Editorial wanting to avoid doing anything that could possibly make Peter look like he's in his 30s was painful. JMS did a very good job making him a responsible adult; Mary Jane, who editorial had tried to get rid of forever, finally fit in well with his superheroics; he even wrote Aunt May as something other than a ball and chain around Peter's neck. Painful they decided to revert him to an early 20s guy living with his aunt.
Unrelatedly, while the overall storyline isn't sooo bad (I don't like Dan Slott's style but the story in broad strokes, I mean), something else funny Spider-Man related: Doc Ock at one point took over Peter Parker's body and had total control. Peter was just a kind of anaemic ghost in the background who could only watch and sometimes complain.
One of Doc Ock's first goals was to bang Mary Jane. However, she sensed something was off and refused his advances. It then occurred on Ock - Wait! I have all of Peter Parker's memories! They've had sex thousands of times! All I have to do is think of one of those occasions and sort myself out with that imagery. [Jerks it furiously while Peter Parker's ghost wails NOOOOO!] Well, that's that taken care of... Although I've a feeling I might need to take care of it again in a few hours eheheehehehh.
Also since Ock had been engaged to Aunt May at one point I seem to recall someone saying he'd intentionally called to mind images of banging Aunt May (particularly awful given she was usually drawn to look 1,000 years old) to freak out ghost Peter.
I don't know if this is all awful or just awfully funny.
Yes. It was a narrow win for 'die'. Years later, it was revealed a lot of the calls had been from some guy with an auto-dialler.
The circumstances surrounding Todd's death were otherwise stupid. His mother was performing illegal abortions in Iran (they retconned this to some fictitious country but it wasoriginally Iran). Joker was for some reason there, too. To extract Todd's location, he threatened to tell the authorities about the abortion operation. The mother gave up Todd's location. By some contrivance I can't remember she then listened to Joker beating Todd to death with a crowbar and just kind of swallowed and moved on.
Also, Joker became Khomeinei's ambassador to the UN.
Doctor Octopus jerking off to memories of MJ was due entirely due to the backlash to Superior Spider-Man, plus a prior storyline where Fred Van Lente wrote a story where Chameleon impersonated Peter and fucked one of the new BND love interests (forget which one) and she took it as a sign Peter was in love with her and kept reminding him about how they fucked and how fucking=committed relationship in her book.
A LOT of people, including notorious online comic nerds Kirk Boxleitner and Jesse Baker (two of the most vocal critics of Brand New Day online) kept screaming that the above storyline was "rape by deception". Fred Van Lente's career never really recovered from the backlash as he was being groomed by Marvel for big things but got dropped like a stone after that storyline ran.
Also, Slott fully 100% intended Otto to fuck MJ and even bragged about it ahead of time that he was going to "have MJ get back with Spider-Man but it won't be Peter she gets back with!". The backlash against Superior and the shitstorm with the Van Lente story, forced editorial to veto that plotline, hence Slott having Otto jerk off to stolen memories of Peter fucking MJ instead while claiming how "superior" he was for "not taking advantage of MJ" by pretending to be her ex.
Also you are confusing the details about Jason's death. Jason found out, out of the blue, that his dad remarried shortly after he was born and that the woman he thought was his mom was actually his stepmom. After a wild goose chase involving Lady Shiva (who was a red herring for Jason's mom) and Joker trying to sell a stolen nuclear bomb to Arab terrorists, Bruce and Jason found Jason's mom as a doctor working for a medical charity ala Red Cross in Ethiopia. However, by chance Joker ended up in Ethiopia after the selling of the nuclear bomb scheme was thwarted by Batman because (contrivance-wise) Joker knew about Jason's mom and her work at said "not-Red Cross" medical charity as far as Joker keeping a huge mental book of Gotham City residents he could blackmail whenever he needed something.
Jason's mom, it turns out, was a respected doctor who also ran a back alley abortion business in Gotham (which doesn't make sense timeline-wise especially since Jason was supposed to be 15-16 years old and the story takes place late 1988 when originally published) back when abortion was illegal pre-Roe vs Wade. One of her patients died and rather than risk losing her medical license and jail time, she fled Gotham City. Jason's dad remarried and rather than let Jason know his mom was an illegal abortionist, had his new wife claim to be Jason's biological mom.
Joker blackmails her so he can steal Red Cross relief material to sell on the African black market (a major plot point for Death In the Family was that The Killing Joke was canon and took place sometime between the brief window between Ten Nights of the Beast and Death In the Family and that, following the events of The Killing Joke, Gotham PD basically beggered Joker and shut down every single single hideout and bank account/money stash that he had hidden save for the hideout with the nuke, which only got overlooked due to "Joker killing anyone who knew it existed and not keeping any record of it save for in his brain") and Jason/Robin stumbles onto them plotting it and Joker brutally assaults him while his mom (who realizes Jason is Robin) basically turns Judas and allows Joker to brutally assault her son with a crowbar. Which bites her on the ass, as Joker realizes he has gone too far and basically puts a bomb in the house this happened in and chains Jason's mom up to die in the blast so frame local warlords for the murder. Jason, ever the simp, shields his mom in a failed attempt to save her from the blast and both die.
