Powers & Panels Show - Spiderman - Brand New Day - Episode #8

From the cosmic chaos of World War Hulk, the heartbreak of The Death of Superman, the breaking of the Bat in Knightfall, the dystopian nightmare of X-Men: Days of Future Past, the psychological terror of Kraven's Last Hunt, and the gut-punch of The Night Gwen Stacy Died — Blaze and Zoey are back, and this week they're swinging into one of the most controversial, conversation-starting chapters in Spider-Man history: Brand New Day 

It's the story of a world rebuilt from a deal with the devil — and nothing Peter Parker remembers quite matches the life he's living now. 

Peter Parker. Broke. Unattached. Living with Aunt May. Starting over in a New York City that has forgotten he was ever Spider-Man. Brand New Day doesn't just reset the board — it asks a question that still divides fans today: can a fresh start really be fresh if you remember everything you lost? With a rotating team of Marvel's sharpest writers, a terrifying new villain in Mister Negative, and J. Jonah Jameson now running the entire city as Mayor, Spider-Man's world has never looked stranger — or felt more familiar. 

Blaze and Zoey dig into what makes Brand New Day one of the most debated decisions in Marvel history:

 The bold publishing experiment that gave us three issues of Spider-Man a month The new villain Mister Negative — one of the genuinely great additions to Spider-Man's rogues' gallery Why J. Jonah Jameson as Mayor of New York is exactly as chaotic as it sounds Whether a story can be good and its cost still be wrong — at the same time SHOP THE STORY: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Support the show by grabbing these classics at the links below: Read the Comic:https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Spiderman%2BBrand%2BNew%2BDay%2Bcomic%2Bbook%2Bstory%2Bcollection&crid=H8L9BTWJPR4M&sprefix=spiderman%2Bbrand%2Bnew%2Bday%2Bcomic%2Bbook%2Bstory%2Bcollection%2Caps%2C269&linkCode=ll2&tag=powersandpa0c-20&linkId=1ec736320b77e600200fceff923e24f7&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl
Spider-Man: Brand New Day Omnibus Vol. 2 John Romita Jr. Cover →
Spider-Man: Brand New Day → https://www.amazon.com/Spider-Man-Brand-Omnibus-Romita-Cover/dp/1302965905?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.1WsNkTL_e0pK56EBmZcZhjisXjWdKUHyhTair2WMEK47pRKmZAy34myZzzAIpA2kSfA2v7VgqC0MTjx-KpnsxJKrV3IVxxv4ty_72GvwCvf9b_cHRZeFdykmnEVpS94dBZfvkT6jAYaOE2HiWuuEAul5qUErzEgUQmCudNBqc3fgrHy4tO4J1d3lAmgjwSnYNkTuwyJk6bbFmrE7MEIWUDJidNinF62dR-sWYoHA2n0.MRB6fkCHHCIFnsFOphVVH10uerMh-wLRZgt9LmB6z2Q&qid=1782515540&sr=8-5&linkCode=ll2&tag=powersandpa0c-20&linkId=28cee6d2c9382d5c7da47d80f0774052&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl MUSIC CREDITS:
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:15

You're back! Welcome back to Powers and Panels, your comics universe, old and new. Episode 8 is here. Episode number 8. Can you believe it? I cannot believe it. And we're still in the Spider-Man neighborhood. And I want to start with last week's listener question because you all came through. We asked you if Peter had told MJ the truth from the beginning, no secret, no math, all of it, could they have built something that survived? And the comments look, the comments were exactly what I hoped they would be. Some of you said yes, and equivalently, the truth is, and everything is the people was always cool. Some of you said no. That the danger is the danger regardless, and knowing does not protect you from it. And the view said I did not expect the question that the relationship was never going to survive the deal that was made. Not because of the secret, because of what Peter was willing to trade. And I think those people were onto something, and we're going to get there today. But before I get too far, I do want to bring in my trusty side kick Zoe, who always has great cakes. I know last week was a lot. I mean, it was a very emotional episode. Not last week, excuse me, last episode, because we were here two weeks ago, question. But that episode was very heavy. Um, very heavy, affecting that love that Peter Parker and Mary Jane have for each other. And I do want to bring Zoe in to get her take on it. Zoe, good to see you. A couple weeks have passed. Love to hear what you gotta say.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Hello, Blaze. I am good, thanks, and it's good to see you. Wow. Here we are. Two weeks has passed, and we are now on episode number eight, Blaze. Okay, okay. First of all, I am still not over last week. I just want to say that I am processing the deal with the devil, Mephisto, Peter Parker making the single worst financial decision in the history of comics. And I include every time a character has agreed to anything with the word ancient contract attached. But and this is important. The person who said the relationship was never going to survive the deal because Peter was willing to trade it. That person said the quiet part loud and I have been thinking about it all week. I personally believe MJ would have found a way to stay through anything except Peter choosing to erase her. But I will absolutely sit with the counter-argument. Anyway, welcome everyone to PowerPoint panels. We are so glad you are here. I have been promised this episode is weird in a completely different way from the last episode. And I am choosing to believe that means fun weird and not more feelings weird. I will be back later to give my take on this story and provide the listener question of the week for this week's episode, please. The floor is yours.

