[A heads-up before we begin. What you’ll find below is not an academic, peer-reviewed article, but neither is it a simple post. It’s a bit of both, I guess. If that sounds confusing, it’s because it is: I started revising this piece thoroughly, but it took me a lot of time to figure out what I wanted it to be. When I finally got the gist of it, thanks to some helpful feedback, I got swamped again with approaching deadlines and other academic commitments. As the piece is too substantial to be left in the (digital) drawer, but still too rough to be published elsewhere, I opted to leave it on my reliable good ol’ personal blog. The current version includes my critical thoughts on the issues at hand (the crisis affecting the US mainstream comic book industry and the corporate and editorial management of Marvel’s iconic character Spider-Man), along with academic works, blog posts, long-form YouTube video essays, and some key historical references that I believe are important for understanding the broader context. I may want to develop this post into one or two more refined and presentable pieces in the near future (one reason being that the situation is changing fast – the very first version of this post dates back to spring 2025), but for the time being this work-in-progress draft is the version I’ll stick to, if only because I don’t have much time to devote to yet another project, however fascinating it may be. I’ll update and revise it whenever I have the chance, so feel free to check back from time to time. In the meantime, I hope you’ll find something of interest in the following musings, ramblings, and mumblings! Cheers.]
“If [Peter Parker]’s still fouling up as an adult, he just isn’t a hero anymore. He’s pathetic.”
Marv Wolfman in DeFalco (2004: 78)
Prologue
The US mainstream comic book industry is facing an ongoing crisis marked by dwindling readership; meanwhile, Japanese mangas, graphic novels, and comic books targeted at a younger demographic enjoy an unprecedented success (Medina 2019; Barnett 2019; Kemner and Trinos 2024; Banks 2026). This turbulent shift in reading preferences comes on top of a disturbing sequence of sexual misconduct and/or assault accusations against celebrated mainstream authors (to name just a few, Warren Ellis, Jason Latour, and, lately, Neil Gaiman; McMillan, Drury and Couch 2020; Shapiro 2025), the dire aftermath of the systemic disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic (Thielman 2020), the financial exploitation and cannibalisation of artists and writers by the corporate Hollywood system (Thielman 2021), the double whammy of machine learning and AI art generated through intellectual theft and copyright infringement (Nam 2024), the baffling disappearance of publicly available, industry-wide comparative sales chart (MacDonald 2023; MacDonald 2025a), new tariffs on paper import affecting print costs that exacerbate ever-increasing prices (Myrick 2024; Gagliano 2025), and the bankruptcy of comic book distributor Diamond (MacDonald 2025b; for a timeline of the still developing situation see Johnston 2025a). If one were inclined to believe in such things, it could be argued that the satirical curse – or accursed satire – anarchic intellectual, novelist, comic book writer, and ceremonial magician Alan Moore placed on the comic book industry as a whole via his novel-size novella “What We Can Know About Thunderman”, conceived as an act of symbolic retribution for its “predatory and immature” practices, has finally begun to work its magic (cit. from Robertson 2024; see Ambasciano 2023 on Moore 2023) [1].
(Un)creative fodder
It is neither unfair nor especially controversial to suggest that, aside from a handful of recent and qualitatively remarkable exceptions, many of the Big Two’s historic flagship titles have long been locked into a repetitive loop: plots are devised to endlessly recombine archetypal narrative elements in fractal-like permutations drawn from the same exhausted diegetic matrix, generating storytelling tropes that have grown increasingly stale and uncreative. Given that the publishing divisions of Marvel and DC are infinitesimal cogs in the corporate entertainment machines of Disney and Warner Bros. respectively, this is rather unsurprising. In the words of journalist Catherine Shoard, “Hollywood, it appears, is stuck on repeat, sucked with an ever-more deafening gurgle into a death cycle of creative bankruptcy desperately presented as comfort food” (Shoard 2025). Through the ongoing barrage of uninspired relaunches and reboots we can glimpse the industry version of Tancredi Falconeri’s nihilistic and opportunistic motto: “if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”, immortalised, only slightly rephrased, by French thespian Alain Delon in the movie version of Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard (1958), and recently retold by Italian actor Saul Nanni in Netflix’s “steamy, sumptuous” adaptation (Aroesti 2025).
Briefly put, new titles struggle to gain traction and are continually cancelled, while ongoing, classic ‘legacy’ titles are forced to periodically revert to the status quo ante, erasing any meaningful progress in the characters’ story arcs (when such arcs exist). The prioritisation of artificial and short-term sales boosts, achieved through the relaunch of these series with a shiny new “issue #1” stamped on the cover or via company-wide crossover events involving several titles at once, rarely comes with sufficiently coherent in-universe justifications. Consequently, the brief sales spikes resulting from these editorially mandated resets fade quite rapidly, which in turn prompt publishers to relaunch the same titles in the span of a few years or even mere months. Other profitable marketing strategies sidestep the content entirely while focussing on the product itself, but they do so at the expense of collectors and die-hard completionists, risking disaffection and disengagement (cf. the proliferation of variant covers, incentive covers, and ‘blind bags’; Avila 2019; Johnston 2025b). Perhaps the monthly floppy has had its day (at least for the time being), in which case bold and unprecedented editorial decisions would be required to halt the industry’s hemorraging, especially considering that every new monthly issue must fight not just for attention in an overcrowded marketplace, both on shelves and on screen, but also compete with celebrated, and often better executed, past runs of the same characters canonised in best-selling, readily available, and self-contained physical or digital volumes (more on this later). It may also be that the superhero genre itself (as it has been conceived in the United States after the Bronze Age) is undergoing a cyclical downturn. Whatever the reason, the US mainstream production’s reliance on the fossilised template of a single genre has made it particularly vulnerable to broader societal or generational changes when compared to Europe or Japan (cf. the recent Jim Lee interview in Maeda 2026). Finally, inadequate salaries for artists and writers and minimal acknowledgment of creators’ rights and contributions aggravate the problem, as such factors understandably limit the appeal of taking on a job in the industry and shrink the available pool of potentially interested creators, and so the qualitatively self-defeating loop can start again – at least until corporations go bankrupt or their intellectual properties finally enter public domain (for a different opinion cf. Brevoort 2024).
On the other hand, a significant portion of good contemporary storylines involving ‘legacy’ characters can rarely grow to express the full potentialities that are unique to sequential storytelling, even within the constraints of the mainstream, because they exist mostly as first drafts, rough outlines, or ashcans for the media conglomerates that own the Big Two [2]. In the surprisingly sincere words of Senior Vice President of Publishing and current X-Men Group Editor Tom Brevoort,
“[…] the purpose of Marvel Publishing is to be out in front, the tip of the spear, generating new ideas and new stories that can serve as creative fodder for eventual film and animation development. So trying to revert things to 1992 or whenever would seem to be defeating the purpose in a major way. Better, I think, to try to develop new status quos that future X-Men projects in film and television can draw from” (Brevoort 2025a; my emphasis).
The multiple crises currently affecting a shrinking Hollywood industry casts Brevoort’s ancillary view of mainstream comic book production as overtly optimistic if not somewhat self-sabotaging (Keegan et al. 2023; Morris 2024; Miracle and Canes 2025; Gumbel 2025; cf. Ambasciano 2024; for a contrastive view on the issue see Lee’s emphasis on comic book produciton per se, empathetic storytelling, and institutional support for artists and writers in Maeda 2026). When we judge Brevoort’s opinion solely on the merits of Marvel’s recent editorial decisions, it is true that the X-Men comic book lines recently tried very hard to escape the frustrating stasis dictated by mainstream superhero narratives by establishing a radical new status quo, but after a while the bold (and equally divisive) storyline originally masterminded by Jonathan Hickman seemingly suffered a lack of editorial guidance and then reverted nonetheless to old, uninspired tropes (Johnston 2021; Meenan 2024).
Another blatant example of both the illusion of narrative change and the domestication of the once liberating postmodern and revisionist approach into a standardised permutation matrix that rewards creative mediocrity and short-term gains, is the official Marvel announcement, dated 18 February 2025, of the resurrection of Earth 616-Gwen Stacy as a superpowered assassin, of all things (Anonymous 2025). Stacy is an important character not just for the Spider-Man lore but for the entire medium as well: she was Peter Parker’s first true love, and her death was so groundbreaking when it was originally published in The Amazing Spider-Man #121 (June 1973) that historians of the medium argue it helped mark the end of the naïve, optimistic Silver Age of Comics and the beginning of the comparatively more realistic Bronze Age (Blumberg 2003). Even though death in mainstream comics has long since become a meaningless and transient inconvenience, the problem is compounded by the absence of any real stakes within the current explosion of multiversal storylines and doppelgängers, of which the multimedia-spanning Spider-Verse is perhaps the best know contemporary example (cf. Kain 2023). Within such a framework, the resulting narrative predictably ranges from middling to disappointing, and inevitably fails to live up to the usual, overblown marketing hype. For instance, in the limited series announced by Marvel (entitled The All-New, All-Deadly Gwenpool), the reanimated Gwen Stacy is revealed not to be the original character but a clone who adopts the codename “X-31” and engages with a heterogeneous ensemble of superheroes including Gwenpool – an unrelated, multidimensional, fourth-wall-breaking figure modeled after Deadpool.
