A lot of things are still unclear about where the Spider-Man franchise is heading next summer with The Amazing Spider-Man, from the fact that relatively inexperienced indie director Marc Webb is the one handling the whole operation to wondering if 28-year-old Brit Andrew Garfield is really the right guy to play a gawky American teenager. But there's one thing that Webb wants to explain over and over again right now, and that's the mechanical webshooters, the apparatus through which our hero shoots out his super-strong webs. In Sam Raimi's take on the character the webshooters were organic, part of Peter Parker's wrists; Webb, on the other hand, has borrowed from one incarnation of the comics that has Parker building the shooters, just as he designs his own crime-fighting costume.

In an interview with The LA Times Webb goes into detail about his choice to bring back the webshooters, something he already addressed in the big Entertainment Weekly story from last month. If it makes you feel any better, Stan Lee was in on the decision:

”I had a meeting with Stan Lee and we talked about the web-shooters. I was curious about the incarnation of them [because] of course in the previous films [they went away from them] and we wanted to reestablish ourselves. That was one thing but the other thing was the fact that the web-shooters were able to dramatize Peter’s intellect and I thought that was really cool. … It was in the comics and we have a different design but it’s a cool element to have. It’s not something we over-use or over-exploit. To me, it’s something I remember from when I was a kid and thinking ‘It would be cool if I could build those.’”

Peter also designs his own costume, which Webb said was designed to make Garfield's body "longer and more lithe, more of an acrobat" and to show up better in night scenes. What he's saying all makes perfect sense, and is a little hard to gauge knowing what we do about the movie now, which is not much. I imagine there are fierce debates raging between hardcore comics fans about the webshooters, but in the final product I can't imagine it'll make much of a difference where exactly Spidey's webs are coming from. There are much bigger things to be concerned about as we wait to see how the newest incarnation of Spider-Man takes shape; we can only hope Webb is as candid about all of those as he is about this whole webshooter thing.