As stated in his most recent Cup O' Joe, and spotted by Robot6, Joe Quesada says that through some logical trickery, that whole One More Day Thing? Not so much.
“MJ unknowingly beat Mephisto at his own game. By agreeing to MJ’s terms, Mephisto has actually wiped himself from ever having been involved in their lives. In fact, looking at it linearly, those four issues never happened. Along with the wedding, ‘One More Day’ and Mephisto have been wiped out of continuity and Peter and MJ never made that bargain. … Ooooooh, me hears something breaking.”
But… but… it was your own thing!
The next convention panel with Quesada is going to be historic! The word Ret-Con is being thrown around a lot.
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He ret-conned his ret-con! It’s like that super virus from every 90’s movie that destroys your system and then erases all trace of itself.
I like Quesada, I do, he’s a passionate guy and I know he wants people to talk about Marvel, negatively or positively. But if he wants us to forget about One More Day, then it’s pretty simple. Don’t. Bring. It. Up. We were all willing to let it go until O.M.I.T. I think he brings it up more then enraged fanboys. So if he "hears something break" it’s because he keeps pushing the issue until it falls off the ledge and shatters.
Pathetic.
Copy/pasted, yet no link to the original article? Whoa.
And it was JMS’s thing, Quesada was trying to fix it best he could given what JMS turned in for scripts on that one.
@Kickass: That’s not true. One More Day was an editorially mandated story. JMS wanted his name removed from the last two issues.
So he’s basically explaining that the scenes in OMD don’t figure into current continuity now…because Mephisto’s magic (the first time through) was designed to rewrite the timeline, including OMD itself.
That’s not that complicated to me, and it makes sense. It’s pretty much the logic of most "travel back in time" stories.
It’s just misleading for Joe to say that it "never happened". It happened alright…it just doesn’t figure into current linear continuity anymore.
Maybe I’ve just read too many comics or something, but this seems very coherent and explanatory to me. Whenever Joe talks about this, though, of course it has the effect of adding insult to longtime fans’ injury. And saying that something "never happened" is just asking for fans to feel cheated. I think if Joe would have just used different wordings throughout his comments about this stuff ("It’s magic, we don’t have to explain it", "It never happened"), then he could have politicked this a lot better with fans from the get-go.
I thought I was confused after reading the final chapter of OMD, but turns out, I was SUPPOSE to be confused. So MJ is better liar than Mephisto?!?!, mabye Peter was better off not marrying her after all, hey Joe?
There’s no point in linking to CBR twice. It’s not like I didn’t give credit, so quit trying to nail me.
Delightful lunacy! I nearly applauded my phone when I read this. Sure to drive all the right people nuts.
It’s not about giving credit. It’s about giving context to your copied quotes. No one’s trying to "Nail you" Josh.
JMS didn’t turn in what was agreed upon. That’s why Quesada had to fix it, or else JQ wouldn’t have. That’s why JMS was upset. They weren’t satisfied with the story details, JMS wanted to retcon 400 issues, so Quesada and the rest had to actually re-write his last 2 scripts.
It’s all in the original article here: http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=28545
Isn’t Joe Quesada a smart guy? I think he is, so WTF! is he talking about?!
Josh DID link to the original article but then Superboy punched the walls of existence and made you THINK that he didn’t.
Wait. . .
@KickAss – Don’t be so mean. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there that would absolutely love to nail Josh.
Everything makes so much more sense now. Just like the X-men continuity. It’s all crystal clear.
So, if I’m taking this right, the lesson to be learned from all this is "Kids you can outwit the devil with absolutely no consequences whatsoever."
And this is why I dont read Amazing spiderman!!
The problem with that is that damned red pigeon–are we supposed to believe that the cop car just randomly opened itself? No matter how you spin in Mephisto still made a deal that the two accepted, and manipulated things so that Peter and MJ are no longer married.
Okay, fair enough. Time to move on and put it all behind us.
You have to be shitting me….do we have to keep going round and round on this….is it some kind of ass backwards publicity thing?!?! I’ve loved Brand New Day, I’ve loved the creative renaissance at Marvel in recent years, and Quesada has much to be proud of….but this just feels somewhat like…douchery.
"Face it Tiger, I am smarter than the Devil !"
