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For the third week in a row, Marvel has released a string of teasers for summer 2015 comics that revisit or at least reference previous Marvel events, at a rate of one a day -- except Tuesday, which was all about the movies.

Last week, the wrench in the gears was a teaser that seemed to imply that the Ultimate Universe was coming to an end. There's nothing quite as big in this week's batch, which included Avengers vs. X-Men, Age of Apocalypse, and Future Imperfect. But one event of the bunch does seem... kind of risky. It's called Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows and it revisits Peter Parker's marriage... and daughter.

Peter's marriage to Mary Jane Watson-Parker has been a contentious topic for Spider-Man fans for a few years now. Back in 2007, the J. Michael Straczynski-written and Joe Quesada-drawn event "One More Day" ended with Peter and Mary Jane's marriage effectively being wiped from history when the couple made a deal with the demon Mephisto to save Aunt May's life. Readers hated it, and with good reason. A lot of people liked married Spider-Man, and even those that hated it weren't crazy about a mostly wholesome superhero making deals with demons.

By contrast, the stories that came after that in the "Brand New Day" event in Amazing Spider-Man were pretty good. Actually, they were really good. Enough to make fans like me just sit back and enjoy them while trying to forget "One More Day" ever happened.

But then Marvel revisited the story in an arc called "One Moment In Time," and now they look to be diving back into the marriage.

The preview art for the new story is reminiscent of Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21, the issue where Peter and Mary Jane got married, but also includes a young girl who would seem to be their daughter, May.

She's yet another point of controversy in recent Spider-Man history. Mary Jane discovered she was pregnant during the Clone Saga in the mid-1990s, but that story was essentially just wiped away, and little May was never mentioned in the regular Spider-Man comics again, though she did appear as a teenager in the alternate-universe Spider-Girl series.

The reason why Peter never got to be a dad and is now a bachelor again is pretty simple: Some of the high-ups at Marvel didn't want to make him seem too old. (Quesada had talked about wanting to do away with the marriage for years before making it happen.)

From the looks of it, this event will explore Peter's life if he had gotten to stay married and be a dad, which could be a really interesting read. It falls in with all these other recycled events, which seem to be something akin to "What If?" tales set in alternate universes. The prevailing thought is they're all tied in to the big Secret Wars event next year.

I do have to wonder if this Spider-Man event ends with someone hitting a giant reset button and making him a teenager again, though.

Also of note among the this week's teasers; an image for AvX that doesn't seem especially evocative of AvX. It's a Skottie Young baby cover that only features three X-Men (and one of them is Deadpool), plus two Inhumans and a big crashed world -- which seems to point more towards Jonathan Hickman's New Avengers incursion story, which is almost certainly the trigger event for the new Secret Wars.

 

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