The Ultimate Universe was made with noble intentions – to find a way to make an accessible version of Marvel characters that were true to the original idea of the comics. It started with Ultimate Spider-Man written by Brian Michael Bendis with art by Mark Bagley, creating a new Peter Parker who was once again a teenager dealing with modern teen problems like balancing school work with his extracurriculars. And it worked. Shortly after, Ultimate Spider-Man gave way to Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, Ultimate X-Men, The Ultimates, Ultimate Daredevil and Elektra and even Ultimate Adventures, an attempt to create a new property that would have it’s home in the Ultimate Universe. And these series were where the problems started.
When your main goal is accessible versions of established characters, you have to also try and avoid the continuity confusion along with the numbering and title rebrands that make comics a mess. Ultimate Marvel Team-Up started as a book to introduce new versions of Marvel characters into the Ultimate Universe. Wolverine showed up in the first issue, teasing the X-Men who were in development by Bendis and Mark Millar, followed by the Hulk, Iron Man, Daredevil and the Punisher and the Fantastic Four, before continuing out until the cancelled. The problem was that most of these characters didn’t exist yet beyond what Bendis wrote in Ultimate Marvel Team-Up and many of the characters appeared in stories that contradicted what they would eventually become.
The Ultimate Marvel Team-Up Iron Man story, #4-5, provides what may be the only canonical origin for Ultimate Iron Man. It’s not the standard Iron Man because here Tony Stark is locked up with other people and someone betrayed him so there’s some corporate espionage. Years later though, Marvel tapped Ender’s Game and noted homophobe, Orson Scott Card, to provide a new origin for Tony Stark, who had been a major member of the Ultimates team. The following Ultimate Iron Man 2 part series series was incredibly complicated and confusing, as well as racist. Tony’s entire body was his brain meaning that he had to keep drunk or covered in goo to not feel pain. Eventually Mark Millar would go on to retcon the existence of the series, offering that the entire mess of a story was an anime that the real Tony Stark produced about himself, with no root in reality. The anime retcon didn’t really resolve any part of Tony’s origin though because at that point, Mark Millar had created Gregory Stark. Gregory was Tony Stark’s older twin brother who was smarter and better at everything than Tony Stark was. He was the white knight brother who we’d never heard of, but because we hadn’t gotten a real introduction to the origins of Tony Stark so it was fine. But then Gregory got killed off by Millar because he was the villain for wanting to liberate countries trapped by dictators by giving powers to the oppressed people and in doing so, replace SHIELD with his own global organization meaning he was the biggest evil. Then, in the final attempted origin story for Tony Stark, Ultimate Comics: Iron Man by Nathan Edmondson and Matteo Buffagni, Gregory is completely absent. Tony’s background is instead tied to a Sinophobic secret Chinese business conglomerate known as the Mandarin with ties to Tony’s father, Howard Stark. Though I would add that the events of Ultimate Comics: Iron Man are never mentioned again and the story feels more like a rejected 616 story where the only Ultimate Universe elements have little to no bearing on the story. And all of this all happened over a decade of storytelling at the end of which left us without a truly defined origin story for Ultimate Iron Man meaning the origin reverts back to the story from Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, before there was an official concept of Ultimate Iron Man.
Other teams that had actual series as opposed to miniseries suffered other fates related to the same inconsistencies. Both Ultimate X-Men and the eventual Ultimate Fantastic Four (which yet again ran directly against the Ultimate Marvel Team-Up depiction of the team) started strong before being torn apart by the lack of consistency and direction. Ultimate X-Men began with the classic idea that the X-Men were the mutant students of Charles Xavier who worked to save a world that hated and feared them. It was a dark and edgy take where the government turned the mutants into soldiers for their war on terror and the X-Men had to save them. Classic villains like Magneto and Proteus were refreshed and brought into a post-9/11 world. The idea of mutant celebrities and non-human mutants was brought up contemporaneously to Grant Morrison’s New X-Men. And then the creative teams changed regularly and the book struggled between writers looking usually unsuccessfully for ways to tell old stories in new ways but being unable to bring truth. After becoming SHIELD funded, supported by two different cults of the Phoenix, and facing a dark timeline that went nowhere, the initial volume ended with the majority of the team having become addicted to a drug made from Wolverine’s blood and Jean Grey losing the majority of her powers due to her dead father patronizing her. That’s also not mentioning the infamous story where the mutant Nightcrawler found out his teammate and best friend Colossus was gay. In response, Nightcrawler kidnaps his teammate, Dazzler, who was previously in a coma and gaslights her into living underground. His deceit is revealed to the entire team before he is kicked out of the X-Men. Then as an outcast he becomes the leader of a group of underground mutant outcasts known as the Morlocks. Unfortunately, he fails to prevent their death by Apocalypse, and even though Apocalypse’s actions are undone by more plot machinations, without any comment, Nightcrawler appears back with the X-Men in the next issue playing baseball and it is never mentioned again. The X-Men became more focused on finding new and edgy stories that their core had vanished when Ultimatum occurred.