JQ and JMS may not be…
Who honestly give a shit? Let’s just move on and forget that it did, didn’t, did didn’t, or didn’t fucking did. I’m just putting it behind me. I never read the story OMD personally, but OMD is how BND came to be, and that is basically what got me into reading Amazing Spidey so I’m not gonna diss it. If it wasn’t for BND, I probably wouldn’t read much MARVEL at all other than Ultimate stuff…
"So, if I’m taking this right, the lesson to be learned from all this is "Kids you can outwit the devil with absolutely no consequences whatsoever." "
Good luck for them trying to find a devil to outwit. They’d have better luck sewing up a supehero costume and going out to fight crime.
Joe Quesada has done a lot of things right for Marvel.
Both as an artist and especially in his current job, like almost too many to mention.
BUT
He needs to put the gun down kick it over and walk away on this one.
@robbydzwonar – Damn straight.
I am so glad I don’t read Spider-man.
On one hand, I understand what Joey Q just stated about BND/OMIT.
But on the other hand……FUUUUUUUUUUCCCCC—-
OMIT was a bad idea. Stop going back to that well, Joey Q. Just go forward. Wasn’t that the point of OMD?
Wait.. my internet is still working…your guy’s?
I know OMD was a mess, but it had to be dealt with. Something like OMIT had to eventually happen. You can say it is ridiculous to get too bogged down in continuity and you would be absolutely right, but you can’t just completely throw it out the window. The major comic companies are built on continuity. And most of us posting here, to some extent or another, seriously geek out on that continuity. Otherwise, why would we read so many DC and Marvel superhero books? It is the shared world that we find so enriching. The giant story with endless complications, like a puzzle. And OMD left Spider-man’s continuity fucked. Plain and simple. No one knew what had happened to the linear continuity of Peter Parker’s life. No one knew what issues had any relevance any longer. You can ignore this for a while and just tell good stories, but long term this amibiguity about Peter’s past could not stand. OMIT fixed this, more or less. There are still some serious holes, but we know what Mephisto did and we know how it affected all the Spider-man comics of the past 25 years.
Was OMIT a good story? Hell no. It was clunky and dissapointing. But it served its purpose. Spider-man can go forward and everyone, writers and readers, knows where they stand. The holes left now are small enough that one probably can get away with just ignoring them (The OTHER powers, etc). Thanks to the 3 month schedule it was also over quickly.
I just could not disagree more. But then, I didn’t buy it, which was how I cast my vote.
@JimBilly4: I disagree that you can’t just throw things out the window and move on. More comics need to do just that. All OMIT did was muddy the waters even further and it was totally unneeded.
@Conor Yeah i would have been fine with them explaining the lack of a wedding by MJ saying something like "Peter’s life is complicated and sometimes spider-Man gets in the way. It just wan’t meant to be."
i really didn’t need more than 1 issue explaining how the wedding never came to be. too much
As a longtime Spidey fan who stopped reading after BND this is a little frustrating. (I think the new direction and BND is well done, just doesn’t appeal to me). I think a lot of people are saying the right thing which is that marvel neebs to stop talking about it and just move on. But I think both Conor and Billy are right because they represent two types of fans. There are fans that want to know how everything works and others who just want a good story. Both views are valid. I guess I’m a little bit of both, I was initially a little upset about OMD but you just have to take the story for what it is and like Conor has said on the show, sometimes make up your own path. For me Peter and MJ will always be together and married because that’s what seems natural to me, those are the Spidey books I grew up with. That doesn’t mean the new status quo for spidey is bad, it just means it doesn’t interest me personally.
I’m not fussed one way or the other. OMD wasn’t very good. Read a few BND stories and they were good. Didn’t care to read OMIT. Won’t be reading Amazing going forward.
That said, this whole situation is pretty ridiculous. What was the point of any of it? They could easily have had them just split up and then quietly forget about the marriage years. Everything else OMD did could’ve been handled some other way. Cosmic cube. Back to basics Spidey stories. Job done. Seems like they tried way too hard getting to this point
After reading the entire interview before commenting on this I have come to the only logical conclusion that anyone can: Joe Q. has a life in politics ahead of him if this E-i-C gig doesn’t work out.
-J.
I didn’t read OMD or any of BND or OMIT. but, I have read a lot of what Quesada has had to say on the matter. as far as he’s concerned, and yes people may disagree with this, these stories (OMD and OMIT) absolutely HAD to be told. and he decided to tell them, using the best material and endpoints he had to work with, himself, either as the writer or artist of the story. he did this so that another creator wouldn’t have to, and thus get blamed for all of the inherent continuity clusterfuck. that is management I’d want to work with, and it’s commendable.
