Credit Marvel Comics
"Happily Ever After" may be hard to come by for comic superheroes by and large, but that old "Parker Luck" is turning around -- for a moment.
Marvel announced Monday via Entertainment Weekly their latest Secret Wars-associated series, Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows. Teased in late 2014 with an on the nose illustration of Peter Parker standing happily with his one-time wife Mary-Jane Parker (nee Watson) and their child, this new series by Dan Slott and Adam Kubert explores that untold story beginning June 3.
“There are legions of Spider-Man fans that are passionate about changes that have happened to Spider-Man continuity,” says Slott. "They are upset that the baby went missing, that the marriage went away. Spider-Man has been around for fifty years, and the marriage was around for twenty-five. So now [with Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows] we’re seven or eight years into a world without a married Spider-Man. It’s a big itch that people want scratched.”
Although Slott has written Spider-Man for over seven years, the storylines which nixed Spider-Man's marriage and his child were well before his time, but as a fan and a creator he's thought through what having those aspects to Peter Parker would do to the character.
“Spider-Man, when you get down to it, is a character about responsibility. And the second he’s a father and a husband—he has a responsibility to share his powers with the world, but suddenly he has two people that are his whole world. That changes everything, the complete dynamic of what it means to have great power and great responsibility,” says Slott. “You need to be there for your daughter, you need there for your wife—in a way that he hasn’t had to be there for anyone else. And that drastically changes what it means to be Spider-Man.”
Set as part of the "Last Days" umbrella branding under Secret Wars, Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows is being positioned as a theoretical "last story" for Spider-Man, and it's something Slott is keying into heavily for the adversities and adversaries Peter Parker will face.
"You haven’t seen Spider-Man’s classic villains the way you know and love—I wouldn’t be surprised to see Eddie Brock as Venom in this story. Or Sergei Kravinoff as Kraven the Hunter in this story. There’s going to be a lot of bullets in the gun for things you wanted to see in a Spider-Man story that you haven’t seen in a while. This is the ultimate classic feel. This is the last Eddie Brock story," says Sott. "The stakes have never been higher for Peter Parker because he’s never had so much to lose. So he has never been this close to the edge. And these are the Last Days.”
At the heart of it all, however, is a new villain called the Regent -- from which this Battleworld domain of the Regency takes its name. EW says that the Regent has "a plan in place" for Spider-Man, and when this series starts will have already crossed paths with Daredevil and Moon Knight.
Here is a first look at uncolored pages from Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows by Adam Kubert.
