Trivia / One More Day

• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: The "It's magic. We don't have to explain it" quote is something a fan said, not Quesada, and is also incorrectly quoted. Quesada, upon being asked why he essentially responded with "It's magic. We don't need to explain it" in regards to the story, said that other Marvel characters used magic and no one needed an explanation for those.
• Creator Backlash: J. Michael Straczynski is not exactly fond of the story.
  • JMS was drafted to write this story since Joe Quesada knew he was ending his run soon and he felt introducing this generation-dividing retcon would be best with the changing of writers since the backlash of what happened would not be seriously blamed on the new guy starting out, while he could have a clean slate. Quesada stated that JMS didn't question the intent of the story (i.e. Peter and MJ's marriage dissolving and shaking up the status-quo) but rather he was angered over the fact that Quesada didn't allow him to fully explain the story and that he didn't get to write it the way he wanted. Things reached the boiling point when JMS outright threatened not to put his name on the final two issues.
  • JMS said later that he respected Quesada, accepted that Spider-Man is Marvel's baby and as EIC it was Quesada's call on how to handle the IP. In other words, JMS disagreed with the idea of erasing the marriage but was willing to play the company man and write the story even though he as a writer disagreed with that direction. He saw One More Day as a stopping off point for his run and hoped to end it with a good enough clean slate that still maintained most of the story points from his run going forward (namely Aunt May knowing Peter's identity). He also disagreed with the logistics of Mephisto and Quesada's "It's magic we don't have to explain it" and the fact that the retcon virtually negated his entire run and the character development he had written. JMS finally disagreed with the idea that it was MJ rather than Peter who made the deal, feeling it was too cowardly on Peter's part to pass the buck to his wife, and that it was out-of-character for him not to take the responsibility and guilt for this action.
  • A few years later it was found out that JMS really did hate the OMD retcon, and got into a rather public spat with creators of Marvel in late 2011 about it, stating that he felt that Quesada exploited the goodwill and favor that had generated between them to write a story that would go down as one of comics' all-time great turkeys, which falls in his CV, while also sullying the work that he had done on Spider-Man, pointing out that the Post-OMD continuity is essentially a Cosmic Retcon for Spider-Man that rewrites years of continuity and fundamentally changes the nature of the stories that Quesada and other claims still happened but only with a Peter who lived with MJ and Harry who was still alive throughout the entire thing but doing nothing of importance.
• Executive Meddling:
  • EIC Joe Quesada, is outright credited as a co-writer on the story and also worked as the artist alongside J. Michael Straczynski, though exactly what parts of the story he and JMS respectively wrote is not fully disclosed, though some parts can be somewhat identified through information from interviews. JMS clearly didn't appreciate Quesada's involvement/meddling very much, almost refusing to put his name on the last two parts before its publishing, and he shortly thereafter jumped ship to the Distinguished Competition.
  • To elaborate, JMS wanted to specifically explain in One More Day how the marriage was erased and the direct effects. Quesada overruled him and decided to leave it up to the viewers' imaginations, and essentially saw it as a Broad Strokes retcon that in his view meant that the marriage didn't happen going forward but all the stories before (with the marriage in them) still happened.
  • According to Dan Slott in a series of CBR posts, the decision to end the marriage was something demanded by Marvel's executives, just a few years after the initial widely successful event of "The Wedding", and was something mandated to earlier editors and EIC of Spider-Man titles, and that it was a corporate decision to protect Spider-Man as a company mascot and brand, rather than merely Quesada's or other writer's desire to settle old fan grudges. While Quesada obviously believed in the decision and has no regrets over it, he wasn't the first editor tasked with ending the marriage^note Quesada also oversaw a run of comics that brought Spider-Man and MJ back together after their brief separation at the end of the 90s and also continued to produce Spider-Girl (a comic featuring Peter and MJ's children) despite weak sales and he made it clear that he did not dislike Mary-Jane as a character and considers her an essential supporting character in the Spider-Man mythos, and in all likelihood it would have happened under the hands of another editor anyway.
  • Even if he wasn't opposed to ending the marriage, Quesada would take any effort to prevent the deal from being undone - when writing Siege, which largely returned the Marvel Universe to the status quo prior to Civil War, Brian Michael Bendis allegedly tried to sneak in a plot point that would've undone the deal, and reunited Peter and Mary Jane. However, as Quesada was still the EIC at the time, once he found out, he forced Bendis to scrap these plans. Peter Parker and Mary Jane wouldn't get back together until The Amazing Spider-Man (2018), when Quesada had left the role of EIC. However, Spencer would go on to reveal that reuniting Peter with MJ in the run had been the suggestion of Quesada himself. Even that didn't last, however, as that was quickly and abruptly undone when Zeb Wells took over the comic.
  • JMS also wanted to use One More Day to retcon another hated Spider-Man story — Sins Past^note where it's revealed Gwen cheated on Peter with Norman Osborn, gave birth to twins, and said twins were tricked by Norman into thinking that Spider-Man was their father — so he could at least get some kind of victory out of OMD, but for whatever reason, Marvel refused. Interestingly enough, Marvel would later actually retcon Sins Past under Nick Spencer's pen in 2021. ^note In the new version, Gwen never slept with Norman nor gave birth to twins. The whole thing was instead revealed to have an elaborate and rather convoluted revenge scheme set up by Harry Osborn, with some help from Chameleon and Mysterio.
