A tasteless joke made by Marc Guggenheim in 2008

Marc Guggenheim, the TV producer who's also written comics on occasion, made a disgusting joke about Mary Jane Watson back in 2008 that was published on Newsarama, but I'd missed the chance to write about it at the time, and then they redesigned much of their site and erased a lot of older stuff from their archives, including the page in question. Fortunately, I've discovered that the page is now available on Archive.Org's database, and here is the specific statement made by Guggenheim at the time One More/Brand New Day had taken place:

"Why couldn't Spider-Man" just get a divorce? McCann said it would be terrible for publicity, the same with killing her off. "I always pictured her being raped and killed," joked Guggenheim, a likely reference to DC's Identity Crisis series.

Even if he was joking, that was NOT funny. It's a serious subject and if had to reference such a horrible thing, it shouldn't have been within the context of a joke, but rather, a serious critique of DC themselves. Trouble is, he did work for them too, including the latter half of the abortive 2006 Flash run that ended with Bart Allen dying at the hands of the Rogues in one of the worst-written finales ever published, so I'm not sure if he'd be seriously critical of a company he's been more than willing to go along with, and he went fully along with OMD on Spider-Man too.

This is yet another example of what some, if not all, of the more recent generation of comics contributors are acting like under the radar of the rest of the showbiz-scanning world. I have no respect for Guggenheim after he mouthed off in such poor taste.