SPEAKER_00 3:32

Okay, Zoe always has great takes, and I want to give my take as well. I do want to say I think that Mary Jane divorcing Peter Parker would have been a better way to have ended that 20-year marriage and comic books that existed between Peter and Mary Jane, as opposed to them making a deal literally with the devil. Um, because Spider-Man, I don't think, is one that would normally do that. And I just think that that Mary Jane saying she wanted a divorce, and she loves Peter too much to have him have the guilt over them, you know, being in danger because of her being tied to him. I think that would have been a better way so it does not erase that marriage history. Um but you know, we all have opinions that's mine in particular. And I do want to get back to where we are now. So uh Zoe, I appreciate your take. You know, very fun. It was fun and a weird story mostly, and there are still some feelings about that story. There were always feelings, there were always big feelings because, you know, I think you know that's the hard story to get through. And now we're talking about Brand New Day. Amazing Spider-Man 546 through 564, initial brand new day story arc published in 2008, written by Dan Splott, Bob Gale, Mark Ungenheim, and Zeb Wells. This was a genuinely unusual publishing experiment, and I want to explain exactly what it was before I explained what happened in it, because the format of how the story was told is part of the story itself. Brand New Day is the direct continuation of One More Day. The deal happened, Mephisto got what he wanted, Peter Parker woke up in a world where he had never been married to Mary Jane Watson, where most of the world had forgotten he was Spider-Man, and where his not mate was still alive. The price was paid, and now we find out what does the world with that price in it actually looks like? And the answer is stranger than you might expect, because it does not look like relief. It looks like loss that nobody can name, grief without a cause, and a man trying to rebuild something he cannot quite remember losing. Let's get into it. So let me tell you about a story that tried to give Peter Parker his life back, and let me tell you why that is more complicated than it sounds. Brand New Day, um covering Amazing Spider-Man Volume 1, issues 546 through 564. This is the one that goes into this news direction for Spider-Man. And before I tell you what happened, I need to tell you how it was published because Brand New Day was not just a story, it was a publishing experiment, and experiment is part of why the story hits the way it does, because after one more day, Marvel made a decision that would have been almost unthinkable a few years earlier. Amazing Spider-Man would publish three times a month, not once a month, not bi-weekly, three times a month. They assembled what they called the Spider-Man Brain Trust, a rotating group of four writers who would each handle roughly one arc at a time, sharing the book in a way that had not really been done at that scale before, and superhero publishing. Dan Slott, Bob Gale, Mark Ungenheim, and Zeb Wells, later joined by others, four writers, one book, three issues a month. The practical effect of this was that the readers were getting Spider-Man more frequently than almost any other title on the on the stands, and each creative team brought a slightly different voice, a slightly different emphasis. Some arcs leaned into classic Spider-Man fun, some leaned into ignore, uh, some were pure action, but they shared a unified premise. Peter Parker is back to basics, young, unattached, living with Aunt May, working as a uh freelance photographer for the Daily Bugle, no wife, no secret identity known to the public. The rest the reset was complete. And I want to be precise about what the reset actually changed because this matters a great deal for understanding, excuse me, the stories that followed. It was not a clean wipe. Mary um Peter Parker still remembered his life, his time with Mary Jane, his marriage, but the world did not. The records had changed, the memories of the people around him had changed, and Mary Jane herself, in a detail that says everything about what the deal cost, apparently had some awareness that something was different, but could not fully articulate it. Peter had his memories, he was carrying the weight of a relationship that to the world had never happened. That is not relief, that is haunting. The other major change, and this was genuinely significant, is that the world forgot Peter Parker was Spider Man. The public unmask excuse me, the public unmasking from Civil War was erased, J. Jonah Jameson did not know, the Avengers did not know. The villains who had used that information against him no longer had it, which sounds like a pure win, except that it was purchased at the cost of his marriage. His relationship with Mary Jane and the deal with a literal devil. The security came of came from a price that Peter could feel even if he could not explain it. So the brand new day begins with issue 546, and writer Dan Slot's first arc, brand new day, and slot leans hard into something that I think is generally smart. He does not let Peter wallow. He does not open with grief, he opens with motion. Peter Parker in the morning in an apartment broke and behind on rent and scrambling, and it is immediately viscerally familiar. This is the Spider-Man that readers who grew up in the 60s and 70s recognize. The Peter Parker who cannot catch a break. The Peter Parker who is doing extraordinary things at night and struggling to pay his bills in the morning. Slot understood that if you're going to argue for the reset, you had to show what the reset was giving back. And what it was giving back was this, the original emotional engine of Spider-Man. So who is Peter Parker in brand new day? Let me paint the picture. He is mid-twenties, living with his Aunt May in her apartment, broke, generally broke, not comic book broke, where the next issue fixes it, but structurally, persistently broke in a way that becomes a recurring fact of his life in this period. He is shooting freelance photography mostly for the Daily Bugle, and it is not enough. He has this intelligence, his