Oh What A Tangled Web He Weaves

Divorce has hit another celebrity couple:

LOS ANGELES — It was bad enough when Jamie Lynn Spears, the 16-year-old all-American girl, announced she was pregnant.

But Spider-Man splitting with Mary Jane, his wife of more than 20 years? We didn't see that one coming.

Which is exactly the point, says Joe Quesada, editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics. It was time to shake things up in the life of Peter Parker, the nerdy New Yorker who upon being bitten by a radioactive spider attained the ability to transform himself into a web-spinning world savior. And it was easier to do that, he said, if Parker wasn't married.

Still, as the writer and artist who created the story that transformed Spider-Man into Single-Man earlier this month, Quesada has made himself about as popular with some of his readers as the villainous Green Goblin.

"When we first did it, the reaction was, 'How could you do this? This is a terrible thing to do," he recalled. "But with the first issue of 'Brand New Day' [in which Spider-Man returns to single life], our letters very quickly changed to people saying, 'This is fantastic. This is the Spider-Man we remembered. We didn't know what we'd been missing."

When I first heard that Spider-Man was no longer married, I had assumed that like other spiders his wife had eaten him. See how much I know...