• Executive Veto: Later writers such as Brian Michael Bendis and Dan Slott proposed ways to undo One More Day and bring back the marriage, only to be told the storyline was untouchable by editors.
• Flip-Flop of God:
  • Quesada's defense over the deal with Mephisto changed over the course of Brand New Day. His various positions on the question have been:
    • A) Peter was actually being selfless by sacrificing his marriage.
    • B) It was an Enemy Mine situation, not a Deal with the Devil.
    • C) Mephisto isn't really the devil so it's not comparable. (Despite Mephisto having been repeatedly presented as a blatant expy — his name is a direct Faust reference after all.)
    • D) It was really MJ who made the deal, not Peter. This is the one he eventually settled with.
  • And now Quesada says MJ's exact words somehow tricked Mephisto into erasing the deal from history. Only without actually erasing it, since the marriage is still ret-conned out.
  • In this part of the post-OMD interview Quesada said that everything besides the marriage still happened as written except for Harry living, only to then backpedal once a fan brought up MJ's pregnancy and the loss of Baby May, saying that never happened.
• Lying Creator: Joe Quesada had before the release stated that Peter and MJ's marriage would not just get dissolved by a "magical retcon", but there are no two words more applicable when trying to describe how it actually happened in the story.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: Marvel tends to place the story in high regard, with editorial (especially Joe Quesada) often defending the story and the decision to separate Peter Parker and Mary Jane, while also actively preventing writers from retconning the event and considering it "untouchable". This is despite J. Michael Straczynski not having made any secret of his dislike for the story and the comic being widely regarded by fans and critics as one of the worst Spider-Man stories ever, if not the worst.
• Older Than They Think: There was actually a storyline in the newspaper comic version of Spider-Man with almost the exact same plot, except this time It Was All A Dream.
• Referenced by...: In her romance arc within the Love Unlimited webcomic, Gwenpool's Fourth-Wall Observer powers make her fear that her new romance is too safe, and doomed to be "One More Day-ed".
  Gwenpool: This will either get retconned after one issue or we'll stay stuck in a boring relationship that doesn't have enough conflict until editorial decides they need to reset our whole universe just to break us up so we can be in interesting stories again! I refuse to be One More Day-ed!
• Running the Asylum: The story was based off of a desire to return Peter to his single lifestyle and supported by fellow Marvel writers and others who remembered the character from The '70s and The '80s and so on. Most notably, Roger Stern who wrote the character in the long gap (AMS #201-240) when MJ was Put on a Bus for the longest time (and ironically enough, brought her back and created the backstory that led her to evolve away from her original party girl facade) returned to writing on Spider-Man after the marriage had broken up, after famously turning down the chance to write on the title because of his opposition to the marriage, claiming that he finally felt he recognized the Peter he knew^note Stern did write a couple of Spider-Man stories during the marriage but in interviews he felt that the sections in his stories dealing with the couple was the part he felt least comfortable with, and he claimed that he always saw MJ as the "party girl" and the wrong woman for Peter. An opinion echoed by others. Even Gerry Conway, the writer who did the most to make Mary Jane a prominent character and Peter's love interest insists that Spider-Man is an essentially adolescent character who should not be married in the regular continuity, either to her or anyone else and admitted that he killed Gwen Stacy to prevent Peter from hitching with his first love.
• What Could Have Been: According to Quesada, JMS wrote the point where the new timeline diverged from the old one as be Harry getting into rehab back in the early 1970's, thereby affecting relationships and meaning Gwen Stacy never died. Quesada was all for this but other Marvel writers collectively nixed it beforehand because such changes would affect the entire Marvel universe and invalidate nearly forty years of canon, and because many of them wanted Gwen Stacy to stay dead to respect what they saw as a classic story. JMS pointed out that by having Harry Osborn alive anyway and by saying the marriage didn't happen and that Peter and MJ were living together, and according to Quesada Baby May never happened, they have effectively rewritten 20 years of continuity anyway but without any logistical grounding and explanation, and essentially OMD, contrary to Quesada's claims and insistence, is very much a Crisis-style reboot for Spider-Man no matter what Quesada and writers insist and according to him, he had written a detailed timeline across weeks that would have still largely kept the stories but with small details adjusted and in any case Quesada wrote another comic One Moment in Time to explain how his reboot worked anyway.
• Writer Revolt: There are a few subtle hints that the writers didn't want to go through with this. Most notably, JMS was very close to refusing to put his name on the story. In addition, May Parker seems to mock the series itself, deconstructing Peter's Wangst and desire to remain a self-centered child with no responsibility. Considering the third and fourth issues were heavily rewritten, it could be Quesada wrested control of the dialog.
  • The writers of the secondary Spider-Man titles, Sensational and Friendly Neighborhood, were also not happy at upcoming events and wrote storylines and slight jabs at what was to come, including Peter having a conversation with God Himself about how it was time to let go of Aunt May.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: JMS (Or Quesada, or probably both) snuck in some emergency "backdoors" in case Marvel balked on OMD after a while or decided to produce a sequel to make the BND continuity more "acceptable", and had MJ make a secondary deal with Mephisto to make a resolution somewhat necessary if sales and fan outrage demand it. Ultimately averted (even though sales and fan outrage arguably did demand it); turns out MJ was just reaffirming the deal with Mephisto.

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