Popverse's top stories

• Made in '87: Rewinding to the movies, comics, games, and TV shows that define pop culture to this day
• Watch now: Watch the Bob's Burgers team - H. Jon Benjamin, John Roberts, Kristen Schaal, Eugene Mirman, Dan Mintz, Larry Murphy and creator Loren Bouchard - grill up memories at NYCC 2025
• Marvel Comics killed the X-Men in 1987 to reset the franchise - but it didn’t stick

All week long: Revisit the highlights and lowlights of 1987 with Popverse's Made in 87 week.

In 1987 Spider-Man married his longtime love interest Mary Jane Watson.

However, one Marvel creator believes Mary Jane might’ve been having a special Marvel/DC crossover the night before the wedding.

Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21, the comic which features the wedding, contains a subplot where a mysterious rich playboy named Bruce tries to woo Mary Jane. He gives her lavish gifts and offers her a trip to Paris. Plagued by doubts about her upcoming marriage, MJ visits Bruce the night before the wedding. We never see Bruce’s full face, but the implication seems to be that it’s Bruce Wayne.

In 2010 Marvel’s then-editor-in-chief Joe Quesada revisited the events of Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21 for a storyline called ‘One Moment in Time.’ The Quesada-penned storyarc, which ran in Amazing Spider-Man #638-641, retold the events of the wedding with new details to explain its place in the timeline after Peter and MJ’s marriage was erased in ‘One More Day.’

In 2010 I had a chance to interview Quesada for the Spider-Man Crawlspace podcast, and he discussed the various things he revisited for OMIT, and the things he…well…omitted. One of those things was Bruce.

“One of the things that I skipped in the wedding annual, because it was just way too much, was the fact that Mary Jane was being wooed by another guy named Bruce, who picked her up,” Quesada told me during a 2010 podcast interview for Spider-Man Crawlspace. “There’s a scene where Bruce picks up Mary Jane on her wedding night, and they leave, and you don’t know what the hell happened. And by the way, I’m pretty sure it was Bruce Wayne, that’s what they were intending.”

In 1987, the iconic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon debuted - and all our lives were changed. Watch this reunion of the original voice actors:

As we flipped through the pages of Amazing Spider-Man #638, Quesada pointed out that MJ was late for her wedding after being seen with Bruce the night before. “Why Mary Jane was late, that’s a story I decided I didn’t want to tell. I didn’t write it. It’s there. She just got there later.”

“You’re going to make the internet explode,” I replied. “Read the annual,” Quesada says. “She leaves with Bruce in his car, and they cut. And the next thing you know it’s the wedding day, and Aunt Anna and everybody’s wondering where the heck is Mary Jane. She’s late and Peter’s late. And who drives her to the wedding?”

Quesada then pointed to a page in the original comic where MJ exits the car from the passenger door, which implies that Bruce drove her to the wedding.

While Quesada found it suspicious, he decided that MJ was on her best behavior in his version of the story. “I’ll leave that up to the reader,” Quesada says. “And by the way, I didn’t tell that story. My story is, they sit, they park, they talk for eight hours, and she decides to get married. He convinces her to get married.”

I then asked if Bruce would show up in any of the remaining issues of OMIT, which hadn’t been published at the time of our interview. “No, you will not see Bruce. Well, at least not in my run. Maybe we should bring Bruce back in an upcoming issue of Spider-Man.”

Now that Marvel and DC are doing crossovers again, the publishers have the chance to give Spider-Man and Batman one of the funniest interactions ever.

Get your wide-shoulder blouses and your Members-Only jackets, and go back in time with Popverse's Made in 87. Highlights include:

• How Bart Simpson was quietly toned down from being "so mean" before The Simpsons' first episode, as revealed by his long-time voice actor Nancy Cartwright
• Marvel Comics killed the X-Men in 1987 to reset the franchise - but it didn’t stick
• Why the Princess Bride’s iconic duel is an even better swordfight than you remember
• How The Golden Girls became a staple at gay bars in the 80s
• Inside Spider-Man’s chaotic 1987 bachelor party that Marvel turned into a real-life spectacle