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One of the questions on The Beat’s annual survey for her Publishers Weekly blog is to ask what “guilty pleasures” her contributors are anticipating in the new year. Last year I named the forthcoming Disney DVD release of The Adventures of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, collecting the silent cartoon series that Walt Disney made just before the creation of Mickey Mouse. This DVD set finally came out in December, and I now realize that there’s nothing “guilty” about the pleasures these cartoons provide. I expected they’d be interesting as foreshadowings of Disney’s later work, but not particularly good in and of themselves. But the Oswald cartoons turned out to delightful period pieces from the early history of animation. Watching these, you can see that Disney was already well on his way to the success he would achieve only a year later with Mickey Mouse.

The Disney company hadn’t released the Oswald series on home video earlier because it didn’t own the cartoons or the character until recently. Back in the 1920s Walt Disney made the Oswald series for distribution by Universal. But then, as a featurette on the DVD explains, Universal sprang surprises on the young Disney: not only did they own Oswald, but they had also hired Disney’s animation staff away from him–except for his best animator, Ub Iwerks, who remained loyal–and would produce the Oswald series without him. This proved to be a blessing in disguise, since Disney was now determined to remain independent and own his own intellectual property; soon he and Iwerks jointly created Mickey Mouse, and Disney was on his way to becoming a cultural colossus. Recently, Disney’s new, enlightened management made a deal with NBC Universal in which Disney regained control of Oswald, and this DVD set soon followed.

Not only does the Oswald DVD set contain copies of all the extent Disney Oswald cartoons (which apparently took some hunting), but also some 1920s Disney cartoons that preceded and followed the making of the Oswald shorts.

The three cartoons that preceded Oswald are from Disney’s Alice Comedies series. Whereas in Max and Dave Fleischer’s silent animated series Out of the Inkwell, a cartoon character, Koko the Clown, entered the real (live action) world, in the Alice shorts a live action girl, Alice, appears within a cartoon world populated by anthropomorphic animals. Hence the evocation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in the series’ title is quite appropriate.

In watching the first Alice short included in this set, Alice Gets Stung (1925), I was initially surprised by how little Alice appeared in it, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been, since I presume that it was harder and more expensive to combine live action footage of the girl portraying Alice with the animation than it was to do the animation alone.

Making Alice’s regular costar, Julius, a cat who looks an awful lot like Felix the Cat seems too much like imitating the competition. (It seems that Disney’s distributor insisted on having a cat in the cartoons: see here) But, as noted, even the premise of Alice is simply taking the Fleischers’ idea for Inkwell and reversing it. At this point Disney is still reacting to his competitors’ ideas rather than heading in a brand new direction.

Alice Gets Stung begins with a lengthy sequence with Julius the cat chasing a rabbit (which doesn’t strike me as being a cat’s natural prey) and the rabbit’s efforts at thwarting him. For example, Julius reaches down into one rabbit hole, while the rabbit emerges from another hole behind him. This is a variation on what became a standard gag in Bugs Bunny-Elmer Fudd encounters. Watching this cartoon, I felt that Disney had stumbled onto the idea of the rabbit as trickster–but perhaps didn’t yet know what he had. Shouldn’t the rabbit be the star animal of this cartoon, not the cat, who, as the predator, seems to be playing the bad guy? Maybe this rabbit points to the creation of Oswald, though it would be Warners that perfected the idea of the animated trickster rabbit with Bugs Bunny.

Even though Daffy Duck can get blasted by Elmer Fudd over and over without suffering greater harm than a temporarily displaced beak, many classic Warners cartoons still depend on the audience’s belief that the hunter or predator could potentially do harm to the animal hero: Wile E. Coyote does indeed want to eat the Roadrunner, and Elmer Fudd does indeed want to kill the wabbit. In the world of Alice Gets Stung, there seems to be no real threat of death or even injury. At one point Julius pulls off the lower half of the rabbit, but the halves soon rejoin, and the rabbit seemingly suffers no pain whatsoever. Later, Julius removes his own eyes and mouth and positions them over one of the rabbit holes; when the rabbit emerges from the other hole, the eyeless cat captures her. This is a rather grotesque extension of the convention of the Felix the Cat silent cartoons, whereby Felix can detach part of his body, like his tail: at another point in this cartoon, the rabbit uses her tail to powder her face. Amusing as this sort of thing can be in silent cartoons, it also makes the characters seem overly unreal, and one can see why later funny animal cartoons mostly disposed of this convention of detachable body parts.

You’ll notice I refer to the rabbit as “she”: this was a surprise, too. Once caught, the rabbit pours out a sob story about her infant children–whom we see in a brief vignette, all in the same cradle and wailing for “Mama”–as two other rabbits play violins, with heart and flowers appearing onscreen as substitutes for music. Moved, Julius lets the rabbit go, whereupon the rabbit laughs at the cat–presumably her story was all a lie–and the chase resumes. This time Julius pursues the rabbit down the rabbit hole where, with no evident cause, the rabbit suddenly grows to giant size and the tables are turned. There is no logical reason why this should happen, but I suppose the rabbit’s increased size might be a metaphor for growing braver and more aggressive, having gaining the advantage once she is on her home ground.

The live action Alice shows up and, in a neat trick, is shown carrying a cartoon fire hydrant. which she and Julius then use literally to flush the rabbit out of her hole. But again this struck me as misjudgment by Disney. Why is our heroine joining the cat in pursuing the rabbit? Shouldn’t we root for the rabbit, as the predator’s potential victim, and admire her cleverness?

The “hearts and flowers” sequence suggests that Disney might already have been longing for the opportunities that sound could provide for his cartoons. So does the next major sequence in Alice Gets Stung, which shows animals playing music as members of a band. This prefigures Disney’s The Band Concert a decade later. Moreover, in Alice Gets Stung animals’ tails get pulled to cause them to emit musical notes, a gag that would be much more famously used in the first Mickey Mouse cartoon to be released, Steamboat Willie. Alice Gets Stung also uses the image of the conductor–in this case, a bear-that would keep recurring in classic Hollywood theatrical cartoons, including The Band Concert.

Alice shoots a gun at one of a pair of dancing bears. This is another misjudgment by Disney; why should the heroine attack an animal that has been entertaining the audience? In the world of the Alice shorts, however, even being shot repeatedly does not harm the bear, who begins dancing in time to the (silent) gunshots. But after bullets sever his head and limbs, once his body parts rejoin, the bear is understandably enraged. Frightened, Alice and Julius shrink in size (reversing the previous bit of the rabbit growing gigantic with courage) and Alice becomes a cartoon character herself. In the end she and the cat are beset by bees, thus finally providing an explanation for the cartoon’s title.

