Known Unknown Knowns: Marvel, Dan Slott Announce Changes To Spider-Man

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Editor’s Note: Look, this entire article is loaded with spoilers about upcoming events related to Spider-Man and Marvel’s and Dan Slott’s plans for the character in the coming months. And while none of those events are particularly hard to guess, if you want to remain pure and unspoiled about things, you should probably move along. And try not to think about the most likely actions a corporation might take to maximize profit via cross-platform synergy. And if you don’t have to think about what “cross-platform synergy” means because it is a part of your job, you should move along before I call you something I can’t take back.

I wrote not too long ago that, despite generally enjoying Dan Slott’s The Superior Spider-Man, that I was ready for the whole Doc Ock as Spider-Man storyline to start coming in for a landing. While it’s been an interesting storytelling experiment, in the sense that it explores a different and darker angle on the concept of “with great power comes great responsibility” that’s at the core of Spider-Man’s character, it’s grown a little long in the tooth for me, since I knew full Goddamned well that eventually, Peter Parker was gonna come back. When? Well, sometime before The Amazing Spider-Man 2 opens in theaters in May, at the very least… no matter what Dan Slott said about Peter Parker staying dead.

Well, Slott and Marvel have finally gone on record about their long-term plans for Peter Parker. And while the broad strokes might be pretty much what one would expect, they amount to pretty big spoilers, so if you want to know what’s up, you can find out after the jump.

Yeah, Peter’s coming back. In April. With a newly-renumbered volume of The Amazing Spider-Man.

“(Parker’s coming back) just in time, fancy that, for a major Spider-Man motion picture,” quipped Slott. “It seems uncanny. It was very nice for Sony to schedule the movie around the story.”

Now, no one is announcing exactly how Peter’s gonna be coming back (or how Ock intends to bring him back – with the upcoming Goblin War storyline where Ock will apparently be fighting The Green Goblin, it wouldn’t surprise me if Ock finds himself unable to defeat Gobby and needing to call for help). And no one is talking about what will happen to Otto Octavius in this situation – it’s possible that he could continue as some kind of alternate Spider-Man, but in a world with Peter Parker, Venom, Scarlet Spider and (possibly) Miles Morales coming as as a refugee from the Ultimate Universe as Galactus is currently noshing on Newark, the 616 Universe needs another Spider-Man like it needs a rubber dick. Either way, when it comes to Peter Parker’s return, as foregone conclusions go, this certainly was one.

And it was a foregone conclusion – the only people who couldn’t foresee it were people who willfully refused to believe the only people who remain dead in comics are in the background of any wide shot of Latveria, and small children who don’t have the history to know that death is ephemeral. And no one would allow a child to believe that their hero is dead, would they?

“To do that for a solid year of my life, that’s the hardest thing I’ve had to do — to look small children in the eye at a convention and lie to them,” says Slott. “One of them with an honest-to-God Little League uniform and a quivering lip. Inside, part of me was dying.”