This is why I hate ongoings and why I love mini-series and limited runs featuring characters that you can put anywhere (Batman, Wolverine, Hellboy, Punisher, Fear Agent, Deadpool, Lobo, TMNT, Judge Dredd, etc.). Frankly, I just don’t care about "Spider Man." He’s on the "X-Men" now (or something, whatever, they have like a retcon every week and the world isn’t up in arms), Aunt May is like 2,000 years old, and Mary Jane is probably not going to be modeling for much more than Activia pretty soon.
And retconning him doesn’t fix anything. Ooh, he’s a teenager again? Really? So you got to go through forty more years of this crap all over again? You mean Eddie Brock ate Ms. Lion? Oh man, that’s a game-changer.
The bottom line is he’s not going to stay a kid forever, if he’s married to MJ and steadily working for the Bugle, it becomes less believable that he’s still such a screw-up (even if he gets fired, eh, he’s got a long history there and a hell of a portfolio), Aunt May should be dead, and why doesn’t he have kids?
The problem is they’re afraid to let Spider Man grow up. I mean, he’s a photojournalist, why not have him go to Darfur or get kidnapped in Afghanastan or something, you know, cool? Or did he do that in "The All-New Amazing Spectacular Spider Man" issue #542, volume 3? Or is that the one where he fought Paste Pot Pete? It’s hard to keep it all straight.
Anyway, bottom line is that none of this O.M.D./B.N.D./O.M.I.T/B.M. stuff prevents a talented creator who loves the character from telling a good continuity free story (give it to Neal Adams!) that I’d be happy to read, but the actual continuity-based regular series just turns me off completely because the creators and editorial staff think the solution is always move backwards instead of forwards.
Also, Mephisto is stupid.
The man’s got balls. I hope someone tapes the next panel he’s at. Genius.
Joe Q would be screwed either way. If he never explained it, then he would have the "It’s magic don’t worry about it" remark he made thrown in his face forever. But any explanation he came up with would never live up to the story the fans wrote in their heads. At least this way he can say he told the entire story and move on, instead of just half assing it and leaving it unfinished.
@stasisbal Indeed. It’s weird that Marvel think it’s more acceptable for MJ to make a deal with a devil than for Peter and MJ to simply split up.
Joe Quesada admits that OMD happened.
http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=28564
@Mart: It’s hard for kids to relate to divorcees.
they’ve gone on record many times saying that simply putting the "divorced" label on the character makes him seem older. also, having MJ make the deal only contributes to the long tradition of shady dealings of many Marvel wives. Sue Storm is the one that has a questionable relationship with Namor. Jean Grey, or at least something that looked like her, is the one that destroyed a whole planet. It’s not right, but to some extent, it’s what supporting characters are for, and that often ends up being the female.
Slaves to continuity make me sad.
I have no friggin clue what’s going on here. I’m not saying that to express frustration. I neutrally don’t understand anything here.
Origin of the Species rules!
I read ams since bnd, in hc and like it. One of my favs. Screw opinions, I like stories if they are good and ams has been good. Whine all u want, quesada runs the show. Until whiners become writers or editors, zip it. Vote w your wallets. But please, don’t cry in public, it brings the real estate price down. And u stink up the place too! No hard feelings?
@conor: I would think that with a 50% divorce rate, the idea of divorce would be pretty damn relatable to children today. Unless of course you were being sarcastic. If so, disregard my post.
@ABirdsEyeView So the lesson we’re supposed to take out of this is "Wimmenz R the evol?" Great.
(I don’t actually think that’s the lesson I was just gobsmacked by that comment.)
@EJ: No, i was being 100% serious. That was one of Marvel’s reasons. (And I agree with it.)
Can i say I love what they did with OMD? OMD wasn’t a good read itself, but what it did was make spider-man comics spider-man comics again. After OMD the world is a funner place! I hated the JMS years, I hated almost everything that was done 15 years before that. The same thing is done with every character every and nobody complains about it. I don’t hear anyone bitching about Crisis in infinite earths. People are just too anal about their continuity. Like it is worth something, every new creative team changes the entire feel of the series, the cast, the focus, the characters personality. Every creator has somethings they like and somethings they don’t. And they choose to ignore those that they don’t like without hesitation. They used just ignore Mary jane in ASM. She simply didn’t showed up.