Death seems to be real in the next Alice cartoon included, Alice in the Wooly West (1926), although the rules by which it operates are unclear. This time Julius looks even more like Felix and he is cast as a Western gunfighter. Bandit mice hold up the passengers of a stagecoach, but Julius rides to the rescue and shoots the mice dead. This is even more startling if you consider that with the creation of Mickey Mouse, Disney would soon firmly establish the convention that in funny animal cartoons, mice are the good guys and cats are the bad guys.

The head of the bandits looks like a bear in a top hat, who seems to be, yea, the forebear of the principal villain in the Oswald cartoons, the top-hatted Putrid Pete. The bear kidnaps Alice, and in the ensuing battle, Julius separates the bear’s head from his body with repeated blows. This causes the bear no harm, his head and body rejoin, and the conflict continues.

In a reworking of a gag from the previous cartoon, this time Julius removes not his eyes but his black fur to use as a decoy. Julius not only clobbers the bear from behind but actually buries him on camera, leaving a flower on his grave! It’s as if Bugs Bunny literally killed Yosemite Sam! So here’s another mistake that Disney would avoid in years to come.

But Alice rejoices, although Julius is embarrassed at her seeing him in his underwear. It’s an odd gag if you think about it, since it evokes the human taboo on nudity by using an animal, to which the taboo would not apply. Variations on this gag would get stranger still in the Oswald series.

The third Alice cartoon in the set, Alice’s Balloon Race (1925), foreshadows the airplane race in the Oswald cartoon, and in both the villain is a bear in a top hat whom the Oswald series would call Putrid Pete. (What an unfortunate adjective to apply to someone with such an appealing first name!)

I was particularly impressed by a bit in which Alice’s balloon crashes in the background and she bounces out into the foreground. Running the sequence back on my DVD player, I could see the point at which the tiny cartoon Alice who is bounced out of the balloon turns into the live action Alice who lands in the foreground. But it happens so quickly that the audience surely had the illusion that it was the real Alice all the time.

Bodies are even more malleable and unkillable in this short than in the others. Falling from the sky, Julius smashes into bits upon hitting the ground, and immediately resumes shape and life. Later Julius enacts a typical Felix-style gag, detaching his tail and turning it into an umbrella. But then this cat goes way further into the grotesque: he eats his tail, which then emerges from the back of his head and then slides down his back until it reaches its proper position. Even the animation experts on this cartoon’s commentary track reacted as if they nearly couldn’t believe their eyes.

The first Oswald cartoon in the DVD set, Trolley Troubles (1927) presents its hero as the driver of a means of public transportation, picking up passengers, just as Steamboat Willie does with Mickey. Oswald looks chubbier here than heroes in the other cartoons. He’s also the visual missing link between Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse. All three are short and black, with white “faces,” black noses, and round heads: the major difference is in the shape of the ears. In Trolley Troubles Oswald also proves to have detachable body parts, using his tail as a brush. More disturbingly, he detaches his lucky rabbit’s foot and rubs it on his head for luck.

In these cartoons Oswald displays a range of emotions that foreshadows Mickey and later animated characters. Unlike many later animated stars, with the major exceptions of Donald and Daffy Duck, Felix, Oswald and the early Mickey were easily prone to anger. In Trolley Troubles Oswald literally hits an obese passenger off the vehicle.

In the most striking sequence, Oswald’s trolley plummets through a series of tunnels. Oswald stands in the foreground, his back to the audience, so we are essentially watching the sequence from his point of view, or, to put it differently, it is as if we are riding the trolley along with him, as the cavernous openings to the tunnels engulf the screen. It’s reminiscent of riding a roller coaster; it’s an early version of the sort of effect that today one might expect to find in a video game.

With the next cartoon, Oh Teacher (1927) Oswald embarks upon a theme that was not often to be found in Felix or Inkwell cartoons: love. here Oswald has a girlfriend, a female rabbit; this obviously prefigures the relationship between Mickey and Minnie Mouse, which is so important to the early Mickey cartoons.

When she accidentally tumbles into a lake, the unnamed girlfriend cries “HELP!”; not only do the letters appear onscreen, but Oswald rides them. as if they were a horse, to the lake to try to rescue her. Earlier in the short a question mark, used to denote a character’s puzzlement, was employed as a hook by the cartoon’s villain. These silent cartoons thus emphasize their own artificiality by taking an written word or a punctuation mark and turning it into a physical object. Maybe the detachable body parts in these cartoons serve a similar purpose: reminding the audience that Oswald and company are pen and ink creations, just as when Koko devolves back into ink at the end of his cartoons.

The girlfriend mistakenly thinks that it was the cat who saved her and snubs Oswald. The cat literally knocks Oswald’s head off, and though the head bounces back onto Oswald’s body, this still seems unintentionally disturbing. It is somehow easier to suspend disbelief and accept an anthropomorphic rabbit as real than it is to accept the idea that a living being can survive beheading.

In the standout sequence of Oh Teacher, Oswald angrily waits behind a schoolhouse to clobber the bullying cat with a brick. The cat unexpectedly comes up behind him, and Oswald nervously tries to hide the brick behind his back, switching it from one hand to the other. When the cat spots the brick, Oswald desperately starts lifting the brick with one hand, as if he is using it for weightlifting exercise. All of this happens in pantomime without a single word onscreen. This is real animated acting; the three Alice cartoons did not even attempt anything like this.

The next cartoon, Great Guns! (1927), suggests that even a decade after the devastation of World War I, Americans had a different attitude towards war than they do today. When war is declared in this cartoon, animals immediately enlist in the armed forces en masse, including Oswald.

Oswald is very much in love in this cartoon: in its most astonishing segment, the shot of Oswald kissing his girlfriend goodbye dissolves into a shot of Oswald kissing a photograph of his girlfriend, as he sits in a World War I-style trench, with rain pouring down around him.

There’s a good touch of Fleischer-style risqué visual humor that I hadn’t expected to find in a Disney cartoon: as soon as the enormous war cannons fire, they immediately collapse into a flaccid state.

Most of the cartoon is taken up by an aerial battle between Oswald and an enemy combatant, each piloting a plane; once again, Disney has cast a mouse as the bad guy.

At this cartoon’s end Oswald is reduced to what looks like shrapnel by a cannonball. His girlfriend, serving as a nurse, sweeps up Oswald’s remains, pours them into a giant shaker, as if she were mixing a drink, and pours out a pool of black ink, which (in the manner of Koko in the Inkwell cartoons) takes form as Oswald. Thus Oswald undergoes death and resurrection, and he gets the girl!

Walt Disney and his principal animators came from Kansas City, and the early Mickey cartoons have rural or barnyard settings. So it’s not a surprise that the next Oswald cartoon teams the rabbit with a cow, but the title character of The Mechanical Cow (1927) is, inexplicably, also a robot! Can we see the seeds of Disney’s future interest in audio-animatronics here? The flaccid cannon joke is repeated here, and Oswald again has a rabbit girlfriend, who is abducted by the bad guys.