The announcement for this series felt like the final straw. The news was so baffling that even mainstream industry-friendly outlets had to vent their anger via self-explanatory articles like “There Are Things We Want for Spider-Man, But Gwen Stacy’s Return Is Not One of Them” (Myrick 2025) or “Marvel Comics Is Doing The Unthinkable”, the latter sporting an unambiguous “What the F***?!” subtitle (Wilding 2025). Besides, Marvel’s announcement came after years of readers’ frustration at the editorially confusing (mis)management of Spider-Man and awkward, if not outright confrontational, interactions with the readers (fjmac 2023; Angeles 2024). And then, once published, the storyline fell into oblivion. One might question whether these examples genuinely qualify as the bold “new ideas and new stories that can serve as creative fodder for eventual film and animation development.”
Infinite crisis in the Spider-Verse
The heated reception of the new series, as well as its deflated aftermath, prompted me to reflect on the state of the titles dedicated to Spider-Man, Marvel’s most prominent character and one of the most recognisable figures in contemporary popular culture. Although some readers may disagree, these books have been mired in editorial controversy since the publication of the much-debated storyline One More Day. Elaborated by then Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada with the collaboration of screenwriter, novelist, and The Amazing Spider-Man writer J. M. Straczynski, along with a circle of collaborators (“[Brian Michael] Bendis, [Mark] Millar, [Jeph] Loeb, Tom Brevoort, Axel Alonso […], Ed Brubaker and Dan Slott”; Quesada in Weiland 2007b), One More Day was a 2007 crossover limited to the three Spider-Man titles then published by Marvel and specifically designed to kickstart a hard reboot of the company’s flagship superhero (Ginocchio 2017: 233-238). This goal was achieved by undoing Peter Parker’s marriage with Mary Jane Watson by way of a deal with Mephisto, the literal devil of the Marvel universe, to save the life of Parker’s elderly aunt May, who had narrowly escaped death many times before. As an added bonus, Mephisto would also erase from everybody’s memory Spider-Man’s secret identity, previously revealed during the Civil War limited series written by Millar and penciled by Steve McNiven.
With its brazen erasure of decades of the main character’s continuity, One More Day stands out in the publisher’s history as a jarring and disconnected narrative U-turn marred by plot holes that “nobody, including its creators, likes” (Wolk 2021: 95; see the “Reception” section of the Wikipedia entry for the storyline; cf. Reaves 2025 and Lennen 2023). Even more damningly, from the perspective of virtue ethics, the storyline doubled as a profound and unexplainable betrayal of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson’s character traits and moral integrity, which understandably resulted in a general loss of faith in the editorial stewardship of the books:
“absent a life-altering event or a mind-blowing epiphany, we don’t expect fictional characters – or real people – to alter their deep-seated behavior abruptly and for no reason. Given the fantastical circumstances Peter Parker has faced throughout his career as Spider-Man, even the impending death of his aunt and a surprise offer from Mephisto don’t seem enough to trigger and justify such an about-face” (White 2012).
Unsurprisingly, the same opinion was shared by former Marvel editor-in-chief, co-plotter, and co-writer of the 1987 Amazing Spider-Man Annual where Peter and Mary Jane got married, Jim Shooter. In a comment published in late 2011 on his website, Shooter wrote:
“I finally got around to reading One More Day and A Brand New Day, and though I admire the skills of the creators I didn’t recognize any of the characters. Open note to Joe Quesada and the Marvel creative staff: If you don’t understand who the characters in your care are, call me and I’ll clue you in. Yes, that's a snarky comment. Yes, I’m that appalled by the thing” (Shooter 2011).
By contrast, the passing of time seems to have been particularly kind to the Second Clone Saga, which is usually considered “emblematic of Marvel’s problems in the 1990s” (Sacks and Dallas 2020: 135; see Danny Fingeroth’s comments in Veronese 2010: 77; cf. also Behbakht 2023, Lennen 2024, and MNStash 2025). The subsequent revelations about the corporate drama unfolding behind the scenes helped clarify why and how certain misguided decisions were made (Goletz n.d.); at the same time, the publication of many lackluster storylines, failed reboots, and controversial retcons (resp., Ginocchio 2015; Ginocchio 2012), along with the equally exhausting and narratively bankrupt decades-long teasing of the dissolution of the One More Day status quo (e.g., Isaak 2021; see also Mendoza 2024), made many readers re-evaluate what were once considered unforgivable missteps (cf. Singer 2019: 74-94). In hindsight, the Second Clone Saga, which run from 1994 to 1996 and saw the unexpected return of the main protagonist’s clone from a half-forgotten 1970s story (i.e., the original Clone Saga) following a successful pitch by Web of Spider-Man writer Terry Kavanagh, had its sincere and emotional moments of true wonder, sadness, and joy (e.g., Mary Jane announcing she was expecting a child to a jubilant but sick Peter in The Amazing Spider-Man #398), it was organically tied to the previous continuity while propelling the main cast of characters forward in their adult lives, it boasted a solid start and a coherent first act, and had at the very least a couple of issues that may well rank among the greatest in the history of the character (with J. M. DeMatteis, Mark Bagley, and Larry Mahlstedt’s The Amazing Spider-Man #400 probably taking the crown). In sum, as Douglas Wolk wrote, it was “a solid idea” that would have marked “a concrete and timely end to the third Spider-Man cycle”, whose defining feature was Peter Parker struggling with his identity and mental health against his various “shadow sel[ves]” and “nightmare id[s]” (like Venom, Carnage, and the Spider-Doppelganger) as he tried, mostly in vain, to overcome the loss of his parents (Wolk 2021: 93, 91; my emphasis).
L’Uomo Ragno #185: the first Italian edition of Amazing Spider-Man #400, which also included Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #222, Web of Spider-Man vol 1 #123, and “The Cycle of Life” from The Spectacular Spider-Man Super Special (1995). Cover by Mark Bagley and Larry Mahlstedt. SOURCE: private collection. © 1996 Marvel.
A very short recap of what unfolded – including what was planned to unfold – across the four Spider-Man titles published at that time is in order. Already at his wit's end, suffering from PTSD, anxiety, and depression, and prone to meltdowns and upredictable outbursts of rage, a worn-out, solitary Peter Parker embarks on a soul-searching quest in an eerie “Philip K. Dick/Twilight Zone territory” that J.M. DeMatteis, at that time writer of the Amazing Spider-Man, summarised as a “twisted exploration of personal identity and a journey deep into the primal question, ‘who am I?’ What would a man do if he discovered that everything he believed about himself was a lie?” (DeMatteis in Veronese 2010: 74; cf. Sacks and Dallas 2020: 134, 174). This psychological pilgrimage was intended to lead Peter Parker toward making peace with both his past mistakes and his present failures. Coping with the recent death of Aunt May would prove difficult, and even more destabilising would be the shattering revelation that he might in fact have been the clone all along (cf. DeMatteis in DeFalco 2004: 170). Nonetheless, the stage was set for Peter to step aside and allow Ben Reilly – the new identity assumed by the former clone during his years as a vagrant constantly on the road – to officially inherit the role of Spider-Man, while the former hero would retire with Mary Jane in anticipation of the birth of their first child, May Parker. As recalled by DeMatteis,
“we were going to send the Peter we knew and loved, the one who’d be revealed as the Clone, and Mary Jane off to have their baby, and they would live happily ever after. They would have this good life that I believe would have fully satisfied the readers. ‘With great powers comes great responsibility’, right? What greater responsibility is there than raising a child and teaching him or her to be a good and decent human being? I remember writing some dialogue for Aunt May about this very fact” (DeMatteis in DeFalco 2004: 171).
The bold story arc did prove extremely popular and profitable in a time of financial distress for the company (Sacks and Dallas 2020: 135, 175). Because of this, its development was quickly derailed by the marketing department at Marvel, which insisted on an unreasonable extension of the original storyline; to make matters worse, the saga was further hampered by editorial indecision and infighting among different publishing divisions, leading to the departure of the original artistic teams who helped creating the storyline (cf. DeFalco 2004: 169-171, 180, 194; Sacks and Dallas 2020: 174, 208). The story was originally intended to run for roughly six months (three according to adjectiveless Spider-Man writer Howard Mackie, “a year at best” according to DeMatteis; Veronese 2010: 75); after more than two years of stalling and a mind-boggling sequence of twists, turns, and retcons that covered “twenty-two different story arcs and over 2300 comic pages” (which featured the return of both Aunt May and long-dead Spider-Man nemesis Norman Osborn, the disappearance of newborn May, and the death of Ben Reilly at the hands of the Green Goblin), disaffected readers left the titles in droves, and in the end the books lost almost half of their initial audience (Howe 2012: 365-366, 370, 372, 381-382; cit. from Sacks and Dallas 2020: 210). Ultimately, the Second Clone Saga failed only insofar as it was a victim of its own initial spectacular success.
It is somewhat ironic that the entire One More Day storyline was designed to resolve the lingering issues that had plagued the Spider-Man-related titles since the implementation of top-down directives and the retcons that affected the development of the Clone Saga more than a decade earlier. In both cases, the editorial mandate “allo[wed] the villain to get a permanent win over Spider-Man for no real reason aside from a business-oriented dislike of Peter's growth” and, once again, the elaboration of the plot caused friction with the main writer(s) (Reaves 2025; cf. Sanderson 2008 and White 2012; see the Joe Quesada interview in CBR Staff 2008).
