Ultimate Spider-Man is the best comic of 2024, and it looks like it wants to keep that crown in 2025. Ultimate Spider-Man #13, by Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto, picks up after the massive cliffhanger of last year’s Issue #12. Peter Parker and Harry Osborn have been the prisoners of Kraven the Hunter for over a month, and in that time the villain has come up with a fiendish — but familiar — plan to deal with them for the Kingpin.
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However, to get to that point, Kraven has taken a page from the Saw handbook. Kraven is known for his capacity for violence and his disregard for the lives of others, but this new version of the character has taken that to a new level. Ultimate Spider-Man #13 shows off just how well a Spider-Man horror movie could go, giving the perfect blueprint one could follow.
Kraven’s Torment of Spider-Man and Green Goblin Goes Further Than Physical
Ultimate Spider-Man #13 isn’t a showy comic, and that makes Kraven’s action all the more chilling. Readers first see the villain as he negotiates with the Mole Man, who on Earth-6160 is the master of the Savage Land, which lies under New York City and not Antarctica like on Earth-616. Kraven is a hunter first and foremost, and he wants to go after Peter and Harry in a place where no one has the advantage. The Savage Land is the perfect place for that and Mole Man eventually agrees to Kraven’s request, especially if he can watch the sport.
Mole Man demands to see Peter and Harry, and Kraven obliges, with the two of them joined by Mysterio. Kraven takes them to the city above and shows them the broken husks that are the two former superheroes. Kraven shares that he’s spent the last month breaking them down, first using sedation and then other drugs to discover their secrets. Interspersed through all of this were savage beatings, so they would know that Kraven was in charge, and eventually, he came up with something very effective to keep control of them: special collars loaded with bombs which will go off if the two try to escape.
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Readers get their first glimpse of Peter and Harry since the last issue as broken and beaten, sitting at a table loaded with food, one final meal before the hunt. It’s an extremely effective way of establishing what’s been happening to the two of them. Instead of going into the gory details panel by panel, Hickman and Checchetto show the aftermath of Kraven’s not-so-gentle ministrations, with the book’s two heroes husks of their former selves. However, Kraven has one card left to play, one that targets the only things that Peter and Harry care for the most: their families.
Kraven threatens Gwen and the Parker family in order to force Peter and Harry into going along with his hunt. This is Kraven’s most monstrous act; he has tormented the two men into finding the one thing they will fight for, showing how willing he is to spill innocent blood to get what he wants. Peter and Harry agree and are dropped into the Savage Land, where Peter is forced to save Harry’s life almost immediately, his superpowers allowing him to fight off the monsters of the Savage Land. Spider-Man and Green Goblin are in a whole new world, one where new rules apply.
Ultimate Spider-Man #13 Is Yet Another Example of Perfect Storytelling
Horror comes in lots of different types. For years, gory slasher movies were all the rage, but later “torture porn” came into vogue. The thing these two have in common is that they both use the visual elements of the destruction of the body in the most terrible fashions as the cornerstones of their frights. However, any real horror connoisseur knows that true horror comes from allowing the mind to fill in the blanks and Ultimate Spider-Man #13 does that beautifully. Hickman and Checchetto go more for Clive Barker than Jason Vorhees, making the reader imagine all of the terrible things that Kraven did to Spider-Man and Green Goblin.
Psychological horror like this is one of the many reasons that Ultimate Spider-Man #13 is such an amazing book. The creative team has used tropes from multiple genres of fiction over the book’s run to give readers stories that have constantly risen to the top. Beyond the horror aspects, Ultimate Spider-Man #13 even establishes a new status quo for the living picotech costume and Richard Parker, adding an amazing framing device to an already brilliant story. Ultimate Spider-Man #13 truly has it all.
Ultimate Spider-Man #13 is on sale now everywhere comics are sold.
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Image Credit: Marvel Comics