Afterwards, Joke flees town but is grabbed by Iranian military and taken before the Ayatollah and made Iranian ambassador in exchange him killing off the entire UN (Chuck Dixon later changes this to Joker being made ambassador of another fictional middle eastern country).
And years later, Scott Lobdell rewrote Jason's origin for New 52 and made even more fucked up and god-awful: in the New 52, Dick was Robin and immediately became Nightwing when he went solo (as the New 52 erased all previous Teen Titans save the one that debuted when the New 52 launched). Joker was upset but then had an idea: he murdered Jason's dad and framed Two-Face for the deed while kidnapping Jason's mom, who was a generic female type) and manipulated things so that Jason would be found by Batman and that Batman, being lonely, would take Jason on as the new Robin. At which point, Joker then informed Jason that he had his mom held prisoner and not only brutally beat Jason in front of her but also set off an explosion in Gotham that killed both mother and son, all in the name of the private joke of Joker breaking Batman's heart by giving him a replacement Robin and then taking said replacement Robin away from him.
I'll never understand the love for and cult following of Ann Nocenti's Daredevil run. There's definitely a handful of gems spread throughout it but overall it's a disjointed mess of bad pacing, poorly structured plots that usually go nowhere, and a ton of half-thought ideas and vague political themes.
There are two characters that are clearly meant to represent the extreme ends of the usual femininity spectrum - a radfem (who's a PETA-esque domestic terrorist) and a housewife (literally brainwashed and molded by the patriarchy) - that 90% of the time exist for genuinely no reason beyond allowing Nocenti to insert a weird stream of thoughts about feminism via the two characters constantly bickering. What makes this even stranger is that she made a similar (and much better) outlet for this earlier in her run: Typhoid Mary. Typhoid's split personalities are essentially that of a sexually charged, powerful woman (Typhoid) vs a more weak-willed, mousy woman (Mary). Like a lot of her run, though, the plots with Typhoid Mary just sorta sputter out and the character is dropped and forgotten about.
I always see people bring up the 'Daredevil goes to Hell' plot but really I think most people just remember the concept because I feel like she didn't do anything interesting with it. It would've been a great time to explore the catholic side of Daredevil but very little is done in that regard. Instead what we do get is a whole issue of two Inhumans (that decided to tag along with Daredevil for no reason) convincing a higher demon to redistribute and share their wealth with the lesser demons. Then there's other weird political stories throughout her run, like one where Daredevil and the radfem character liberate an animal farm because eating meat is bad. Another issue features Daredevil trying to stop a shadowy government agency from covering up a guy's project about a car that runs on an alternate energy source.
I wonder how much of the 'good' of the run is from John Romita Jr., since he seems to be able to bring out great work from writers. Howard Mackie had a long and storied career on Spider-Man that began awful and ended awful but in between those two points he was paired with JRJR for a while and the work the duo put out was great. Likewise, J. Michael Straczynski's Spider-Man run was at its best with Romita Jr.
Still, to her credit Nocenti's characterization of Daredevil himself was pretty great and meaningful, focusing on (but sadly not doing much with) the weird, paradoxical duality of Daredevil being a vigilante that regularly breaks the law to beat up on criminals and Murdock being a defense attorney that upholds the law and defends criminals.
Despite me not finding her run that great (or at least as great as people make it out to be), Ann Nocenti's run is probably one of the few bright spots for Daredevil during this era. Frank Miller turned Daredevil into one of Marvel's hottest properties that they then proceed to squander for nearly 20 years. D.G. Chichester becomes the main writer following Nocenti and the first two or so years of his run are decent but then he trips, falls flat on his face, never recovers, and after him there's a revolving door of writers until volume one of Daredevil is canned and it's relaunched as volume two with Kevin Smith's 'Guardian Devil' arc (which I think is also overrated, though it does make Daredevil relevant again, eventually leading to Bendis' decent run that really rejuvenated the character).
Nocenti's DD run is loved because it did damage control for how Frank Miller blew up Daredevil's life and the status quo for the book, due to the fact that Born Again was conceived as a series finale for the character back when Jim Shooter wanted it to be one of the books canceled to make room on the slate of books Marvel could release, for the New Universe line. And how pre-orders for the first couple of issues of Born Again were so great that it single handedly saved the title from being canceled.
Also, Typhoid Mary was an interesting tragic villainess and compared to some of the other new villains Nocenti made for Daredevil, the best of the bunch.
But yeah, it does loose steam when Nocenti moves Daredevil out of New York City and have him and Karen break up and kind of flounders about. I can see where Nocenti was potentially aping Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (which did a similar arc where the Turtles suffer a major defeat and forced into exile into upstate New York ala Daredevil). But the Acts of Vengeance stuff is pretty good, even though it's mired down in Nocenti continuing plot threads from her Inhumans graphic novel that don't get resolved until years later in Fantastic Four Unlimited.