@ohcaroline- no, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying that we shouldn’t be surprised by Marvel deciding that MJ making a deal with the devil is better than divorcing them. Peter Parker certainly wasn’t going to be the one whispering into Mephisto’s ear. I’m not an expert in literary gender roles, but I’m sure we could find plenty of examples in and out of comics where things like this happen. no, it’s not right. we can all hope for the day Matt Murdock’s test results come back HIV positive, explaining that he, in fact, infected Karen. that would even things out.
Daredevil: One Needle In Time! (sorry, it just came to me and I had to)
I didn’t need OMIT to explain the nitty-gritty details of OMD to me. I hated OMD, but loved the BND and forward stories. OMIT just irritated me again. Hopefully the ongoing issues will be good enough to have a similar effect, where I just forget ever being mad at Spider-Man.
And speaking of readers getting mad at comics not explaining stuff: where’s the outrage over no one EVER recognizing Clark Kent as Superman? HIS DISGUISE IS A PAIR OF GLASSES! I demand answers!
Thank you.
@Conor: Well, I suppose thats one way of looking at it and I respect your opinion. Although I do find it interesting that with all of the adult themes, situations and dialog that companies like Marvel have in their mainstream books, they decide to cherry-pick the whole "it’s for the kids" excuse as one of their reasons for this particular situation. I find that reasoning to be a bit disingenuous from a publisher that prides itself as being the trendy more current choice in funny-book reading.
I’m not a kid, and I think Peter Parker, divorcee makes him sound old
@ABirdsEyeView I just don’t see how "it is understandable because it makes women look terrible, which comics do and that’s just how it is" operates as a DEFENSE of this storyline.
you’re right it isn’t a defense of the storyline. it’s just my observation. terrible and evil are harsh terms maybe, but in a story about a man, isn’t it natural to feature women doing questionable things that affect his life? I think it is. there’s plenty of examples in the history of Amazing Spider-Man where a female has a positive spin on Peter’s life, even involving MJ. the opposite would be true of a woman’s story.
Wow. Okay, done with this. But wow.
Joe Q is an artist, pretty good at times. Maybe he’s even a big idea guy and gives that to writers to script. But dude has never written anything good. So why did he get the story assignment for this one?
@poopmonster: Because he’s the boss. And this whole thing has been his baby,
I’ve collected comics for 20 years. During that time I’ve always tried to get into Amazing Spider-Man, and while I was able to start a run here and there I would drop it after a few months because there was something I didn’t like about it.
I decided to give the series one last shot during Civil War and kept it on my pull list after that ended and fell behind a few weeks and wasn’t able to read One More Day/Brand New Day as it happened but I sure heard the fall out.
Mostly from people who didn’t read it. I was convinced I would hate it too but picked them up since they were pulled and LOVED it. I’ve been reading the series since and, unlike the people who complain and DON’T read it, I can say, with the exception of a few issues here and there, Brand New Day has been the best thing to happen to Amazing in years. My favorite part? MJ is GONE! That marriage is gone!
Then we move to OMIT and people are confused. Probably because they are trying to put more into this than there really is. I mean, it made sense to me and I enjoyed every issue.
Basically, if you don’t read it you have no right to complain. Move along, go back to your X-Men comics. If OMIT confused you then you must have been trying to place more weight on the story than there was meant to be.
Don’t forget, at the end of the day these are just Comic Books. Have some fun with them, lighten up.
OMD day was a dumb idea in the first place. OMIT was an even dumber idea. The whole removal of the marriage and messing up of Spider-Man’s continuity was dumber than both put together.
No wonder he wants to write it off as never having happened.
I stuck with BND for a fair few story arcs after the balls up, and read most of the others, but the writing was poor (with the exception of Zeb Wells) and the art, although very good, was inconsistent and jarring. Peter’s been regressed, the stories have been dumbed down, the quality of the writing is poor and there’s a niggling inconsistency hanging over the whole book since OMD.
To be honest the Clone Saga was a better idea (and execution) for getting rid of the marriage (which didn’t need to be got rid of in the first place!).
This whole mess was the straw that broke the camels back for me and has been pushing me to drop more and more Marvel books. Fingers crossed that sometime down the line there is a editoral change up top at Marvel and I can come back to some of their characters because when they’re done right, they’re fantastic.
In like two weeks, we’re all going to completely forget about all this nonsense. What’s happened has happened. Stories get "ret-conned" all the time. Read what interests you or don’t. The main thing that needs to happen: Continue making good Spider-Man comics.
Besides, he probably just wrote that Cup o’ Joe thing to get everyone all riled up and talking about Spider-Man comics. In that case, he’s a genius.
