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Some words about 'Late Hours Hornies'
🕑 Added 2022-09-20 00:10:09 +0000 UTCJust to be clear, lots of SPOILERS AHEAD.
So if you haven't read this one, go check it out first and then come back here later.
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Early in August, during an interview at Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo, artist Ryan Stegman and Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief, C.B. Cebulski said that Peter and MJ's marriage life is not in Marvel's plans for the foreseeable future.
“Just because MJ may be Peter's true love, that doesn't necessarily means that it works out. The thing with Peter Parker is that he always hast to be relatable. Getting Peter married or having a family is something that Marvel is not interested in.”
That naturally got a lot of fans upset, and so I decided to write a story about that era. I went back to research and read a lot of stuff... from the old David Michelinie, Todd McFarlane and Erik Larsen runs in the 90's until the J. Michael Straczynski and John Romita Jr. run that ended with One More Day in 2007.
I personally think it's unfair to blame the end of their wedding on JMS, since from my research, he was somewhat forced to write that under editorial ruling, but... that's beyond the point.
Thing is I wanted to make a fun, slice-of-life tale, that had that vibe of Michelinie's spiced conjugal Parker's life, but also wanted it to have something a bit more contemporary.
Then I came across this scene from AMS 535, during the Marvel's Civil War:
And the story basically wrote itself from then on.
What if MJ caught Peter rubbing one off in the middle of the night? Would she be upset? Would she be curious? Would she join him?
Well... All of the above, of course!
The set-up is not exactly that complicated: Peter got attacked by some new villain who can make anyone instantly crazy horny. He manages to take the bad guy out, and that's where things go from in this comic.
One specific creative liberty I took in this narrative was changing their notorious Chelsea apartment to a suburban two-stories house in Queens. That happened because my artist MR Pink used Aunt May's house for reference in his early sketches, and the stair-descent scene with MJ looked so cute and visually interesting that I decided to just keep it, even if it broke canon a little bit.
Going forward, I particularly loved writing a few moments in this story:
"Whatcha got there? A smoothie?"
I am a sucker for these cinematic sequences, where panels have very slight differences. To reveal a small secret, there has been times in previous comics where I doubled panels and made edits myself to achieve that effect. But in this case, it was already planned in the script. The only thing I added in the lettering phase was the final fup! onomatopoeia, for emphasis on the gag.
"Whoa... Wait! Is that a self-reference comment?"
Now this little conversation about the fairness of adult parodies was created only during the lettering phase. In the script, it was originally just them talking about the actors and costumes in the video they're watching. But I the I had this insight about addressing the validity of this kind of content, not only in video form, but also in my own comics format.
Here's a bit of information on that subjects, extracted from this article from 2012.
Without getting too deep into how fair use is determined, parody is one of the most protected forms of speech under the law. The reason is that parody is the act of making fun of an already existing work and both the law and the courts recognize that, in order to “conjure” up a previous work to lampoon it, you have to use a large amount of it. It's what protects the works of Weird Al Yankovic, Mel Brooks and whatever other mainstream spoofs you can think of.
It's basically what Peter says: as long as there's enough original content, and the material don't claim to own or have relations with the copyright owners, there's a large grey area for creators to work upon.
Of course things can get a bit tense once lawyers enter the game, but I'd rather not comment much further on that.
"She really likes to show off those freckles, doesn't she?"
Lastly, I really enjoyed how the final page came out. At least for me, this epilogue really felt like those Spidey 90's stories. MJ always loved to exhibit her fine figure to Peter and that's what I aimed for.
It's a pity that those romantic days are apparently gone, at least under the current editorial staff. It appeas they prefer a different kind of drama for our amazing couple and we'll have to wait and see where that'll take our poor loving birds.
At least we'll always have those Chelsea pad days to fondly remember.
