This past weekend at Comic Con in New York, there was a point where I was in a library. No, seriously. I was in a library because my friend needed to print his NYCC registration, so I perused the graphic novel selection. The book I ended up sitting and reading while waiting was a little Terry Moore comic book called Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. It seemed cute enough, not something I had to take too seriously. Just a nice all ages book that would offer me a surprising amount of amusement as I waited for the papers to print (which seriously allowed me to get through about half of the first issue). Then, while AT NYCC, I was perusing at a vendor who had a “Buy one, get two free” option when I stumbled upon two hardcover books collecting a series with the same title by Sean McKeever. A little bit more perusal found me getting rather interested in the title, and I decided that this was definitely a book I needed to check out.
And check it out I indeed did. In one of the fastest times I’ve ever read a 28 page series, take a look behind the cut for my thoughts on this all ages comic.
The comic book stars Mary Jane as a young high school freshman. She’s best friends with cheerleader Liz Allen, quarterback Flash Thompson, and suave ladies man Harry Osborn. Mary Jane is a quiet girl, and she basically has one fantasy: to go on a date with the mysterious hero known as Spider-Man. Of course all her friends laugh at her, and her nerdy tutor friend Peter Parker thinks she’s being ridiculous, but when Spider-Man actually saves her life and the two develop a strong friendship, Mary Jane’s high school world is thrown a bit topsy turvy as relationships begin to develop, new girls start to come to school, and Mary Jane begins to explore her role as a teenager.
There are many reasons to like this comic book. For me, having a book that starred Mary Jane in the Spider-Man story was the first good idea, and it continued throughout. Yes, the book acts upon it’s own non-canon continuity, but it does so in an incredibly charming way. It’s entertaining and amusing in the same way that all teen dramas are to us, because part of it reminds us of our own high school experiences. Mary Jane and her friends are very real characters, and I’m sure we all had awkward relationships like Harry and MJ at some point. We all knew someone like Liz Allen and Flash as well. When it comes to reading an all ages book like this, the obvious selling point for older audiences is a sense of nostalgia, and the comic really captures that classic high school feeling in the same way that John Hughes films do (to which the book pays tribute to several times). It’s almost like watching Pretty In Pink (which yes, I do own on DVD, and yes, I’ll probably put it on after writing this).
Of course, another huge factor of why I found the book so entertaining is that it really isn’t about Spider-Man. Spidey is a HUGE part of the story, but throughout the book it is never revealed to Mary Jane that Peter and Spider-Man are the same person. Yes, we as fans know this. Of course we do. In fact, the comic makes several references to big Spider-Man stories (especially when Gwen Stacy pops up). But Mary Jane never learns this. The book solely relies on the fact that she knows Peter Parker and she knows Spider-Man, and the two are polar opposites, so her
feelings for the two often become misconstrued, and eventually lead to several awkward situations. I love the fact that you can read this Spider-Man story that really embraces the fact that it’s coming from a different perspective, and it’s one of the few times I’ve really “gotten” the weirdness of Peter Parker disappearing so Spider-Man can appear. The frustration the characters feel to this becomes very real and relatable.
The series, for all intents and purposes, is very reminiscent of Runaways and Ultimate Spider-Man (and, for the record, series artist Takeshi Miyazawa did art for both comics). I mean, if there were a book called Ultimate Mary Jane, this would be it. The book does all the things that Ultimate Spider-Man has ever done right in terms of Peter Parker and Mary Jane’s high school experience, except it has less dialogue and focuses on MJ instead of Parker. McKeever really took the ball with the book and he ran with it for a good 28 issues and a story arc that plays out wonderfully throughout the whole thing. This is a high school teen drama through and through, with everything you might expect from that kind of genre specific story, and McKeever really nails it. There are no super-villains, no real antagonists. Felicia Hardy shows up as a bit of a jerk at a point, but for the most part the main antagonist of the story is just teens and their hormones. It’s been a while since I’ve read a really solid teen story in a comic book, and as I mentioned earlier, I was really transported back to the days where all we did was watch John Hughes movies after school.
It’s also impossible to talk about the charm of the book without mentioning Miyazawa’s art style. The book is very clearly manga influenced, and that offers up a considerable amount of likability to it. While I don’t read any manga myself, I have often found that books that emulate this style have a certain sense of charisma to them that make them that much more endearing, such as Runaways had or the current artist in Ultimate Spider-Man shows (David LaFuente). I think it actually helps to make that style of art more accessible to people not used to it, and using Mary Jane’s story in high school as a conduit is the PERFECT setting for it. It fits wonderfully into the all ages category and literally oozes charm around every corner.
I suppose that the book should really be called Mary Jane Loves Spider-Man, but that’s really here nor there. What we have instead is a nice and short (I say 28 issues, but it’s a quick read) story about life and love in one of the hardest times to be a kid. We all look back at high school and laugh at all the idiocy, but we also tend to forget what it was like. That’s why we have John Hughes movies to remind us, and that’s why we have comics like Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. I’ve never really gotten into too many all ages comics like this before, but after reading McKeever’s run on the book I was honestly very pleased with it. It was one of the most satisfying teen stories I’ve been able to read from Marvel comics in quite some time, and it couldn’t have ended better.
Although, I should note before I end – I’d skip Terry Moore’s short miniseries. Where McKeever leaves the book makes for such a wonderful finale that seeing it continue on, especially when the continuation didn’t make any sense, felt a little bit cheap to me.
So in summation: it stars Mary Jane, it doesn’t have Spider-Man’s secret identity revealed as some huge plot point (which is honestly quite different than most young takes on the Spidey story), it’s a story about life and love in the years of raging hormones, and it’s the Pretty In Pink of Spidey stories. This is the same kind of story that we find in indie books and fall in love with due to how we relate into it, but now it has Spider-Man in it as well. I really don’t know what’s not to love about it, and with the whole 28 issue story collected into two relatively cheap (on Amazon) hardcovers, the book definitely adds a nice nostalgic read in any comic collection.
