete and MJ being married within it. I think it has a lot more to do with the quality of the work that Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto are producing.”
“So I get that people who want Pete and MJ back together are of course going to point to that series, but the truth is that it doesn’t really make a convincing argument to me at all,” he concluded. “I’ve been around this particular sort of block too many times over the years to mistake the signals.”
A few days later, Brevoort would throw further fuel onto the spider-fire when he began personally – and combatively – engaging with a number of readers who both disagreed both with his anti-Spider-marriage stance and his dismissive attitude.
“Let me ask you this, Fam,” he addressed one critic. “Is Batman cratering? Absolute Batman is consistently outselling it, right? Is Batman in the toilet? Do they need to bring Martha Wayne back to life in the main series? Seems crazy right.”
Attempting to explain his disingenuous comparison, Brevoort asserted, “Martha Wayne is an element of AbBats that’s different from the regular book. So it’s analgous to Peter and MJ in USM. I don’t think it’s responsible for those sales either, but this is the sort of argument you guys are marking. Correlation isn’t causality.”
Putting a stamp on his BlueSky detour (even more highlights of which can be read in our previous article on the topic), when met by a fan’s frustratingly positing that “anyone at Marvel can say a title is doing well, and they are not required to offer any proof,” the Marvel Comics exec declared, “Jack, I’m in business, part of my job is to sell Marvel comics. You seriously think that if there was an easy way to make sales skyrocket, I wouldn’t do it?”
“Or that I’m lying about information that I have access to and you certainly do not?” he concluded. “At this point, why are we even talking?”
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