Meanwhile the Ultimate Fantastic Four series struggled to a purpose from the beginning. The core of the Fantastic Four is traditionally telling stories about a group of scientists and explorers who are also importantly a family. The problem was that where the Fantastic Four should have been about finding new ideas with this family, the book barely moved past the perfunctory nature of a greatest hits album. Classic Fantastic Four villains like Moleman, Annihilus, and even Namor came through unchanged from their 616 counterparts. The only completely new idea that appeared was the invention of the Marvel Zombies Universe. The cost of this discovery ultimately led to the banishment of Doctor Doom whose changes under Warren Ellis had been controversial for their differences, notably his entirely metallic satyr-esqe body. This removal inadvertently caused issues later on when Doctor Doom reappeared without comment, looking and acting like the classic 616 Doctor Doom until his demise in Ultimatum. This death of Doctor Doom was eventually retconned at the tail end of the Ultimate Universe to have been Mary Storm, the mother of Sue and Johnny who worked for Doom. But even then, Brian Michael Bendis with 2 issues to go in his Spider-Man run introduced the idea that Doctor Doom was leading Hydra, despite a total lack of setup or logical sense . New concepts and characters did finally come with the arrival of Mike Carrey who went to explore the team’s relationships while also more actively questioning the activities and choices of Reed Richards that had only been grappled with in crossover events, eventually resulting in his degradation into the villainous Maker. But Carey left and the book returned to questioning what the purpose was until “Ultimatum” hit.
Both X-Men And Fantastic Four’s lack of consistent writers and themes meant that the book could change direction completely, undo what was done, completely ruin characters, or leave them stuck in other corners, forgotten and dying.
The one book that generally avoided this fate was Ultimate Spider-Man, which is usually the go-to recommendation for an Ultimate Universe series to read. The only mandatory reading outside of the main series is the Ultimates and Spider-Man limited crossover series, Ultimate Six, which makes rereading the run simple. The series is generally successful in avoiding Ultimate Universe continuity changes while retelling older stories in a new light as well as telling new stories. The biggest strike against the book is the result of the homogenous nature of the creative team of Bendis and Bagley which means the book is filled with an almost entirely white cast. The only notable character of color who has a storyline is Ben Reilly, who is a lab assistant whose name is mostly used as a callback to the Spider-Man clone who ends up creating Carnage. Joe “Robbie” Robertson exists as another voice of opposition against J. Jonah Jameson, Blade is Wesley Snipes Blade, and Kenny “Kong” McFarlane is Caucasian though his ethnicity in other media has been different.
When you eventually do arrive at Miles Morales, the Afro-Latinx Spider-Man, Bendis treats Miles differently than he ever treated Peter Parker. Bendis immediately puts Miles through ringer after ringer, either because Miles is completely unlucky or because Bendis is unsure of what to do with Miles as a character. Miles gets his powers from a spider bite connected to Norman Osborn. His uncle, the Prowler, blackmails him into working as an enforcer until Miles stands up to him, which leads to the Prowler’s death. Spider-Man is then blamed for the murder of his uncle until he gets absolved of it from outside intervention. All the while, Miles is regularly questioned, insulted, and also criticized for not being Peter Parker’s Spider-Man. Eventually he tries to join SHIELD and then quits because he decides he’s not good at it. Then he loses his mom while fighting a knock-off Venom because a policeman accidentally shoots her. He quits being Spider-Man for a year as a result but finds other teens with similar origins and tries to work with them. Then when things start to look up when he finally decides to return to being Spider-Man, it gets worse. Bendis makes Miles’ father, the unfortunately named Jefferson Davis, abandon him, the girl Miles has been seeing has ties to Hydra, and Peter Parker returns from the dead demanding his web shooters back. In the 12 issue post Cataclysm series, the large chunk of the issues is spent with Miles justifying himself being Spider-Man. And then at the very end, Bendis scrambles to wrap up loose ends, gives Jefferson Davis an origin story with 2 of the last 5 issues, before quickly rushing Miles through 1 more ringer against all of HYDRA and Doctor Doom which mostly wraps up off panel without a satisfying conclusion. I’m not saying that Ultimate Peter Parker never had it rough, but he never had it as rough as Miles Morales had. When Peter lost Gwen Stacy to Carnage, she returned. When his allies died, most of them had turned out to be evil. The amount of problems given to Miles was so ridiculous that when the Ultimate Universe was destroyed, they had to give Miles a fresh start by giving him a new universe with his parents back together and alive.. If you want to get into Miles Morales, the character works more effectively in the Spider-Man: Enter the Spider-Verse film, even though they changed Miles’ father into a cop. In the comics, Jefferson is initially painted as an active anti-mutant bigot. He also abandons his son which includes completely moving out of a New York apartment in 4 hours with a broken leg by himself while Galactus is attacking New Jersey and a plane has crashed in the street outside of their house. The attempted justification doesn’t really pan out either, adding in more confusion with the timeline. Ultimately Bendis has Jefferson apologize but both it should be viewed both in universe and as something being read, too little, too late.