In this cartoon the bad guys are ultimately devoured by sharks. I suppose that, considering that characters can survive dismemberment and beheading in the silent Disney cartoons, we shouldn’t take deaths in them seriously. Still, the Alice and Oswald cartoons certainly operate on a harsh moral code.

In The Ocean Hop (1927) Oswald competes against Putrid Pete, with top hat and peg leg, and others in an airplane race across the Atlantic. This updates the theme from Alice’s Balloon Race while probably alluding to Charles Lindbergh’s groundbreaking transatlantic flight, which also inspired the later Mickey Mouse cartoon Plane Crazy. Putrid Pete uses chewing gum to glue Oswald’s plane to the runway so it can’t take off. Instead, Oswald and some mice–friendly ones, this time–turn an unusually long dachshund into a substitute plane, utilizing balloons to lift him into the air. In another Felix-style gag, Oswald uses a word balloon containing a question mark as one of the balloons, employing the question mark to hook it onto the dachshund. (This is a more elaborate version of a similar flying dachshund gag from Alice’s Balloon Race.)

In the best moment of this film, a title card announces, “Then Night Falls,” and we see huge black raindrops falling around Oswald’s plane, which then merge into a sort of black sea of night. This has nothing to do with how night falls in the real world, but it makes a lovely alternative.

At the end Oswald falls from the sky to land safely in Paris, where he looks distinctly uncomfortable as Frenchmen congratulate him by kissing him on the cheek. Was Disney hinting at homosexuality here?

In All Wet (1927), set at the beach, Disney tries an interesting experiment with Oswald’s leading lady. Usually Oswald’s girlfriends, who are sometimes rabbits and sometimes, strangely, cats, are flat-chested; lacking breasts, they tend to go topless, like the early Minnie Mouse. What identifies them as female are things like hats with flowers or skirts and even visible panties. But the lady rabbit in All Wet not only wears a dress but is drawn with the suggestion of a bust. Indeed, at one point in the cartoon, she hides from the camera in order to change from her dress into a one-piece swimsuit. She even strikes flirtatious poses. She’s by no means built like a Jessica Rabbit or even Betty Boop, but she’s certainly preferable to the androgynous female leads of so many early cartoons.

Trying to impress her, Oswald bribes (!) the lifeguard into letting him substitute for him; she rows out to sea and feigns distress, but ends up in real danger. In a clever sequence, Oswald and the girl rabbit are continually being separated as waves lift him or her high up out of the other’s reach. But the girl rabbit seems less than real when Oswald, in giving her artificial respiration, rolls up her body and legs, as if she were a rug!

The Rival Romeos (1927) are Oswald and Putrid Pete, this time without a peg leg. Early Fleischer cartoons depict a world in which everything could be alive and mobile. The silent Disney cartoons in this set generally steer away from this approach, but in Rival Romeos Oswald and Putrid Pete drive cars with faces and personalities. Putrid Pete’s car refuses to drive into mud, and Oswald’s car joins Oswald in laughing at Pete.

With the opening of Bright Lights (1928), Disney and his team are obviously setting themselves new visual challenges and meeting them. This short opens with an animated version of an electric sign such as one might have seen in Times Square, with dancing stick figures, advertising “Mlle. Zulu, shimmy queen,” an exotic dancer. Then we go inside the theater to find yet another example of a conductor in classic animation, this time an ape leading an animal orchestra. There’s a chorus line of scantily clad dancing girl cats, followed by Mlle. Zulu herself, who performs her shimmy dance in an impressively animated serpentine manner.

All of this is before Oswald even makes his entrance. When he does, Oswald proceeds to demonstrate his growing range as an animated actor. His heart bulges from his chest as he thinks about the sensuous Mlle. Zulu, and he grows embarrassed when he unconsciously rests his hand on the derriere of a poster image of Mlle. Zulu, which then angrily comes to life.

Though Oswald’s personality grows fuller and more believable, the characters bodies remain unbelievably malleable. A theater guard hits Oswald so hard that he turns into a mass of tiny Oswalds, which merge back into the full size version; this is a recurring gag in the Oswald series. Oswald retaliates by tying the guard’s legs around a lamppost, as if he were made of rubber. I also like the clever bit in which Oswald tries to sneak into the theater by hiding under a patron’s enormous shadow as if it were a carpet.

With Ozzie of the Mounted (1928) Disney shows ambition as a storyteller by moving away from familiar rural and urban settings into the Canadian wilderness, parodying the same tales of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that later served as fodder for Jay Ward’s Dudley Do-Right. In this cartoon the familiar furry villain in the top hat is identified as Putrid Pete alias Kid Pete alias Peg Leg Pete, a name later given to Mickey Mouse’s feline adversary. Oswald’s horse is another robot, although why Disney was so interested in mechanical farm animals remains a mystery.

My favorite of the Oswald cartoons in this set is Oh What a Knight (1928). On the commentary track Leonard Maltin and Mark Kausler suggest that this is a parody of Douglas Fairbanks’ Robin Hood (1923), which makes sense since the early, adventurous Mickey has also been compared to Fairbanks. So Oh What a Knight is a parody of the swashbuckler genre in film, with Oswald as a kind of heroic singing troubadour: we can’t hear him sing, but there are plenty of musical notes drawn on screen, as Oswald makes his entrance, singing, while his donkey dances along. Robert Israel, a veteran composer of scores for silent films on video, created the musical accompaniment for the Oswald cartoons. I’m especially pleased that he sets Oswald’s singing entrance in Oh What a Knight to music from Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, which deals with medieval singers. Later in the cartoon, Israel quotes from Tannhauser, another Wagner opera about a singing knight (and possibly Israel’s nod to Chuck Jones’s What’s Opera, Doc?, which extensively uses music from Tannhauser).

It’s been two decades since I saw Fairbanks’ Robin Hood, but the most astounding segment in Oh What a Knight reminds me of Errol Flynn’s much more familiar The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), co-directed by Michael Curtiz, which was made a full decade after this cartoon. Both the Flynn Robin Hood and Curtiz’s The Sea Hawk (1940) culminate with swordfights in which the combatants cast enormous shadows on the walks behind them. Was this a swashbuckler movie tradition that predated Curtiz’s films? For, lo, in the greatest segment of Oh What a Knight, Oswald and an armored Putrid Pete wage a swordfight complete with ominous shadows behind them. Moreover, at one point Oswald exits the battle to go kiss the leading lady, while his shadow continues the duel with Putrid Pete in his place!

