What is so wrong with Mary Jane?
I try to avoid looking at Comic Boards these days, because the discussions there now, to be quite honest, are almost unbearable. But for now, here's but one item from their database, about the question of if Mary Jane Watson-Parker will or won't be killed off. Let me make it clear that I am against it, and look down in disappointment upon Joe Quesada, the one who really doesn't like her, for reasons I cannot even begin to figure out.
Until a few years ago, I probably would have thought it unlikely that any so-called Marvel fan would actually be easy with getting rid of even the most minor lady with historically noteworthy status who's been around since the mid-80s or mid-90s, in contrast to DC, where some readers, if not all, seem to have no problem with destroying the minor ones, if any. But, as I discovered, while they may be a minority, there do seem to be some aimless bums out there who've developed a disliking out of nowhere for Mary Jane, because she's supposedly annoying and they actually seem to agree with Quesada's erroneous notion that being married makes it impossible to identify with Peter Parker.
Well first off, it appears that these lemmings who think that MJ is grating are basing their judgement upon the material produced circa 1998-2000, in which Howard Mackie really dropped the ball. You'd have to figure that none of them have any interest in the original issues where Mary first made that famous official debut of hers with the "tiger" statement, at the end of ASM #42 in 1966 (I think she may have actually first appeared several issues earlier, towards the end of Steve Ditko's run, when Prof. Spencer Smythe was presenting his spider-hunting robot to J. Jonah Jameson, but wasn't seen in actual view just then. Stan Lee must've wanted to keep her actual debut a surprise when John Romita became the new artist, and what a pleasant surprise it was). Or, maybe they seem to think that because she emotes, even anguish, that something's wrong with her. Or maybe they're using whenever she gets angry, even if it's sensibly written, as their excuse! I have no idea. All I know is that why they'd even bother to read Spider-Man is beyond me.
And then these same people might tell you that they expect reality in comic books! Well, getting angry or being cynical is also part of reality, so I don't know where they'd ever get off by claiming that.
But what's really funny is that these same people who seem to be easy with the idea of getting rid of MJ, or want her to be, aren't offering up any clear ideas of what is to be done afterwards. Can't say they've ever really asked if some girlfriends or even a new wife, for that matter, could or should be intro'd. So there you have it, once again, we're back at square one, and I still can't understand the no-MJ crowd.
And to address that no-MJ crowd again now, two years ago, I had an argument with a columnist who discriminated against Jean Loring, ex-wife of Ray Palmer, the Silver Age Atom, and putting aside for a moment that he said some things about Jean that were untrue, the biggest flaw in his own approach was that he seemed to forget that Jean is a fictional character. And he seemed totally clueless to the fact that, if there was anything wrong with her, it's not her fault, because she's an entirely fictional character. Au contraire, it's the writer's fault. So, as I asked him, "is it that hard to ask for a repair job?"
Yeah, if anyone finds something wrong with her, or any other character, how come I don't hear anyone asking to fix the characters, rather than killing them off, or worse, villifying them? And how come they seem to actually ask for a damaging blow to be dealt more to the female cast than the male cast? Rick Jones, certainly when Roy Thomas was writing him, had some really grating dialect at times, but after awhile, that was all fixed, and I certainly don't hear anyone calling for his demise now. In fact, unless I'm too out of the loop, I notice how nobody seems to be asking for Gambit, who in all due honesty, you could probably make a much more legitimate case for a character to bump off, to be sent to the grave. The one time I can think of when someone really called for getting rid of a male character was that famous (notorious?) time in 1980 when a letter writer to Uncanny X-Men who didn't like Wolverine made the call to "ditch the little runt!" Since then, there doesn't seem to be much opposition to the male cast of characters whom readers either do or don't like.
Hmm, have I found something to go on then? That some audience members are too biased in favor of the male cast to give a damn whenever the female cast has been marked for death? What a good question.
But until that can be answered, I think there needs to be a case made that we can't think of every single female character, major or minor, as irrepairable, and think of death/villification as the only answer to everything. If readers really do want to make things better, then they'd be advised to knock off the call for, or even show of tolerance thereof, for whenever a company even sounds remotely like they want to destroy certain female cast members, because they're minor and that supposedly makes everything legit, or because they dislike that these ladies have won over the audience, like the Black Cat did in the mid-80s, yet Marvel, some time after Felicia Hardy's reformation, chose to make her an annoyance, and in that case to influence the audience to ask for her to be shown the door. A move that, sadly, may have worked, but fortunately, since then, there were some repairs made.
If you think there's something wrong with a female protagonist, don't ask for her to be killed or worse yet, villified, and in ways that prove Mark Gruenwald right when he said, "Every character is somebody’s favorite. You shouldn’t kill them off lightly, or worse, ruin their old appearances in retrospect." That's what was done with Jean Loring, and if we just tolerate what was done with her, we'll be tolerating if Betty Brant, who's fairly minor by today's standards, gets ruined next. She may have been absent from the Spider-cast for several years now, and if we don't think carefully, then yes, it's possible that the editors could mandate tampering when bringing her back again. If you think there's something wrong with any female protagonist, ask simply if they can be fixed. Ask, best of all, if writers with a real dedication can be found who can accomplish this task. But don't ask for death. There has been too much of it running rampant in comics today anyway, regardless of if they're reversed. The villifications are even worse.
And if you can ask for something more productive and positive, then that way, comics can be made much better, and a good step can be taken towards redeeming them from the disasters they've undergone today.
Labels: bad editors, marvel comics, Spider-Man, women of marvel
