Episode 0006: Amazing: Spider-man: Renew Your Vows, Volume 2: The Venom Experiment (Part One)

Summary: <br> Adam Graham takes a look at Amazing Spider-man: Renew Your Vows, Volume 2: The Venom Experiment with a look at the alternate universe Spider-Family and the reason they exist. He discusses Issues 6 and 7 as the Spider Family meets the X-men.<br> Affiliate link included in this post. <br> Transcript Below:<br> Spiderman and family meet the X-Men, fight the Lizard and face a giant Green Goblin robot. Find out more about it on today’s episode of the Classy Comics Podcast.<br> <br> Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host Adam Graham.<br> Welcome to today’s episode of the Classy Comics Podcast. If you have a comment email it to me classycomicsguy@gmail.com. Today we’re going to be talking about the trade Amazing Spiderman: Renew Your Vows Volume Two: The Venom Experiment, collecting issues Six through Twelve of the ongoing Amazing Spiderman: Renew Your Vows series. So, what’s this series about? To explain that you have to begin in the 1980s with the marriage. In both the comics and comic strip Spiderman, AKA Peter Parker, had been a bachelor from the 1960s on. He had a series of women in his life: Betty Brant, Gwen Stacy, Mary Jane Watson, Deborah Whitman and the list goes on and on. However, invariably, tragedy would strike or Spiderman would come in between Peter Parker and happiness in one way or another. <br> However, the decision was made for Peter Parker to marry Mary Jane Watson and it was a big to-do. It was done in both the comic strip and the comic books, as well as a live action ceremony performed by Stan Lee himself at Shay Stadium. However, many comic book writers chafed against the marriage, and really struggled with how to write it well. The best writers managed to come up with interesting angles on the marriage, while others could only portray Mary Jane as someone who was constantly worried about Peter, and serving no constructive purpose in his life. And increasingly Marvel looked at ways to get rid of the marriage in order to avoid having Peter seem too old, and they tried several things. There was a period where Peter and Mary Jane were separated and there was a period where they actually killed Mary Jane off. Neither of these were accepted by fans and Mary Jane returned alive, so this led to One More Day.<br> In One More Day Peter’s Aunt May is critically wounded by a gunshot wound. Peter turns to help from anyone in the Marvel Universe he can find it from including Doctor Strange and Doctor Doom and Doctor Octopus and Reed Richards of The Fantastic Four but all are powerless against a bullet wound. They might be able to bend reality, summon dark forces from other dimensions, bend time itself and threaten creation with utter destruction, but a bullet wound – that’s just a little bit too hard for them. So, Peter ends up trading his marriage to Mary Jane to Mephisto, the Devil character of the Marvel Universe in exchange for Aunt May surviving and his secret identity being restored which was revealed after civil war. <br> For many fans, One More Day led to a parting of the ways with Spiderman and disillusionment with Marvel Comics because it represented a betrayal of the character of Peter Parker and Spiderman. Not only had the comics portrayed Peter as someone who cared about morals and responsibility, doing the right thing and that was all betrayed here because ultimately, according to One More Day, the big reason he couldn’t let Aunt May die is his inability to take responsibility for his own sense of guilt about the person who shot her having done so because of his activities. And it…also Spiderman has always been a character that rue, changed and advanced in life. When Peter Parker became Spiderman he was sixteen years old, and Stan Lee made the really monumental decision in Amazing Spiderman Number Twenty-Eight to have him graduate from High Sc...