The Greatest Superhero Weddings in Comics

The solicits for "Amazing Spider-Man #600" have been advertising a mystery wedding between two major Spider-Man characters -- and they're not Peter Parker and Mary Jane.

Fan speculation has been leaning towards Aunt May and Jay Jonah Jameson, the father of Parker's long-time loudmouth editor at "The Daily Bugle," whom Peter recently caught in bed together.

Aunt May's (possible) upcoming marriage to Jameson wouldn't be the first time she's gone down the aisle since Uncle Ben's death; after a whirlwind romance that seemed designed solely to give us the worst possible mental images, she almost tied the knot with Doctor Octopus in Amazing Spider-Man #131. And if you're wondering what a (relatively) young, (relatively) handsome scientist could see in a woman who was drawn to look like she could die any time between tomorrow and last week, then you're underestimating the allure of a truly wonderful personality.

Nah, we're just kidding. He actually wanted some Canadian uranium.

It's conventional wisdom that a relationship changes after marriage, but it's rarely as drastic as it was for Wally West and Linda Park, whose marriage in Flash (v.2) #142 saw the bride literally erased from existence and trapped in a pocket dimension by Abra Kadabra.

Then again, some things don't change at all, as evidenced by the previous Flash, Barry Allen, who tied the knot with Iris West in "Flash (v.1) #165" without bothering to tell her his secret identity, instead preferring to tell her he was working late. This is not, as you might expect, the sign of a healthy marriage.

The early days of their relationship in "Alias" might not have been the most romantic thing to ever hit the comics page, but when Luke Cage and Jessica Jones tied the knot in "New Avengers Annual #1" in a ceremony that, since it was written by Brian Bendis, took about eighteen hours to get through, it was actually pretty sweet. In fact, we heard that it moved Iron Fist to tears, but that might just have been because he was left out of his best friend's wedding party.

After a sixty-year courtship, Clark Kent and Lois Lane were finally married in "Superman: The Wedding Album," thus proving that one of comics most enduring romances can conquer not only differences in two people who are literally from different planets, but also the fact that Clark totally had a mullet when he proposed.

The status of Batman and Talia's wedding in "Batman: Son of the Demon" is a little complicated, since it was in continuity, then not in continuity, then sort of in continuity when Batman's son Damian showed up courtesy of Grant Morrison, but the ceremony itself was pretty simple: Ra's al-Ghul said they were married, Talia said okay, and we moved right along to some crowd-pleasing Shirtless Batman Action.

Donna Troy and Terry Long got hitched in "Tales of the Teen Titans #50," despite the fact that she's usually portrayed as being a younger, hotter version of Wonder Woman, and he's a creepy ex-college professor in a dead-end job who spent most of his time hitting on all of her friends and quoting Saturday Night Live. Truly, love is blind. And deaf. And stupid.

Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson's wedding in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21 had one of the most ignominious ends of any comic book relationship when Spidey sold his marriage to the devil to save his octagenarian aunt as part of the "One More Day" storyline, but before you get too upset about the death of romance, it's probably worth noting that the actual wedding is pretty much 39 pages of Peter wondering if marrying a supermodel is a terrible mistake before finally getting on with it.

In a super-hero wedding, you're pretty much equally likely to have your marriage interrupted by your arch-nemeses attacking or -- as Johnny Storm and the ersatz Alicia Masters or Colossal Boy and the shape-shifter who pretended to be Shrinking Violet could attest -- to marry an impostor masquerading as your fiancee. Unfortunately for Black Canary, who got married to Green Arrow in the appropriately named "Green Arrow/Black Canary Wedding Special," she had to deal with both, leading her to stab her new husband (later revealed to be the shape-shifter Everyman) in the throat with an arrow on what was quite possibly the worst wedding night ever.

The wedding of Scott Summers and Jean Grey in X-Men #31 might just be the most 90s wedding ever, as it includes both an appearance by Cable (the alternate future son of the groom and a clone of the bride) and a set of commemorative trading cards bound into the issue that gave Cyclops the dorkiest glasses known to man.

Rick Jones, the sidekick to pretty much the entire Marvel Universe, got hitched to Marlo Chandler in "Incredible Hulk #418", a star-studded affair that features appearances by Mephisto, ROM: Spaceknight and even Death from DC's Sandman (who gives Marlo a hairbrush in a pun so egregious that it oughtta be punishable by law), but the real action is in the previous issue, where the stag film shown at Rick's bachelor party turns out to star his bride-to-be. As you might expect, this gets a little awkward.

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...but not quite as awkward as the Hulk's own wedding to Betty Ross a few years before in Incredible Hulk #319, when, rather than forever holding his peace, the father of the bride busts in with a pistol and shoots the Best Man, Rick Jones, in the gut to stop the wedding. To be fair, though, this sort of thing happens all the time in South Carolina.

Reed Richards and Sue Storm's wedding in Fantastic Four Annual #3 set the standard for every comic book wedding that came after, including appearances by not only almost every Marvel superhero, but attacks by Dr. Doom, the Puppet Master, the Red Ghost and his Super-Apes, the Mole Man, the Mandarin, the Black Knight, Kang, the Mad Thinker's Awesome Android, the Grey Gargoyle, the Super-Skrull, Hydra, Cobra, the Executioner, the Enchantress, Mr. Hyde, Electro, the Beetle, Attuma, and (believe it or not) the Human Top, plus a cameo by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby themselves!