Editor’s Note: With great spoilers must come great responsibility. More or less.

Okay, so Peter Parker is “dead,” and Otto Octavius is Spider-Man now. Whether you agree with how Dan Slott did it or not, it’s the way things are for the time being. And given that Spider-Man appears regularly in four different comic books that I can think of off the top of my head, if you have any intention of following Marvel Comics – particularly the Avengers books – for the next year or so, you’re going to need to come to terms with this new Spider-Man, and get to know what Otto’s like now that he’s Spider-Man, and what makes him tick. You know, besides being suddenly able to walk, see his own junk without a mirror, and leer at Mary Jane (and make no mistake, it will just be leering; if you follow Dan Slott’s Twitter feed, you know that he’s bought himself enough trouble without setting himself up to be confronted by women in red wigs at every comic convention, asking him why he supports date rape via deception in his comics).

Marvel Editorial, possibly realizing that killing Peter on December 26th and leaving readers to wait two weeks for the debut of The Superior Spider-Man on January 9th would only give the most rankled ones more opportunity to figure out how to plant hooker toes on Slott and then dime the police, made the decision to give us the first real taste of the new Spider-Man in Avenging Spider-Man #15.1, released this week in parallel with The Amazing Spider-Man #700.

So: what do we get in our first full issue of Doc Ock as Spider-Man? Scenes of a former villain embracing the responsibility that comes with his newfound power? Or does he frantically masturbate to Pete’s iPhone gallery of Mary Jane pictures before going to the barber, handing over his favorite bowl and saying, “Just follow this”?

There was one minor, eensy, tiny problem with Marvel Comics’s Amazing Spider-Man panel Sunday. The panel wasn’t really about Spider-Man.

Oh sure, the panel opened with news about the Amazing Spider-Man and Avenging Spider-Man comic books, but those updates took about seven or ten minutes of an hour long panel. After that, we got updates on Carnage, Venom and Scarlet Spider, which are at least Spider-Man related… but we also got status reports on Captain Marvel, Punisher War Zone, Space Punisher, and last but not least, Daredevil, whose status report was, in effect, “Yeah, we have no idea what’s going on with that triple-Eisner Award winning book! But Eisner Awards are cool! And Daredevil won three of them! So who doesn’t love Daredevil?”

Which actually brings to mind another minor problem with the Spider-Man panel, and with every other Marvel panel we went to: Moderator Arune Singh, who is Director of Communications for Marvel Comics and possibly the most irritating and repetitive public speaker on the planet. Here are some of my notes from the panel, verbatim from my notebook:

  • If I hear Arune Singh say, “How many of you are loving X” again, I will shit.
  • At least 4 “How many of you love…” so far. Fuck.
  • Fifth. Fucking. “How many of you LOVE…”
  • SIXTH. SINGH WILL DIE BY MY HAND.