As the cartoon’s commentary track says, Oswald “recharges” his energies during the battle by continually returning to his lady love for a kiss. In this cartoon and some others, Oswald’s leading lady is not a rabbit but a cat. It would seem strange if Mickey Mouse’s girlfriend were not also a mouse, but then again, in more recent times Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy have gotten away with interspecies romance. I like the way that Disney and his animators kept devising new ways in these cartoons to portray Oswald’s sexual arousal. For example, at one point in Knight, his leading lady’s kiss causes Oswald’s feet to rotate in ecstasy.

Like Bright Lights, Sky Scrappers (1928) places Oswald in a then-contemporary urban setting: a skyscraper under construction. Putrid Pete sexually harasses Oswald’s girlfriend, a female cat, leading to an energetically staged battle between Oswald and Pete on a girder suspended high above the ground. Still, the cartoon disappointingly fails to evoke the suspense of the live action “thrill comedies” with similar settings that surely inspired it, like Harold Lloyd’s Never Weaken (1921) and Safety Last (1923) or Laurel and Hardy’s later Liberty (1929). It certainly pales in comparison to the split second timing of Popeye and company sleepwalking on and off girders in A Dream Walking (1934), whose complex visual choreography and split second timing was presumably beyond the capability of animators in the 1920s. The main problem, though, is that there’ not enough sense of potential sense of danger from falling in Sky Scrappers. At one point Oswald, climbing a rope, falls several stories, squashes on impact, but immediately resumes normal form, seemingly feeling no pain. He’s so rubbery that if he fell off the girder, one wouldn’t be surprised if he bounced.

The Fox Chase (1928) is another example of misjudging audience sympathies. Surely the audience would side not with Oswald the fox hunter but with his intended victim, the clever fox who outwits him. This fox is not only a trickster but a shapeshifter, adopting a disguise in the cartoon’s final moments that thwarts his hunters once and for all. In the high point here, Oswald tries to drive the fox out of a log by rolling it up like a rug–or like his leading lady from All Wet.

The last Oswald short, Tall Timber (1928), utilizes another ambitious setting, opening with Oswald rowing a canoe down a river, past a wilderness, down waterfall and, excitingly, through rapids. This time Oswald is a duck hunter, but, once again, I found my sympathies going to the duck. But then the cartoon resumes thrill comedy mode. Oswald finds himself riding a moose and being catapulted towards the screen–and the audience–until his face fills the frame. Then Oswald flees from an onrushing, rolling boulder, which finally, literally flattens him against a tree. The result is that Oswald is literally rail thin, but far taller. Oswald tries to restore his true shape by hitting himself with another heavy rock, but this impact distorts his body to the opposite extreme. An amazingly weird closeup shows Oswald’s head, inflated like a balloon. In long shot Oswald now looks short and obese, and his ears are no longer long but rounded: in fact, he looks like a fat Mickey Mouse! Two bear cubs seize either end of Oswald and pull, finally causing the rubbery rabbit to snap back to normal shape. Nevertheless angry, Oswald pursues the bear cubs to what looks like an immense black rock, but proves to be their huge, ferocious mother. But after an offscreen battle in a cave, the mother bear flees, with a furless body in bra and panties (yet another of the various animal “nudity” gags in the Oswald series that falls flat). Oswald then reenters, wearing a resplendent fur coat; he dons a top hat and lights a cigar in triumph. That seems an appropriate final image for what amounts to his curtain call in this final Oswald cartoon.

On the second disc are three key cartoons, animated by Ub Iwerks, that Walt Disney made independently, after Universal took Oswald away from him. They include the Mickey Mouse cartoons, Plane Crazy (1928) and Steamboat Willie (1928). The opening credits for each cartoon call it “a Walt Disney comic by Ub Iwerks,” a description that’s interesting for two reasons. First, the phrasing indicates that Walt Disney was in charge, but that Iwerks was the actual hands-on creator of the film. Second, the phrase “Walt Disney comic” suggests that at this point Disney–and perhaps his audience, as well– regarded the animated cartoon as a cinematic kind of comic strip, rather than as a separate artform.

Plane Crazy was the first Mickey Mouse cartoon that Disney made, and it was originally created as a silent cartoon. But it was the third Mickey cartoon, Steamboat Willie, with its groundbreaking synchronized sound track of music, dialogue and sound effects, that was the first to be released. But watching Plane Crazy, I found myself thinking that even apart from the question of sound, it was a good thing that Mickey actually made his debut in Steamboat Willie instead.

Opening in a barnyard, Plane Crazy presents Mickey as rural rodent who, with hep from other animals, builds his own plane and models himself after Charles Lindbergh, the first pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic. (We even see a surprisingly realistic picture of Lindbergh in the film, which sharply contrasts with the “cartoony” style in which the animal characters are drawn; Mickey even musses his hair in imitation of Lindbergh’s.) Mickey invites Minnie Mouse to join him on his flight. Eventually Mickey starts flirting with her and puts his arm around her; she wags her finger and tells him no. Looking devilish, Mickey speeds up the plane and puts it through aerial maneuvers that frighten Minnie. then he forcibly kisses her, Minnie slaps his face and she jumps out of the plane to escape him, her skirt billowing into a makeshift parachute. In other words, Plane Crazy portrays Mickey Mouse as guilty of sexual harassment, acting no differently than Putrid Pete in Sky Scrappers!

Watching Steamboat Willie after the Oswalds, I realized that much of the first half of the cartoon and its final scenes is conventional for its time, nowhere nearly as inspired as the best of Felix, Inkwell and Oswald. Mickey is the pilot of a steamboat, and his boss is an enormous cat with a high hat, an early version of his archfoe Black Pete (whom we can now see as Putrid Pete’s descendant). The bullying Pete pulls Mickey’s body, as malleable as Oswald’s, out of shape, stretching it till Mickey’s midsection looks like a rubber hose. There’s some vulgar comedy business with Pete spitting. Too late to board the steamboat, Minnie runs alongside it until Mickey uses a winch and hook to lift hold of her panties, a rather demeaning way to treat the leading lady, and deposit her on the boat. At the end of the cartoon Pete forces Mickey to peel potatoes, a parrot laughs mockingly at the mouse, and Mickey gets angry, beans the parrot with at grown potato, and laughs. This material seems all too conventional. sometimes crass and even mean-spirited.

But the opening image of Mickey at the wheel of the steamboat shows why Steamboat Willie fired the public imagination. Mickey is smiling, happy, and whistles a tune we hear on the soundtrack. It’s not just the fact that Steamboat Willie had synchronized sound that made it a breakthrough: it’s the way that Disney adapted his characterizations and stories to the opportunities that music provided. By making music, either by whistling or by playing his improvised instruments later in the cartoon, Mickey becomes a source of pure joy.

