Originally introduced in 1966 in one of the most memorable moments in Spider-Man history,
Mary Jane has had a career on the page that's almost as complicated as her radioactive boyfriend's.
From her comic book origins to her on-screen adaptations, here's the untold truth behind
Mary Jane Watson.
While she wouldn't make her full appearance until December 1966, Mary Jane was first mentioned
more than two years earlier.
It was actually a running gag in the comic, with Aunt May constantly trying to wrangle
Peter into a blind date with the niece of her next-door neighbor, and Peter making every
excuse that he could to duck out and avoid actually meeting her.
The joke, of course, was that Peter assumed anyone who needed their aged aunt to set them
up on a blind date was, to put it charitably, probably not the most desirable person for
a relationship.
For the record, Peter was also someone who needed his elderly aunt to set him up on dates.
Finally, after 27 issues of MJ looming ominously like a go-go dancing Sword of Damocles, came
Amazing Spider-Man #42, from Stan Lee and John Romita Sr.
After a relatively forgettable fight between Spider-Man and hero astronaut and future werewolf
space god John Jameson, Mary Jane Watson made her first full appearance, and we finally
got the punchline.
It turned out that MJ was actually hot.
Putting aside the slightly sketchy moral lesson about keeping an open mind because people
you haven't met might be physically attractive, Mary Jane's appearance marked a huge shift
in the Spider-Man dynamic.
For the first few years of her existence, Mary Jane's major effect on the Amazing Spider-Man
comics was to convert a love triangle into something that looked a little more like a
rhombus.
She was pitted against Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker's long-established dream girl, competing for
Peter's affection, and settling for double dates with Peter's roommate (and future Green
Goblin), Harry Osborn.
Gwen, for her part, had been introduced way back in the early days by Spider-Man's co-creators,
Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.
In her original appearances, Gwen was a very different sort of love interest — a brilliant
science student with a short temper who often found herself bickering with Peter and trading
sharp quips as their romantic tension grew.
All that changed when Ditko left the book and Romita stepped in as Ditko's replacement
and arguably became the definitive artist of the era.
The main change came from bringing his experience from doing romance comics at DC, and he transformed
Peter from an awkward, angular teenager to a handsome college student.
Romita also applied the same style to the rest of the cast.
Gwen started spending a lot of time in go-go boots and minidresses, and MJ, earned her
reputation as the consummate party girl ... right up until the Green Goblin changed Spidey's
supporting cast forever.
Amazing Spider-Man #121 will live in infamy for being, as the title of the issue revealed
on its very last page, "The Night Gwen Stacy Died."
If you're even passingly familiar with Spider-Man's history, you know how this one goes: After
discovering Spidey's secret identity, the Green Goblin kidnaps Gwen and winds up tossing
her off of the George Washington Bridge.
And when Spider-Man snags her with a web-line in an attempt to save her life, he accidentally
snaps her neck.
It was a huge shift for the Spider-Man saga, and it remains one of the most important deaths
in Marvel Comics history (and along with Uncle Ben's, it's one of the few that's been carved
into stone and never undone).
What's often overlooked, though, is that the issue that followed represented a change that
was almost as big, and not just because the Goblin himself "died."
After Gwen's death, Mary Jane shows up at Peter's apartment, and in his grief, Peter
snaps at her, offering up some extremely harsh comments about MJ's seemingly shallow personality.
When he tells her to leave, though, Mary Jane chooses to stay and help him through the tragedy.
It was the first sign readers got that MJ was a little deeper than we'd been led to
believe, and it also hinted at a major reveal that wouldn't hit the page for another 16
years.
In 1989, Marvel published Amazing Spider-Man: Parallel Lives, an oversized graphic novel
focusing on Peter and Mary Jane as they grow up, and the ways their lives intersect.
Over the course of flashbacks, the story reveals that Mary Jane had taken a keen interest in
Spider-Man from the very beginning.
Her fascination only increased on the night that Ben Parker was shot, when she looked
out the window of her aunt's house and saw Spider-Man climbing out of her neighbor's
window.
She immediately realized that Peter Parker was Spider-Man, and comic book fans suddenly
realized that MJ had always known about his secret identity.
Instead of being the blind date that Aunt May and Anna Watson had worked so hard to
set up, Mary Jane had a new context as someone who'd pursued Peter herself.
It wasn't because of a misguided obsession with Spidey, or because she had a thing for
superheroes.
Instead, it was because she'd found a parallel — get it? — between the way he wore a
mask and kept his heroic identity separate from the tragedies of his personal life and
the way that she had always affected that flighty, shallow persona to mask the trauma
of her abusive upbringing.
More than anything else, the idea that she'd kept Peter's identity a secret for years without
him even knowing it put her in a completely different class than any other love interest
in Spider-Man history.
In a lot of ways, the Spider-Man saga is about watching Peter Parker grow up.
He starts his superheroic career as a high school student who lets his bitterness at
being a social outcast cause him to give into selfishness.
"You coulda taken that guy apart and now he’s gonna get away with my money.”
“I missed the part where that’s my problem."
He then has to deal with the consequences of those actions.
