If there was ever a comic that challenged the Comics Daily “No Drama” rule at every single turn, this is it. 40 pages of nothing but industry drama exploding off the page. Is there even a story beneath this, the punchline to the worst editorial joke ever told? Apologies in advance, but this is going to be way longer than the usual word limit. Just believe me when I say, it needs to be.

First, let me be frank – I don’t like JMS. He’s driven me away from several books with his writing. As far as it’s possible to dislike someone you’ve never met - that’s me with JMS. I look at One More Day, however, and I genuinely sympathise with the man. It’s clear that he doesn’t want to be known as the man that broke up Spider-Man’s marriage. And luckily, thanks to Quesada’s constant, vocal opposition to the Spider-Marriage, talking about genies and bottles and whatnot, JMS is well and truly off the hook.

For, you see, Amazing #545 isn’t about a writer and his quirky ideas, like animal-totems or vampires. It’s about what happens when an editor looks at a title and decides that he’s the new and infallible Pope of Comicstown. “Spider-Man,” he decreed, “Is Broken. And Yea, Let What Is Broken Now Become Fixed.” And his will be done. But for a character he’s so intent on fixing, did Quesada even really understand what was broken, or did he just remember that the Spider-Man he loved was single?

Spider-Man, as a character, is fundamentally driven by responsibility. First, to Uncle Ben, who represents those who die if he doesn’t act – all the people he should’ve saved. Then to Gwen Stacy and Harry Osborn, and all those others who died even though he does act - all the people he can’t save. Spider-Man’s central premise is the classic line – With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility.

One More Day shows Peter not taking responsibility. Why admit the mistakes you made when you can simply undo them by making a deal with Satan? Peter’s reasoning is as uncharacteristic as it is unheroic: “I couldn’t handle it.” As a character, that’s not Spider-Man. Even more so – on a technical, structural level, that’s not a Spider-Man story. If this were the beginning of a saga designed to show how Peter’s mistake dealing with Mephisto will eventually cost him dearly, well, good for Quesada – but it would also be the biggest editorial fake-out in history. This doesn’t read like a beginning of a Spider-Man era, it reads like the ending of one.

And beneath it all, we’ve got this one issue straining under the weight of a thousand questions. 30 pages of comic, an Aunt May profile and a reprint of Peter and MJ’s marriage, capped off with a page praising JMS’ run as writer. How ironic that that should appear in an issue he tried to disassociate himself with. In the comic, MJ and Peter take Mephisto’s offer, without asking the one question that needed asking – what would May want? Because we all know what she’d say, and the story can’t go ahead with that reasoning.

MJ pulls some strings, hopefully to provide an editorial get-out for the whole sordid deal, there’s a bizarre scene where Peter gets angry that Mephisto showed them the child they now won’t have, and then as quick as all that it’s gone – years and years of it. Marriage, organic webs, unmasking, two sets of new powers, almost certainly May’s knowledge of Peter’s identity and even some stories that were barely related, like Harry’s death. Luckily this hasn’t impacted Marvel’s continuity TOO widely because the power of Satan has allowed Mephisto to remove only “one stitch in time.” Well, let me hammer that analogy into the ground for you – if you pull on a stitch, eventually the whole thing can unravel. A person could be sent insane trying to think of all the stories that wouldn’t make any sense without MJ married to Peter, not just in Spider-Man but in the entire Marvel Universe.

But we won’t. The answer’s there in the story – a wizard did it. Doesn’t have to make sense. What matters is that after 20 years of stories that weren’t really about Spider-Man – the dark, gritty Spider-Man of the early 90s, the clone saga, a stalled John Byrne reboot, confusing mysticism and too many new powers, the character is finally, finally, finally fixed, right?

Right?

Comics Daily will be gearing up for a return on Monday with a review of Amazing Spider-Man #545 and, you can be sure, there’s going to be plenty of commentary on the matter.

For now, I’m going to pad out the week with a hastily constructed Op/Ed piece. I’d like to invite some preliminary discussion of the ramifications of One More Day. Specifically, what do you think the damage – if any – is going to be in the long term?

Incoherant rambling and some spoilers for OMD below the cut…

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Comics Daily will be taking a short break for the festive period! We’re not really sure when the comics are out this week, but rest assured we’ll most likely be back in some form or another by, ooh, Friday or so. Anything you get before then is a bonus, so remember to be thankful in this season of goodwill.

For anyone wondering, the image above is from X-Men (Vol. 2) #165, and is one of the X-Men’s many christmas issues written by Chris Claremont, as if that wasn’t obvious from the fact it has Rachel and Kitty dressed as elves and Beast dressed as Chris Claremont.

Anyway, that turkey isn’t going to eat itself (which is strange, because it’s probably been eating nothing but slurry made from the ground-up corpses of its departed barn-mates) so I’m off. See you back here in a few days.

We’re now up to chapter 8 out of 13 in Messiah Complex, and the second act is drawing to a close. In this issue, X-Force track down Cable, just in time to end up fighting Deathstrike and the Purifiers while he makes his escape, Madrox and Layla get imprisoned in the future, and the remaining members of X-Men and X-Factor get their collective asses into gear just slightly too late to be of much use, it seems.

