Ultimate Spider-Man

• 1. Introduction

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  Ultimate Spider-Man was a Marvel Comics series that ran from 2000 to 2011, and it opened with some strange arithmetic. Spider-Man's original origin story, in Amazing Fantasy #15, took only 11 pages. The new version stretched the same tale across seven issues and about 180 pages. Why would a publisher spend so much room on a story that nearly every fan already knew? The answer begins with a worry that Marvel's heroes had become hard for newcomers to approach. It also involves a lonely teenager in Queens, a spider bite, a spiteful choice at a market, and a version of New York where even the hero could die. This documentary asks how a risky restart became a hit, who built it, and what became of Peter Parker along the way.

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• 2. The Reinvention Gamble

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  Bill Jemas, Marvel's publisher, looked at more than 40 years of Spider-Man backstory and saw a wall that kept new readers out. He wanted to rebuild the Marvel Universe from the ground up, and he wanted to start with Spider-Man. Marvel's Editor-in-Chief, Joe Quesada, was skeptical at first. A 1998 attempt to retell Spider-Man's early adventures, called Spider-Man: Chapter One, had failed with both critics and buyers.

  The experiment went ahead anyway, and Ultimate Spider-Man became the first series in the new Ultimate Marvel line. Its earliest issues drew enthusiasm from fans and critics, and they sold well. That success gave the whole line a boost in credibility.

  Ultimate X-Men arrived alongside it. Quesada and Jemas then widened the line with The Ultimates, a re-imagining of the Avengers, and with Ultimate Fantastic Four. All of these titles shared one fictional setting, which the stories call Earth-1610. The writer chosen for Spider-Man, Brian Michael Bendis, had a habit that would soon startle his own artist.

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• 3. A Slow-Burn Partnership

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  Mark Bagley, a veteran Spider-Man artist, called Bendis's notoriously slow pace a "real shock" when they began working together. Jemas had originally imagined a comic made of single-issue stories. Bendis chose instead to build each story arc across roughly six issues.

  Bagley's wariness faded fast. The two found chemistry quickly and enjoyed working together, and both reception and sales stayed strong over the next two years. Bendis later named issue #13 as his favorite. In it, Peter tells Mary Jane his secret identity, and Bendis saw the scene as proof of how much the Marvel editors trusted him.

  The numbers backed that trust up. The series grew to outsell Marvel's flagship title, The Amazing Spider-Man. Readers of Wizard: The Guide to Comics voted issue #1 the ninth-greatest Marvel comic of all time in 2001. Across its life the series sold roughly 20 million copies worldwide, and the direct edition of issue #1 became one of the most valuable comics of the Modern Age.

  Bendis and Bagley also set a record for the longest continual run on a Marvel series by two people. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had held that honor on Fantastic Four. The partnership ended in July 2007 with issue #111, called "The Talk", which split its pages between Bagley and his successor Stuart Immonen.

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• 4. Guilt and Great Power

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  Peter Parker is 15 years old when the series begins, living in Forest Hills, Queens, with his Uncle Ben and Aunt May. His parents died in a plane crash, leaving him an orphan at the age of six. He is bookish, quiet, and the brightest student in his class, and he has few friends.

  On a science field trip to Oscorp Industries, a mutated spider exposed to a drug called OZ bites him on the hand. Instead of dying, he develops strength, speed, agility, stamina, reflexes and durability. He can also crawl on solid surfaces, and a sixth sense warns him of unseen danger.

  His first instinct is to use these gifts for himself. At school he blocks a punch from Flash Thompson and accidentally breaks Flash's hand. To pay the medical bill, he wrestles professionally in a red-and-blue costume supplied by the promoters. He is later fired when the promoters suspect him of stealing their money.

  On his way home through a market, an armed burglar runs past him. Still angry about the firing, Peter spitefully refuses to stop the man. That burglar later kills Uncle Ben during an attempted home invasion.

  Wracked with guilt, Peter catches his uncle's killer. He takes up Ben's motto, "with great power comes great responsibility", and reworks the wrestling costume into a Spider-Man outfit. His web fluid comes from the unfinished adhesive research of his father, which Peter completes. He fires it from wrist-worn devices called web-shooters.

  Even so, school, a job as a web designer at the Daily Bugle, a girlfriend and a double life barely fit together. The story's most drastic answer comes in "The Death of Spider-Man", where a battle with the Green Goblin kills him. He is later revealed to have survived because OZ made him immortal. After the second Secret War, he returns as Spider-Man and joins the Ultimates.

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• 5. The Supporting Cast

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  Aunt May is a secretary in her 50s who sees a therapist to cope with Ben's death. Bendis based his version of her on his own mother. She once hated Spider-Man, believing he hid behind a mask and cared little for bystanders. In issue #99 she learns Peter's secret, grows angry, and slowly accepts it.

  Mary Jane Watson is Peter's next-door neighbor and the first person he trusts with his identity. She often repairs his costume and tends his injuries. Her friend Liz Allan spends most of the series afraid of mutants, then turns out to be one herself, with the villain Blob as her father.

  Gwen Stacy follows the most haunting path. Mark Bagley drew her with inspiration from an early-career Madonna. Her father, NYPD Captain John Stacy, is killed by a criminal wearing a Spider-Man suit, and she blames the real hero. After she moves in with the Parkers, Carnage kills her, adding to Peter's guilt. She reappears in issue #98, then is revealed in issue #100 to be the new Carnage. In issue #128, Tony Stark's examination shows she is a molecular copy of the real Gwen come back to life.