The Ultimates stand as the other factor here. The jingoistic parody of hoo-hah nationalism after the events of 9/11 that really fails to criticize the jingoism. They started as the Ultimate Avengers in theory (though the actual Ultimate Avengers would also exist) while taking the team dysfunction scale up to an 11 out of 10. Where the Avengers were made to exist as a team of heroes who had to come together despite the odds to save the day, Millar as the writer wanted to deal with complicated ideas of what heroes are and what we expect of them. Millar wanted realism in his superhero comic. He limited the size of Giant Man due to cube law. But then also at the core it portrayed Captain America from WW2 as a good boy from Brooklyn would be super supportive of fascism and he would be the Captain America that everyone with a Punisher bumper sticker on their car would love. The initial enemy of the run is the Hulk, who is an actual rampaging monster that the team has to fight and then hide that the Hulk is an associate. This isn’t even mentioning the actual depictions of assault and abuse as Hank Pym regularly assaults his wife, Janet van Dyne. There is also the politics of having Thor, the only member of the team critical of the military agenda of Nick Fury being depicted as actually mad.
Once Millar left after the second Ultimate series, the book and spinoffs fell into weird hell pits where the Squadron Supreme showed up to put over J. Michael Stracyznski’s Supreme Power by stealing Ultimate Nick Fury. This series was followed up by the failed mystery of Ultimates 3 over who killed the Maximoff twins. The twist was they weren’t actually murdered, even though it looked as thought the robot Ultron was behind it. Of course, the second twist was that Doctor Doom was involved, but this was not the actual Doctor Doom, but Johnny and Sue’s mother, Mary Storm. The series also served to introduce Ultimate Black Panther who exists as a mute mutant who was kidnapped by SHIELD. The problem was the Black Panther never does anything because for almost the entire series, he is actually Ultimate Captain America. Black Panther then vanishes and is never seen again. The Ultimates were a team solely because the Avengers were a team and the name The Ultimates meant something – and questioning that necessity, and the necessity of the other stories, justified asking “what happens if we kill a bunch of people?” which led to “Ultimatum”.
As someone who has spent an exorbitant amount of time reckoning on “Ultimatum”, I will say it is unfairly maligned as an event overall. The core idea of Magneto being a dictator with a superpowered army trying to destroy the world after his children are killed is a strong core. If they can’t be his legacy, then it will be the destruction he can bring. There are also good tie-in books that are forgotten, like where the Fantastic Four do a Fantastic Voyage and find that Reed Richards, who isn’t around because he blames everything on Doctor Doom, has put nanites into every member of the team. I will also admit that there needed to be an editor who could turn to Jeph Loeb and say “you’ve lost your kid and that is rough, but like – you and Magneto could both use some therapy and second passes on this book”. Villains randomly turn cannibalistic and wander around New York City for no reason.
For a lot of people “Ultimatum” is, entirely reasonably, the end of the Ultimate Universe with Spider-Man being the only title that really restarts. The following generation of Ultimate Comics is mostly publishing while trying to find their next steps. There are some stars on the rise in the miniseries with Jonathan Hickman on Ultimate Comics: Thor, and Jason Aaron on Ultimate Comics: Captain America but there is very little in the core books. It’s an era looking for a next step and it finds it when Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man resumes numbering for the big 150 just in time to kill off Peter Parker. This is partnered with the heel turn of Ultimate Reed Richards in the “Ultimate Doom” trilogy as he seeks to take over the world to save it, along with the revelation that mutants were man-made, and are not the next step in human evolution.
