Mary Jane, the Gateway Drug
Part of CV's Top 100 Spider-Man Universe Stories - reviewed!
mary♥jane™ was part of Marvel's all ages 'Marvel Age' line. Somewhere along the line someone decided that Marvel should have a gateway drug to comics for young kids, and that gateway drug is of course, Mary Jane. You know, a character the kids (especially girls who we want to increase our market share of) can relate to.
And you know it has to be manga style. These kids today, they were raised on the Pokey-Mans and stuff. Kids like manga. Anyway, although it smacks of a comic created by market research and focus groups, there's something undeniably appealing about mary♥jane, which is a testament to it's creators.
In an age where so many teenagers in comics come off so phoney (
Ultimate Spider-Man
, I'm looking in your general direction), Mary Jane, Liz, Peter, Flash and Harry in mary♥jane are like a breath of fresh air. Sean McKeever writes Mary Jane like she's a real high school girl.
Takeshi Miyazawa is a Canadian born artist of Japanese extraction, and possibly by blessing of his mixed heritage, he gives us a manga/western art style. Though I'm not normally a fan of manga-fusion, I think it works here - as simplified cartoon stylings have long worked for this kind of teen life stories, as devotees of
Archie
comics can attest. If I have any complaint about the art, it's that Miyazawa overuses one manga convention (the big sweat drop) to convey emotion. Granted, when dealing with simplified faces, you get simplified expressions and have to resort to the crutch of broadcasting emotions to the audience this way more, but I just think the comic would have been better without it, even if the emotion seemed to be lost - I can't help but interpret it literally, as a bunch of kids with overactive sweat glands, no matter how much I try not to.
While the whole Peter Parker / Mary Jane / Harry Osborn love triangle has been done to death, it's never been done this
human
, and for that I have to give mary♥jane credit. Entertaining if not essential, this is like the indie film of the blockbuster action movie filled Marvel Universe.