  Other heroes drift into Peter's life. Kitty Pryde of the X-Men dates him and fights beside him in a green and yellow costume. In issue #106 she shows up as a new student at Midtown High. After the Ultimatum events, Johnny Storm moves into the Parker house, and Iceman joins them under the cover name Bobby Parker, one of Peter's cousins.

  The cast also has a lighter moment. In issue #85, the cat burglar Black Cat realizes Spider-Man is a 15-year-old boy and vomits on his costume out of embarrassment. Meanwhile, the Daily Bugle editor J. Jonah Jameson runs a smear campaign against Spider-Man, rooted in the death of his own son a year earlier.

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• 6. Rogues and Clones

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  Norman Osborn, the CEO of Oscorp, develops the OZ drug and, after seeing its effect on Peter, injects it into himself. He becomes the Green Goblin, a green-skinned monster built like the Hulk who throws fireballs. This may be the first version of the character without a costume, since the body itself is mutated. Bendis told Bagley to pattern Osborn's look after the actor Brian Dennehy.

  Actors shaped other faces too. Bagley based the Vulture on Jason Statham and the Tinkerer on Paul Giamatti, both at Bendis's direction. Otto Octavius, a scientist Harry calls "scary smart", has four cybernetic arms melded to his body in the blast that creates the Green Goblin. Harry himself becomes the Hobgoblin after exposure to OZ.

  Some villains are twisted by their own era. Kraven the Hunter hosts an action reality show and wants to kill Spider-Man for ratings. Deadpool hunts mutants for sport on another reality program. Electro and Sandman both gain powers from genetic tampering orchestrated by Justin Hammer.

  Venom has the strangest origin. Eddie Brock, a childhood friend of Peter, works as a lab assistant for Dr. Curt Connors. Their late fathers had been developing a living suit meant to cure a terminal illness. The suit is tailored to one person's DNA. Anyone else who bonds with it is attacked by it and must feed it organic flesh.

  The tale of the clones, which ran in issues #97 through #104, is the most tangled. Otto Octavius turns out to have played a large role in creating them. Peter meets Jessica Drew, a female clone who keeps all his memories and shoots organic webbing from her fingertips. He also meets Kaine, a flawed and mentally unstable clone. Peter's supposedly returned father Richard is revealed in issue #103 to be an aged clone, and he dies in issue #104. Nick Fury, meanwhile, had quietly arranged for Spider Slayers to "handle" Peter if he ever lost control.

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• 7. The Renumbering Maze

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  Issue #133 closed the series for a moment, and a two-issue follow-up called Ultimatum: Spider-Man Requiem showed what had become of its characters after the Ultimatum storyline. The cancellation did not last. In August 2009 the title returned with Bendis still writing and David Lafuente drawing. That relaunch was short-lived. The comic resumed the Ultimate Spider-Man title with issue #3.

  Then came the confusing part. The run returned to its original count with its 16th issue, which was numbered #150. The series ended again with issue #160. In 2011 it relaunched as Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man, with artist Sara Pichelli, and this time it centered on Miles Morales.

  Many readers found the renumbering baffling. The letter page of Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man (2011) issue #8 explained that a half-issue, numbered 0.5, had been counted in the total. Marvel Legacy later took a different approach for its own milestone issues, 200 and every issue from 234 up. It treated #54 to #133 and #150 to #160 as wrongly numbered, and it counted Ultimate Six, a seven-issue miniseries, as issues 54 through 60 of the run.

  The name did not disappear for good. In 2024, Marvel reused the Ultimate Spider-Man title for a new series set on Earth-6160, written by Jonathan Hickman and drawn by Marco Checchetto.

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• 8. The Screen Afterlife

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  Sam Raimi's 2002 Spider-Man film borrowed heavily from these comics. Its Peter is bitten by a genetically altered spider on a school field trip. He lets a burglar escape after a bad experience in a wrestling exhibition. Its Green Goblin threatens to drop Mary Jane from the Queensboro Bridge, where the mainstream comics used Gwen Stacy.

  Television came close to a direct adaptation. The series that became Spider-Man: The New Animated Series was originally going to adapt the Ultimate comics, and Bendis worked on it as a producer. Years later, an unrelated Disney XD cartoon of the same name aired from April 2012 to January 2017. Its "Spider-Verse" episodes showed that Ultimate Peter Parker had died, with Miles Morales carrying the mantle.

  Later Marvel films kept reaching back. The Amazing Spider-Man in 2012 drew on the comics for Peter's personality and for his bite at Oscorp. Spider-Man: Homecoming in 2017 recreated a bank robbery from issue #42, in which criminals wear plastic masks of Avengers members. A building in the background also carries graffiti reading Bagley, honoring the artist of the first 111 issues. The 2018 film Avengers: Infinity War kills Peter at age 16, much like his Ultimate counterpart.

  Video games joined in. A 2005 Ultimate Spider-Man game, released on PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox, Microsoft Windows, Nintendo DS and Game Boy Advance, featured an original story and cutscenes from Bendis and Bagley. Its plot was later loosely recreated in issues #123 to #128 of the comics.

  Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, a 2018 animated film, uses the Ultimate universe as a setting and takes loose inspiration from Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man. In its sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, a band poster in Gwen Stacy's bedroom references the first issue of Ultimate Fallout.

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