One more day ... with the devil!!

If you're not reading Spiderman comics at the moment, you may be unaware that they've gone batshit crazy.

I've been reading Spidey since I first picked up comics. He's a prime example for why I've always gravitated towards Marvel's cast of character. Marvel's heroes are real people. Of course they have fantastic powers, but they're often welded onto an all-too-frail human frame, flaws included.

Spiderman - or Peter Parker - fights crime by night but by day he's a regular joe who puts up with his fair share of life crap. He's someone you can identify with.

Tangent: When I was a kid I really wanted to be Spiderman. I stopped wanting that when I realised there were no tall buildings in my city, thus dooming me to a life of stopping crimes only if they occurred within 12 metres of the central post office's clock spire. I gave up on being Wolverine after a similar realisation - that his awesome powers would allow one great adventure and then life in a prison for grisly knife murderers.

So of course the most recent Spiderman story centres around him making a deal with the devil, who saves his elderly aunt's life by rewriting history in exchange for erasing Peter's marriage so he can feed on the love it contains. Totally why I read Spiderman.

Seriously, last week I accidently burned down my Mars house, killing the family Cattodarg in the process. I was cut up about it but luckily Satan strolled by and swapped my lifesize Tanooki Suit collection for a small rewrite in history. Now I'm happily a journalist in Australia, Satan is enjoying the satisfaction I no longer recall and the Cattodarg is - I assume - safe and sound. Somewhere.

You wouldn't remember any of that of course. Because of Satan.

Tangent: Like many sci-fi writers before me, I came up with a name for my new Cattodarg creature by combining two existing names and slightly altering the spelling. Come with me now as we assault the Mad King Georboosh in his Wheathoossien Stronghold. Also, Catdog was an awesome show, with an even better theme song.

So, in the interest of spoiling everything, Spiderman had publicly revealed his secret identity recently. This led a sniper to his house and a bullet to his aunt's abdomen. Exhausting all other options, he was confronted by Mephisto - Marvel's satanic stand-in - who offered the deal. He wanted Peter's marriage and would save Aunt May. He would do this by making it so no-one had ever known Peter's identity, assumedly meaning the bullet was now sitting alone and unloved, wondering why 'Aunt May' was clearly written on it.

Peter's wife Mary-Jane convinced him to take the deal and the history was changed. He is no longer married, has no memory of ever having been and is basically reset to who he was thirty years ago - living with his aunt and being a zany single guy.

Within the story, Satan's only apparent change in history was to erase the memory of Spiderman's identity from everyone's mind. In a butterfly effect kind of way, this apparently erased the marriage at the same time.

The thing is, Marvel's editor-in-chief Joe Quesada has spent years complaining about Spiderman being married. He feels it makes the character inaccessible and removes him from his roots as an 'everyman'. Putting aside the fact that the character has been married as long as I've been reading, and I certainly had now trouble identifying with him, does not dealing with Satan lead to inaccessibility?

Tangent: If my experiences with heavy metal enthusiasts give anything to go by: Absolutely.

It's impossible to read this storyline without seeing, between the lines, a blinking light that says "I'm the editor and I wanted to get rid of this marriage. Where's my Satan?"

As unimportant as it may be to almost all human beings, I likes me some comics. Measured on a long enough scale, none of them make any sense. Batman's broken spine? Healed. Superman's age? Same now as it ever was. Captain America? No longer a werewolf.

Tangent: Yeah, I have a lot to say about Spiderman. I could also talk for this long on Drow. Tread carefully.

While we're on the whole 'Cap was werewolf' thing - comics aren't all that realistic. What they do have, when written well, if internal consistency. I appreciate that, and broad stroke revisionist stuff like the current Spidey situation push that aside. Characters come back from the dead all the time, but time is paid to make it work within the story. They were frozen. They were abducted. They healed very slowly. They were replaced by an actress sixteen months ago. It's crazy, but its believable in a highly suspended sort of way.

When Satan erases the knowledge of Spiderman's identity from everyone's brain, it apparently dissolves his marriage, saves his aunt from a gutshot, reanimates his dead best friend and does lot of other crazy stuff. This, at the moment at least, lacks internal consistency.

I love mythologies. I love Lost, Twin Peaks, comic books and movies. What I don't like is feeling like my investment in mythologies is a waste of time because I seem to pay more attention to how it works than the creators. I'll spend hours internally rationalising all the weird stuff that happens to Locke on the LOST island. If Mephisto rocks up there and changes history so it becomes 'LOST in a box factory with a paralysed man', I'll likely stop watching.

Unless he shoot webs. That'd be awesome.

Tangent: My spellchecker tried to turn Batman into Boatman. I'd totally read that.