In best American drama tradition, the 27-year-old will be playing Spidey's teen alter-ego in what's been likened to a Batman Begins of the franchise - probably based on the Ultimate Spider-man comics.

It's a hell of a coup for Garfield - who apparently only found out he'd been cast a few minutes before being introduced to the press while at a media event to promote Aaron Sorkin's Facebook movie, The Social Network.

And it's a cracking move by director Marc Webb - as the Anglo-American (Garfield was born in the US) is a phenomenal actor. Folk have been citing his turn in last year's adaptation of the Red Riding trilogy for Channel 4 as a key source to see him in, and rightly so, but if it's a gritty teenaged performance you want, absolutely check him out in Boy A for his BAFTA-winnng turn as a notorious schoolboy killer trying to have a normal life and keep his identity secret following his release from prison.

He beat off a lot of competition to land the Spider-man role, and a lot of well-known competition at that - including fellow Brit Jamie 'Billy Elliot' Bell and Anton 'Chekov' Yelchin.

Interesting how cyclical all this is, though. Folk raised an eyebrow at Webb - best known for quirky indy romcom 500 Days of Summer - landed the director's chair, and now he's gone for a critically acclaimed but outside bet to play Peter Parker. Rewind a few years, and you had exactly the same situation with Raimi and Maguire.

If you liked last week's Doctor Who story The Lodger - you know, the flatshare comedy with that fat bloke who upset Sir Jean-Luc Picard the other week - then you may (or likely, may not) be surprised to know it started life as a comic strip in the fabled pages of the official Doctor Who Magazine.

For many guys in the 80s, the only musical they ever saw outside of Disney or Footloose was Annie, which as many know was based on the strip Little Orphan Annie. Directed by John Huston and with a strong cast, the film did quite well and still turns up on TV. The real legacy though is that if you see anyone with a red headed doll, they more or less instinctively call it Annie.

http://www.imdb.com/media/rm2462686464/tt0083564

What you may not know is that the comic had been getting dropped by a large number of newspapers and at the end was being run - after 86 years in daily print - less than 20 US papers were running it. So it got dropped.

And as endings go (which was a topic on a recent Thumbcast), this has to be up there with the best of them: she gets turned into a sex slave by a Balkan war criminal and Daddy Warbucks thinks she is dead, meaning there is little hope for rescue.

That might just top the end of Blake's 7 for the definition of downer...

(Thanks to Comics Alliance for pointing this out because, like most people, we weren't reading it)

We haven't been shy in our love of The Walking Dead as a comic/trade paperback and we've equally enthused about the upcoming show. These new shots over at AICN show quite a bit of detail in the look of the zombies and also Andrew Lincoln as lead character Rick Grimes for the new AMC show.

What I really want to see though is a crossover with Breaking Bad and Mad Men...