Interesting that “One More Day” writer, JMS, is publicly distancing himself from the slow-moving trainwreck that this Spider-Man storyline is becoming. The following comes straight from his message boards:

In the current storyline, there’s a lot that I don’t agree with, and I made this very clear to everybody within shouting distance at Marvel, especially Joe. I’ll be honest: there was a point where I made the decision, and told Joe, that I was going to take my name off the last two issues of the OMD arc. Eventually Joe talked me out of that decision because at the end of the day, I don’t want to sabotage Joe or Marvel, and I have a lot of respect for both of those. As an executive producer as well as a writer, I’ve sometimes had to insist that my writers make changes that they did not want to make, often loudly so. They were sure I was wrong. Mostly I was right. Sometimes I was wrong. But whoever sits in the editor’s chair, or the executive producer’s chair, wears the pointy hat of authority, and as Dave Sim once noted, you can’t argue with a pointy hat.

So at the end of the day, all one can do is try to do the best one can with the notes one is given, and try to execute them in a professional way…because who knows, the other guy may be right. The only thing I *can* tell you, with absolute certainty, is that what Joe does with Spidey and all the rest of the Marvel characters, he does out of a genuine love of the character. He’s not looking to sabotage anything, he’s not looking to piss off the fans, he genuinely believes in the rightness of his views not out of a sense of “I’m the boss” but because he loves these characters and the Marvel universe.

I think this sounds a lot like a mixture of sour grapes with a healthy dose of “too little too late” thrown in for added flavor. Frankly, this explanation doesn’t wash considering that JMS is supposed to have a “no real editing” clause in his Marvel contract. I can buy Quesada overruling a few decisions from before from his EiC seat, but I don’t buy for a minute that he’s the one orchestrating all of the story points in OMD with JMS acting solely as script monkey. More likely, JMS and Joey da Q both hammered out the entire thing, top to bottom, and managed to convince themselves that they created an epic storyline. When fans finally got a whiff of their brew and started turning on them, going as far as to claim loudly that the freaking Clone Saga was never as horrible as OMD, JMS made the first move and threw Marvel under the bus.

I give it less than 2 weeks before we have a JMS interview pop up on Newsarama or CBR where he “clarifies” his message board ranting and makes nice-nice with Marvel.

Spread the word!