"One More Day," the conclusion

(SPOILERS AHEAD) Well, they did it. “One More Day” wrapped up today with “Amazing Spider-Man” No. 545, putting an end to the marriage of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson. Mephisto wiped it away, along with the public’s knowledge that Spider-Man and Peter are one and the same.

Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada had long said that Peter’s marriage to Mary Jane had been a mistake, that it was tough to sympathize with the perpetually unlucky Peter when he was married to a hot supermodel. And that wasn’t just his view, Quesada told me recently. Other editors and writers who had worked on Spider-Man had found the marriage a hindrance, he said.

Fair enough. Maybe it was a mistake, but I think I would have preferred them living with it. The events of “One More Day” essentially add up to a reboot and leave a lot of questions behind. Which adventures of Spider-Man over the years stand and which don’t? Take “Civil War,” for example. Did Peter’s unmasking never happen, or do people just not remember it? If Peter and MJ were never married, they obviously never lived together in Tony Stark’s high-rise. Did Peter? In “One More Day,” Mephisto erases the marriage by cutting out “a thread in time.” But removing that one thread seems to make a lot of things unravel. It makes my head hurt.