Whatever one’s views on the qualitative merits of One More Day, the crossover also appears to have been financially detrimental to the Spider-Man’s books: after an initial spike of interest fuelled by the controversy surrounding the story, sales steadily declined for Brand New Day, the immediate follow-up story arc. With only rare exceptions, sales volumes never actually recovered to the previous highs of the Clone Saga (see the tentative data gathered from Comichron and presented in Sartheking 2023).
The “strangest thing that Marvel has ever done”
In light of all this, the ongoing editorial refusal to undo the unpopular post-Clone Saga/Mephisto-sanctioned status quo arguably stands as one of the most striking examples of the sunk cost fallacy in contemporary entertainment industry, as Marvel’s editorial leadership remains unwilling to cut its losses after decades of financial and narrative investment (on the sunk cost fallacy see Chatfield 2018: 212, 282, 297). Nor is this the only instance of fallacious reasoning and questionable long-term strategies for IP preservation at work in the editorial logic of what Charlie Reaves has characterised as “the strangest thing that Marvel has ever done” (Reaves 2025). To understand how all this came to pass, however, we must take a step back and sketch a brief biographical profile of the story’s real protagonists, Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada.
Jemas, at the helm of Fleer Entertainment Group since 1993, became Marvel’s President of Consumer Products, Publishing and New Media in February 2000, in the early stages of the post-bankruptcy restructuring of Marvel Comics under a new ownership, “chief among them toy baron Avi Arad (who spent much of [the early 2000s] spearheading Marvel’s film and TV efforts in Los Angeles) and the legendary cash-conscious Ike Perlmutter” (Rabiroff 2024: 23; for a detailed history of the tumultuous period that followed Marvel’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy and subsequent merger with Arad and Perlmutter’s Toy Biz, see Howe 2012: 379-432; cf. Shooter 2025 [1998]). During his tenure at Marvel, which would last until February 2004, Jemas would manage to overturn the fortunes of the company, which at that time was $250 million in debt. Jemas’ bold strategy entailed the radical transformation of the company’s approach to storytelling, from an ongoing in-universe continuity (even if a bit faltering since the late 1980s because of a steady increase in the number of publications and the rise of star creators at the expenses of characters) to a parcellation into self-contained, semi-independent story arcs that could be then collected into trade paperbacks to be sold in the burgeoning graphic novel, manga, and YA markets; as Russian dolls, those story arcs would become chapters to be collected first into deluxe hardcover editions and then into gargantuan omnibus tomes (Rabiroff 2024: 23). The ultimate goal was to create a library of pre-packaged, stand-alone snippets of commodified IPs ready to be licensed and sold to Hollywood companies – which would hopefully lead viewers eager to know more back to comic books. In his detailed review of the Jemas’ years at Marvel, Zach Rabiroff defines this corporate strategy as follows:
“Not comics as a universe, or comics as a creator-driven medium or comics as an art. Rather comics as container shipping: modular units of story that can be stacked and shuffled into whatever form the market dictates. These are the building blocks of modern comics” (Rabiroff 2024: 23).
At the heart of Jemas’ strategy was the idea that the still struggling and relatively small company could be effectively run as an “IP-manufacturing arm of a larger entertainment complex” (Rabiroff 2024: 26). Despite Jemas’ “truculent and bellicose posture” toward the dog-eat-dog world of licensing and the “unapologetic ruthlessness” taking hold in his own company, where a toxic work environment was slowly brewing, and notwithstanding a series of disconcerting publishing failures (like the limited series Marville and Trouble), the success of this approach was undeniable (Rabiroff 2024: 31-33, 39). In just four years, the corporate make-believe would turn into reality: Marvel stock price rose from $2 to more than $30, and domestic licensing revenues increased from $9.4 million to $88.3 million (Rabiroff 2024: 43). Thanks to Jemas’ aggressive IP management, in 2009 Disney acquired Marvel for $4 billion, and the production of a shared cinematic universe based on Marvel’s IPs would earn the new owner $27.357 billion, “making it the most successful film series in history” (Rabiroff 2024: 26, 43). As we shall see, this success would come at a high price for the comic books themselves.
Joe Quesada, “a star artist of the ’90s with […] echoes of the bad boy image with which he had entered the industry”, was promoted editor-in-chief in 2000 and became Jemas’ key lieutenant on the field, where he played a critical role in the implementation of the new corporate vision (Rabiroff 2024: 23-24). At the time, Quesada had only been involved with Marvel for a couple of years. The former indie artist who “got into comics later on in life” and “didn’t even aspire to be a comic book artist early on” (Quesada in Vogler 2006: 147), was originally hired by Marvel in 1998 along with collaborator Jimmy Palmiotti after having worked for Nintendo Comics, Valiant, DC Comics, and Event Comics, the latter being the creator-owned comic company he started with Palmiotti in late 1994 (Sacks and Dallas 2020: 30, 75, 99). At Marvel, Quesada and Palmiotti’s goal was to oversee the new, edgy Marvel Knights line and help the company reclaim a central place in the pop mainstream of the new millennium by exploiting their “deep experience in advertising” and “strong relationships with movie producers and directors, the kind of high-profile Hollywood talent that Marvel wanted to attach to their properties” (Sacks and Dallas 2020: 159-160). Their recruitment by the company was itself the result of their strong ties to the pop culture world of the era, as then Marvel president Joe Calamari followed a suggestion made by Wizard magazine publisher Gareb Shamus (Sacks and Dallas 2020: 247). The strategy, buoyed by filmmaker Kevin Smith’s best-selling run on Daredevil with pencils and inks provided by Quesada and Palmiotti themselves, would quickly pay off (Sacks and Dallas 2020: 247-248).
As editor of the Marvel Knights line, Quesada had already demonstrated the effectiveness of a strategic approach based on “attention-getting, sharply produced” monthly books written by “celebrity writers” and supported by “marketing stuns” (Rabiroff 2024: 24). A clever iconoclast, Quesada initially tempered a move fast, break things approach with “a respectful willingness to play within the tennis court of Marvel’s shared universe and continuity” (Rabiroff 2024: 24). Once promoted to editor-in-chief, and following a professional split with Palmiotti, Quesada entered into a “good cop/bad cop” dynamic with Jemas where “politically incorrect, attention-grabbing trash talk [became] business as usual” (resp., Rabiroff 2024: 24, and Howe 2012: 418). Together, they jointly managed the radical overhaul of the company, of which the complete blank slate of the new Ultimate line of comics – basically a younger, slicker, edgier, and cinematic rebuilding of the entire Marvel Universe from the ground up in the style of Image/DC imprint WildStorm – would become their crown jewel [3]. As recalled by Andrew Lis, a former editor at Marvel, Jemas’ rationale behind the shiny calling card of the new line, Ultimate Spider-Man (written by Brian Michael Bendis, pencilled by Mark Bagley, and inked by Art Thibert), was crystal-clear from the beginning, and is worth reproducing in full:
“‘Spider-Man’s always a teenager. He’s always learning about his powers. Nobody wants to read a Spider-Man comic where you’ve got 30-year-old Peter Parker, and his job sucks and he’s got a kid at home. Nobody wants to read that because teenagers need to buy Spider-Man. That’s the whole idea of the character aging because old, aging people are writing the books for aging people like them. What we need are fresh takes on these characters’. And he’s like: ‘Anybody have questions?’ […] [During those meetings] you never, ever had questions. That’s the worst thing. So, this girl raised her hand and said, ‘I have a question. What happens after a couple of years when there’s continuity?’ And [Jemas] said, ‘Good question. You’re fired’.” (Rabiroff 2024: 30; cf. Howe 2012: 404) [4]
Jemas’ gospel became Quesada’s credo. Having survived Jemas’ ousting from the company, Quesada would retain his role as editor-in-chief for another seven years and attempt to recapture lightning in a bottle by applying the same blank slate approach that had made Ultimate Spider-Man so successful to the traditional Spider-Man titles (cf. Rabiroff 2024: 42). Talking to Wizard in 2007, Quesada stated that One More Day would be “the final word on the marriage. It will leave no lingering doubts on what’s going on with Mary Jane and Peter” (Saffel 2007: 315). To justify his approach, he would repeatedly express his personal opposition to Peter Parker’s marriage, citing both a romanticised, nostalgic vision of the early Ditko, Romita, and Lee era of Spider-Man and corporate considerations, as exemplified by the following interview excerpts:
“The golden era of Spider-Man gave us things we had never seen in a comic before. […] When Peter Parker got married, it caused the character to be cut off from many of the social situations and settings that put him at conflict with his family, friends, and especially the girl he was dating. […] And whatever nerdish sex appeal he possessed, we had to tread very carefully. He became the perpetual ‘designated driver.’ Sure, Peter could hang around with other married folk – I bet that would be exciting! […] I’ll get personal, for a moment. I have an incredible marriage and a fantastic kid, but there is no question that my life was much more story-worthy when I was single. Was I happier? Absolutely not. Was my life a better story from a drama sense? Ummmm, yeah. It had many more twists and turns and theater and was a bit of a mess. […] Now let me say, not everyone, but for most: when people get married, they tend to settle down – life slows down and you gain different responsibilities, grown-up responsibilities, boring responsibilities. […] We all want Peter to catch a break and to settle down and have happiness in his life, but that isn’t really what we want. If that actually happened, people would stop caring about Spider-Man” (Quesada in Weiland 2008).
