This is LOOOONG overdue. The marriage was a mistake made twenty years ago to boost readership of the newspaper strip and to have a cheap publicity stunt wedding at Yankee Stadium. And editor-in-chief-at-the-time Jim Shooter was short-sighted enough to go with the idea and tie in the comic as well. You have to remember, at the time the wedding was decided upon Peter and MJ weren't even dating in the comics. They had exactly three issues to have the characters get together, decide they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together, and get married. And remember, this was all because Stan Lee was told to come up with some sort of stunt to boost readership if the newspaper strip, and remembered that weddings were always a good gimmick in Gasoline Alley or Mary Worth, or whatever.

They tried to get out of it in the comics a dozen or so years ago with the clone stories (and readers at the time will all remember how well that went over), and now they've finally got the cojones up to give fixing the book another shot. Thank God.

People tend to argue that marrying the character off (and this applies to Superman as well) is a logical progression for the character, and I don't disagree. Most people do eventually settle down, get married, have kids, buy houses--but the thing with fictional characters in general, and Spider-Man in particular is that giving the characters the happy endings you want them to have ends the characters journey and FINISHES THE BOOK!

So basically what fans have been stuck reading for the last twenty years in the Spider-Man books is the longest continuing epilogue in publishing history. And people concerned about Marvel being able to reboot characters' continuity every time it gets too cumbersome need to remember that it took almost fifty years for Spider-Man to get to this point and most likely they'll be long dead by the time it needs to happen again.

And Count Karnstein, I'm partial to the 60's Marvel books too, and I can see how being away from reading comics for several years can make the current books seem pretty alien when you give them a casual glance years later. But I hope I never reach the point where I automatically dismiss any form of current culture on that basis. The "All old--Good, All-new--Bad" argument gets more attractive as you get older, but deep down most of us don't really believe that's true, do we?