The Spider-Man Brand
According to Dan Slott, the Spider-Man marriage wasn’t written out of continuity at editorial whim. Instead, he points out, Marvel had made concerted efforts to backtrack on the marriage pretty much as soon as it happened. He describes the marriage as “a profound change that affected the core continuity of the brand/franchise in a way that could not easily be fixed.”
He argues that key figures at Marvel – and he’s talking well beyond the level of Editor-In-Chief – had been unhappy with the marriage. They’d seen this move as progressing the character too far from his roots, distancing him from his core concept. Sure, for the fans reading at the time it was an amazing change to the status quo – but it meant new readers would never meet Spider-Man in what Slott calls “his regular setting.” As he explains:
“The core continuity Spider-Man can’t be a character for one generation, he’s an icon that every generation should be able to discover.”
Dan Slott’s point is a breathtakingly simple one; that comic book fans need to take a step back and realize that Spider-Man is more than just a comic book superhero. He’s also a powerful, marketable brand; and that means writers have to be very, very careful not to take him off-brand. Marvel’s view was that the marriage took Spider-Man off-brand, and as a result they had to do something pretty dramatic to fix that mistake. In 2007, “One More Day” was simply the company putting their foot down.