The Amazing Spider-man #545 By Hervé St-Louis Jan 26, 2008 - 11:05:41 PM

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The Amazing Spider-man #545
Marvel Comics
Writer: Michael J. Straczynski
Penciler: Joe Quesada
Inker: Danny Miki

Spider-man and Mary Jane decide whether they will take up Mephisto’s of erasing the several years off their lives and saving aunt May in exchange for the loss of their love and future daughter.  The couple takes a decision and their lives change forever. Mephisto has strange ways of dealing with humanity but he dreads Spider-man and Mary Jane’s love the most. Can he succeed in destroying it?

I really hope that the return to a clean slate for Spider-man and his alter ego, Peter Parker is temporary. The first half of the story with Mephisto was quite interesting, but the second half, set in a new past created by Mephisto, is unbearable and unreadable. Maybe it’s because I’m no longer interested in reading about overgrown failure to launches. I could not read the second part of the book as it was too painful to see a character regress.

It’s is true that fictional characters who marry, have limited life spans and story potential and that the unveiling of Spider-man’s secret identity last year limited what story could be told. However, perhaps that’s something Marvel Comics should have thought about before they ever married their main character. I remember a story from Amazing Spider-man where Mary Jane first opened up to Peter Parker and told him about her family life. It’s stories like this that Marvel Comics hope to erase by rebooting Spider-man and putting him and Mary Jane through the ropes of finding each other again. If that’s the way they want to do it, they better not make them find each other within two years. They should make them find each other no sooner than 10 years in real time.

I like how Mary Jane acted in this story, but like I said, most of it was not readable.

Quesada is a good Spider-man artist. My favourite pages are the ones he inked himself. He brings a light line that is crisp to the character, making his work look younger than the earlier pages. I do like Quesada’s Mephisto rendition though.

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