If you don't mind giving more comic character advice, Do you have something for core personalty traits for Mary Jane? I'm asking to better understand how she and Peter work together.
I feel there’s a bit of a catch-22 with getting to the core of Mary Jane’s characterization. And it’s a good one! It’s one with a lot of pay off. The issue where Mary Jane’s backstory is revealed in full – Amazing Spider-Man #259 – is an amazingly written piece that throws all of her actions up until that point into stark relief, while simultaneously shaking up the fact that we have, with a few exceptions, been seeing her through the lens of Peter’s perceptions, and Peter has a bad tendency of assuming things about people and then sticking those assumptions, even when contrary evidence is thrown in his face. Mary Jane’s beautiful, Mary’s Jane’s vivacious, Mary Jane loves a party, and so despite several people in his life, his aunt, and even Mary Jane herself telling him there’s a bigger story afoot, he still doesn’t see it until she tells him everything.
(ASM #97 – seriously, the way the real fits together at the end is nothing short of brilliant writing, which is extra admirable when you’re not the person who wrote the character’s initial appearances. That someone sat there and connected all these different little scenes and made up this really perfect backstory is, in my opinion, some of the greatest comics writing of all time.
”I don’t want to love him. Can you dig it? I like the guy too much for that kind fo scene.” ASM #131)
And she tells him everything as a trade – her biggest secret for his, because in Amazing Spider-Man #257, two issues before, Mary Jane reveals that she’s always known he was Spider-Man. But the problem with the reveal, as amazing as it is, is that for the full effect you have to have been following along from the beginning.
Mary Jane tells us something very important from the start, in Amazing Spider-Man #43:
I’ve talked before about how I feel like separating Peter and Spider-Man is, in my opinion, a shallow read on the character. He’s always Peter and he’s always Spider-Man and while the anonymity of Spider-Man may allow him more freedom than the average everyday social scenario, he doesn’t really act that differently whether masked or maskless. Not true with Mary Jane, though her mask is metaphorical. She is an actress. Carefree party girl Mary Jane is an act, and she’s a carefully cultivated one, and Mary Jane knows exactly what she’s doing, in a much more careful and practiced way than Peter knows what he’s doing when he pretends there’s just no way he could be Spider-Man. Mary Jane says it herself much later in the aptly named Amazing Spider-Man: Parallel Lives:
“He wore a mask, too.” So you have this really incredible reveal, but it’s so much better if you’ve been following along and letting things unfold. And I feel like a lot of understanding Mary Jane early on depends on tossing Peter’s notions of her out the window – he might be Spider-Man, but when he first meets her, he’s still an 18yo boy, and this is the girl he spent months dodging because, and this is literally in the text, he thought she might be ugly. And this gets tossed aside a lot in adaptations because we currently don’t like our heroes to be flawed, but Peter is very flawed, and because of that he’s very real, and he thought when his aunt said Mary Jane had “a nice personality” she meant she didn’t have a face to match, because he was an 18yo boy, with everything that comes with being a fairly good looking 18yo boy and only child who was raised by an aunt and uncle who adored him beyond measure.
“And you know what that means!” (ASM #259) And then he does meet Mary Jane, and not only is she beautiful, but she’s vivacious and fun-loving and seemingly carefree, and he’s simultaneously very attracted to that and put off by her devil may care attitude because he thinks she’s flighty.
“You know me – I’m never serious about anything… Never.” (ASM #244) High school gets a lot of gravity in Spider-Man adaptations, for some reason – because it was when Peter was bit by the spider, I guess, or when Uncle Ben was killed – but the college years aren’t really afforded the gravity they deserve, because that’s where a lot of who Peter is and maybe most importantly who the most valuable people in his life come in, and Mary Jane’s a very big part of that. College is where he meets her, and Harry, and Gwen, and where he and Flash start to move past their high school rivalry, and you have this great little friend group that, some issues aside, actually functions really well, with Peter and Gwen’s romance very much at the center of that. And then Gwen is murdered by Norman Osborn.
The Door Scene is in my own opinion one of the most powerful moments in Spider-Man mythos. Gwen’s dead, Norman Osborn’s been impaled on his own glider, and Mary Jane is waiting for Peter. When he arrives, she tells him she’s “real torn up” about what happened to Gwen, and in response, consumed by his grief and his rage, he yells at her and tells her someone like her wouldn’t be upset if her own mother was dead (Mary Jane’s mother is dead, and as ASM #259 will tell you it had a huge impact on her life) and tells her to leave. Despite everything he’s said to her, she stays.
One thing I see get used in comics discourse that erroneously twists things from film adaptations is the idea that Mary Jane loves Spider-Man, the masked hero, the mystery of it all, the drama!, whereas (as she’s always painted when these comparisons come up) good girl Gwen Stacy loved Peter Parker, the real boy underneath. On top of it being a cheap argument meant to pit two complicated female characters with a lot of history against each other, and on top of the fact that it’s an argument that’s always going to be unfair because in comics Gwen didn’t know Peter was Spider-Man, it’s also always going to fall flat for one big reason: at first, Mary Jane hates that Peter is Spider-Man and that he risks his life. It’s what caused her to break off their engagement the first time.
(Spectacular Spider-Man #113) There’s an interesting parallel in the early days – Peter can’t run away, and Mary Jane can’t stay, no matter how much they might want to. Mary Jane is very much about masks, about playing on preconceived notions, about events in your past defining your current actions and the identities you create out of them, the different facets of yourself. I would say that she and Peter work together because as characters they both really grew together; she’s not his first girlfriend, he’s not her first boyfriend, there were times when they were in and out of each other’s lives, and even before he knew it, she was keeping his secrets.
“Because that’s what I do. I keep people’s secrets.” (Amazing Spider-Man #511) I’ve said all this – and I could say a million more words, because I think Mary Jane’s fascinating and complicated and that she’s one of the best written characters in comics – but I really suggest reading for yourself Mary Jane’s appearances from Amazing Spider-Man #42 through when she breaks off her first engagement with Peter in Amazing Spider-Man #183, then when she reveals she knew Peter was Spider-Man all along and tells him her the story of her own past in #257-259, and then their second and successful engagement in Amazing Spider-Man #291-292. It’s a lot of comics, but they’re so good and the way information about Mary Jane is revealed and how it informs her actions in older comics is amazing.
One final note: Mary Jane never met a blunt object she wouldn’t bash over a man’s head.
(ASM #261 – a favorite Harry moment, too.)
She’s not afraid to use her fists, either. Love it. (Spectacular Spider-Man #163)
