This comic came from a conversation I had with my friend Meaghen. “Why is Mary Jane getting captured all the time?” she asked. “Can’t she just shoot them?” There were a lot of levels to the answer. First, while a lot of Spider-Man’s enemies can’t be killed by gun, most of their powers make shooting them problematic. Second, most villains have a specific weakness so you’d really have to carry around several weapons. And let’s ignore how Spider-Man would feel about it (he really goes out of his way to not kill his enemies).

For example, I’m pretty sure you could kill Chameleon, Doctor Octopus, Electro, Green Goblin, Hobgoblin, and Kraven with a gun. Probably not Kingpin though – he’s pretty fat.

I’m surprised it took us this long to do a comic with Spider-Man in it, or a Marvel character at all. Sopes and I used read a lot of Marvel comics. Spider-Man, Silver Surfer, Infinity Gauntlet, Adam Warlock, X-Men, Wolverine, Ghost Rider, and even a little Fantastic Four. I read Marvel comics from 1992 until the Spider-Man clone saga, when Peter Parker hung up the webs for good and left Ben Reilly to be Spider-Man. And then I too left comics, for a time.

Being a Spider-Man fan has invested me in the movies probably more than I should be. But with this new one coming out I’ve done some further thinking on that. From what I’ve seen of the new movie and read about it, “so far so good.” Fingers crossed true believers.