Tl;dr (Patreon)

So I've been watching a lot of yuppie nightmare movies lately because I have this idea for a story that's like a cross between Before Sunrise and your After Hours/Into The Night/Something Wild stories, covering Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson's first blind date (after the famous "face it, tiger, you just hit the jackpot."). It springs from an idea I had for a Spider-Man movie that isn't, like all superhero movies, either an origin or the tale of a supervillain coming to power and his feud with the hero. There wouldn't be any A-list supervillains, no Big Bads, just minor baddies conspiring with random events to complicate Peter's life. 

Instead of being the typical "how do I beat this bad guy?" plot construction, it's more like how does Peter get his keys back, how does he find his car, how does he deal with this and this and this? Much more Rube Goldberg than your more straightforward antagonist plot; plus, the hallmark of the yuppie nightmare subgenre is that the hero is trapped and powerless in his predicament, even physically threatened, and as Spider-Man, Peter can outfight just about anyone and get around the city at leisure (unless he runs out of webbing. Hmm...). Which is why pairing him with MJ in this story works so well, because he can't do anything to give away his secret identity, he's gotta either be clever or grin and bear it.

It's basically an intellectual exercise, since I might not ever get to write it, especially given Marvel editorial's apparent disdain for the entire character of MJ, but I think I'm really onto something here. Like it'd be set in the past, clearly, but not some pseudo-sixties thing or a blunt "ten years prior to present day" past, but more a pre-Giuliani New York, Streets of Fire, The Warriors, the city as the forest in some old fairy tale. 

And it'd be, like, 90% in keeping with continuity, treating the comics as history and then taking the liberties that a good period piece might. Which makes for an interesting Dogme 95 thing in regards to what you can cheat and what you can't. 

The big thing is setting it during Peter's high school years, when he doesn't meet MJ or Gwen till college, but every adaptation does that, and I think that you could easily franchise the story. Do this one covering the Dikto years, then pick up the next when Peter and MJ are in college and now we're on the Romita years. 

So both Peter and MJ are 18, it's been some months since Peter lost his Uncle Ben. I actually made a list of villains who showed up already by MJ's debut in ASM42, so when Spidey meets them he can just go "You again!" It's a shorter list than I expected--somehow I got it into my head that MJ didn't show up until the 100s, but no, she was practically there since the beginning. I had planned for a scene involving the Hypno Hustler taking over a nightclub they were dancing at, but he won't show up till far in the future.

I also had a very planned out sequence where MJ needs to meet with an ex-boyfriend, John Jameson, and as she's meeting with him, the Black Cat is robbing him, so Peter has to become into Spider-Man, so we have Spidey and Cat stealthing around the same apartment where John and MJ are talking about their relationship. And the thing Cat is out to steal is the Moonstone, so naturally Man-Wolf makes an appearance.

However, while Black Cat had showed up in ASM before and John Jameson had been Colonel Jupiter (making him-as-MW an acceptable cheat, as far as I'm concerned), I ended up deciding that implying prior relationships between the two pairs would never work. Even if MJ were 18 and it were her and Peter's senior year, it's unbelievable she would be dating an astronaut, much less used to be dating an astronaut (implying she was even younger when they hooked up). And conflating Peter's earlier battle with Felicia into their later relationship would be really overstating things.

Still, it's a good idea, and one of the reasons I think this story could work on its own as a standalone and then also generate sequels. There's so much material you can mine from the beginning of the Peter/MJ relationship to the end of it (when they die in bed of old age, surrounded by grandchildren). Anyway, here's the list of villains I made.

• The Enforcers 
• The Beetle 
• Circus of Crime 
• Molten Man
• The Looter 
• The Rhino 
• The Scorpion 
• The Spider-Slayers

I figure winnow that down to six 'encounters,' one per issue of your standard miniseries (tho I think it could go as high as 8 if I overthink it). You could also pad that out by looking at supervillains who were active with other superheroes--your Daredevils, your FFs, your Iron Mans--and say that they were active in New York at the time and ran into Spidey, but I feel that's a pretty good representation of Spidey's rogue's gallery on its own. Wanted to avoid any Big Bads who would dominate the story and immediately make Peter, even at his most irresponsible, ditch MJ to focus all his attention on them--basically, anyone in the Sinister Six. Ironically, ASM42 is just 4 issues shy of introducing the Shocker, possibly the preeminent piker of the supervilllain set. He'd be a great example of the type of heavy I'm aiming for, but including him would be just too much of a cheat.

Anyway, I'd better write something I'm getting paid for.