Broken Frontier

This column is going to have some spoilers for One More Day, so if you don’t want it to be ruined, you might want to skip this column.

A couple weeks ago in Amazing Spider-Man #545 we witnessed a life changing event in Spider-Man and Peter Parker’s lives. Peter and Mary Jane made a deal with Mephisto to make it so their marriage never happened in exchange for saving Aunt May’s life. But the end of the issue left fans with more questions then answers. Peter wakes up in a house with Aunt May alive and well and making breakfast. He then hops on his bike and heads off to a surprise party for none other then Harry Osborn. Mary Jane is at the party and when Flash spots her ha asks if she’s still mad at Peter and he says he doesn’t know if she’ll ever forgive him, but for what we don’t know. Then they all raise their glasses to, "A brand new day!" in that typical campy Marvel fashion we all know and love. 

But the kicker is that Peter makes no indication that he still has any spider powers. Now obviously he must, or he’ll get them again, or else the book would have been cancelled. But the cover of Amazing Spider-Man #546, coming out this week, holds a clue. A billboard behind spider reads, "Spiderman Returns!!" So did Peter give up the superhero life for a bit? I hope this isn’t a One Year Later kind of thing.

So Spider-Man is back. From where? We don’t know yet. We didn’t know he went anywhere to begin with. But let’s be honest, the book hasn’t been that great in a while. And when I say, "a while", I’m talking since Erik Larsen and Mark Bagley were doing Amazing.

Mary Jane isn’t in the picture any more (good), Aunt May is alive and well (whatever. Does she still know he’s Spider-man?), his identity is a secret again (how much Civil War stuff does this undo? How did their bargain affect the other Marvel heroes that know Spidey), Harry Osborn is back (but is he the Green Goblin? And what about Norman?). Things are beginning to look familiar and that’s not such a bad thing. But how long will it take them to answer all the questions that we have coming out of One More Day?

The other important thing fans should know is that Amazing Spider-man is now going to be coming out three weeks a month. With Dan Slott writing and Steve McNiven writing, it looks like my typical every other week trip to the shop isn’t going to cut it. This is a very exciting time for the character. He’s cut loose some of his baggage, one of his greatest foes may have returned, and he’s got a serious creative team working for him. The other Spidey titles have been have been cancelled in favor of the new three week scheduled for amazing, with a rotating creative team on the title. How long Marvel will keep this up no one can say.

Fans will undoubtedly bash Marvel for undoing Spidey’s unmasking. And they’re right to do so. That was a huge event in Peter’s life, and they undid it pretty easily when the going got too rough. However, if fixing just that one tiny thing (which I thought was a bad decision on Peter’s part to begin with) makes room for some great new stories to tell, I’m all for it. My ‘common sense’ is tingling.

Being that this marks the beginning of Spider-man returning to a familiar life it probably should be called "A Brand New Day". So maybe this Brand New Day arc is more like, ‘Just Like Spider-man Used To Be’. This sounds like it’s shaping up to be the Spidey I fell in love with in the early ‘90s, which sounds just fine to me.