“If Spidey grows old and dies off with our readership, then that's it[,] he’ll be done and gone, never to be enjoyed by future comic fans. If we keep Spidey rejuvenated and relatable to fans on the horizon, we can manage to do that and still keep him enjoyable to those that have been following his adventures for years. […] At the end of the day, my job is to keep these characters fresh and ready for every fan that walks through the door, while also planning for the future and hopefully an even larger fan base” (Quesada in Weiland 2007a).
Since an in-depth analysis of Quesada’s statements, along with other key excerpts from coeval interviews, would take too much space, I’ll limit myself to noting that, just like Jemas’ ageist bias, his appeal to hypothetical future generations of readers (that is, today’s readers) was tinged by rosy retrospection and special pleading and didn’t factor in cultural changes affecting societal norms (more on these points later). In addition, Quesada’s viewpoint presumed the perpetual corporate ownership of IPs despite the limits imposed by copyright laws, and maintained that an aging, mature, responsible character wouldn’t have the same appeal of a young one unburdened by “boring responsibilities”, notwithstanding the fact that in our contemporary onlife cultural environment, where old and new contents coexist simultaneously on and off the screen, it would be actually easier for young readers to be introduced to a long-established character through a collection of old stories or an adaptation rather than through a monthly floppy (which was the point of Jemas’ strategy) (“onlife” is a neologism used by philosopher of information Luciano Floridi to describe the current “hyperconnected reality” where our digital and offline lives are fully intertwined; Floridi 2015: 1). Finally, by denying Peter Parker happiness and any lasting victories (professional, sentimental, or heroic), Quesada stunted the character’s growth and risked alienating the existing readership (again, more on this in later sections).
As a response to corporate pressures to reverse course in light of low sales, Quesada’s radical stance was diametrically opposed to the dominant editorial and adult approach that had previously shaped the Spider-Man titles. For instance, in the 1989 paperback edition of Kraven’s Last Hunt, editors Glenn Herdling and Jim Salicrup wrote:
“One would infer that [the readers who criticised the existential themes and the suicide at the ending of the story arc] believe everything about the wall-crawler should be candy-coated and totally escapist. We, on the other hand, feel that anyone who believes such nonsense doesn’t understand who Spider-Man is or what he represents. From the very outset, Spider-Man (the comic) explored mature themes” (Herdling and Salicrup 1989; quoted in Dallas 2024: 208).
And yet, had he managed to provide a compelling, carefully planned in-universe justification, the dissolution of the marriage could have worked. However, true to his move fast and break things attitude, Quesada didn’t actually offer any credible rationale as he proceeded to undo it anyway via a supernatural intervention – a choice regrettably uncharacteristic of the titles in question [5]. While it can be argued that some good and memorable stories were indeed published after One More Day, in the end none of them featured any new love interests the creators came up with for post-One More Day Peter Parker, which in hindsight invalidates Quesada’s primary motivations [6]. From a long-term financial point of view, Quesada’s gamble would also prove unsuccessful. Post-Jemas, Marvel suffered significant losses in both the direct and bookstore markets: in the former case, the company tried to “mak[e] up in sheer, market-flooding volume [of new titles] what they were now losing in actual per-title sales,” while in the latter the company’s share “slowed, plateaued and eventually spluttered to a halt[: in 2021] they had precisely no title among the 750 top-selling collections” (Rabiroff 2024: 40). By injecting stand-alone story arc DNA into the ongoing Marvel continuity as a whole, the monthly floppies had mutated into something they were never meant to be. Although they initially succeeded in colonising the graphic novel market, the new hybrids eventually cannibalised themselves, leaving the company without sustainable revenue from any format.
The “best Platonic ideal”
Definitely not the “best Platonic ideal” according to post-2000s Marvel editorship. Cover from the first Italian collected edition of The Amazing Spider-Man #290-292 and The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21: Speciale L’Uomo Ragno 2, Star Comics, 1991; variant cover by Bill Sienkiewicz. SOURCE: personal collection. © 1991 Marvel.
Although Quesada’s original master plan was meant to “rejuvenate” the character while preserving all prior events as canonical, it neither turned back the clock nor made Peter Parker younger. What it produced was instead an “infantilisation” of Spider-Man (Hart 2021): a fully-grown character trapped in a Groudhog Day-like limbo as an emotionally immature kidult who repudiates his “greatest responsibility”, as Aunt May puts it in DeMatteis & Bagley’s The Amazing Spider-Man #400 – namely, being a husband and a father. Post-One More Day Spider-Man becomes the poster child for Peter Pan syndrome or, in old-school analytical psychology parlance, a narcissistic puer æternus unable to come to terms with ageing. (Cue the obligatory Millennial meme of Steve Buscemi’s ‘How do you do, fellow kids?’ sketch.).
Former Marvel Comics editor-in-chief and writer Tom DeFalco stated that such outcomes are the inevitable results of the readers’ alleged preference for a perennial reversal to the status quo in vogue during their childhood. The “simple truth of comic book readers” would be that they “don’t like change”, DeFalco declared, adding that “[t]hey claim they like change but they always [want] everything back to the way it was when they were kids” (DeFalco in Singer 2019: 94). A qualitative and quantitative examination of this statement is beyond the purview of this post; suffice it to note here that DeFalco himself had relinquished his editorship in 1994 while contributing to the Clone Saga because of irreconcilable disagreements with Marvel management (Sacks and Dallas 2020: 133-134). This episode, rather than indicating an extraordinary cognitive dissonance experienced by large swathes of the fandom, exemplifies the negative impact of punishing or ineffective editorial restructuring and top-down interference on creators.
Indeed, the success of inter- and multigenerational narratives in autobiographical graphic novels and decades-long mangas (and animes) demonstrates that readers are, in fact, eager to embrace long-term narrative evolution, character growth, and definitive conclusions. Despite occasional backpedaling, this was also, by and large, the real selling point and the raison d’être of the whole Marvel universe until the early 1990s. In 1991, former Star Comics editor-in-chief, former CEO of Marvel Comics Italia, and current publishing director of Panini Marco Marcello Lupoi singled out Spider-Man as the clearest example of the classic Marvel approach to comic book storytelling:
“In the comic-book universe created by Stan Lee [sic], one defining feature above all helps make superheroes seem like real people: change. […] A clear example of this approach is the career of Spider-Man, a.k.a. Peter Parker. When he first appeared in 1962, the world-famous web-slinger was a bespectacled teenager, a bookworm in his final year at Midtown High School. However, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, his brilliant creators, understood that this was meant to be only an initial phase. Spider-Man would age alongside his readers, through a process of change that was slow, gradual, and inevitable [, ultimately leading to his marriage]” (Lupoi 1991; original emphasis; my translation) [7].
Four years later, Lupoi introduced the new Clone Saga to Italian readers and explicitly contrasted the evolving Marvel universe with static European narrative dynamics:
“Something new is on the horizon for Spider-Man. Comebacks, deaths, new villains, new creative teams. Marvel has decided to take the Wall-Crawler and his entire world and turn them upside down, dramatically altering a status quo that had essentially remained the same for years, specifically ever since our hero married Mary Jane Watson. The reason behind this urge for ‘revolution’ will likely be lost on many of you. Italian readers are famously conservative. Once a character settles into a well-defined mould, we would like to see it crystallised that way forever. A Diabolik driving the same car. A Tex with the same friends and enemies. A Dylan Dog wearing the same clothes, the same supporting cast, the same narrative dynamics. While American soap operas reinvent themselves season after season, mainstream audiences here tend to prefer shows like Derrick, built on the same identical situation endlessly repeating week after week. It goes without saying that Marvel comics operate on the exact opposite philosophy: change. Spider-Man graduates from high school, goes to college, loses friends, girlfriends, enemies; he gets married, moves house, changes jobs, changes his costume. His life is a whirlwind of personal evolution, and anyone who has been following his adventures for a while knows this perfectly well […].” (Lupoi 1995; my translation) [8].
Whether that was really the creators’ original plan is beyond the point; what’s important is the cumulative result of their foundational decisions (along with those made by their colleagues and successors) on the emic, in-universe Marvel narrative progression (cf. Howe 2012: 431-432). As summarised by former Marvel editor, writer, and biographer Danny Fingeroth, while the stories published by DC Comics until the 1960s showed “little if any forward character growth or development of the various situations in that universe”, Marvel’s entire narrative strategy hinged on the idea that its characters did actually
“develop over time. They changed and grew from issue to issue, year to year. Lee and his collaborator were incrementally creating some form of literature. […] Marvel’s stories and everything surrounding them were evolving, subtly inviting readers to grow, too. This was a large part of what made Marvel so irresistible to those on its wavelength. And there were more and more people on its wavelength all the time” (Fingeroth 2019: 136, 138; original emphasis).
