Today, Marvel's announced that Peter Parker (aka the amazing Spider-Man) and Mary Jane Watson (aka Peter's bae since Gwen Stacy died) are going to be married once again (with child!) in The Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows, which is a new tie-in to May's mega Marvel event "Secret Wars."
For those who actually keep up with Spider-Man's trials and tribulations, you'll remember that these two lovebirds finally got hitched in 1987, back when Spider-Man was rocking the black costume (which, ironically, he picked up at the end of the first "Secret Wars" event). Their marriage had it's ups and downs, and resulted in a pregnancy that was altogether forgotten when the Parkers made a deal with the Devil to have the world forget about their marriage.
That's right, during the events of the "Civil War" event, Spider-Man's secret identity was revealed to the world, which ended up putting Mary Jane and Aunt May in serious danger–which lead to Aunt May getting hit by an assassin's bullet. For some reason, Marvel cooked up the fanboy-hating "One More Day" storyline in 2007, which found Peter and Mary Jane accepting Mephisto's offer to save Aunt May's life at the cost of the memory of Peter and MJ's marriage being wiped from reality (we know, we know). That entire storyline was a way to "reboot" Spider-Man as a single man, although with the "One Moment in Time" story, those changes themselves appear to have been retconned, at least between MJ and Peter.
We say all of that to say that Marvel's getting the band back together once again for "Renew Your Vows," which teases us with another wrinkle: a child that these two appear to have brought into the world. For those who remember, Mary Jane was pregnant during the mid-'90s "Clone Saga" storyline, but due to a number of circumstances, the baby was stillborn. Anyone following Marvel's MC2 universe knows that Mary Jane and Peter's child lives on in that continuity as May Parker, aka the superhero Mayday. There was even an entire Spider-Girl series that followed Mayday's adventures in that universe, which makes the idea of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson's marriage appearing once again, in the current timeline, even weirder.
Current Amazing Spider-Man scribe Dan Slott says that "Spider-Man, when you get down to it, is a character about responsibility. And the second he’s a father and a husband—he has a responsibility to share his powers with the world, but suddenly he has two people that are his whole world. That changes everything, the complete dynamic of what it means to have great power and great responsibility. You need to be there for your daughter, you need there for your wife—in a way that he hasn’t had to be there for anyone else. And that drastically changes what it means to be Spider-Man.”
With Secret Wars already promising to shake up the entire Marvel Universe to its core, it's hard to determine what they're billing as "The Last Spider-Man Story" will entail. It's possible that the Spider-Man you see here is drastically different than the Spider-Man we've grown to adore. It will be intriguing to see how Slott handles Peter and Mary Jane now being in a much deeper relationship than they've been in for almost a decade. It seems that Slott thrives in the unknown, though: “If all you care about is Spidey, it’s totally cool if you have no idea what’s going on in Secret Wars.”