And the big tease coming out of the death of Spider-Man was the introduction of Miles Morales as the new Spider-Man, coming out of Fallout. This character shift was accompanied by new titles with big name writers and artists looking to make their mark. Jonathan Hickman starts with The Ultimates and Hawkeye dealing with world level threats that actually feel like they have impact. Reed Richards now going as The Maker destroys all of Asgard and most of Europe with his City of Tomorrow and in Asia, a new generation of man made mutants leads to a revolt. And then along with Miles, the Nick Spencer X-Men mostly deal with racist cyborgs, exploitation of mutants as resources, robots possessed by the ghost of the leader of the racist cyborgs, and a lot of buildup to events that never happen like the reappearance of the dead Charles Xavier, Magneto, and Apocalypse.
Once Hickman leaves, the Ultimate Universe starts wilding and the scale of “anything can happen ” turns into “we need more problems to solve” now as Sam Humphries takes the reigns. This leads to the first Ultimate Universe summer event across in “Divided We Fall/United We Stand”. The United States broke apart after the central government in Washington DC was previously killed by The Maker. Entire states now withdraw from the United States in a matter of hours and amass armies to fight anyone who would force them back together. Meanwhile Tony Stark finds a talking tumor, and Captain America is elected by write-in vote President America because he wanted to punch people. Then shortly after he decides to step down so he can punch more people. The X-Men get into nation building on a reservation after Nick Fury turns them into a fighting team before he leaves to join up with Hydra while Miles Morales gets chased by a giant woman through a cornfield and has a lot of mixed emotions. It is an era of sound and fury adding up to nothing – why was there a civil war? Thor’s son, Modi, who Thor saved during the destruction of Asgard, found a magic stone that let him control people and decided to make his own kingdom since Asgard was destroyed. Modi built Hydra mostly with mind controlled people and all of the issues that the states claimed to have were caused by Thor’s son trying to create dissent. There were never real issues in the United States.
And after the Humphries era ended, Joshua Hale Fialkov took over and in a true bit of continuity crafting, pulled out a satisfying end to the Ultimates. Tony’s tumor turned out to be one of the Infinity Gems which was captured by the Dark Ultimates, a team of evil geniuses. They in turn wanted to save the world and were unafraid of using power to get there. Meanwhile Kitty Pryde turned her reservation into a fully autonomous mutant homeland. The biggest threat was Jean Grey who wished to annex all mutants into her nation of Tian, so Kitty was forced to rail gun Tian into oblivion. Also after meeting Cloak and Dagger, teen superheroes mutated by the Roxxon Corporation, Miles decided to be Spider-Man again to fight Roxxon.
The end of the Ultimates’ world went well enough that Fialkov was given the reins to guide the Ultimate Universe in “Cataclysm” which is the only good Ultimate Universe crossover. When the 616 event “Age of Ultron” releases their Galactus into the Ultimate Universe, Galactus merges with the Ultimate Galactus into a truly dangerous threat. Fialkov, writing on the majority of titles, weaves in almost every lost thread from the Ultimate Universe— the return of Vision and MODOK from back in the Ultimate Gah Lak Tus crossover to the quickly forgotten City of Tomorrow that opened Hickman’s Ultimates run. The event ends with the entire world deciding that because Kitty Pryde, a mutant, defeated Galactus, that mutants aren’t something to fear, while SHIELD is dismantled for not preventing the appearance of Galactus. It ultimately serves as a hard reset with the goal of making new jumping on points but fails to deliver them.
In Miles Morales: Ultimate Spider-Man, Miles Morales deals with Peter Parker’s return as well as his father’s history and Hydra. In Fialkov’s Ultimate FF the book works on tying up plot holes and cleaning continuity but suffers from very inconsistent art. In the final book, Michel Fiffee homages gang films with a teen superhero twist in his All-New Ultimates before Hickman returns for Secret Wars and blows up the Ultimate Universe, ignoring the continuity that happened after he left the Ultimates.
While Marvel attempted to build new places to get into the Ultimate Universe after the “Death of Spider-Man”, none of the books worked well as an introduction. While I love Fialkov’s era for tying up plot holes and presenting expansions on ideas, the books weren’t something for new readers. There were plenty of people who left the Ultimate Universe after Hickman left Ultimates and never returned. In fact, the big problem was for something meant to be able to attract new readers, the Ultimate Universe instead provided a large number of regular jumping off points for any readers that they had.