The adoption of serialised storytelling and the “lengthening of the story lines” allowed for “stories, subplots, and especially characters” to be “developed as never before” in a way that started to resemble, if not real lives, at the very least “lives as portrayed by creators of novels and plays and movies that dealt with human growth and development” (Fingeroth 2019: 136; my emphasis) [9]. The result of all the characters growing together was an unprecedent, coherent, and tightly woven in-universe continuity that set the company apart from its mainstream competitors – an “epic among epics, Marcel Proust times Doris Lessing times Robert Altman to the power of the Mahābhārata” (Wolk 2021: 4; cf. Rabiroff 2024: 16) [10].
While the first troubling signs of the dissolution of this “unbroken soap opera narrative from 1961 to the present” arguably emerged during Marvel’s bankruptcy and Toy Biz’s acquisition of the company in 1997 (coinciding with the corporate disruption of the Clone Saga), the in-universe continuity began to visibly unravel under Jemas’ tenure (cit. from Rabiroff 2024: 22). Quesada’s One More Day storyline, shaped by a scorched-earth approach meant to emulate the original Ultimate line, would ultimately bring it to an end. In 2025, Brevoort, who had been assigned to supervise the Marvel Universe trading cards under Jemas’ presidency of Fleer and was part of the editorial team that elaborated the One More Day storyline (Rabiroff 2024: 13; Weiland 2007b), confirmed that the post-One More Day status quo is here to stay:
“I believe that we’ve concluded decisively that the best platonic ideal of Spider-Man is one that is unattached [i.e., unmarried], and that conclusion isn’t going to be changed by a particular alternate interpretation momentarily performing well” [scil., the all-new, all-different Ultimate Spider-Man, which is the current alternative-universe title by Jonathan Hickman, Marco Checchetto, and David Messina in which Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson are married with kids; cit. from Brevoort 2025b; cf. also Brevoort 2025c].
From a narrative perspective, this “Platonic ideal” ignores Marvel Comics’ once “defining feature” and replicates Quesada’s suggestion that an out-of-character deal with the devil is preferable to a divorce between responsible and consenting adults (“Sorry, divorce is out, but Faustian bargains are cool!”, from White 2012: 238; see Weiland 2007b for Quesada’s false dichotomy). Besides, the editorially preferred “unattached” status of an infantilised Peter Parker is problematic for another reason. According to novelist, comic book writer, and chaos magician Grant Morrison,
“in a secular, scientific rational culture lacking in any convincing spiritual leadership, superhero stories speak loudly and boldly to our greatest fears, deepest longings, and highest aspirations […] and the best superhero stories deal directly with mythic elements of human experience that we can all relate to, in ways that are imaginative, funny, and provocative. […] At their best, they help us to confront and resolve even the deepest existential crises. We should listen to what they have to tell us” (Morrison 2011: xvii).
What do twenty years of meandering stories about an emotionally immature Peter Parker in his mid-twenties have to tell us? Even if unintentionally, the editorial rationale invoked to defend the hedonistic superficiality of his romantic relationships and the apparent disposability of his new love interests not only fell short of providing any higher mythical aspiration; they also are a fossil of the mysoginistic ‘lad/bro culture’ that characterised the early 2000s and the prurient “Wizard magazine mentality” of the same period, “arguably suggesting that the marriage wasn’t a positive development, that MJ was an inessential character, and even that the heroic male is better off alone” (resp., Sanderson 2008 and Rabiroff 2024: 37; on lad culture and the early 2000s see Coslett 2023). I can hardly imagine a worse betrayal of a character whose entire arc was originally built on the credo: “With great power, there must also come – great responsibility!”.
The “essential quality of a legend”
By the time Quesada issued his blank-slate directive, it was already far too late to implement it as intended. During his stint as a writer on The Amazing Spider-Man between 1978 and 1980, Marv Wolfman had already acquiesced to the editorial decision “to make Peter older for some reason”, but “planned to put him in graduate school, and just leave him there. I didn’t like the idea of letting him get married or have kids.” As he explained in 2004, “if [Peter Parker’s] still fouling up as an adult, he just isn’t a hero anymore. He’s pathetic” (Wolfman in DeFalco 2004: 78; my emphasis). While Wolfman’s premise, much like Jemas’ and Quesada’s, is questionable (did Ulysses’ wanderings, mistakes, marriage, and family truly render him pathetic and unrelatable as a hero?), his reasoning is nonetheless sound: once a character has matured and accumulated a sequence of formative life events, any abrupt or insufficiently motivated return to a prior status quo risks becoming narratively self-defeating (the reasons are explained below).
Perhaps more importantly, the stakes and tropes that define superhero narratives are, by their very nature, radically different from those typical of any other genre within the same medium. As Morrison has pointed out, they are closer to religious narratives than to conventional serial fiction. They are almost myths.
In his brilliantly controversial, and ultimately rejected, synopsis for the DC Comics crossover Twilight of the Superheroes, Alan Moore considered “how one of the things that prevents superhero stories from ever attaining the status of true modern myths or legends is that they are open ended. An essential quality of a legend is that the events in it are clearly defined in time” (Moore 1987; on myth and comics see Curtis 2019). In his pitch, Moore reasoned that because (post-)Bronze Age superheroes storylines were chained to the “commercial demands of a continuing series” in which nothing could ever change or evolve permanently (a trope that primarily affected DC characters, as we have seen), such stories
“can never have a resolution. Indeed, they find it difficult to embrace any of the changes in life that the passage of time brings about for these very same reasons, making them finally less than fully human as well as falling far short of true myth” (Moore 1987; my emphasis).
Myth, however – and especially oral mythology – cognitively reproduces itself by generating variants, and this generation accounts for the existence of different versions of the same story, sometimes complementary and mutually enriching, though at other times diametrically opposed and contradictory: the myth of one character “contains all the variants”, and for those myths whose origins are lost in time, continuously retold by different storytellers with different agendas, no single variant can ever be proclaimed to be “the ‘true’ version of the [same] myth” (Powell 2021: 5). This does not mean that every literary variant has the same cultural weight, cognitive grip, or memorability, nor does it mean that a character’s fictitious biography can go on indefinitely with unexplained and increasingly incoherent twists, turns, and retcons: the internal structural coherence of each variant is paramount for its survival and transmission. Incidentally, this is the crucial point missed by the mid-1990s marketing department at Marvel and by the new editors a decade later: we intuitively and effortlessly represent the fictional characters’ motivations, desires, and emotions in our minds as if they were real agents, and we use those mental representations to predict and assess the characters’ actions and demeanour as a consequence of their personality traits. The same goes for the coherence of the fictional worlds they inhabit. In both cases, inconsistency is usually rejected by the audience or the readers (Sanchez-Davies 2016: 54-55; fictional characters are given a wee bit more cognitive leeway in this regard; see Fillik and Leuthold 2013; cf. also Dubourg and Baumard 2022) [11].
The authors behind serialised superhero comic books intuitively elaborated or adopted the same narratological precepts and incorporated them into their own storytelling/commercial framework, developing main universes to follow their characters’ journeys while deploying alternative, mythical retellings set on other Earths as “counterfactual […] storyworlds” or “what ifs… ?” (Ayres 2021: 44, based on Kukkonen 2010: 55; for Moore’s role in the reimagining and systemisation of Bronze Age multiverses see Ayres 2021: 42). As we have seen, this clever solution would eventually backfire with the proliferation of multiversal backdoors, making every key turning point moot and inconsequential, but when Moore was pitching his proposal this was still a relatively novel and promising concept. Something crucial was missing, though, as Moore was quick to point out: in the long run, the biographical open-endedness of each comic book character in each storyworld – especially those considered as the main versions in their prime universe – was not sustainable.
Interestingly, Twilight of the Superheroes was also meant to offer a meta-commentary on DC’s canonical continuity in the wake of Wolfman and George Pérez’s epoch-defining crossover Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985-1986). As recently noted by Jackson Ayres,
“[t]he broader point made in the Twilight proposal […] is that when established narrative histories are invalidated – an editorial move that also implicitly invalidates the creative labor responsible for producing that history – serialized comics lose the crucial ability to engage productively with their past” (Ayres 2021: 71).
Once seen through Moore’s lenses, the portion of the Second Clone Saga that roughly followed the publication of The Amazing Spider-Man #400 and the radical retcon provided by One More Day managed in one fell swoop to both prevent the natural character progression of 1990s Peter Parker/Spider-Man towards his final resolution as a character (with his mythical twin Ben Reilly rising to the occasion and the Parkers’ daughter May as heir apparent) and invalidate decades of “established narrative histories” [12]. No wonder that the current Amazing Spider-Man’s storylines are met with either cold feet or widespread indignation: they have lost the “crucial ability to engage productively with their past”.
As if such insights were not enough, in 1983 Moore had already singled out the narratively crippling stasis suffered by Peter Parker/Spider-Man as an adolescent, immature character who “has a lot of trouble with his girlfriends” to denounce the fact that sometimes in the mid-1970s Marvel’s storylines had “ground to a halt” and “stopped developing” (see Wolfman’s comment above; it is worth pointing out that Moore published his critical notes in an official Marvel UK magazine; Moore 1983). Even though subsequent runs on The Amazing Spider-Man and The Spectacular Spider-Man invalidated Moore’s initial analysis (as they slowly and organically integrated more adult and mature themes, including Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson getting married and expecting a child, possibly influenced by the industry-wide reception of Moore’s own revolutionary approach to comic books) [13], the One More Day’s blank slate, which featured the uncalled-for return to a perpetually post-adolescent, immature Parker who “has a lot of trouble with his girlfriends”, proved Moore’s assessment eerily prescient [14]. Beware the magic of the Northampton Bard.
