How Do You Like Your Jolly Jonah?

That's what I'm wondering tonight? Do you like you Jonah Jameson with a burning hatred for all vigilantes, or simply locked onto Spider-Man to the point that not only does he write an endless string of scathing editorials about how bad Spider-Man is, he commissions the construction of Spider-Slayers and experiments that produced the Scorpion and the Fly?

If you prefer him to intensely despise Spider-Man, do you prefer that it be out of jealousy, fear, or some reason we aren't aware of?

Do you like it when Jonah actually takes aim at people who deserve it, say Wilson Fisk in that Fall of the Kingpin story from Daredevil 297-300? How about when he stands up to people trying to intimidate, or buy his principles? At one point during that Operation: Zero Tolerance X-Thing, Bastion tried to provide Jonah with some inflammatory information on his opponents, and Jonah refused to publish it, because he didn't trust Bastion's motives. Flat turned him down. Or does that seem out of place to you, coming from a character that so often is willing to distort anything Spider-Man does as part of some larger scheme or grab for attention?

Or maybe you prefer a Jonah that's a bit gruff, but whose heart is generally in the right place. He may make mistakes, whether because he thought it was the right decision at the time, or just because it was a snap decision, but he'll actually listen to people and correct his mistake. I think that would be Ultimate Universe Jonah, for the record.

Maybe you like all of them. I have to admit, there's a sort of fun to watching JJJ lose his mind simply because he sees Spider-Man crawling up a building across the street, but I do enjoy those moments where he's calm, where he checks to see how his wife or son are doing, or when he comes to Peter's house in the middle of the night to admit it was wrong to fire him simply for asking a question.

I guess it's my love of redemptive stories, that idea that nobody is totally bereft of humanity. Which is odd, because I think I'd actually be annoyed if they tried a redemptive thing with Norman Osborn at this point. So there's a limit to how much suffering the character can cause before I decide they're not worth the trouble of having hopes for. I suppose the reason Jonah's never hit that point with me is because he was well past the point where he was actually financing the creation of Spidey's enemies by the time I was reading comics, and well into the point where those folks were as focused on killing him as they were on Spidey.

Does that make Jonah's story about the dangers of pride? Man sees great power wielded by mysterious being who he distrusts, he attempts to harness similar power without understanding its source to counteract the mysterious being, things go awry, and now his creations attempt to destroy him, forcing him to rely on the mysterious being. Parts of it seem similar to Frankenstein and his monster. Anyway, that's a little off the original topic, but if you wanted to discuss it also, that's cool.