The middle of the cartoon has no story: it’s just Mickey playing his instruments, whether they are spoons and pots or various animals. For example, the musical sequence begins when a goat eats the sheet music for “Turkey in the Straw”; Mickey discovers that by turning the goat’s tail like a crank, the goat becomes a living gramophone, with the music coming from his mouth. Steamboat Willie has incurred criticism for Mickey’s supposed sadism, pulling a cat’s tail, or stretching a goose’s neck, or, startlingly, pressing a female pig’s udders in order to produce musical sounds. But in the context of the Oswald cartoons, in which characters’ rubbery bodies rarely sustain any harm, this doesn’t seem so bad to me. Presumably viewers in the 1920s would accept the convention of the period’s cartoons that these animals are not really being hurt. Instead, the audience would be carried along by the music Mickey is playing with these animals, in an effect that is simultaneously comedic and pleasurable simply as music. The cartoon’s ending, with the reversion to expressions of violent anger, is a letdown: it would have been better had Steamboat Willie ended with a musical gag of some sort. It’s Mickey the music maker who first won audience’s hearts.

The final cartoon in this DVD set is The Skeleton Dance (1929), animated by Ub Iwerks, the first of Disney’s Silly Symphonies series. This cartoon is a little masterpiece even though it has no actual story. Whereas the “Turkey in the Straw” segment in Steamboat Willie was an extended interlude between more conventional story sequences, The Skeleton Dance is entirely founded on music. The cartoon begins as a sort of visual tone poem, establishing an eerie mood both through the music and through classic visual elements from horror tales: lightning, the ominous eyes of an owl, a seemingly deserted church and graveyard, a howling dog (who looks like Pluto in silhouette!), and flying bats. Soon the cartoon introduces notes of humor as well, with black cats battling by pulling each other’s noses as if they were rubber bands. This reversion to Oswald-style visual humor is abruptly interrupted when a skeleton looms from behind a tombstone separating the cats and then leaps directly at the “camera,” invading the viewer’s space. Four skeletons then begin their dance, which takes up the rest of the cartoon, sometimes entertainingly silly, sometimes macabre, sometimes both at once.

The success of The Skeleton Dance led to Disney’s long series of Silly Symphonies which were built around music, frequently classical music. I’ve written about a number of Silly Symphonies before after seeing them at Lincoln Center (see “Comics in Context” #136: “Before There Were Cars”). Last December I attended the Museum of the Moving Image’s four-part retrospective of Silly Symphonies, including The Skeleton Dance and demonstrating how Disney further developed his new invention, the musical cartoon, but that is a topic for a future installment.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

Back in 1987 there was a party at a Manhattan nightclub called the Tunnel to publicize the wedding of Peter Parker, better known as Spider-Man, to Mary Jane Watson. Actors portraying Spidey (in mask and tuxedo) and MJ (in wedding gown) were present as was Stan Lee, as himself, and I attended as well. This week I informed my companion for that evening that Marvel had just retconned Peter Parker’s life so that he had never been married. So, I told her, I guess we never attended that party either. Too bad, because she was really proud of the dress she wore for the occasion. I then explained to her that Peter Parker had made a deal with the devil to save his aunt’s life, and the price was changing history so his marriage never happened. Not a comics fan, her reaction was, in effect, say what? Exactly.

It was Stan Lee’s idea to have Peter Parker marry Mary Jane Watson. As Marvel editor in chief Joe Quesada told Comic Book Resources, “It was a stunt.” Quesada explained to CBR that “Around 1986, circulation on the Spider-Man newspaper strip had begun to drop.” So Stan Lee and an editor from King Features Syndicate came up with the idea of having Peter marry Mary Jane to boost circulation.

Quesada continued, “So, at a certain point, Stan called up Marvel and let the folks there know that he was planning to marry Peter and Mary Jane in the newspaper strip at such-and-such a point. At the time, Mary Jane wasn’t even dating Peter in the series, but [then editor in chief] Jim Shooter, not wanting the comics to get scooped by the newspaper strip or whatever, decided that the publicity surrounding the marriage (there was talk of a faux wedding ceremony taking place at Shea Stadium to commemorate the event) and the fact that this was Stan made it worth doing in the books as well.” (And I wonder if Peter and Mary Jane will remain married in the Spider-Man comic strip, and if not, how Stan will explain it.)

But after Peter and Mary Jane got hitched, Marvel editors and writers regretted the decision. But why? After twenty-plus years of Spider-Man stories, wasn’t it about time for Peter Parker to get married?

When Stan Lee was writing The Amazing Spider-Man comic book in the 1960s, Peter Parker started out as a 15-year-old high school student who eventually graduated and entered college. Later writers had Peter graduate college and enter graduate school where (as I know from firsthand experience) people can remain students for years and years. Spider-Man/Peter Parker was supposed to be a young guy, a student who had not yet begun an adult career. This distinguished him from “adult” superheroes like Daredevil, who in his secret identity was one of Manhattan’s leading lawyers, and certainly from Iron Man, who was really multimillionaire C. E. O. Tony Stark. If Peter Parker was married, the argument ran, that made him seem too old.

That, it was argued, was a problem because Marvel’s target audience was perceived as being high school and college age kids, who, supposedly would be less able to identify with a Spider-Man who was older than they were. (By that logic, I suppose, they couldn’t identify with Daredevil or Iron Man because they weren’t kids. And for a brief, terrible time in the 1990s Iron Man was indeed replaced with a “teen Tony” version.)

But what is the median age of Marvel readers nowadays? Looking around at comics stores and conventions, I see mostly adults. The owner of one Manhattan comics store tells me that he never sees customers who are kids.

Yet I can see the point that readers well into their twenties, thirties, or middle age might prefer that Peter Parker remain fixed in his early twenties, because he reminds them of themselves when they were that age.

Another, probably greater problem with Peter’s marriage is that the essence of Spider-Man is that he is the “hard luck Harry” (to use Stan Lee’s phrase) of the superhero world. Despite his triumphs over his supervillain adversaries, nothing else ever goes right for Spider-Man either in his costumed identity or as Peter Parker. Therefore, it is argued, the marriage is a mistake because being married to a gorgeous supermodel makes Peter Parker just too happy.

I agree that it was a mistake in the immediate aftermath of Peter and MJ’s wedding to portray her as a wealthy, famous and highly successful model and actress. Peter Parker has always suffered from money problems, and this removed them. Later writers and editors recognized this and gave MJ considerable career setbacks; Todd McFarlane drew an amusing symbolic cover of Spider-Man being literally kicked out of an upscale apartment building where the Parkers were living in the lap of luxury (Amazing Spider-Man #314, April 1989).

It’s certainly a naive view of married life to picture it as a constant source of blissfulness. I suspect there may even have been a certain sexism in this attitude towards Peter’s marriage, as if MJ were defined principally by her looks and her presumed prowess in bed. Why couldn’t Peter and Mary Jane be portrayed as partners in the struggles, personal, financial, and so forth, that Peter had formerly faced on his own? This is the direction in which Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies appear to be moving.

