What Day Is It?

I’ve found myself having trouble figuring out what day today was.
After being off for two days and then returning to work, part of me thought it was Monday, though another part of me was convinced that it was Friday.
Stopping at the comic shop on the way home to pick up my new comics only added to the confusion.
My eyes handled the return to work pretty well; driving directly into the sun this morning wasn’t pleasant, but it also wasn’t the hellish nightmare that it had been on Monday morning, so that was a plus.
The only real problem is that I haven’t been able to wear my Gentle Molding lenses for days, so my vision has been receding to its previous levels. It’s not quite there yet, resting instead in a sort of hazy middle ground in which I have to wear my glasses to see any significant distance, but unable to see near objects when I do wear them.
One of the more unpleasant aspects of my recovery from ill-health is that my nose is no longer stuffed up, which is good, but my sinuses are constantly draining, which is bad, or rather, gross, as I essentially have snot running down my throat all day long.
On a more pleasant note, I completed my first major piece of documentation today and sent it out to a rather large group of people. So far the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.
(That I’ve only gotten feedback from one person is neither here nor there.)
Last week when I went to the comic shop I noted something that made me laugh, though it didn’t occur to me to take a picture.
Today it was still there and it did occur to me to take a picture, albeit a really crappy, blurry picture (which pretty much only Scott will appreciate), as can be seen below:




The sign is in response to the recent much-maligned (and rightly so) Spider-Man story in which Peter Parker (Spider-Man) makes a deal with the Devil that retroactively voids his marriage to Mary Jane (AKA MJ) in exchange for restoring his beloved Aunt May to her normal (fragile) level of health after she was hit by a sniper’s bullet intended for Peter.
Not wanting to say anything more about that story than I have, I will say that the sign has a very good point, in that Spider-Girl is an existing comic that has pretty much all of the elements that Joe Quesada claims that Spider-Fans have been clamoring for, which was, ostensibly, his motive for undoing Peter and MJ’s marriage.
For the uninitiated – which is pretty much all of you except Scott – Spider-Girl is a comic set in an alternate universe in which an older Peter and MJ are still married and have a teenaged daughter who inherited her father’s powers and has taken up the family business after Peter retired from his web-slinging career.
It’s very much like old-school Spider-Man.
And I mean it’s seriously old-school – writer Tom DeFalco once titled a story “If This Be My Destiny!” – which in many ways is a good thing, as it touches on most of the same themes that Spider-Man used to before the character actually progressed and grew up and the Editor-In-Chief decided that he needed to regress and go back to the way he used to be, because, after all, the fans were demanding it.
But that’s rather the point; there was no need to go back to telling old-school Spider-Man stories in the main Spider-titles, as those stories are already being told in Spider-Girl (and Ultimate Spider-Man and Spider-Man Adventures...).
Of course, the one big problem is that it’s Spider-Girl, and if there’s anything that we can learn from comics – particularly Spider-based comics – it’s that girls are icky.
Thus, even though it presents exactly the kind of stories that Quesada claims the fans want to read, Spider-Girl doesn’t count, because it’s about a girl. A girl who isn’t just a piece of hyper-sexualized eye candy. And who wants to read something like that?
Also, it has that whole icky Peter and MJ being married thing, which is such an impediment to great storytelling. Much more of an impediment than, say, being a shitty writer.
But whatever. The whole point is that the sign is funny (because it’s true).
(In case you can’t read it, it says, “Peter & MJ? Still married! Aunt May? Dead and buried! Mephisto? Not in this book! Spider-Girl. Not magic, just makes sense.”)