Jan 4, 2009 09:00 AM
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Wed Feb 10
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It's apparently not just the comic book Spider-Man who's having trouble holding onto his marriage - Now the newspaper strip version has been hit with the instant divorce as well. Is nothing sacred to wall-crawlers?
The first signs that something was happening to the newspaper version of Marvel's flagship superhero came on New Year's Eve, when the last panel of the strip promised "a huge change" that was "the same Spidey surprise that Marvel Comics has given its countless readers." But, while Spidey-fans feared that the newspaper strip was going to go down the same "making a deal with the Devil" route that comic book Spidey had, the truth was something more benign:
Yes, Stan Lee (or whoever is ghost-writing the strip for him these days) has chosen the path of least resistance and just rebooted the strip altogether. It achieves the same goal as Marvel Comics' messy One More Day storyline - getting Spider-Man unmarried without having to deal with an actual divorce - without raising questions about whether or not old continuity still "happened" or not. End result, a Spider-Man full of surprises - like this:
In case you didn't see the surprise, it's that 2009's newspaper Spidey strips are now almost identical to when the strip was launched in 1977! Who saw that coming?
Spider-Man Newspaper Strip [King Features; online strip runs a month behind newspaper editions]
Send an email to Graeme McMillan, the author of this post, at graeme@io9.com.
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