Sunday, October 21, 2007

Ask Monstrobot--One More Day?

Dear Monstrobot,

I'm a costumed adventurer who is very worried about the danger my life poses to my loved ones. Enough people know my secret identity that I fear I can't protect the ones I care about from villains who wish me harm.

I have come up with a pretty radical solution, but is it too radical? I have found a way to write my loved ones out of my life, in such a way that they can never be connected to me. Is this the right thing to do? Or is my author just trying to get rid of the inconvenience of having to script around inconvenient family members?
--One More Day

Grrr! Fear me!
Dear OMD,

You must think you're dealing with an amateur here, huh? After that description, it's obvious who you really are: Catwoman!!

Hah!! I bet you (and the audience) thought I was going to say Spider-Man, huh? But I saw through your little subterfuge.

But don't worry: you've clearly succeeded in your plan, because while Spider-Man is getting savaged by every blogger out there, you've sailed under the radar, even though you're pulling the exact same stunt!! (Editor's note: obviously, until we see the final chapter of Spider-Man's One More Day, we can't be sure...but whatever the mechanism is, the outcome will be the same).

The editors and writers of Spider-Man obviously got tired of having him lug family matters around with him, so they went to great lengths to concoct a scenario that would force him to abandon his family in oder to save them. Through some magic deal or whatever, Mary Jane's going to be removed from his life, and we'll just go on.

And sexily clad Zatanna gets featured on the cover because?????
With you? Well, after we solved your One Year Later mystery of who the kid's father was, and it turned out to not be Batman (clever Earth-2 feint with the Helena name, dear), everyone sort of lost interest. And apparently your creators felt exactly the same as Peter Parker's, because after several issues of putting Helena in danger, they waved the magic wand of a billionaire crime fighting friend to remove her from your life, just as if she were never there. Poof.

I can't say why Will Pfeiffer has gotten a free pass on this, while Joe Quesada and JMS are raked over the coals. Yeah, Spider-Man's execution has been so drawn out, so over hyped, and so clumsily executed, that it was bound to get the lion's share of the attention. But a lot of bloggers out there talk up Pfeiffer and your book, so you'd think that they'd have noticed by now that he's now virtually eliminated all of your supporting cast from the book, and made completely irrelevant One Year Later and what followed.

Maybe it's because, unlike Quesada, Dan DiDio had the good sense not to boast publicly that they wanted to get rid of your kid, and that writers had no idea what to do with her. They just removed her, quietly, at the same time Peter Parker was hogging the headlines for the same thing. Like robbing a small bank the same day Fort Knox is knocked off--who's going to notice??

So relax, Selina, you got away with it. You eliminated any pesky family connections that might spoil your mag for the fanboys who don't want to read about a single mom, and no one at all called you on it. Job well done.

Now go out there and be a thief again, OK? Evil's glad to have you back.

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