By now, anyone who's even remotely interested in comic books has heard the bad news about the last issue of The Amazing Spider-Man.
Peter Parker is dead.
This isn't like the time an alternate universe Spiderman was killed off and replaced by Miles Morales, a half-black/half-Latino kid bitten by a genetically-engineered spider created by Norman Osborn.
This is the "real," main continuity Spiderman everyone's familiar with.
Doc Ock is dying, so he switches bodies with Parker, and, well, wins. Parker dies, and Otto Octavius is left in his body. Of course, with great power comes great responsibility, a lesson Octavius will learn in coming issues as he struggles with his new lease on life and the heavy mantle of Spiderman he's inadvertently placed on his own shoulders.
But will Peter Parker stay dead? It's been said that the only comic book characters who definitely can't come back to life are Spiderman's very own Uncle Ben and Thomas and Martha Wayne, the murdered parents of DC Comics' Batman.
Superman was famously killed by Doomsday, but he didn't stay dead, and the entire comic book arc is now known as "The Death and Return of Superman."
Jean Grey seems to pop out of the grave as often as she loses control and threatens half the universe.
Spiderman's fellow Avenger Captain America died, as did his sidekick and eventual Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, but both came back to life multiple times. Often character deaths are retconned as near misses, or comas, or cryogenic stasis teleportation Doombot clones -- whatever a writer needs to bring back a valuable copyrighted commodity.
But it is useful to remember that even heroes aren't immortal (though maybe some villains are), and they only stay alive as long as people keep reading and buying their stories.
So shell out some cash for a new issue or a movie ticket, and maybe Peter Parker will live again.
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