During an interview with Comic Book Resources, Marvel’s Executive Editor and Senior Vice President of Publishing Tom Brevoort stops short of saying, “Once this is all undone and Peter Parker is back in the costume…” but still implies that the current goings-on in the Spider-Man titles are temporary stuff.Pressed on the controversy surrounding this week’s Amazing Spider-Man #700 and the new status quo it puts forth for the hero, Brevoort answered, “twenty years from now people will be saying, ‘Isn’t there some way we could bring back the Superior Spider-Man? I dug all those comics.’”And he’s right, of course; there are a great many fans who miss a lot of stuff from fifteen or twenty years ago. Wally West as the Flash, books like Impulse and Tom Peyer’s Hourman were all stories I adored back when they were on the stands. You know why there are people who pine for those books? Because they no longer exist.Most fans, of course, expect that this story is one designed with an endpoint and claims to the contrary made by writer Dan Slott and series editor Stephen Wacker (who also participated in the CBR interview) have been scoffed at by the readership and the Internet at large. Still, the acknowledgment that “one day, when all of this is ashes, you’ll wish you had it back” is a bit of a break with the party line of “This isn’t going anywhere.”Granted, he said twenty years–which is as long as Wally West got to be The Flash over at DC–but with a new Amazing Spider-Man movie on the way in just about two years, nobody much is expecting the new Spider-Man to last that long.
