In 2007, Marvel’s editors decided that nobody liked Peter Parker being married to Mary Jane Watson. In fact: they demanded a way to break up their marriage so that Spider-Man could keep playing the field a bit, expanding the comic’s cast. And what they came up with lives on in superhero infamy as One More Day, in which Mephisto dissolves the marriage between the two in order to save, in exchange, Aunt May’s life. And that’s how it’s been for almost 20 years.
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During that time Peter has had time for Otto Octavius, in Peter’s body, to fall in love with someone else, for Mary Jane to have (fake) children with the son of a supervillain she met in another dimension, and for the two of them to fall back in love once or twice. But always with Mephisto’s deal as a backdrop, impossible to shake… until now. And in Captain America written by Chip Zdarsky they’ve finally found, at last, a very Marvel-style way out.
The comic shows Steve Rogers, Cap, in a deep coma: the perfect moment for Doctor Doom, who has lost power in Latveria, to take him to hell. There, Mephisto offers them two deals: to Doom, the chance to come back to life in exchange for tormenting Valeria for all eternity (he accepts, obviously). To Cap, giving up his soul in exchange for breaking all the deals he’s made throughout his life. He accepts too, condemning himself in exchange for the good of humanity.
Mephisto says it clearly: all contracts are null and void, which matters little to us in most of them… except in one, Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson’s. We still don’t know what it means, but if the comics are interconnected (and they should be) they’ve finally solved one of the biggest problems in the history of superhero comics. It was about time.
