Oh woe is me. It’s bad enough when celebrities get divorced, but superheroes? I just don’t know what to do with myself.

Which is exactly the point, says Joe Quesada, editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics. It was time to shake things up in the life of Peter Parker, the nerdy New Yorker who upon being bitten by a radioactive spider attained the ability to transform himself into a web-spinning world savior. And it was easier to do that, he said, if Parker wasn’t married.

Still, as the writer and artist who created the story that transformed Spider-Man into Single-Man earlier this month, Quesada has made himself about as popular with some of his readers as the villainous Green Goblin.

“When we first did it, the reaction was, ‘How could you do this? This is a terrible thing to do,” he recalled. “But with the first issue of ‘Brand New Day’ [in which Spider-Man returns to single life], our letters very quickly changed to people saying, ‘This is fantastic. This is the Spider-Man we remembered. We didn’t know what we’d been missing.”

“Considering I have been reading Spider-Man for exactly 20 years now, and that seems to be the amount of time Joe Q. has decided to rip from Spider-Man continuity, can I simply return all of my Spider-Man comics for a full refund?” asked one of the more polite postings on Marvel’s Internet message boards. Some message threads were discontinued after they became nothing more than forums to insult Quesada and others.

“It’s heresy for some people,” laughed Dave Pifer, who runs the Secret Headquarters comic book store in Los Angeles.

Does it really affect your comic book experience that much if Spider Man is married to some chick or not? I don’t think him getting to fingerbang a nubile NYU student is going to make him any more or less capable of shooting web at some dude wearing a fishbowl on his head or some crap.

If I were Marvel, I’d probably just write like 200 straight issues of Spider Man being depressed and hanging around his apartment. Then doing really exciting things like going to meet with lawyers and then cry about losing his woman and half his money. That’d teach you assholes to read comic books and get emotionally attached to the characters. THEY’RE DRAWINGS OF MUSCULAR MEN WHO FLY THROUGH THE AIR AND PUNCH OTHER PRESUMABLY EVIL MUSCULAR MEN IN THE FACE. GET OVER IT.