If the goal of the Ultimate Universe was to make accessible comics that were true to the core idea, we didn’t end up with that. Spider-Man was spending his time trying to define himself against the expectations of the other Spider-Man, the X-Men as an entity vanished after Kitty Pryde punched out Galactus beyond cameos, the FF were a weird thinktank exploring cosmic dangers while fighting themselves, and the All-New Ultimates were a bunch of teens fighting street crime and super drugs. In that sense, I don’t think the Ultimate Universe achieved its goals as regularly as it abandoned them. It was in many ways, too tied to the past of what happened in the main Marvel Universe to try and tell new stories or invent new ideas. Mike Carey’s Fantastic Four run introducing Jack Kirby New Gods analogues might have been the closest but even that eventually introduced Thanos. Now, 20 years after it started, Ultimate Spider-Man is dated, a new generation is more familiar with Miles Morales, and offering someone the Ultimate Universe as something to read comes with caveats and warnings. Even creating new series set inside the universe would do little more than serve the few readers who have read everything, and even then would require cleanup. It wouldn’t be a good gateway for new readers.
But I think that all is not lost and with the right application of talent, there could be a new introduction for the general populace to the Marvel characters. That way is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which cribbed a fair bit from the Ultimate Universe— like a SHIELD supported Avengers team, along with their iterations of Nick Fury and Hawkeye. I’d note that the MCU stopped going to the Ultimate Universe well when they ran out of content that worked. But if the movies don’t work, Marvel could easily use Disney support for a new Marvel series telling stories in a connected universe similar to the modern DuckTales cartoon, slowly introducing other aspects. But cartoons and movies are also avoiding the real problem which is how to get people into reading comics.
How do you make comics the primary format for these stories that aren’t American mythology but who are globally known characters? The root of it is that there needs to be a core idea and a goal to the books themselves. What is the core of Iron Man? What do you want out of an Iron Man story? What needs to be said, if anything. And if the questions lack answers, they don’t need to be told at that time.
Part of the problem with the Ultimate Universe was so many people grew up loving stories and characters and wanted to tell their versions of the stories. Many of the stories never even left the shadows of the originals. If the characters and series have a core idea – then there is nothing wrong with bringing in creators who can find new stories to tell with those ideas without reusing the same supporting casts they’ve had for decades. This is a chance to bring in people who have different backgrounds and experiences to find ways to tell their stories to bring in new audiences.
And looking at alternate audiences is equally important. If Marvel can find the talent to tell the stories – it needs to equally search for new ways to tell the stories. I’m talking about multi-platform content that reaches people— and that solution is a web/print/digital initiative. In many ways if Marvel wants to reach out to readers, it needs to make a fresh start with digital comics as a concept. Not just posting the comics onto Comixology or Marvel Unlimited. It needs to consider making content for digital comic reading platforms like Tapas or Webtoon where you have creators who don’t even touch the direct market telling and who are delivering stories to potential new readers.
Marvel can try to create multi-format comics with regular online posts – 3-4 times a month, followed by releasing a standard digital comic to be released for free on your Marvel Unlimited, Comixology, and Amazon for people preferring that format, and then at the end of the month, the print copy of the comic is released as well with some additional pages of content to justify a cost of the comic.
The added benefit of doing this now compared to 20 years ago is that audiences understand topics like the multiverse better. Executives don’t need to shy away from the idea that multiple iterations of characters who are very different exist. Into the Spider-Verse got acclaim while presenting the idea and even DC is recognizing the benefits now as they accept the idea of having multiple theatrical iterations of Batman at the same time.
By creating a new universe or universes that the iterations of these characters can exist in, it frees creators and audiences from the expectations of what they have seen before, while staying true to a core. If a series loses a writer there can be new material to build on instead of deciding to wedge in old content, as long as it sticks to the core. With the removal of a financial incentive to the content, creators are free to try new stories and to even conclude stories instead of needing to keep them running forever.
If the goal is to make new accessible stories, then it is a chance to expand further, to try new things, and to take risks. It is a chance to tell stories that haven’t been told before, to reach audiences that people have not cared for before, and to make comics Ultimate in a way that they weren’t before.
Luke Herr
Luke Herr does a lot of ridiculous things, and some of the ones that people enjoy are MultiversalQ and Exiled.
