Ultimate Spider-Man's Relaunch Heralds a New Age of Heroes
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
When the Ultimate Marvel line launched 24 years ago, it wanted to bring Marvel’s heroes back to their roots, a modern world for modern titans to shape. In the last two and a half decades it lived, thrived, died, and was quietly reborn—but only now is Marvel taking the reigns on what shaping that rebirth should be, in a world with very different wants and needs than the last new Age of Heroes.
The sense of yearning for something subsumes this week’s relaunch of Ultimate Spider-Man #1, written by the architect of the X-Men’s radical Krakoan age, Jonathan Hickman, alongside art from Marco Checchetto and Matthew Wilson, and lettering by Cory Petit. We knew going in to expect a very different Peter Parker to the one we met in Ultimate those decades ago—not a teen who would one day give his life as the Amazing Spider-Man, but an older man, a father, happily married and navigating his place in a world of job pressures, bills, and the trauma that comes of any kind of lived, human life. But almost every page of the issue drips with tension, as both we the audience and Peter himself know that something is not right. Something has been lost, that should be there, and is terribly missed.
Read more
Consumer Reports Says Not To Buy These Popular Cars, Offering Alternatives You Should Buy Instead
Would You Live in R. Kelly's Newly Listed $3 Million 'Chocolate Factory' Mansion? A Look Inside
The best and worst moments from the 29th Critics Choice Awards
This Peter Parker isn’t the nerdy tween outcast most origin stories for Spider-Man present to us. He is just... a man. With each change to what we know of Spider-Man’s most-told stories presented and tweaked here, Peter and MJ’s family, May’s death, Ben’s life—itself upended when the Kingpin himself makes moves at the Bugle, ousting both the elder Parker and Jameson in an editorial reshuffling that will, perhaps, make any journalist covering this issue for work wince a little too hard—within this lingering trauma and sense of loss that suffuses New York beyond this one family, we are constantly reminded of that fact, and the offness of it. But there’s also that offness in Peter too, one that feels in part metatextual, but also reflective and earnest of a man who has lived the life he has up to this point largely unseen to us. It’s still the relatability that defines the characters that have Spider-heroism thrust upon them, but a very different feeling one, one that meets fans who grew up with Ultimate Marvel all those years ago in the here and now.
But the reason that yearning is in part at least metatext is a reveal from the last few pages of the first issue; it sets a very different tone for what’s to come in Ultimate Spider-Man. In flashback after the end of Peter Parker’s long, wild, sad day, it’s revealed that the night before, he was visited with a mysterious package claiming to be Tony Stark from six months into the future. Revealing the Makers’ plan, Tony offers Peter, as he seemingly has many other would-be heroes of the Ultimate Earth, a chance: become the heroes they were fated to be, as they are now, and usher in a new era of superheroes into a world that has spent its re-existence up until now with out them. And Peter Parker wants it.
We are used to Spider-powers being thrust upon our protagonists—after all, that is the point of Ben Parker’s lesson, to learn that the sudden arrival of this power requires its bearer to wield it with a responsibility that is just as superhuman in and of itself. To be presented with a Peter Parker that has lived the life our own has craved for pretty much his entire publication history in fits and starts—peace, love, happiness, family, and yes, loss, but the loss that comes inevitably of a life long lived—who is practically vibrating as Stark’s package opens to reveal a test tube holding a radioactive spider in it opens a fascinating well of potential for this new era to usher in. What does it mean to have a Spider-Man who chose? What does it mean to have a Spider-Man whose balance of his superheroic and personal life will be so much more different, having forged the relationships he has at this point in his life?
We have had older Spider-Men, we have had ones with happy lives alongside their webswinging alter-ego. We’ve had ones prescribed by fate, we’ve had ones who’ve seen that fate ripple out and connect them to others across the web of Marvel’s myriad realities, to be able to define in some sense what it means to be a Spider, not the. But we’ve rarely had this combination—a life lived but one yearning for change in any form. And what Ultimate Spider-Man #1 lays out for that choice is filled with such potential that we cannot help but likewise yearn to see this Peter Parker, this Spider-Man, take his first steps into a growing world of great power.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
More from Gizmodo
Steam Pulls Fan's Portal 64 Project, But Not For The Reason You Think
David Chase calls The Sopranos' 25th anniversary a "funeral" for the golden age of TV
Noah Hawley's Alien prequel show is just going to skip past all that Prometheus stuff, thanks
Sign up for Gizmodo's Newsletter. For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
