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If Spider-Man fans were unhappy that Marvel Comics made the decision to break up Peter Parker’s marriage to Mary Jane after 20 years, they can take some solace from the fact that the character’s co-creator didn’t end up taking the split too seriously — and, in fact, reversed course just a couple of years later.

For those unfamiliar with what happened, Marvel Comics married Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson in 1987’s The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21 — and then repeatedly tried to undo that decision time and time again. It wasn’t just that the marriage itself was an unpopular decision creatively amongst those working on the Spider-Man comic — the original plan was Peter was going to have been left at the altar, according to then-writer Tom DeFalco — but that executives at Marvel Comics worried that the character being married robbed him of the soap opera appeal that had been central to his initial appeal.

The problem was, as bad as a married Spider-Man might have seemed to Marvel, the alternatives were even less attractive. As then-editor-in-chief Joe Quesada put it in 2006, “all that said, divorcing or widowing, or annulling the marriage compounds would only be worse, that would only serve to make both Peter and MJ seem even older.” So, in the 2007 storyline ‘One More Day,’ the company went for a dramatic fix, bringing in Mephisto to re-write history so that the characters never married in the first place.

Splitting the couple after two decades was such a dramatic fix that it didn’t just impact Spider-Man comics — the retcon also took effect in the Spider-Man newspaper strip written by none other than Stan Lee himself, taking effect in the January 1, 2009 strip. “In keeping with the new Spider-Man story line at Marvel Comics, we, too, are going back to Spidey’s roots,” the January 2 strip explained. “He’s single, and attending college. Now let the surprises begin!”

The biggest surprise was to come just five months later, when the May 24, 2009 strip revealed that the strip had abandoned the retcon. “You guessed it, true believer!” read the closing caption of that morning's edition. “We’ve decided to bow to your letters and have Peter and Mary Jane married again!” The explanation for the previous five months of material? Peter had literally dreamt it all. (Shades of 1980s soap opera Dallas, which similarly retconned an entire season away when an actor decided he didn't want his character to be dead anymore.)

The creative team of the strip — officially Stan Lee and Larry Leiber, although Alex Saviuk inked Leiber’s work uncredited and Lee was believed to have worked with uncredited ghost-writers throughout its run, also — never officially addressed the reason for restoring the Spider-Marriage, but given that Lee’s belief that the character should be married in the first place is reportedly what made the 1987 wedding happen in the first place, it’s not too much of a stretch to believe that he wasn’t a fan of the retcon when it happened despite public comments in Marvel’s support. To be fair, if that was the case, he wouldn’t be the only high-profile creator who didn’t like the decision.

The Amazing Spider-Man newspaper strip ended in 2019; Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson stayed married until the very end.

You can read more about the Spider-Marriage right here.