My Big Fat Geek Wedding

Written by Chris Fluit

Thursday, 06 September 2007

Okay, so I may not be that excited about this month’s wedding between Green Arrow and Black Canary.  But that doesn’t mean that I can’t take a look back at the best, the wildest and the worst comic book weddings over the years.  And just because I feel like it, I’m including both successful weddings as well as those that were cancelled, called off or otherwise interrupted. Reed Richards and Sue Storm (Fantastic Four Annual 3, 1965)  I’m not the Silver Age expert on this site.  For that, you’d have to check out Commander Benson’s Deck Log.  And I’m not the big Silver Age fan on this site either.  Often, the Silver Age stories just don’t appeal to me.  Yet I know that this is the wedding by which all other comic book weddings are measured.  This one had it all: the best team of the time in the Fantastic Four, the classic creative team of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, guest art by other creative superstars like Steve Ditko, dozens of heroes guest-starring as wedding guests and even more villains guest-starring as wedding crashers.  Yup, this one is considered a classic.  And though I may not be all that familiar with the original tale, I’ve read enough in retellings and reprints to know why.   Henry Pym and Janet Van Dyne/Yellowjacket and the Wasp (Avengers 60, 1969)   Now this is a Silver Age story I’m familiar with.  For some reason, The Avengers grabbed me in a way that the Fantastic Four never did and I own all but a dozen of their original stories.  This story, though well remembered, isn’t considered to be in the same class as the Fantastic Four wedding.   For one thing, the guest-stars were kind of light.  And the only villains, the Circus of Crime, are pretty lightweight.  Then there was the whole “why is the Wasp marrying Yellowjacket/who is Yellowjacket?” mystery.  It turns out that the Wasp’s boyfriend Henry Pym has forgotten who he is.  He’s now running around as a brash, new hero Yellowjacket.  Janet, sensing an opportunity, marries the outgoing Yellowjacket, knowing that her normally shy boyfriend wouldn’t normally go for it.  And after he’s regained his normal mental state, they’ll still be married.  While this story isn’t as fondly remembered as other weddings, it is pretty wild and crazy in its own way.  It’s also kind of creepy in a way that only Silver Age stories can be when you think about them too hard twenty or forty years later.   Logan and Lady Mariko (Uncanny X-Men 172, 1983)   This is one of my favorite single issues of all time.  Wolverine had been growing as a character.  He was no longer the berserker runt that had bothered Cyclops.  And his progression continued in his landmark mini-series by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller.  This issue marked Wolverine’s return to the X-Men after that mini-series.  His return was in the form of a wedding invitation.  Logan had found love with a noble Japanese beauty, the Lady Mariko.  The cover was perfect, with the wedding invitation, the little note to Nightcrawler telling him to bring the beer and the knife letting you that this wedding wouldn’t go smoothly.  And it didn’t.  The ceremony was never finished.  Wolverine tragically was never able to marry his love.  Some weddings bring tears to your eyes out of joy.  This wedding interrupted brings tears of sorrow instead.   Terry Long and Donna Troy (New Teen Titans 50, 1985)   This is the classic wedding for my generation.  One of the things that made the New Teen Titans so beloved was that Marv Wolfman and George Perez made the Titans’ private lives as interesting as their superhero adventures.  This was fashioned in early issues like “A Day in the Life” and fortified in this issue.  No costumes.  No villains.  No fight scenes.  Just a beautiful wedding for a character we had come to know and care for.  I know that other fans aren’t happy with Terry Long as a husband for Donna Troy.  After all, he wasn’t a superhero like Roy Harper or Kyle Rayner.  He was a divorced father of two.  But he was a real person and I liked that Donna was able to find a mature man who loved her outside of the superhero community.  You know, superheroes used to date regular people all the time (see especially Louise Simonson’s run on X-Factor).  For that reason, and many others, this will always be my favorite wedding story.   Dick Grayson and Princess Kori’andr/Nightwing and Starfire (New Titans 100, 1993)   New Teen Titans has one of the best weddings ever told.  It also has one of the worst.  This wedding was already heading in the wrong direction.  Much earlier in the series, Dick Grayson had broken off his relationship with Kory when she was forced into a royal wedding at her father’s command.  That estrangement lasted for some time.  Yet eventually, the two began seeing each other again.  However, as a way of protecting their secret identities, Dick always dated Kory in disguise.  Kory became frustrated with the situation.  Eventually, Dick proposed but even at the time, it was obvious that he wanted to marry her for all the wrong reasons.  As a reader, I went into this wedding hoping that it would be called off somehow.  Yet the way that it was interrupted was even worse.  Raven had finally become corrupted by her father Trigon’s darkside, attacked the wedding, caused a little bit of mayhem and abducted Starfire.  This issue marked the beginning of one of the worst periods in Titans history, with half of the team possessed by demon seeds and all of the team depressed.  And this issue, this awful wedding, kick-started much of this awfulness.   Clark Kent and Lois Lane (Superman: The Wedding Album, 1996)   This wedding isn’t without a little controversy.  A lot of fans were upset because they thought that Superman was only marrying Lois in the comic books because Superman was also marrying Lois on the Lois & Clark TV show.  There’s also the counter-story that DC had planned to have Superman marry Lois years earlier but had postponed those plans because the TV show was going to feature an unmarried romantic couple and wanted the comic book to do the same.  Either way, this is one of my favorite wedding stories.  In my opinion, it combines the best of the Teen Titans and Fantastic Four weddings.  Like the Titans tale, this story focuses on the relationships and simply tells us about the day that Clark Kent and Lois Lane got married.  No villain interruptions or world-conquering plots.  Yet that didn’t mean that this story forgot about the superhero elements.  As with the Fantastic Four, there were guest-stars galore, including one great scene in which Bruce Wayne promises Clark that they’ll watch over Metropolis for him and Clark looks up to see dozens of heroes such as Nightwing, Robin and the Guardian leaping through the sky.   Rokk Krinn and Imra Ardeen/Cosmic Boy and Saturn Girl (Legion of Super-Heroes 96, 1997)   This was one of the weirdest weddings that I’ve ever read.  Imra Ardeen and Garth Ranzz had been one of the Legion’s classic couples, whether as Saturn Girl and Lightning Lad or as Saturn Girl and Live Wire.  However, in this version of the Legion, Imra and Garth had a falling out.  While Garth still pined for Imra, she began dating Rokk Krinn instead.  Yup, that Rokk Krinn- Cosmic Boy, leader of the Legion and Garth’s best friend.  They scheduled a wedding, much to the disillusionment of Garth and dismay of his sister Ayla.  But the wedding was, you guessed it, interrupted.  Saturn Girl had been, unknown to even herself, animating an otherwise comatose Cosmic Boy and causing him to love her as the perfect boyfriend.  When the ruse was discovered, Saturn Girl quickly repented and the wedding was called off.  All that was pretty weird.  Yet the best part of the story was the ending.  When Rokk is actually wakened from his coma, he assumes that all of the wedding stuff is for Jo and Tinya.  Imra gently explains to Rokk what had really happened, while Jo and Tinya pick up on the idea and sneak off for a quick wedding of their own.  As a certain Will from Stratford used to say, “All’s well that ends well.”   And there you go, just some of the best, the wildest and the worst weddings in comic book history.  There are plenty of others to talk about- Ralph and Sue Dibny, Barry Allen and Iris West, Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson, Scott Summers and Jean Grey, Black Panther and Storm- but I’ve leave those up to the rest of you.  Cheers!

Last Updated ( Friday, 07 September 2007 )