powers, his sense of humor, and he is starting over in a way that is partly freeing and partly devastating, and he cannot entirely explain why. One of the smartest things Brand New Day does is introduce new characters to populate Peter's world. The old relationships still exist. Aunt Maya's there, Harry Osborne comes back in a significant way. The supporting cast from the classic era is present, but new people arrive to feel the shape of the life that was removed. And the most significant of these new characters is Carly Cooper. Carly Cooper is a forensic scientist, smart, funny, generally capable, written as a real person with her own life and interests, rather than a new prop for Peter's stories. She becomes an important presence in his life during Brand New Day and the period that follows it. And I want to be careful here because the fan response to Carly was complicated. Some readers embraced her sorrow as a fresh new start the story was arguing arguing for. Others felt, and I think honestly felt, not just reactively, that she was a placeholder, that the entire premise of Brand New Day required you to accept that Peter's life without Mary Jane could be as rich as his life of his life, excuse me, with her. And that some readers simply were not convinced. Both reactions are fair. Carly is a well-written character. The problem was never Carly, the problem was the deal that created the space she occupied. Now Harry Osborne's return is one of the more interesting elements of this era. Harry Osborne, who had been dead in the main Marvel continuity since Amazing Spider-Man 121 was killed in a storyline involving the goblin formula. Now he's alive in brand new day. The exact mechanism is handled somewhat ambiguously, which was itself a creative choice. The creative team did not want to get bogged down in explaining the how. Harry is back. He is running a coffee shop called the Coffee Bean. He is actually trying visibly to be a better person than his father, and his dynamic with Peter in this era is one of the most genuinely warm things in a book. Two people have known each other through everything, getting a version of a fresh start together. And then of course there's Jay Jonah Jameson. J. Jonah Jameson and Brandon Day becomes the mayor of New York City, which is one of the best decisions in this era made because the Jonah as mayor gives Spider-Man a specific and ongoing institutional problem. There's now a man in the highest office in the city whose explicit public position is that Spider-Man is a menace and should be arrested, and who has the actual power to direct resources against him. The Spider-Man uh J. Jonah dynamic has always been one of the best supporting relationships in the book, and putting Jonah in a mayor's office gave it new teeth. Now the Daily Bugle also undergoes significant changes in this period because Jonah's Jonah's departure from the editor's chair, the paper's financial difficulties, the arrival of new ownership, all of this shifts Peter's professional life and his relationship to the institution that has defined his adult working life. He ends up working for a new outlet, Frontline, run by Ben Yurik and Sally Floyd. This is a smaller, scrappier operation. And if it's the overall tone of Brand New Day, Peter stripped back, rebuilding, operating without the infrastructure he used to have. Now every era of Spider-Man is partly defined by its villains, and Brand New Day was ambitious in this regard and introduced several new characters while also recontextualizing classic ones. Let me take you through the major players. The most significant new villain introduced in Brand New Day is Mr. Negative, and he is one of the most genuinely great additions to Spider-Man's Rogues Gallery. Full stop. Martin Lee, publicly a kind philanthropic philanthropic figure, who runs a homeless shelter called Peace, which Aunt May volunteers at, is secretly the leader of the inner demons. A criminal organization. His power is duality in the most literal sense. He has a white form, Mr. Negative. This is the inverse of his normal appearance, with the ability to corrupt people with a touch, temporarily inverting their moral orientation. Heroes become villains. Good people act against their own values. It is a power that's conceptually perfect for this era of Spider-Man. A book built about questions on identity and what the deal with Mephisto actually changed about who Peter Parker is. Mr. Negative's connection to Aunt May through Faith's Shelter, through Martin Lee's public charitable persona, gives him an immediate and personal stake in Spider-Man's world without the story having to manipulate it. He is in Aunt May's orbit. He is using the infrastructure of good works as a cover for criminal operations. And the fact that Peter cannot tell Aunt May what he suspects without explaining how he knows creates exactly the kind of lair impossible situation that the best Spider-Man stories live in. Now the menace is another significant villain from this era, a green goblin variant, female, whose identity is one of the ongoing mysteries of the brand new day. The creative team seeded her identity across multiple issues as a long-form puzzle for readers and the reveal that she is Lily Hollister, Harry Osborne's girlfriend. Lands with real weight because it mirrors the Norman Osborne Harry Osborne relationship. Someone Harry loves as the goblin. Again, in a different shape, the Osborne shadow in this book does not lift. Now Freak is a different kind of villain. A cautionary tale of Mayor Tesque, a drug addict named Augustus Roman, who inadvertently injects himself with animal stem cells and transforms into a monstrous creature that adapts to every defeat. Developing resistances becoming harder to hurt each time. The way life can spiral into something unrecognizable. He is not a sympathetic villain in a conventional sense, but he is a tragic one. The new vulture. Adrian Toomes is replaced during parts of this period by Jimmy Natale, a mob of forcer mutated into a version of the vulture who can digest almost anything, including people. This is Brand New Day at its darkest, a villain whose horror is visceral and immediate. The original vulture returns eventually