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When Spider-Man married Mary Jane Watson in 1987, Tom DeFalco had reservations.

“I thought it was a big mistake,” Tom DeFalco says to Popverse. When DeFalco was writing Amazing Spider-Man he pitched a story where Mary Jane would leave Peter at the altar. After he was removed from the title, Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter decided to marry the couple for real after some coaxing from Stan Lee.

When DeFalco returned to the character years later, he began to see the Spider-Marriage through new eyes. “At some point, I ended up writing Spider-Man again, and I realized if it was treated like a real marriage, and we think of Mary Jane as someone who is married to a cop or a serviceman, all this does is add extra responsibility on Peter’s back.”

“To me, Spider-Man is always about Peter’s responsibility. Creating responsibilities for Peter... that's a good thing. So, I thought the wedding was fine. Years later they decided that Spider-Man was all about youth, and I was thinking, no, it’s about responsibility. But they were in charge, and I wasn’t, so that’s how it goes.”

The conversation surrounding the Spider-Man marriage will not go away, even though the marriage ended nearly 20 years ago. Perhaps it’s because of the responsibility angle that DeFalco mentions. Love it or hate it, it’s hard to deny that responsibility is one of the core pillars of the Spider-Man mythos.

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