Of mice and spiders
One More Day deliberately froze the flagship character of the company in a state of arrested development – much like an old-fashioned comic strip figure – in order to dilute his complicated history, erase his personal growth, and maximise his appeal as a purely commercial mascot. Regardless of any original creative intent, the One More Day retcon anticipated the corporate strategy that would be further entrenched following Disney’s acquisition of Marvel in 2009. In practice, Peter Parker, the married-with-child character who had to fail, suffer unspeakable losses, and face his own personal demons before accepting his greatest responsibility, had been subjected to a process of Disneyfication, which is defined in the Cambridge Dictionary as “changing something so that it entertains or is attractive in a safe and controlled way” (Cambridge Dictionary n.d.; see Bryman 2004: 5: “To Disneify means to translate or transform an object [or, in this case, a character. My note] into something superficial and even simplistic”).
It is somewhat ironic, then, that Panini Comics, the Italian licensee of the Disney characters acquired by Marvel during the financially counterproductive buying spree of 1991, has recently found renewed critical and commercial success with its flagship weekly title Topolino (lit., “Mickey Mouse”) under the direction of new editor-in-chief Alex Bertani. Early in his tenure, Bertani introduced traditional Marvel-style continuity rules, emphasised fictional worldbuilding through carefully coordinated crossovers, encouraged more emotionally complex storytelling involving the core characters of Duckburg and Mouseton, and, last but not least, greenlighted a flurry of marketing gimmicks (Brambilla 2022; for a recent assessment see Fiamma 2026). This shift, which built on the successes and editorial transformations achieved under former editor-in-chief Valentina De Poli (De Poli 2022), is perhaps unsurprising, given that Bertani began his career in the comic industry in 1994 when he joined the marketing department of Marvel Italia, then the Italian subsidiary of Marvel USA.
However, as exemplified by a peculiar and recent joint project, the tension between the two different approaches may produce lackluster results. Between 2024 and 2025, Marvel published a series of “What If… ?” one-shots co-produced in collaboration with a stellar roster of Italian Disney writers and artists, all under the supervision and strict narrative control of the American company. These issues featured familiar Disney characters taking on the roles of iconic Marvel superheroes: Goofy turns into Spider-Man (and Hulk), Donald Duck becomes Iron Man (and Thor), Minnie Mouse dons the Captain Marvel insignia, and Mickey Mouse is reimagined as Mr. Fantastic and Iron Man (again). While the art, courtesy of seasoned veterans like Giada Perissinotto, Alessandro Pastrovicchio, and Donald Soffritti, truly shined, the narrative beats and tropes felt relatively stiff, unemotional, disjointed, uninspired, and quite unfunny by European standards. Disneyfied, if you will (see Fiamma 2024a; Fiamma 2024b; Pavan 2024; Nocera 2025; Santarelli 2025; Fidecaro 2025).
The US trade paperback edition of Marvel & Disney: What If… ?. Cover by Andrea Freccero and Lucio Ruvidotti. SOURCE: private collection. © 2025 Disney/Marvel.
As strange as it may sound, however, the Disneyfication of a Disney product wasn’t always the inevitable outcome it seems today. Once upon a time, Disney earned its true acclaim through authentic, raw emotions and relatively complex, dramatic events that connected with the audience at large, regardless of their age. That is not longer the case. With regards to the “What If… ?” collaboration, the overly cautious limitations and sanitised narrative constraints imposed by the parent company, as articulated by Steve Behling (who authored the plots for all but one of the one-shots), can be inferred by reading between the lines of a short interview published in the Italian edition of the Spider-Goofy issue. Concerning the decision to portray Uncle Ben as a sidecar (!?) and to reframe his death as an economic issue (selling the sidecar would help relieve Aunt Tessie’s financial duress), writer Riccardo Secchi remarks with barely concealed dissatisfaction:
“The question of how to adapt the tragic event of Uncle Ben’s death, which serves as the motivation for Peter Parker to take up the role of a superhero, was definitely not an easy one. Obviously, it was not possible to reproduce such a dramatic event, even though the Disney universe has actually never shied away from depicting tragic aspects of existence, at least in animation. One only has to think of Bambi or Dumbo, for example” (What If… ? Pippo diventa Spider-Man: 32; my translation).
Secchi further notes that the situation may be somewhat different in the comics medium (What If… ? Pippo diventa Spider-Man: 32); however, internationally renowned masterpieces such as Don Rosa’s Eisner Award-winning series The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, along with innumerable stories from both the Italian and broader Disney comics traditions, in which characters evolve, mature, and confront emotionally complex situations, openly contradict these claims, which appear to be understandably diplomatic in nature (cf. Del Core 2023: 240, 245, 255, 267, 271). Despite the mixed results of Jemas’ tenure at Marvel, his era was undoubtedly characterised by a “creative ferment[,] and [a] wild brutal pressure for novelty” (Rabiroff 2024: 42). That penchant for experimental approaches now seems long gone.
Two emotional vignette (panels) from the recent Italian Disney production: Paperino (Donald Duck) longing for a lost and impossible love (left), and mourning the disappearance and possible death of a family member (right). SOURCES: (left) Alex Bertani, Vito Stabile, and Stefano Zanchi. 2022. L’ultima avventura di Reginella. Topolino Extra - Graphic Novel 12i. Modena: Panini Comics, p. 27 (originally published in Topolino #3430, 18 August 2021); (right) Fabio Celoni (colours by Alessandra Amorotti and Luca Merli; colour supervision by F. Celoni), “Paperone in Atlantide”, in Topolino #3661, 21 January 2026, p. 35. SOURCE: private collection. © 2025 Disney/Panini Comics.
From a historiographical perspective, it is only fair to note that Disney lost any genuine interest in, and emotional connection to, its comic book division long ago. In his homeland, Donald Duck, and even more so Mickey Mouse, is reduced to a brand mascot, an icon; elsewhere, he is a fully-fledged, almost mythical character who, despite some obvious limitations, is able to feel, laugh, cry, grow, live, and, sometimes, even learn from its mistakes (De Poli 2022: 233; cf. Del Core 2022). Today, the US production of comic books featuring the company’s flagship characters is negligible and largely outsourced to brand licensees. Considering that until a few years ago the internationally renowned Italian production accounted for roughly 70% of all Disney comic books worldwide (De Poli 2022: 89), and that in 2012 the Italian readership of Topolino comprised approximately 1,114,000 adult readers and 600,000 children – figures which, despite a shrinking market, remain relatively strong even today (De Poli 2022: 186; Fiamma 2025) – the situation should, at minimum, have been reversed, with Italian authors plotting stories for their US counterparts, if not being given completely carte blanche.
Conclusion
In his The Self-Tormentor, Latin playwright Terence, who lived in the 2nd century BCE, famously wrote: “I am a human being, and nothing that is human is alien to me”. Emotional and intellectual respect for all readers through multi-layered, emotionally engaging, and intelligent storytelling that neither talks down to its audience nor dumbs down its plots, while remaining true to the characters and their history and appealing to everyone – that’s an art honed by many Italian Disney writers and artists (see De Poli 2022). This winning formula was patiently and carefully crafted over more than ninety years of Topolino’s almost uninterrupted editorial existence – an alchemical distillation resulting from the hard work and trusting collaboration of generations of talented artists and writers pushing the envelope, smart editors ready to take the lead, and a multigenerational, perceptive readership. Trust is fragile, though, and once it is broken, for whatever reason, it is very difficult to restore it. As sales diminish and readership, artists, and writers pivot away, editorial skills and sensibilities wither away too. This may sound banal, but it is something the US company seems to have forgotten. The impact on its subsidiary specialised in superhero comic books is obvious.
Directives issued from the upper levels of the Disney corporate hierarchy have already brought Marvel Studios to the brink of an irreversible financial and creative crisis (Fritz 2025). The comic book division by itself does not generate enough profit to justify its existence within a major corporation, and “the recent rise in comic book-based films has had little to no effect on comic book sales within the American market”, casting doubt on the long-term viability of the strategy once pursued by Jemas (Hionis and Ki 2019). The recent launch of more or less radically reimagined alternative universes (Marvel’s all-new Ultimate universe and, most notably, DC’s Absolute line) has enjoyed significant critical and commercial success; however, according to reports, the situation at Marvel Comics remains financially precarious and creatively compromised, having, in all but name, effectively abandoned its original “epic among epics” and alienated its core readership in an attempt to sustain the financial illusion of endless growth (cf. MacDonald 2025c). The case study of Spider-Man presented above underscores that the roots of this failure to reverse course run deep [15]. Without a change of leadership and strategic planning at both the business and editorial levels, it is not an unlikely scenario that Disney may ultimately have to license out the rights to and management of Marvel titles and characters, as it has already done with his own historical in-house IPs. From an investment standpoint, the worst-possible outcome would be a repetition of the mistake made with another well-known property. As I wrote some years ago in a peer-reviewed article,
“in 2001, Disney bought the rights to produce the Power Rangers TV series following the buyout of Fox Family Worldwide for $5.3 billion. In 2010, because of the corporate failure to manage the franchise, original developer Saban bought back the rights of Power Rangers from Disney for $65 million (James 2017)” (Ambasciano 2021: 256-257).
