In Left Unresolved, I spotlight storylines that have been, well, left unresolved.

Today, we look at what, exactly, is the deal with Spider-Man's unmasking during Civil War.

As you may or may not know, in the year or so before Civil War, Spider-Man joined the New Avengers and began to both live at Avengers Tower with his wife, Mary Jane, and his aunt, May Parker. Peter then went to work for Iron Man. Peter was so close to Iron Man that when Iron Man got involved in the United States government's attempts to regulate superhero registration, Spider-Man went along for the ride. Iron Man was able to deter the government for a while, but then the New Warriors blew up in a fight with supervillains in Stamford, CT near a school and a bunch of innocent people died, including a bunch of kids.

So the government established the Superhuman Registration Act and Iron Man decided that he was going to back it (as better that he do it and control it than let other people take control of it). Spider-Man went along for the ride once again and so, during Civil War (by Mark Millar, Steve McNiven and Dexter Vines), Spider-Man decided to prove that he was all the way in on Iron Man's plan (Peter felt a lot of pride in Tony being his mentor) by revealing his secret identity to the world....

The problem is that Spider-Man then began to realize that he did not actually BELIEVE in Iron Man's position. So he decided to split from Iron Man. Of course, this was way too late for him to do this, because he had, you know, revealed his secret identity to the world. Spider-Man went on the run with his wife and his aunt. He was now hunted by both the government and all of his old foes who now knew his secret identity. It took a turn for the worse when Kingpin ordered Spider-Man assassinated. This being Spider-Man, though, his Spider-Sense caused him to move out of the way of the bullet and it instead hit Aunt May. It fatally wounded her.

Spider-Man was distraught. This was a dude who is all about guilt and now he feels like he was responsible for Aunt May's impending death! So Mephisto offered Spider-Man a deal - he would cure Aunt May if Spider-Man would surrender his marriage to Mary Jane. Mary Jane said that they had to do it, because she knew Peter and she knew he would never forgive himself for May's death. So they gave up their marriage and Aunt May was saved.

However, his identity was still public knowledge.

In Amazing Spider-Man #641 (by Joe Quesada and Paolo Rivera), Doctor Strange, Tony Stark and Reed Richards got together and came up with a scientific/magic solution to erase Spider-Man's secret identity from the rest of the world...

So, Spider-Man's secret identity was now hidden from the world.

However, what's the deal with how this affected how people knew Spider-Man?

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Before the details of HOW his identity was hidden again, we saw that when the Fantastic Four saw Peter with his mask off in Amazing Spider-Man #591 (by Dan Slott and Barry Kitson), they could not see him period...

It turned out that Peter could voluntarily let people in and when he did, they all remembered their past interactions with him...

Years later, Spider-Man "revealed" himself as "Spider-Man" during Spider-Island (when everyone else had spider-powers), so suddenly everyone COULD find Spider-Man's identity because he now officially told everyone. So he had no more special protections.

However, we still don't know how people remember Spider-Man's role in Civil War.

In Amazing Spider-Man #546, they mention that people seem to remember something about him unmasking, but, well, huh?

In the most recent Amazing Spider-Man series (before this current one), we saw that Tony Stark and Peter do remember being colleagues together before Civil War...

But that's it. We don't know specifics about Spider-Man's identity being revealed during Civil War or what (people remembering SOMEthing doesn't really make any sense, right? Especially once Spider-Man lost his special protections during Spider-Island). We don't know why people think Spider-Man split from Iron Man.

This bit from Iron Man #593 SEEMED to suggest that the Civil War reveal still happened, but Brian Michael Bendis later explained that it was a case of Peter and Tony both being at a costume party (and Peter cheekily went as Spider-Man)...

It's just sort of an unresolved thing and I doubt we'll actually ever see it specifically resolved.

If anyone has a suggestion for an unresolved comic book plot, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!