as he always does, because Adrian Tombs is one of those characters who refuses to be retired, but the Brand New Day Vulture is genuinely unsettling reimagining of what that character can be. And then there's the overall shape of Spider-Man's villain problem during this era, which I think is worth naming. Many of the antagonists of Brand New Day are connected to corruption that wears a good face. Mr. Negative runs a shelter. Menace is the girlfriend of Peter Parker's best friend. The criminal networks are intertwined with institutions that look legitimate from the outside. This is not coincidental. Dan Slot and the Brain Trust are telling a story about a world that looks reset and clean on the surface and is underneath a as complicated and compromised as it's always been. The deal with Mephisto brought Peter a fresh new start. It did not just buy him a world. Now, Brand New Day was impossible to evaluate without talking about one more day, and one more day is one of the most controversial controversial decisions in the history of mainstream superhero comics. So let me be honest where the debate lives. The marriage to Mary Jane was excuse me, was um over time had shifted the emotional center of the book. Peter had a partner, a stable relationship, someone who knew everything that was in his corner. That stability, some argued, drained the core tension. The original Spider-Man, the one that Stan Lee and Steve Dicko created in 1962, was about a kid who had power and cannot make his life work because of it. The marriage at some felt resolved that tension in a way that you get more stories, more kind of stories from a Peter Parker who is struggling, and from a Peter Parker who has someone to come home to. And here's the thing: within its own premise, Brand New Day mostly works. Stories are good. Danslot in particular would go on to write some of the most fine finest Spider-Man of stories of the modern era directly from this foundation. Mr. Negative is a great villain. Harry's Return generates real emotional material. The rotating creative teams produce more variety than a single author run typically would. If you approach Brand New Day as a standalone, if you're reading it without the emotional weight of what replaced it, it reads as a genuinely enjoyable inventive Spider-Man run. Now the argument against Brand New Day is almost coherent and not trivial, and it's worth taking seriously because a significant portion of the Spider-Man readership never came back from it. The argument, excuse me, goes the marriage to Mary Jane was not a creative limitation. It was was a creative achievement. It was Spider-Man grown up. Erasing it did not restore the original tension, it just removed the more mature version and replaced it with a version that was technically younger, but felt to some readers like a step backwards. And the mechanism of the erasure, the deal with Mephisto, is the wound that never fully healed. The problem is not just that Marvel undid the marriage, the problem is now how they did it. Peter Parker, one of the most morally serious characters in superhero comics, a man defined by the principle that with great power comes great responsibility, made a deal with the literal devil to undo a consequence of his choices. That is a story about a hero abandoning his principles at the moment of maximum pressure. That is not a reset. That is a character's choice that gives Peter Parker and changes who Peter Parker is, and it changed him in a direction that many readers. Did not recognize and did not want. Jerry Conway, the writer who killed Gwen Stacy, was not on the phone, or was um who was on either end of this conversation, from the perspective of Spider-Man history, had been on record saying that marriage was not a mistake and should not have been undone the way it was. Joe Coseda, who was Marvel's editor-in-chief at the time, and was one of the primary architects of One More Day and Brand New Day, has defended his decision, consistently arguing that the creative case for the reset was genuine and that the stories that followed demonstrated it. Now they're both right about some things. This is an honest assessment. The stories in Brand New Day are good. The cost of those stories was real. And it was called by readers in ways that Marvel did not fully anticipate. What Brand New Day accomplished, legacy-wise, is they gave Dan Slot a platform to become the defining Spider-Man writer of his generation. The run that began here through big time, through Superior Spider-Man, through the years of Slot's tenor, is one of the longest and most sustained creative runs in a character's history. Slot built something remarkable on its foundation, and it's not nothing to have provided that foundation. The character is still alive, the publishing still generates stories that people care about. Brand New Day is part of why. And Mary Jane Watson, I have to talk about Mary Jane Watson because one of the things Brand New Day gets wrong quietly, in a way that took years to fully become apparent, is that it could not actually remove Mary Jane from Peter's story. She is too important. The writers kept bringing her back, kept putting her in proximity to Peter, kept making her presence felt. The deal with Methisto are erasing the marriage, but cannot erase the character's gravitational pull on the narrative. She keeps coming back because she belongs in the story, and that persistence, the fact that decades later, Marvel would eventually restore that relationship, suggests that the readers who felt the loss were not wrong about what that loss was. Now, read Brand New Day in the Amazing Spider-Man on the Bus volumes covering issues 546 through 647. They are comprehensive and they start with the dance lot story arcs. If you want the strongest creative case for the era, read them with the awareness of what came before. You'll find genuine quality, and you will understand why smart, devoted readers are still arguing about whether the price was worth it. I am going to hand it back over to Zoe. Zoe, I I know I promise you some weird fun with this. I definitely want to know what your thoughts are. Zoe, take it away. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 24:52