Over the next few years, readers saw him stand up to a bully, get a job, and deal with all
the other milestones of adulthood that most folks go through, even if they don't fight
Doctor Octopus and the Lizard in between.
In 1987, Peter and Mary Jane reached the next big life milestone together when they were
married on the steps of New York City Hall in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21.
The thing is, it almost didn't happen, at least in the context of the story.
Even once they realized they wanted to be married, and even after Peter proposed twice,
they both still had a lot of doubts.
That was what made Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21 such an interesting comic.
Plenty of superhero weddings feature villains showing up, but this story was focused on
Peter trying to decide if he should break things off, with MJ herself being tempted
to run away with a famous actor.
In the end, of course, the two got hitched.
As for the real-world reason behind the wedding, Stan Lee claims credit for coming up with
it as a publicity stunt, and also performed a live-action version of it at Shea Stadium.
The wedding also happened in the Spider-Man newspaper strip that Lee was writing, with
an extra detail.
That version of the marriage was dedicated to fashion designer Willi Smith, who created
Mary Jane's wedding dress and appeared in the Annual.
Sadly, he would die of AIDS-related illness at the age of 39, shortly before the issue
was published.
For years, it was rumored that higher-ups at Marvel Comics wanted to get rid of Mary
Jane and Peter's marriage due to worries about it making him seem old.
The problem was that they didn't want to be stuck with a Spider-Man who'd been widowed
or divorced, which would make him seem even older than the marriage did.
"The Wife and I split up, but I handled it like a champ!"
It was a tough problem, but eventually, they came up with a simple, elegant solution: Just
have somebody make a deal with the devil.
Like, literally.
The literal devil.
No, really!
It happened in the aftermath of Civil War, a crossover that, among other things, had
Spider-Man publicly reveal his secret identity, which immediately led to Aunt May getting
shot by a hitman.
In order to save Aunt May and put the "secret" back into Peter's secret identity, Peter and
MJ essentially sold their marriage to Mephisto, the Marvel Universe's most stalwart stand-in
for Satan, in a story called "One More Day."
The second weirdest thing about this — other than the part where Spider-Man and his wife
were making Faustian bargains — was that it didn't really disrupt continuity all that
much.
The official company line was that every Spider-Man story that had taken place during the married
years had still happened.
The only thing that had been retroactively changed was the wedding itself.
The post-"One More Day" idea was that all of the couples' previous doubts had actually
gotten to them, and while they'd kept on living together, they just never tied the knot.
Actually, no.
The real weirdest thing was that, just as it had with the wedding, the newspaper strip
attempted to do the same, but those readers hate change even more than superhero comic
readers do, and the reaction was so bad that the new storyline only lasted a short time
before it was all re-retconned into just being a weird dream.
In the newspapers, Spider-Man and MJ are still happily married.
If you're less than four degrees of separation away from Peter Parker, the odds are pretty
good that you've been a superhero, a supervillain, or both at some point in your life.
His college roommate became the Green Goblin, and his science teacher was the Jackal.
A coworker became Venom, two other coworkers were both the Hobgoblin at various times,
and one of them was also another Green Goblin.
His boss' son was a space werewolf.
Even Aunt May was once taken into space and reborn as Golden Oldie, Herald of Galactus.
The one big exception?
Mary Jane Watson.
Despite being in close proximity to Spider-Man for over 50 years of real-time comics, MJ
never got any superpowers of her own.
The only big exception came during the events of the "Spider-Island" crossover, but considering
that everyone in Manhattan briefly got Spider-Man powers during that story, that doesn't really
count.
There was, however, an issue of Marvel Team-Up back in the late '70s where MJ was briefly
possessed by the spirit of Red Sonja, who was brought forward in time to fight an evil
wizard.
Really, though, that's just a pretty normal Tuesday for the Marvel Universe.
Given her prominence in the comics, it's no surprise that out of the four big-screen versions
of the Spider-Man story that have hit the big screen since 2002, Mary Jane Watson has
appeared in three of them ... sort of.
She's completely absent in the two Amazing Spider-Man movies from 2012 and 2014, with
Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy serving as the love interest in those films.
In the Spider-Man trilogy directed by Sam Raimi, MJ is one of the most prominent characters.
Kirsten Dunst co-starred in all three films, and her version of Mary Jane provided most
of the non-superhero drama.
She's there from Peter's sad decision to keep his identity secret in the first movie all
the way to their relationship difficulties in the third film — made worse, of course,
by an alien symbiote that drove Peter to stage one of cinema's most mean-spirited dance numbers.
Unfortunately, all that drama led to some criticism of the character for being needlessly
harsh towards her city-saving boyfriend.
MJ has also appeared in the MCU Spider-Man films, in a way.
Peter's main love interest in those, particularly in Far From Home, is Michelle, played by Zendaya.
"Why are you here, you don’t even HAVE detention.”
“Oh, I know.
I just like coming here to sketch people in crisis.
Heh heh, that's you."
It's not until the end of Spider-Man: Homecoming that viewers learn her full name is Michelle
Jones, and that her friends call her MJ.
This MJ is very different from what we've seen in the comics, but those initials are
definitely not a coincidence.
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