While Spider-Man fans have waited decades for Marvel to undo the damage done in the much maligned One More Day event, Stan Lee used the Amazing Spider-Man newspaper comic strip to fix the hated storyline. While the comic strip is not canon to Marvel Comics, it at least offered fans a place to read stories where Peter Parker and Mary Jane’s marriage was never broken up and they remained a couple.
The 2007 event One More Day is often considered one of the worst Spider-Man stories of all time. Spearheaded by then-editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, the story was intended to get Spider-Man back to his roots as a single young man juggling his superhero career and his secret identity. But in order to do that, Marvel needed to erase years’ worth of stories, including when Peter revealed his identity to the world in 2005’s Civil War, and his 1987 wedding to Mary Jane Watson. The solution they came up with was to have Peter make a deal with the devil Mephisto, who erased any memory of the marriage and Spidey’s unmasking. Fans were outraged, but the changes remain in place to this day.
The Amazing Spider-Man comic strip ran from 1977 to 2019 and was primarily written by Stan Lee with art by his brother, Larry Lieber. In 2000 Lee took a step back from writing, with stories being plotted or ghost-written by Marvel Comics great Roy Thomas under supervision by Lee. The comic strip was largely separate from events in the comics, with the exception of the 1987 wedding and the dissolution of the marriage two decades later. In the strip published on January 1, 2009, Peter Parker wakes up in his Aunt May’s house, once again a single college student. In order to get the comic strip more in line with Spidey’s status quo in the comic books, his marriage was undone. However, unlike in the books, the change in the newspaper strip would only last about five months.
Peter’s return to his days as a swinging single spanned just one storyline in the comic strip. The strip moved at a glacial pace, taking about five months to tell a story about Spidey fighting Electro that would have taken up probably one comic book issue. While Stan Lee publicly supported the changes brought about by One More Day, he and Thomas gave the fans what they wanted. The May 24, 2009 strip shows Peter waking up next to his wife, Mary Jane. It turned out that the dissolution of the marriage had all just been a dream. The last panel reads, “You guessed it, True Believers. We’ve decided to bow to your letters and have Peter and Mary Jane married again!” They would remain married for the rest of the strip’s run.
For many Marvel Comics fans, the One More Day story and its aftermath felt like a bad dream. But unlike the comic strip version of Peter Parker, it’s one that they still have not been able to wake up from. Marvel has gotten their hopes up several times – the Kindred storyline in Nick Spencer’s recent run of Amazing Spider-Man had many readers believing that the change would finally be undone. But so far, those hopes have not come to fruition. One More Day went to great lengths to break up Spider-Man and Mary Jane’s marriage, and it seems that Stan Lee was the only one powerful enough to put it back together.