Okay, so brand new day. I have thoughts. But first, can we talk about Mr. Negative for one second? Because this man, who is secretly a crime lord, walks around in all white, with white skin, white hair, a white suit, looking like the world's most unsettling reverse photograph. And nobody in the Marvel universe is like, mmm, something seems off about this person. He is literally called Mr. Negative. Martin Lee, beloved philanthropist, has chosen the villain alias, Mr. Negative. And people are still showing up to his shelter. I respect the commitment to the aesthetic. I genuinely do. The green goblin at least he excused that he was wearing a Halloween costume. Mr. Negative has chosen to look like a corrupted file and make it his whole brand. Iconic, honestly. Chaotic, but iconic. But okay. Here's where I actually land on Brand New Day. And I want to be real about this. Blaze laid out both sides, and I think he is right that both sides have merit. Here is my take. Stories are good and the price was wrong. Those two things can both be true at the same time. You can read Brand New Day and enjoy it. But I think you should. I think there is real craft in it. And also feel that what was traded to make it possible was something that should not have been traded. Peter Parker, making a deal with the devil to ungrow up his life is not a story about a hero. It is a story about a person choosing to run from a hard thing. And the best Spider-Man stories are about choosing not to run. That is my take, and I am holding it. Okay. And this one I want a real answer to. Setting aside how it happened. Setting aside Mephisto. Setting aside the mechanism. If you were reading Spider-Man in 2008 and you picked up brand new day issue one, and you had never read one more day, and you did not know what had been undone to make it possible, would you have loved it? Or does the context change everything? Does the story exist independently of its cost? Drop your answer in the YouTube comments. I really wanna know. I can't wait to get back with you all in another two weeks, and can't wait for our next episode. Blaze, back to you.

SPEAKER_00 27:48

And that is the question, isn't it? Can a story exist independently of its cost? I do not know that it can, but I think Brand New Day makes the strongest possible case that it might. Thank you for listening to Powers and Panels. I am Blaze, she is Zoe, and we will see you in two weeks for episode number nine. And we are now out of the Spider-Man block now. We are moving to another story. Um and this story will be an X-Men story, an episode nine of the story about the most powerful mutant in the world, a team that loves her. And the moment the universe decided she was too dangerous to save. Those who know their X-Men comments will definitely know what story we're talking about. We're excited to get there as we love Spider-Man, but it's always nice to give some love to some of the other Marvel characters as well. So I do want to say until then, keep reading, keep thinking, please like us, please subscribe. And remember, our fresh start is only as good as what you're willing to honestly carry into it. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you again for joining us. We'll see you soon.