About a year ago, Spider-Man fans were in an uproar when Peter Parker died in ‘Amazing Spider-Man’ #700 to be replaced by his long-time nemesis Doctor Octopus in the new Marvel NOW series ‘Superior Spider-Man’. During December 2013, we got to revisit the Peter Parker era through some untold tales, but those pre-Superior stories were not enough for the fans of the original wall-crawler. But good news surfaced for Spidey fans when information concerning the return of ‘Amazing Spider-Man’ as part of All-New Marvel NOW leaked onto the internet in the form of a cover for the March/April issue of Marvel Previews featuring Peter Parker in his classic suit. Since then, Marvel has officially confirmed this news and now writer Dan Slott has opened up about the announcement.
It seems like the writer has had a blast in putting the friendly, neighborhood Spider-Man through the ringer. But through all the good times and the bad, Slott seems just as happy as everyone else that Peter Parker is coming back. In an interview with New York Daily News, he declared how happy he was that this was a secret that he no longer had to keep:
“We’ve gone over 30 issues without Peter Parker, so when we let him out of that box and he gets to put on that costume again and he gets to swing through the sky, it’s going to be the greatest feeling.”
He continued to say that the past thirteen months have been exceedingly difficult considering the amount of secrecy he had to upkeep. After all, he knew that Peter wouldn’t be gone forever, but the fans sending death threats and the sad little kids had a harder time dealing with it:
“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. One of them with an honest-to-God Little League uniform and a quivering lip. Inside, part of me was dying.”
As for other fans, they anticipated the return of the hero with over fifty years of history behind him. However, when Slott brings Peter Parker back into the comics with the help of the spectacular Humberto Ramos to take on Electro (coincidently just in time for his big screen counterpart to do the same in ‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2’), it probably won’t be in a way that people were expecting:
“We did it this way because no one was expecting it. Everyone out there assumed we’d have a big reveal later. People thought we’d bring Peter back in a year’s time – or right before the next Spider-Man movie. Everyone was so savvy with how this all works that I thought the best way to keep people off their game was to just put that card on the table right from the get go. You’re all so sure it was coming – well? Here it is! But if you think that’s all there is, get ready to be wrong.”
There’s a whole lot to get through before Peter Parker can return to the pages of Marvel Comics. ‘Superior Spider-Man’ is still around until April and things are really coming to a boil as they lead up to the ‘Goblin Nation’ storyline that will bring the series to an end. Slott teases that this week’s issue should shed some light on how things will come to be, but until those books hit the shelves, do you have any ideas as to how Peter Parker comes back from the dead? Let us know your thoughts and theories in the comments below.