But is nostalgia the real reason that these Baby Boomer editors and writers prefer that Peter Parker be single? Peter was single when they were growing up reading Spider-Man, so they feel that he shouldn’t be married now. I confess that I wonder if this sort of nostalgia clouds my judgment in the issue.

After all, Peter and MJ got married in Amazing Spider-Man Annual # 21, published in 1987. In real time they were married for twenty years, nearly half of the Spider-Man series’ nearly forty-six (!) year history. So that means that anyone who started reading Spider-Man comics (apart from reprints) in the last two decades only knows the character as a married man. Yet Spider-Man remained highly popular among comics readers over that period. Isn’t it possible that post-Boomer generations of Spider-Man readers consider Peter’s marriage to MJ one of the sources of the series’ appeal? Since the comic book audience has been much older over the last twenty years than it was back in the 1960s, isn’t it possible that male readers aren’t put off by the marriage? Young kids might think that a married superhero is more like their father than like themselves. (Reed Richards is the father figure of the Fantastic Four, so Stan Lee and Jack Kirby probably had no qualms about alienating FF readers by having him marry Sue; there was still Johnny Storm to serve as an identification figure for the kids.) But wouldn’t many teenage and twentysomething male readers wish they had a girlfriend or wife like Mary Jane themselves? Spider-Man’s marriage might therefore make the character more appealing to them.

Moreover, there has been a visible growth of the numbers of female readers for American comic books in recent years. Last year’s uproar over the allegedly lurid statuette of Mary Jane pointed to how important and iconic the character has become to female fans of Spider-Man comics–and the Spider-Man movies, in which Mary Jane plays such an important role (see Comics in Context” #178: “The Whole World Is Watching”). To what extent is that role responsible for a significant portion of the blockbuster commercial success of those films? Don’t the love story and Kirsten Dunst’s performance as MJ bring in a considerable female audience who might not otherwise be interested in superhero movies?

If so, then is Marvel alienating present and potential women readers by putting an end to Peter and MJ’s marriage, thereby arguably suggesting that the marriage wasn’t a positive development, that MJ was an inessential character, and even that the heroic male is better off alone?

Then again, one could argue that the essence of Spider-Man is that he is loner, and not by choice. As both Spider-Man and Peter Parker, he continually strives to do the right thing, only to be rewarded with mistrust, misunderstanding, lack of appreciation, and even hatred. In the classic Stan Lee Spider-Man stories of the Silver Age, Peter/Spider-Man was operating entirely on his own, unable to confide in anyone else: even Gwen Stacy, his first great love, turned against Spider-Man, mistakenly holding him responsible for her father’s death.

Therefore, it makes sense to me that Spider-Man/Peter Parker should be single, and that the series works best when he must face his troubles on his own. Peter/Spider-Man would meet mistrust and lack of appreciation wherever he turned, whether it was the public at large, or J. Jonah Jameson, or even, at times, from his girlfriends.

One of the traditional themes of the series is that carrying out his responsibility to do good as Spider-Man continually complicates and damages Peter Parker’s personal life, and this would be true of his romantic relationships as well. This point was most powerfully made by the death of Gwen Stacy at the hands of the original Green Goblin.

Well then, if Peter’s marriage to Mary Jane was a mistake, why not just find a reason for them to get divorced? They could still remain friends, and possibly at some point return to being lovers. This was the simplest solution, and yet Marvel editors refused to take it.

Thankfully, Marvel did not go for the other obvious solution, which was to kill off Mary Jane. Perhaps this was a case of Been There, Done That, since Peter’s first true love, Gwen Stacy, had been killed off. Perhaps Marvel editors and writers over the last twenty years recognized that she was too appealing a character to kill off.

If Spider-Man were published by DC Comics, DC would simply have done of its long series of reboots, casting all past continuity into oblivion and starting the series over from scratch. Traditionally, though, Marvel keeps its continuity intact perhaps because it is founded in the classic stories that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and company created in the 1960s, and which no new version is likely to equal or surpass. I agree with this policy. As the late Mark Gruenwald used to say about reboots, Marvel got its characters right the first time.

So, rather than use any simple solutions, Marvel has resorted to complicated and convoluted schemes to undo Peter and MJ’s marriage.

A decade ago there was the now infamous Clone Saga in the Spider-Man books, founded upon a story in Amazing Spider-Man #149 (1975) in which the criminal geneticist, the Jackal, had created a clone of his foe, Spider-Man. By the end of that issue the clone had seemingly been killed. But in the 1990s a Peter Parker lookalike named Ben Reilly surfaced. The readers were made to wonder, was Ben the Spider-Man clone–or was he the original Spider-Man? Could it be that the Peter Parker who had starred in Spider-Man comics from 1975 onward was actually the clone?

As the Clone Saga evolved, the Spider-Man editors and writers saw it as a means of simplifying Spider-Man continuity and eliminating the marriage. They identified the Peter who married MJ as the clone and shipped them off to Portland, Oregon to live happily ever after; MJ even became pregnant. Ben Reilly was identified as the original Spider-Man and reassumed his Spider-Man identity. Hence, the “Spider-Man” who starred in stories from Amazing Spider-Man #150 into the mid-1990s was an unwitting impostor.

And readers rebelled, quite understandably. The Baby Boomer writers and editors of the Spider-Man books might have been happy since the Spider-Man stories from 1962 into 1975, which they had grown up with, were left intact.

But what if you had started reading Spider-Man in 1976 or later, and Marvel had just told you that you had been reading about a phony Spider-Man? Even if you were a Boomer Spider-Man fan you might be outraged. The Clone Saga was effectively discarding twenty years of Spider-Man comics. Unintentionally, Marvel was telling its audience that they had wasted the last two decades reading about the wrong character!

So Marvel hurriedly sought to undo the damage. Peter and MJ rushed back to New York, Ben was proven to be the the clone and was killed off, and Peter returned to his role as Spider-Man. As for MJ’s pregnancy, she gave birth and was told the baby was stillborn, and the baby was abducted by an operative of the original Green Goblin. Was the baby live or dead? There was no answer, and thus the baby became a continuity time bomb, liable to detonate at some point in the future.

The Clone Saga also failed in its objective of providing a Spider-Man who was unmarried. And so Peter and MJ’s marriage survived for another decade, not alienating readers, as far as I know, until editor in chief Joe Quesada and company devised their solution to the alleged problem in the recent “One More Day” story arc which culminated in Amazing Spider-Man #545, whose writing is credited to J. Michael Straczynski and Joe Quesada.