Yet one must ask: from a creative perspective, would such developments ultimately be bad things at all?
Following the recent CEO succession from Bob Iger to Josh D’Amaro at Disney (Spangler 2026), perhaps the most thrilling What If…? scenario is still to come: What if Marvel Comics, as we know it, folded… and someone from the Italian Disney/Panini Comics’ editorial boards past and present, like De Poli, took over? Now, that’s a counterfactual crossover I would really love to read.
Notes
This post first appeared here on 10 March 2025, and was later shortened, revised, and (hopefully) improved between April and August. The article was subsequently expanded and amended on 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 January, and 6, 7, 11, 16, 20, 26 February, and 10, 12, and 19 March 2026.
[1] “If a bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates, it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was an extremely finely worded and clever satire, that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries. Then years after you were dead, people still might be reading it, and laughing at you, your wretchedness, and absurdity” (from Moore 2003).
[2] I’ve recently come across a post by a comic book shop owner that aptly summarises other relevant issues here: “price, decompression, constant events, oversaturation, and writers not staying on books for more than a year makes it harder to want to buy single issues. [Comic books are] [e]xpensive, [there are] too many events, too many entangled stories, [and] not enough actual stories per issue” [Anonymous 2024]. Another contributing factor affecting the quality of the stories itself might be the diffusion of storytelling handbooks and the proliferation of courses and classes about creative writing over the course of the last decades, which standardised and popularised certain narrative techniques to the detriment of other out-of-the-box approaches and choked the unorganised, but lively, creative effervescence experience by the industry in the second half of the 20th century (for an analysis of the widespread diffusion of the hero’s journey in Hollywood see Ambasciano 2021; on the creative explosion that characterised mainstream US comic books in the 1970s see Mazur & Danner 2014: 45-60).
[3] Before deciding to launch a parallel and independent version of the standard Marvel universe, Jemas “actually toyed with destroying the Marvel Universe and building it back up from scratch”; Howe 2012: 404.
[4] The numbers themselves would later vindicate the employee’s legitimate question and illustrate the pitfalls of short-term editorial strategies. In 2011, under editor-in-chief Axel Alonso, and amid declining sales and an increasingly convoluted continuity, the Peter Parker of the once-successful Ultimate Universe was killed. Although the decision produced a short-term boost in sales, the subsequent soft reboot of the series did not appear to significantly alter the book’s financial downturn; cf. Howe 2012: 431 and Miller n.d.
[5] A sequence of fallacies and biases concerning One More Day, along with Quesada’s reasoning to undo Peter and Mary Jane’s marriage regardless of the implications for the history of both the characters involved and the books themselves, is available in Sanderson 2008; see also White 2012; for a contrastive intergenerational analysis focussed on divorce rates, the developmental impact of failing marriages and divorces on attachment, and changing views on marriage that may help contextualise the early-2000s Marvel editorship’s aversion to Peter Parker’s marriage see Crowell, Treboux, and Brockmeyer 2009; Kennedy and Ruggles 2014; Di Nallo and Oesch 2023; Bowens 2025.
[6] “It’s the strangest thing that Marvel has ever done: the publisher took a character who seemed to have unstoppable momentum and simply removed all of his progress and trapped him in a static state for no benefit at all. There haven’t been any amazing groundbreaking stories told because Peter and Mary Jane aren’t together. It didn’t push his character further in any way; it didn’t teach him a lesson about responsibility, because he doesn’t even remember having been married to Mary Jane to begin with” (Reaves 2025).
[7] The passage continues as follows: “Accordingly, in 1965 Peter graduates from high school and enrolls at university a few months later. The four years he spends at Empire State University unfold over thirteen years in real time, with his graduation taking place in October 1977. This is followed by a period of doctoral study and, after leaving academia, another major turning point in 1987 – his marriage” (Lupoi 1991; my translation).
[8] Here’s the rest of the excerpt: “Now, however, we are about to face changes so radical that they will overturn everything we know about Peter Parker and his world. Some will frown. Others will cry scandal. Let me explain what lies behind the revolution that is about to erupt. In America, in recent years, media attention (and the public’s) has been monopolized by major events within comic-book stories. The death of Superman. The transformation of Green Lantern into a super-criminal. The crippling of Batman and his replacement by a ruthless vigilante. At DC Comics (Marvel’s traditional rival), writers have pulled no punches and, month after month, have regained the readers’ lost favour through unprecedented narrative upheavals. Purists complained, traditionalists tore their hair out, but struggling titles suddenly soared back to the top of the sales charts […]. For a long time, Marvel attempted to ignore this trend, partly out of a certain snobbery toward rival DC. […] Then, over time, something changed. Faced with a U.S. market in deep crisis (in both sales and ideas), Marvel too sat down at the table and asked itself: ‘How can we breathe new life into our heroes? How can we renew them, propel them into the 1990s?’ […]. If you stay with us, you will see new adversaries, new developments, and the most incredible and mind-bending sequence in the entire career of Spider-Man. Don’t believe it? Just wait and see…” [Lupoi 1995; original emphasis; my translation].
[9] A strong editorial strategy supporting long-running story arcs, evolving characters, and proper endings may lead to best-selling collected editions long after the series have ended, cementing their status as ‘classics,’ particularly when their quality is above average (see Lippi in Tosti 2016: 779, 781-782). On the contrary, change is rejected when it is poorly conceived, cheaply developed, badly executed, subjected to interference, and then – following the inevitable backlash from the target readership – reverted to the wrong status quo ante due to corporate incompetence or editorial unwillingness to pinpoint why such a flawed change was rejected in the first place.
[10] This is a time as good as any to recall that Marvel characters also stood out from the competition because they “had flaws – hell, embodied flaws, weaknesses, vulnerabilities – of personality. You could find their diagnoses throughout the various edition of a psychiatrist’s DSM diagnostic handbook. They had tragic pasts that they actually acknowledged, reflected on, and were motivated by” (Fingeroth 2019: 134; original emphasis).
[11] In a response to a critical comment posted on his Substack blog in March 2026, Quesada defended the controversial One More Day storyline by arguing the following: (a) the ongoing success of Spider-Man as a multimedia brand, along with the fact that Marvel has not “cancel[led] every Spider-Man comic due to lost readership”, invalidate any narratological criticism against One More Day and its aftermath; these statements conveniently confuse different corporate structures to highlight a desired, but fallacious, positive conclusion, qualify as a red herring since the point raised by the commenter concerned the qualitative and long-term effects of the comic book storyline per se, and reframe the editorial strategies highlighted at the beginning of this post by resorting to rhetoric technicalities (exaggeration, some/all ambiguity, etc.); (b) One More Day did not damage the character because “Spider-Man has been reinvented for more than sixty years. Married, single, clone, dead, replaced, multiversal. None of those versions erase the others. They coexist. That elasticity is why the character endures”; in the light of the basic cognitive and narratological points emphasised in the paragraph above regarding the main version of any character, this statement appears short-sighted (Wilding 2026).
[12] One could even argue that, in principle, the Clone Saga as it was originally intended represents the closest we have come to a bona fide Alan Moore-penned deconstruction/reconstruction of Spider-Man grounded in the character’s history. In a 1986 interview, artist and inker Joe Rubinstein commented on the restrictions surrounding superhero comic books by drawing a prescient, if ironic, analogy between Moore’s revisionist Swamp Thing and Spider-Man: “Bill Sienkiewicz was talking to me the ther day about how he wants to make a more personal statement in his artwork, to which I replied: ‘Swell, but how are you going to do that with a [Marvel comic] mutant?’ Comic books are limited in what you can say. Obviously, if you’re given Spider-Man – unless you’re Alan Moore, who would probably kill him and bring him back as a real spider or something (laughter) – there’s just so much you can say, so that’s why you have to go off and do your own work and make a personal statement about it” (Rubinstein in Henderson 1986: 49; my emphasis). Arguably, the largely forgotten Paul Jenkins’ storyline “Changes”, pencilled by Humberto Ramos and published on Spectacular Spider-Man (vol. 2) #17-20, 2004, and the retconned Spider-Man crossover “The Other” (2005-2006), written by J. Michael Straczynski, Peter David, and Reginald Hudlin, illustrated by Mike Wieringo, Pat Lee, and Mike Deodato Jr., and published in The Amazing Spider-Man (1999) #525-528, Marvel Knights Spider-Man #19-22, and Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man (2005) #1-4, would later attempt to do something in this vein, drawing belatedly and too literally on the deconstructive template established by Moore in The Anatomy Lesson twenty years prior (Swamp Thing vol. 2 #21, 1984), and ultimately adding to the confusion of the character’s “established narrative histories.”