Again, while the Madrox plot feels horribly overstretched at this point – we’ve been getting drip-fed it for a good portion of the crossover now, where other threads wrap up after substantially fewer issues – the rest of the story is continuing its breakneck pace. Plus, from the next issue preview, it seems like the Madrox plot might be due an ending soon…

The biggest part of the issue consisted of X-Force fighting the Purifiers to get to Cable. Because it’s effectively the New X-Men book, the New X-Men characters are afforded slightly more focus than in the last few chapters, which will hopefully satisfy NXM fans, though at this point it’s hard to believe anyone who’s not buying the crossover would still be following it. X-23 in particular has an excellent fight scene with Deathstrike, and Surge gets a decent character moment too, lamenting the consequences of her unsanctioned attack on the Purifiers some issues ago.

Again, it’s very interesting to see Wolverine taking a leadership role – he doesn’t second guess his charges, and he’s quick to issue orders when it looks like someone’s losing focus – for instance, when Caliban is shot and probably killed, and Warpath blinks. It’s a substantially different style to Cyclops, and it impresses me that they’re managing to convey that so clearly. X-Force also manage to kill a whole bunch of people out of necessity - even Rahne manages to off at least one – showing the slippery slope that X-Force may well be on. I’m still not sure if it’s enough to make me interested in an ongoing title featuring an X-Men “Black Ops” team, but for this story alone they’re doing the job well.

Or rather, Incredible Hercules. Yes, folks, this is the issue where the title changes hands in all but name (that’ll be happening next month) – the Hulk has disappeared from his own title. Standing in his place are World War Hulk survivors, the demi-god Hercules and child genius, Armadeus “Flex Mentallo” Cho.

Now, it’d be very easy to hate this book. I’ve previously yammered on about how I think changing the cast and title in this way is a horrible and cynical marketing idea, but since I’ve already covered that, I’ve decided to give it a chance and consider it on its own merits.

And, well, it’s pretty good. Pak and Van Lente take the time to really round out Hercules as a man trying to do the right thing but who all too often lets his emotions cloud his judgement, illustrating many examples of this throughout existing Greek legend. After being denied the pardon extended to any other supporters of the Hulk due to their destruction of a Helicarrier, Hercules convinces Cho that they should hand themselves in, following his sense of honour.

While Cho is asked to use his super-brain to co-ordinate the cleanup of New York, Hercules discovers that his half-brother, god of war and Mighty Avenger Ares will be his new commander in the Initiative. Enraged by his goading, Hercules breaks free of SHIELD, taking Cho with him. Cho suggests that the two join forces and take down SHIELD together.

The dynamic between Hercules and Cho is remarkably compelling. Cho is the impetuous brains of the outfit while Hercules represents the much slower, if easily-led brawn of it. There’s plenty of potential for comedy and the use of Ares as the first arc’s “villain” makes a lot of sense, given how Hercules was previously an Avenger and now finds himself on the outside. It’s not a perfect comic, of course – the main question is whether or not anyone wants to read about Hercules and Cho trying to take down SHIELD – but at least it’s got direction. Either way, it’s going to sell more comics than if they cancelled it in favour of the new Hulk series…

Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue at random, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

Uncanny #318 shows the team enjoying some downtime just between the almost-modest Phalanx Covenant crossover and the Legion Quest/Age of Apocalypse mega-crossover. Mmm, smells like the 90s. Hand me my checkered lumberjack shirt.

Most of the issue deals with the establishment of a new Xavier’s School, run by Banshee and recently-reformed villainess, Emma Frost. Jubilee says her goodbyes to the X-Men (pausing briefly to stick it to Archangel) and then leaves the mansion, joining the cast of Generation X. A parallel plot sees Beast giving grey-hued mutant Skin a lift to the airport as he attempts to draw a line under his experiences with the X-Men and Phalanx, but is ultimately convinced to join Generation X as well. Shoe-horned around those are a couple of scenes dealing with Scott and Jean’s return from their “honeymoon” several thousand years in the future, and some further advancement of a White Queen/Iceman subplot that Lobdell plugged neatly away at for a few years.

This is the kind of issue that used to turn up a lot, largely because there were as many crossovers going on that needed to be placed into some kind of context. The issue acts as both epilogue to and summary to the first Cyclops/Phoenix miniseries as well as a 2-month crossover that touched a total of 7 different series. Then it spins merrily off into the first issue of Generation X. Ye gods. While the decompressed arcs of today often make me nostalgic for the single issue episodic stories of the past, looking back does make you realise that it wasn’t quite as simple as all that.

At this point, Scott Lobdell was writing Uncanny. The shadow of Claremont’s legendary 15-year run still cast itself over the franchise, and Lobdell was probably the only person who managed to ape his soap-opera style with any success. Fill-in art comes from the, er, polymorphic Roger Cruz, doing his best Jim Lee impression. To his credit, Lobdell does manage to inject some humanity into what could’ve been nothing more than a mish-mash of editorial cleanup - Jubilee is the real star, though the Beast/Skin conversations are great and even Cyclops gets some comedy material. It’s a nice read for that stuff alone, but I shudder to think how someone who doesn’t have a degree in 90s X-Men would handle the actual plot.

Oddly, these kind of stories are the ones that really stick in my mind – the ones that dispense with action and really focus on the characters at the heart of the X-Men. Lobdell did that kind of thing best of all, and even now it reminds me just why I used to love the series so much.

Download Uncanny X-Men #318 in .cbr format here for a limited time, and there’s more Uncanny X-Men available to view online at Marvel Digital Comics.