Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 3) hit the comic industry like a ton of bricks. It came at the perfect time; fans were quite tired of The Amazing Spider-Man and Marvel’s insistence that Peter and Mary Jane should never be together. They were ready for something different, and all signs pointed to Ultimate Spider-Man being what everyone was looking for. Writer Jonathan Hickman had written Spider-Man before but mostly in teams and back-up stories, so fans were interested where he would take an older, married Peter Parker. Add in Marco Checchetto’s pencils, and it was looking to be a perfect storm of awesome.
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For a while, it was. Ultimate Spider-Man was Marvel’s best book, vaulting over the competition to become the bestselling book in comics, selling out just about every month. It was a legitimately hot book like we hadn’t seen in a long time and it was the tip of the spear for a line of books that Marvel fans were in love with. However, eventually, the cheese would no longer stand alone. The new Ultimate line was joined by the X-Men “From the Ashes” reboot and DC’s Absolute line. Even with those, things were still looking up, with Ultimate Spider-Man #11 and #12 blowing minds. Since then, though, something has changed. Fans are no longer praising it as vociferously, and it’s no longer on the top of the charts. Things have fallen off the rails, and maybe it’s time to admit that the book always had problems.
Ultimate Spider-Man Coasted on the Peter/MJ Status Quo More than Great Storytelling
Ultimate Spider-Man was once the head of a line of books that was the definition of “new hotness”. Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate X-Men, and, to a lesser extent, Ultimate Black Panther were the coolest things happening in the comic industry throughout 2024, and they were soon joined by The Ultimates, another book everyone loved (some people like Ultimate Wolverine, but a lot of people also don’t). The line had an energy that was missing from Marvel and DC alike, and Ultimate Spider-Man rode high on the hog. Fans were ecstatic to get Hickman on Spider-Man, and Checchetto’s art was amazing. The whole thing was building perfectly.
Ultimate Spider-Man #12 was the turning point. The first year of the book had built the bedrock, and that issue’s cliffhanger ending had everyone excited for 2025. However, things haven’t exactly worked out the way they seemed they were going to. The next story arc put a giant pause on the Parker family, and the book became the Green Goblin and Mysterio book. Peter and his family felt undercooked, even after a year of set-up, and they were pushed to the back seat for the Osborns. The book was still good, but the cracks had started to show.
Here’s the thing — if the book’s first 12 issues had been better at setting up Peter as Spider-Man and his family more, things would have been different. Looking back, Hickman was so occupied in setting everything else up, he forgot to set up some important things, like Peter. We got very little of his development as a character and a hero, instead depending on the Ultimate’s book’s most frustrating trope — each story taking place a month later than the last — for readers to understand why he was suddenly better in a fight even though we hadn’t seen him getting better.
Those early issues were still great, but there’s so much going on, so much plot, that a lot of things that should have been built weren’t. We were still entertained, and what we got was interesting, but it’s telling that we loved Ultimate Spider-Man in the doldrums of 2024 but in 2025, where DC started firing on all cylinders in both the Absolute and main line, the book has fallen in the estimation of fans. Ultimate Spider-Man was a mostly good book that fans thought was great because they were so happy that we were getting Hickman writing Spider-Man and Peter and Mary Jane back together. We ended up overlooking a lot of the weaknesses of the book, I think, because of the glow of Pete and MJ. The flaws were always there, but we were blinded by the light.
Ultimate Spider-Man‘s Hype Has Overshadowed the Quality of the Book
There was once a time when Ultimate Spider-Man was nearly everyone’s favorite Marvel book. In fact, in that first year, it was probably the best book month in, month out. There always seemed to be something cool in every issue, and it was the talk of the Internet. However, eventually, the Absolute books would come along, DC K.O. would come along, and the Ultimate line took second place. Since then, USM hasn’t been able to grab the spotlight back, something that everyone would have expected it to have done in the first year.
The book was overhyped from the beginning, I think. It’s hard to downplay just how happy it had made readers when it first started. We were looking forward to this world to explore Peter and his family, but that’s all gone. We were more willing to forgive the book its slow build when we thought it was going to be an ongoing. However, with the Ultimate Universe’s ticking clock attached to the book, the pacing looks like a huge mistake. We were sold a bill of goods, and now we’re never going to get them. It gives the whole situation an aura of disappointment it didn’t have before. Ultimate Spider-Man was never the book we thought it was going to be.
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