[13] While Moore’s influence on the Spider-Man mythos is understudied and overlooked, we have already seen that it is far from negligible (see previous footnotes). Before the Spider-Man writers of the early 2000s opted for a slavish imitation of Moore’s deconstrution/reconstruction template, in the mid-1980s one writer had already pursued a more subtle and inventive emulation. While preceded by a few more dark and mature stories, most notably Peter David and Rich Buckler’s “The Death of Jean DeWolff” (Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #107-110, Oct. 1985 – Jan. 1986), the first adult, “grim and gritty” Spider-Man storyline of the modern era is universally recognised by readers, critics, and comic book historians alike to be J.M. DeMatteis’ “Kraven’s Last Hunt”, whose original title (“Fearful Symmetry”), explicit references to William Blake (one of DeMatteis’ favourite writers, along with Dostoevsky), Harrowing of Hell-like plot, exploration of “embodied subjectivity”, and formal structure all seem to echo Moore’s revisionist, literary, and structuralist penchants from his watershed run on Swamp Thing onwards (cit. from Ayres 2021: 57; for the original title see DeMatteis 2012). Pencilled by Mike Zeck, inked by Bob McLeod, and published in six consecutive issues of the three monthly Spider-Man books between October and November 1987 (making it thus the first Spider-Man crossover ever; The Amazing Spider-Man #293-294, Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #131-132, and Web of Spider-Man #31-32), the story is “[e]ssentially the tale of Kraven’s last-ditch effort to conquer his foe, Spider-Man, by [ostensibly] killing him and then stepping in to replace him” (Dallas 2024: 207). As Spider-Man re-emerges from the dead on the verge of madness, after having been buried alive in a drug-induced coma, Kraven denies him the final confrontation, satisfied by the success of his brief spell as a darker, edgier, more violent and effective version of the superhero and pleased by the fact that, despite the ordeal, Spider-Man has managed to retain his humanity and integrity as a true “man of honour.” As Arturo Belluardo noted in 1993, “it is then that [Kraven] understand[s] the futility of his gesture, of his entire life: he has always fought the wrong adversary. It was not the Spider who haunted Sergei Kravinoff throughout his tormented existence, but Kraven the Hunter. ‘Kraven’s Last Hunt’, a psychodrama stretched to its furthest existential limits, has led to the capture of a prey far more dangerous than Spider-Man: a frightened, sick child whose name is Sergei Kravinoff. And faced with this final revelation, Kraven can do nothing but disappear” (Belluardo 1993; my translation). Kraven, then, takes his own life, bringing to an end a tragic history of family trauma, mental illness, and an unresolved identity crisis; in so doing, the comic book story also doubles as a pioneering metanarrative critique of the “grim and gritty” approach in vogue at that time, indexing the ultimate vacuity and sterility of edgy anti-heroism. As for Spider-Man, he would never truly recover from the trauma inflicted by Kraven, and the PTSD he subsequently suffered exacerbated his pre-existing mental health issues, directly leading into the Clone Saga through a sequence of dramatic storylines (most notably, DeMatteis’s own runs on both The Spectacular Spider-Man and Amazing Spider-Man). Given that Swamp Thing was “quickly hailed as a classic” (Ayres 2021: 53), and that its publication chronologically precedes DeMatteis’ magnum opus (Moore’s run on the DC title started with issue #20, Jan. 1984, and concluded with issue #64, Sept. 1987), it is not far fetched to hypothesise a potential link connecting Moore’s early forays to the Second Clone Saga, with “Fearful Symmetry”/“Kraven’s Last Hunt” as the crucial middle point. An interview conducted in March 2009 by Dave Johnson helps clarify the origins and context of DeMatteis’ plot and offers some intriguing statements in this regard. During the interview, Johnson focusses on the potential impact of The Dark Knight Returns (by Frank Miller; Feb.-June 1986) and Watchmen (created by Moore and Dave Gibbons; Sept. 1986-Oct. 1987) at a time when “everyone was doing dark and edgy” and slavishly following their lead (Johnson 2009: 7). As DeMatteis himself explains, by that time he had already been working on the “Kraven’s Last Hunt” plot on and off for at least three years, adapting it to suit different characters (first a pitch involving Wonder Man and the Grim Reaper, which got nixed by De Falco at Marvel, and then two story iterations for DC with Batman facing, and losing to, the Joker and Hugo Strange; DeMatteis in Johnson 2009: 3-4). Reportedly, DC Comics editor Len Wein rejected the first Batman proposal because Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke was already in development, and he found the “two stories […] too similar”; then, “probably in 1985 or 1986”, new Batman editor Denny O’Neill rejected the second pitch because “DC already had a Batman graphic novel for that year” (DeMatteis in Johnson 2009: 4). A renewed invitation by De Falco and Spider-Man editor Jim Owsley to contribute to the Spectacular Spider-Man title prompted the fourth, and final, retooling of the storyline (DeMatteis in Johnson 2009: 4). Asked directly about the influence of the two groundbreaking DC limited series-turned-graphic novels on the development of his story, DeMatteis replies: “That was certainly in the air, and if you were working in the business, you were breathing it in. Not to in any way minimize the impact that Frank Miller and Alan Moore had, but Watchmen was not a book I was particularly paying attention to. (Let’s pause a moment while half of your readers faint.) The Alan Moore book that I really, really liked was Swamp Thing” [my emphasis]. While Johnson fails to press further on this point and doesn’t pursue the Swamp Thing lead, DeMatteis explains, in a long response which I report in full below, that the catalyst behind the story being so dark was his personal life: “When it came time to finally write this story after developing it in some form for three years, I was in the middle of a divorce. It was one of the darkest, most painful periods of my life. This story became a vehicle for my pain. The darkness in that story, and also the struggling for the light that Peter Parker does in the context of the story, had nothing to do with The Dark Knight Returns or Swamp Thing or Watchmen. It had to do with my life. The timing was such that all that other material was in the air, and I’m sure it all filtered in, but really, the core of what that story was about, and why it was as dark as it was, had nothing to do with anything that was going on in comics. It had nothing to do with anyone else. It was me, expressing through the metaphor of the superhero story what I was going through in my life. I felt as buried alive as Peter Parker. I felt as insane as Kraven. And I felt as much a dweller in the darkness and the sewers as Vermin. There are different pieces of my psyche that were reflected in those characters. It was probably great therapy for me to write that story. I was trying to claw my way back to the light the same way Peter was as he was clawing his way out of the grave. So, I wasn’t jumping on anyone’s dark bandwagon, I was just writing about my life” (DeMatteis in Johnson 2009: 7; my emphasis). Nonetheless, later in the same interview DeMatteis admits that Moore’s Swamp Thing provided him with a new visual and narrative vocabulary, albeit in an oblique way: “I’ll tell you one thing in ‘Kraven’s Last Hunt’ that reflected Alan Moore’s influence: Moore is the most wonderfully visual writer and I thought that he, more than many artists, knew how to use visual metaphor and recurring imagery. Looking back, and I don’t know if it was conscious then or not, but I think the recurring imagery, for instance the image of the gravedigger that repeats throughout the story [stemmed from his Swamp Thing]. Just seeing what Moore was able to do helped me to think in a different way, in terms of the visuals. And, of course, what Mike [Zeck] did with that imagery was spectacular” (from Johson 2009: 7; my emphasis; for DeMatteis’ recollections see also his blog post in DeMatteis 2010). On his part, artist Mike Zeck added that, despite not being a stranger to “dark and gritty” approaches, considering his previous experience on The Punisher, “the other titles didn’t influence [him] in any way. Marc [De Matteis’] plot was influence enough” (Johnson 2009: 7).
[14] In Moore’s own words: “[w]e were wild-eyed fanatics to rival the loopiest thugee cultist or member of the Manson family. We were True Believers [Stan Lee used to call Marvel faithful readers and aficionados “True Believers”. My note]. The worst thing was that everything had ground to a halt. The books had stopped developing. If you take a look at a current Spiderman [sic] comic, you’ll find that he’s maybe twenty years old, he worries a lot about what’s right and what’s wrong, and he has a lot of trouble with his girlfriends. Do you know what Spiderman [sic] was doing fifteen years ago? Well, he was about nineteen years old, he worried a lot about what was right and what was wrong, and he had a lot of trouble with his girlfriends” (Moore 1983: 47).
[15] Apparently, a new comic book starring the flagship character of the company is no longer a guaranteed seller. Less than two years ago, Marvel Comics President Dan Buckley promised to refocus the publishing schedule of Marvel Comics from five-issue to ten-issue series (Johnston 2024). On 17 March 2026, former Amazing Spider-Man writer Dan Slott, one of the architects behind the post-One More Day status quo, revealed that Marvel has apparently already reneged on that promise. Slott’s new Spectacular Spider-Man: Brand New Day series, greenlit in the wake of the upcoming MCU/Sony Spider-Man film (very loosely inspired by the original Brand New Day storyline) (Johnston 2026), is already on the brink of cancellation possibly due to low preorder numbers: “If you are, like, a reader […] and if you had fun reading my run on Spider-Man and you want more of it, please put this on your pull list now. The final order for our first issue is March 30th. Please put this on your pull list now. If you are a retailer, we know you’re going to order issue number one well. No doubt. Everyone always does that with number one. This is me talking to you. I need you on issue two […]. When it’s time to put in your orders for issue two, I need you to order this like you’re ordering your ‘Dan Slott Spider-Man comic’ for issue two, instead of like, hey, there’s like twelve other books with blind bags and I’m going to put all my money into that. We’re at a point now where, […] when Marvel books come out, no matter what they are, they’re lined up for five issues at a time. And what that means is, if you don’t support issues two and three, these books will go away by issue five” (Dan Slott on WordBalloon 2026: 40’:32’’–41’:56’’).
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