Yea, what Neb said. Who cares? We’ll all move on, there’ll be good Spider-Man stories in the future, and we can just forget about all this nonsense. Just ignore Joe Q fanning the flames for a little longer and it’ll all be gone. Well… for me it will be. See, i smoke a ton of weed everyday, and had already forgotten OMD existed. Give me a month or so and OMIT will be gone too! Thank you Mary Jane, even if Peter doesn’t, I still care about you.
As much as I hate to admit it… I’m with Conor on this one. OMIT? => Unnecessary, Unneeded, and Unimportant (ran out of Uns)
@Josh: glad I casted my vote there too by completely ignoring it.
@Preacher: Couldn’t have said it better.
And just like OMIT & OMD/BND I’m going to pretend Quesada said nothing and everything fixes itself. I just read the good ASM stories as oneshots (eg: SHED which had fantastic art and story) and ignore the rest of continuity because quite frankily Spider-man is a mascot meant to be dynamic and change overtime so the continuity will always shape around the times, but the stories are meant to entertain and that’s why I buy comics.
His idea was spot on. Rebooting spidey has given rise to some great stories. I love most of the stories since OMD. But, the idea that it needs to be explained and fixed and whatever. Stop. Just stop. You told a BS story to get the comic to a place where it could tell good ones. You did the right thing. Move on.
the divorce argument shouldn’t be used. because since bnd, peter has had crazy hotel sex with black cat, and crazy drunken roommate sex with michelle. how does that appeal to the kids. i will say that i hated both omd and omit but there have been some very good stories in between and I am pretty excited for Big Time or whatever its called. I am ready for there to be one voice on spider-man.
@Conor I remember the ‘divorce = old and unrelatable’ argument, but it’s not like Marvel would ever have to mention it much after doing the deed. MJ could pop up occasionally as ‘Peter’s ex’. And anyway, how many little kids are reading Spider-Man? Adults are unrelatable to them, whatever. They’re old and icky.
I would be shocked if children read ASM. It is totally not for kids, especially since BND has come around. USM is almost kid friendly, but I say even then it’s only for teenagers or older. It’s the Marvel Adventures (or whatever the hell they call it now) is the Spider-Man series kids should be reading.
@ABirdsEyeView Karen page didn’t actually have AIDS. It was a faked test result by Mysterio.
"…and by agreeing Peter Parker automatically became his own grandpa."
The full article, which I’m only getting to now, fascinates me so much I’m reading it with a bucket of popcorn. It’s more interesting than the book was.
“Flash way forward: I was two issues into drawing “One More Day” when I started to get a bit concerned because we hadn 19t gotten to any of the ideas that were discussed in the writer 19s room. There was a lot that needed to be covered in what was now amounting to be fewer and fewer pages. But look, JMS is a master storyteller and knows how to pace a story. So at that juncture in the process, that concern was only a mild one. When the third script finally came in, Axel and Tom contacted me incredibly concerned. I had already read it by that time so I knew why they were calling, we had an incredibly big challenge in front of us. To put it bluntly, the ideas that were pitched at the summit and the parameters that we had all agreed to, was not what was in the script. Instead of a story that took us back to the wedding day and why it didn 19t happen, what we were looking at was a story in which 37 years of Spider-Man continuity never happened and every issue since “Amazing Spider-Man” #98 no longer counted. As a bit of context, issue 98 was the issue in which Harry was addicted to drugs. Harry and MJ were dating at that time, so his addiction caused their breakup which subsequently drove Norman to become the Green Goblin, again with devastating results to Peter 19s life. The script in front of me for issue 3 of “One More Day” revisited that story from back in 1970. In this new version, Peter heroically manages to get Harry into rehab. Because of this, Harry and MJ never break up. That meant she and Peter didn 19t start dating as originally happened and Norman would not become the Goblin, thus never killing Gwen Stacy. This was also a problem because we had also come to the decision a while before all of this that Gwen was going to stay dead. In defense of JMS, he did at one point pitch a version of this story at the summit, but it had been shot down by the room because of all the history it would wipe out, not just with Spider-Man, but across the entirety of the Marvel U.”
@Jimski That’s. . .just. . . . I can’t decide if the story is more or less weird because the artist was the editor-in-chief. Like, would he have tried to slip it under the radar with another artist.*
*I am assuming Quesada’s version of events is correct, considering the man is on the record (as in, I was in the room) saying, "I’m not an elected official, I don’t have to tell the truth."
Ahh, so Maxwell Lord sneezed and… wait, what was I typing?