During Civil War, which, as regular readers know, is not my favorite series, Spider-Man publicly revealed his other identity of Peter Parker. He was subsequently reminded of the reason he had a secret identity in the first place, when his Aunt May was shot and fatally wounded. It seemed that there was no way to save he life until the demon Mephisto, Marvel’s counterpart to the Biblical Satan, made Peter and Mary Jane an offer: he would save her life if they agreed to allow him to alter history so that they had never been married. Realizing that May’s life would still be in danger if the world knew that Peter was Spider-Man, Mary Jane insisted that Mephisto make Peter’s dual identity secret once more. Mephisto, Peter and Mary Jane agreed to the terms of this bargain, and history was changed. Peter and Mary Jane no longer remembered being married, and no one knew that Peter was Spider-Man. (It’s now obvious that Marvel only publicly revealed Spider-Man’s double identity in Civil War because they intended to restore it to secrecy again in “One More Day.”)

Oddly, Mephisto threw in some bonuses. He further altered history so that Harry Osborn had never died. Well, since Harry once followed in his father’s footsteps as the second Green Goblin, perhaps Mephisto intends for Harry to cause trouble in the future.

But what motivation did Mephisto have for removing Peter’s new “organic web-shooters” and having him return to his original, mechanical ones? I assume that Marvel gave Spider-Man the power to shoot webbing out of his hands because he can do so in the Raimi movies. Was Marvel’s comics division under pressure from the movie division to make the comics Spider-Man conform to the movie version? (That could well be yet another reason why Marvel put an end to the Peter-MJ marriage, since they’re not married in the movies.) Did the comics division restore the mechanical web-shooters because that pressure was off, or because fans–or even Marvel pros–had protested?

I applaud the fact that Quesada and company did not kill off Mary Jane. Now that the world knows about the character from the movies, if they killed her off there would be outrage in the mainstream media. And besides, she may be in future Spider-Man movies and certainly in licensing and merchandising spinoffs of the movies and comics.

I’m also glad that Quesada and company didn’t do a reboot of Spider-Man. I wish that they’d refrain from reboots altogether. Is J. Michael Straczynski’s Strange miniseries that radically revised the Lee-Ditko Doctor Strange stories (without coming close to matching them) meant to be canonical?

Although I’d prefer not altering past continuity at all, I am relieved that the changes to past Spider-Man stories are less than I’d expected:

COMIC BOOK RESOURCES: So, to get this straight, OMD [One More Day”] doesn’t actually negate the previous 20 years of Spider-Man stories?

QUESADA: Exactly, that’s precisely what we wanted to avoid. What didn’t occur was the marriage. Peter and MJ were together, they loved each other–they just didn’t pull the trigger on the wedding day. All the books count, all the stories count–except in the minds of the people within the Marvel U, Peter and MJ were a couple, not a married couple. To me, that’s a much fairer thing to do to those of us who have been reading Spider-Man for all these years. Like I said, is it perfect? No. As far as we investigated, short of divorcing Peter, nothing really is.”

(http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=12681)

Thus Marvel avoided making the Clone Saga’s mistake of telling readers that the previous two decades of Spider-Man stories are now irrelevant.

But if a divorce would be the “perfect” solution, why didn’t Marvel go for it? Quesada claims to be protecting Spider-Man’s younger readers. He told Newsarama last year, “divorcing them to me sends out completely the wrong message. Imagine you’re a mom and you’re buying little Bobby or little Betty Spidey Adventures or maybe Spidey Loves MJ and you’re watching the news one day and the broadcaster looks right at you and says, “˜Spider-Man is getting divorced, more on that after these messages.’ Let’s just say that as a parent, I’d be upset by the sound bite, I could only imagine how the rest of the world would feel”.

Well, yes, I can see that small children might be afraid that their own parents would split up, so the idea of Spider-Man getting divorced might disconcert them. Then again, small children who are Spider-Man fans might be even more upset if they found out that his eye had been brutally gouged out, as it was in 2006 (see “Comics in Context” #118: “O Other, Where Art Thou?”). Okay, that wasn’t widely reported in the mainstream media, and Marvel was lucky that it wasn’t. But what the mainstream media did make a big fuss over was the assassination of Captain America in 2007 (see “Comics in Context” #168: “O Captain! My Captain!”). Gee, if I were a small child who read comics about Captain America, I bet that would upset me. Why, reading about Cap’s death might even be the first time that little Bobby and little Betty grapple with the meaning of death. And Cap’s still dead in the comics.

Here’s something else. Divorce is far more widespread and accepted in this country than it was back when we Boomers were children. I recall when people claimed that Nelson Rockefeller’s campaign to be nominated for President in the 1960s wouldn’t succeed because he’d been divorced, and it didn’t. But two decades later Ronald Reagan was elected president, and no one cared that he had been divorced and remarried.

I expect that little Bobby and little Betty who read Spidey Adventures may well have friends whose parents are divorced. Maybe little Bobby and little Betty have an aunt or uncle who is divorced, or maybe their own parents are divorced. The traditional nuclear family unit is not as common as it used to be. So maybe these children wouldn’t be as upset by the idea of divorce as Joe Quesada thinks they would be.

But you know what? I bet that if little Bobby and little Betty are being brought up to be religious, they might be really upset by Peter Parker making a deal with the devil. Mommy, mommy, is Spider-Man going to hell?

Spider-Man has a tradition of dealing with disturbing subjects. Consider that Spider-Man’s origin not only centers on the death of Uncle Ben, Peter’s father figure, but makes clear that Spider-Man feels responsible for allowing the murder to happen. And yet somehow for over four decades kids have been able to handle the notion that their hero Spider-Man is partly guilty of patricide. Spider-Man likewise feels guilty for the death of Gwen: the Green Goblin pushed her off the bridge, but her neck snapped when Spider-Man caught her.

Besides, have we forgotten how Stan Lee defied the Comics Code to publish his groundbreaking anti-drug storyline in Amazing Spider-Man #96-98 (1971), which showed Peter’s friend Harry deathly ill from drug addiction? What about that 1986 Spider-Man & Power Pack special, aimed at small children, that revealed that as a young boy Peter Parker was a victim of child abuse? Marvel has a tradition of dealing with such hard issues. Is divorce, then, really too much for Spider-Man’s young readers to handle?

In the year 2008 Quesada’s attitude towards divorce seems, at the very least, quaint. He told Comic Book Resources, “Sure, divorce is a reality of life, but Peter Parker and Spider-Man are not the types of characters that would do that. Spider-Man is a worldwide icon and is considered one of the good guys, like Superman”. So the “good guys” don’t get divorced, presumably because divorce is evil. So anyone who gets divorced is a bad guy?

Quesada has also said that he opposed divorcing Peter and Mary Jane because he wanted to present them as a “strong loving couple”. Well, by breaking them up via Mephisto’s magic, Marvel has put an end to that theme, at least for now. Isn’t it possible that Peter and Mary Jane could continue to love each other but still get a divorce because it is simply too dangerous for Spider-Man to be married, as the assault on another of his loved ones, Aunt May, demonstrated?

