No Surprises Here...(Or Are There?)

There's no way to say this without sounding irritatingly smug, but, well, I called it (as I'm sure many other longtime fans did): Peter Parker will be back in the pages of Marvel Comics as Spider-Man by April 2014 in a relaunched Amazing Spider-Man book with yet another spanking new #1, just in time for Sony Pictures' new movie, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and with no less than Electro who will appear in the movie portrayed by Jamie Foxx, as the bad guy.

I have no intentions of taking Marvel to task for this decision, because in the year since Doctor Octopus took over Peter Parker's body the crew responsible for dreaming up Spider-Man's adventures has given a decidedly different series of stories which have been, to be honest, quite entertaining. This wasn't the "clone saga" where Marvel attempted to replace married Peter with unmarried Ben Reilly; this was a finite endeavor, with a beginning, a middle and an end, and in a way that gave writer Dan Slott and his rotating crew of artists a freedom they would not have been able to enjoy had this been a permanent or long-term change. Beyond the more obvious story tropes--Spidey-Ock (or "Spock" as some members of the fan community have dubbed him) kills, Spidey-Ock brutalizes crooks, Spidey-Ock hires henchmen, etc.--what made Dan Slott's writing so darned compelling was that he didn't simply write a book about a bad guy trying to be good and failing at it. He wrote about somebody completely different from Peter Parker living his life, and how differently he made decisions, not all of which were necessarily worse than the ones Peter would have made.

Peter Parker (as he appears to outside world) now has a doctorate. He's running his own business, which includes charitable work.  He's romantically involved with a dwarf (and for those who lack imagination, suffice it to say that he has...um...consummated that relationship). This is not stuff that is all going to go away when Peter returns to his own body, and it is to Slott's credit, I think, that he knows this fully well.

I won't spend a whole blog post trying to second guess Slott or Marvel, because apart from being entirely predictable as to Peter Parker's return they've thrown some pretty good curveballs. Ultimately, Otto's 31 issues in Peter's shoes will have left quite a bit of fallout, and the fun will be seeing how my favorite nerd-turned-superhero will handle it.