Okay, so Marvel has seriously pissed me off with what they're doing to Spidey. Here's the deal:

The Kingpin had Aunt May shot. She was dying. Mephisto shows up, and offers Peter and MJ a deal: They consent to having their marriage erased from history, and Aunt May gets to live. They agonize over it for a while, and just as the story reaches the inevitable conclusion, wherein Peter and MJ tell Brimstone Breath to shove his deal up his demonic arsehole, they turn 180º and say yes.

So now they were never married, nobody can remember who was revealed when Spider-Man unmasked on live TV, and Aunt May is denied a tragic end.

Just wait, it gets worse.

MJ whispered something into Mephisto's ear just before he erased their marriage. Now (a woman who at least strongly resembles) MJ is running around as the super-heroine  "Jackpot" (*twitch*), and, to make it even worse, see the attached pic.

Yes, that's Faust she's reading. I think I may vomit.

*sigh*

Spider-Man was actually fun to read again, for a while there. So much for that.

I'm a big advocate for "let your characters change"...but this is "Hey, let's revert the character to a previous state instead of moving him forward! Even better, let's do it with MAGIC so that we can completely ignore the state of things as they are now!"

Maybe Spidey is a victim of his own success?

I was about to say...

Aunt May got one of the best deaths in comic book history already, and they just dragged her back anyway.

You're not projecting. Aunt May would be seriously pissed if she found out.

That's the only thing this plot has any potential in, really - somehow, at some point, Aunt May remembers the truth and verbally bitchslaps not only Peter and MJ, but Mephisto himself (the way she's been written in recent years, at least from what I've read, I have no doubt she'd have the balls to do that).

Unlike this, there were at least a couple of things about the whole Clone Saga that didn't completely suck. For example, the updated Spider-Man costume was quite nice, and lives on in Amazing Spider-Girl.

I liked where Civil War had left Spidey. His ID was public, She-Hulk saved his ass from being sued off by J. Jonah Jameson, he fought on both sides of the Civil War, and he could have been pardoned with the others at the end of the war, so he wouldn't be a fugitive anymore. Aunt May could have finally gone to her Ben, Peter and MJ could have finally had the children they were meant to, and the whole series could have evolved into something cooler. But no; they've taken a thirty-year leap backwards, fucking over every single fan with a three-digit IQ.

Thanks, Marvel!

I think what bugs me the most is the idea inherent in this kind of thing, that comic book characters never ageing, having kids, or dying is somehow a good thing. That's three-panel newspaper funnies shit, for fuck's sake! Spider-Man has always been about growing up, right from Amazing Fantasy #15. Spider-Man started out as a teenager. When Uncle Ben was murdered, it aged Spidey into a hero. When they killed off Gwen Stacy, it made Spidey grow further. He grew again, when he married MJ. He grew up even more, when he revealed his identity to the public.

Aunt May finally dying (preferably in a touching six-issue miniseries devoted just to the process of saying goodbye, mourning, and letting go of the woman who helped make him the man he is), Peter dealing with being a fugitive, and then a celebrity, in and out of costume, having to quit teaching high school, finding paying work as Spider-Man, and he and MJ having a bunch of little Spider-Children, all the while fighting the good fight, win, lose, or stand-off, is the way the story should go. Fighting the natural evolution of a story in the name of Status Quo is what turns potentially good stories bad, bad stories worse, and devoted readers into vicious critics.