Isn’t it also possible that Marvel’s writers could have crafted a storyline that maturely and sensitively handed a divorce between Peter and Mary Jane, written in a way that could explain to younger readers that divorce is sad but sometimes necessary? Maybe reading such a storyline could actually help children of divorced parents reconcile themselves to the idea of divorce.

On reading the conclusion of “One More Day” in Amazing Spider-Man #545, I wasn’t as upset about Peter Parker’s deal with Mephisto as I thought I’d be. Spider-Man is the everyman as superhero, and how would you or I react if the only way to save a loved one’s life was to make a bargain with the devil? Could you justify allowing a loved one to die by refusing to make such a deal?

Moreover, I like the grand, operatic romanticism of Mary Jane’s speech to Peter that not even the devil can destroy their love for one another, and that even if he makes them forget what they meant to each other, they will inevitably be reunited. It puts me in mind of the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or stories about reincarnated lovers reunited, from Hawkman to Dark Shadows, which deal with a similar concept.

But still, I remain repulsed by the idea of Spider-Man making a deal with the devil. In his CBR interview Quesada points out that “One More Day” is based on the myth of Faust. Yes, indeed, and the point of Faust and the many variations on it is that making a deal with the devil is always wrong.

Just look at Marvel’s previous leading version of the Faust myth: the origin of Ghost Rider (in Marvel Spotlight #5, 1972). Like Peter Parker, Johnny Blaze was desperate to save the life of the person who had acted as a parent to him: “Crash” Simpson, who was succumbing to cancer. Blaze made a bargain with the devil, who was subsequently identified as Mephisto, and who did indeed prevent Simpson from dying of cancer, only to let him die soon thereafter performing a motorcycle stunt. Then Mephisto transformed Blaze into the human host of the demon Zarathos, turning him into the Ghost Rider. The Ghost Rider’s origin follows the standard pattern of the Faust myth. The moral is that making a deal with the devil leaves you far worse off than you were before, and that you do not even gain the original goal for which you sacrificed your principles and perhaps your soul.

Therefore, the truly heroic choice for Spider-Man to make may have been to resign himself to letting Aunt May die rather than provide Mephisto with the opportunity to wreak even greater harm.

Indeed, as soon as Peter and Mary Jane agree to the bargain, Mephisto shows them a vision of the daughter that he claims they now will not have. This, presumably, is Marvel’s way of disposing of that “time bomb’ baby: if Peter and Mary Jane were never married, they never had that child. In Tom DeFalco’s Spider-Girl series, set in the future, that child grew up to become the teenage title heroine. But “One More Day” suggests that Spider-Girl takes place in the future if an alternate reality, not that of the “mainstream” Spider-Man.

So there is one consequence of Peter and Mary Jane’s satanic bargain that is arguably worse than the death of his elderly aunt: it’s like an abortion via black magic. And just how many lives would Spider-Girl have saved if she existed in the “mainstream” Spider-Man’s reality? You can expect that Spider-Man writers will be tempted to do still more stories about how far Mephisto has sunk his claws into Spider-Man’s life, if not now, then in the future.

How dense do Peter and Mary Jane have to be not to realize any of this? Have they never seen any version of the Faust story–not even something like Damn Yankees or Bedazzled? There are already mainstream media reports about “One More Day.” How can making a deal with the devil possibly be good for the public image of Marvel’s flagship hero?

Furthermore, to my knowledge, Mephisto has never before demonstrated such power to restructure reality and even resurrect the dead (Harry). But there are plenty of Marvel characters who do, who could have been used to retcon the marriage without morally sullying Peter and Mary Jane’s characters. Over at his online forum, John Byrne has explained how he and writer Howard Mackie would have used the alien Shaper of Worlds to undo the marriage. I find myself leaning towards using the Grandmaster, who has been established as having powers to control time, space, life and death.

For twenty years Marvel writers and editors thought that Peter and Mary Jane’s marriage was a mistake and longer to undo it, and finally Marvel did. And you know what? Right now I expect there are people who are professional comics writers and editors, and people who will someday become professional comics writers and editors, who are outraged that Marvel had Spider-Man make a deal with the devil. And these present and future writers and editors will be determined to undo it. We shall see whether it takes twenty years this time, or much less.

Still, despite my qualms about Marvel brought it about, maybe Peter Parker and Spider-Man should be single. But I don’t feel any enthusiasm about this. Over the last twenty years I have grown very, very weary of reboots, resets, and revisionism.

One reads fiction on two levels. The reader knows that it is fiction and can admire and analyze the craft of the author. But the fiction should also persuade the reader simultaneously to suspend his or her disbelief, to pretend that the story and its characters are real, and to become emotionally involved with them.

But why should we invest ourselves emotionally in the Marvel Universe–or the DC Universe, for that matter–any longer?

For twenty years Marvel has sought to make its readers care about the marriage–and about the love–between Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson. Did they succeed with you? Too bad, because they just retconned the characters’ past so that their marriage never happened. So why should you care about any other romance in Marvel stories, since it too could disappear from Marvel history with the snapping of an editor’s fingers?

When Spider-Man revealed his secret identity in Civil War, did you think that this would change his life permanently? Did you wonder if and how Spider-Man could ever find a new secret identity? Well, Mephisto just wiped out everyone’s knowledge of Spider-Man’s dual identity through magic. So why should we ever care about any disastrous situation that befalls a Marvel character in the future? All they have to do is hit the magical reset button.

Did you feel moved by J. M. DeMatteis’s well-crafted story of the death of Harry Osborn in Spectacular Spider-Man #200 (1993)? Surprise! Harry’s death was retconned away! Now that Bucky has turned up alive, it is clear that no death is sacrosanct at Marvel. It’s as if every character had a version of Wolverine’s fast healing power; it just takes some of them longer to recover from the dreaded deading (as The Goon Show used to put it) than others. Death has just turned into a means of demeaning noble characters–like, say, Captain America, symbol of our nation–and exasperating longtime readers we wait, sometimes years, for Marvel to get around to bringing them back.

One of the main points of the Marvel Revolution was that Stan Lee wanted to explore what would happen if a superhero existed in what was basically our world. In the real world death is irreversible, one’s problems cannot be made to disappear by magic, and reality is not malleable, capable of being shaped and reshaped at will.

How can a reader continue to suspend disbelief when the stories make it all too clear that the characters are merely puppets, and we are all too aware of the puppeteers pulling their strings?

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

To my astonishment, Marvel has just released Essential Marvel Saga Vol. 1! This is a paperback collection of a series that I wrote in the 1980s which outlined the history of the Marvel Universe from Fantastic Four #1 through the Galactus trilogy, with appropriate illustrations from the original stories. It was abruptly canceled with issue 25, back when conventional wisdom had begun to decree that no one wanted books like Marvel Saga and The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. i am glad to see that history has proven them wrong.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson