Spoiler Alert:  I will be discussing some of the details from the recently released copy of The Amazing Spider-Man #700.  If you have not read it, I recommend you do so before reading this review.

Today’s “New Comic Wednesday” was unlike any other in the past few years as the internet exploded with the news of Peter Parker’s death in The Amazing Spider-Man #700.  With coverage from news outlets such as CNN and the Associated Press pushing headlines from “Peter Parker, the Original Spider-Man is Dead” to “Marvel’s Peter Parker in a Perilous Predicament,” it’s no wonder that social media and message boards were ablaze with commentary.  It’s not often mainstream media casts its eye on the world of comics when there isn’t a movie being discussed.  Events such as the apparent “death” of Steve Rogers in the aftermath of the Civil War story arc, the marriage of Northstar, or the death of…Peter Parker—in the Ultimate Comics line—are just a few instances when the comics themselves can be found trending on sites such as Yahoo or being covered by various pundits.  With this in mind, it seems Steve Wacker and the rest of the editorial team behind The Amazing Spider-Man gave head writer, Dan Slott, the go-ahead to tell the story that many fans and other writers have longed to tell:  What if Spider-Man actually died?  But in this issue, we are meant to believe that poor Puny Parker has finally punched out for good.

By trade, I am an English teacher.  One of the lessons I tell the freshmen in my college classes is the danger of dealing in absolutes.  Of course, anyone who has any history with comic book superheroes understands that death is never permanent in comics.  Superman died only to return.  Batman never actually died in the early 1990s, per se, but he did have his back completely broken over the knee of a very enthusiastic Bane only to return his typical crime-fighting duties in about a year’s time.  He was, however, “killed” during the more recent “Final Crisis” storyline only for readers to later discover he’d been spirited off for a fun-filled romp through history.  Peter Parker was nearly given up for being a clone, and yet, he was returned to his normal status once the Clone Saga was finally cleaned up and ended.  The adage of “Bucky dead” was made invalid when Bucky—revealed to have died in a 1968 issue of The Avengers—would later reappear in “The Winter Solider” storyline from 2005.  Steve Rogers was fatally shot while in custody, but he too returned safely to the land of the living.  Are you getting the hint?  Superheroes simply do not stay dead.  So why would The Amazing Spider-Man #700 be any different?

I decided that I would swing by my local comic shop and pick up a copy to see what all of the fuss was about.  I will admit that I have not been following the series with any regularity.  Whenever Comixology has a sale on The Amazing Spider-Man, I load up on a bunch of issues; otherwise, I consider myself a fan of the earlier stuff (e.g. McFarlane and earlier).  Now, I have to give credit to editorial for designing that cover, as I spent quite a few minutes staring at the various pieces of the collage and recollecting the various issues where those images showed up and the artists who drew them.  It’s certainly the cover one would expect for an issue with this much hype built around it.  I also decided to start the issue at the very end: The letter pages.  It was obvious all stops were being pulled here as Steve Wacker had creators from all walks write in and share their various experiences with Spider-Man.  One of the most memorable to me was hearing from Klaus Janson that “the first Marvel comic I read as a kid was Spider-Man #6…that was my introduction to Spider-Man, Marvel, and the beginning of my career.  Blame it on Spidey.”  This is coming from one of the two creative forces behind Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.  Fascinating.  Gail Simone commented on how there “were two era of superhero comics…the first was the era before Spider-Man…And then the era after Spider-Man, where every writer worth their salt tried at least once to recreate that formula” of a teen-aged superhero.  Yes.  And so, going into the storyline with the feelings of nostalgia built up from the impressionistic cover art to the testimonies from the greats at the end, I began reading what is supposed to be Peter Parker’s swan song.

So does this story provide the cathartic experience one might expect following the demise of one of the most significant comic book superheroes of all time?  After reading this issue, I’m not sure it does.  Quite honestly, the “out” seems fairly obvious to me.  From an earlier issue, it seems the terminally ill Dr. Octopus used a “gold Octobot” device to switch his body and consciousness with that Peter Parker and essentially giving him the body and powers of Spider-Man.  Peter, in turn, attempts to use this device on Otto and downloads his consciousness into the device.  All-too-conveniently, Dr. Octopus accounted for this possibility and had his newly acquired skull covered in carbonadium, which would protect him from his own mind-swapping technology.  Peter finds himself caught in a dying body and after having his life flash before his (and Doc Ock’s eyes), he passes away by all appearances to the gathered crowds, a villain.  However, the reader is privy to the final exchange between the two adversaries where we (and Doc Ock) discover he now has all of Peter’s morals in addition to the memories he acquired.  Much akin to the sudden change in character at the end of Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith, the protagonist experiences an immediate shift in their worldview that causes them to go over to the other side.  In this case, Otto Octavius switches gears from declaring victory to be his only seven pages earlier to accepting the charge of responsibility and vowing to be an even more superior Spider-Man than Parker ever was.  For my part, all of this feels a little too “Deus Ex Machina” for my liking.  But since we effectively have a “soul-swapping USB Octobot,” which Peter last used to upload himself onto in an attempt to regain his body, who’s to say he’s still not partially loaded on this device and will be reloaded into his body at a future date?

There’s another commonly used convention that is used in literature, film, and comics called “Chekov’s gun.”  The theory is that if a gun is shown on the mantle in the first act, then it needs to be fired at some point before the close of the story.  We’ve seen Peter’s consciousness loaded onto the golden Octobot and we also know he disclosed his true self to the police detective, Carlie Cooper, who appears at the scene of the final battle saying little but looking deeply unnerved.  If there was any doubt that Spider-Man was, she’d hardly be concerned about the beating he was laying upon the broken and dying old villain.  The gun is loaded.  The only question is when it will be fired and when the real Peter Parker will return.  As I mentioned before, however, I have not been following the series up to this point, so perhaps this all makes more sense within a greater context.  And at some point, I may scan some of the online message boards and see if more dedicated readers have picked up on this as well.

But here’s the real heart of the issue: The Amazing Spider-Man was rebooted before, and after a while, editorial saw fit to reset things back to normal.  Much like the “deaths” of superheroes and their inevitable returns from the “grave,” series are often rebooted as a means of cleaning the palette, so to speak.  In this instance, the reboot can effectively allow the creative team the space to tell newer stories from different angles that they might otherwise be unable to explore with Peter Parker.  Once those stories have been uncovered and told, we will no doubt find out that Parker has found a way to reboot himself back into his body.  But what’s really important here is that Spider-Man will go on regardless of who is behind the mask.  This is alluded to in the story (on multiple occasions) as well as from the respondents in the letters page.  I think Akela Cooper sums up the appeal to Spider-Man best when she says: “I always considered Spider-Man the white, male-powered version of me… he was everything I wanted a superhero to be.”  Something I seem to recall Brian Michael Bendis saying was along the same lines—you never really knew who was under the mask.  So as long as whoever is behind the helm of writing Spider-Man stories recognizes these inherent qualities in our beloved hero, neither Spider-Man nor Peter Parker will ever truly die.

And on a final note, I do have to say that the backup story by J.M DeMatteis was simply superb.  It was one of those stories that brought me back to how I felt when I first read The Amazing Spider-Man #248 with Tim Harrison that remind me of the inspiring power of the superhero story.

(Art by Charles P. Wilson III)

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