Marvel’s New Ultimate Spider-Man Will Make Peter & Mary Jane Married Again

Marvel’s Ultimate Universe has been reborn, and the first ongoing series of this new era will be none other than everyone’s favorite web-slinger. Today Marvel revealed the first details on the new ongoing Ultimate Spider-Man series and will be shaking things up in a major way. The new series is written by Jonathan Hickman and drawn by Marco Checchetto and will reunite Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson as a married couple. That’s not all though, as the happy couple are also parents to a daughter and a son, and the series teases that Peter’s time as Spider-Man starts in a much different place than readers are used to. 

“When we decided that we were going to do a book about an older Peter Parker becoming Spider-Man, we really wanted to lean into him starting his super hero life from a very different place than what’s traditionally expected,” Hickman explained. “Peter and MJ being married is one of many decisions we made that underline this being quite a ‘different’ kind of Spider-man story.”

You can also check out the Parker family in two new covers by Elizabeth Torque and Ryan Stegman, and Torque will be spotlighting Peter and Mary Jane’s romance in special variant covers of the first four issues of the series. Ultimate Spider-Man #1 will hit stores on January 10th, 2024, and you can check out both covers above and below.

The foundation of the new Ultimate Universe was created in Ultimate Invasion, the four-issue miniseries that showed how The Maker created this new universe.  Hickman and Bryan Hitch were the architects of this new universe, and while Hickman had been wanting to work with Hitch for some time, the reason for the universe returning had to be sound on its own.

“I think it’s fair to say that both Bryan and I have already put in our time doing Ultimate books, so when Marvel laid this project in front of us, we both knew there needed to be a good reason to revisit the idea of ‘Ultimate Comics’ beyond telling a cool story or just getting to work together, which is something we’ve been trying to do for years,” Hickman told Entertainment Weekly. 

“So with that in mind, it couldn’t be replicating or revisiting what Bryan did in the original Ultimates – creating a streamlined, modernized version that would eventually become the spine of the MCU – and it certainly couldn’t be what I did, which was a final chapter of a pre-existing universe,” Hickman said.

“We also thought the very idea of Ultimate Comics needed to be inverted from what the original universe was. We wanted this to be something that could really only exist in the comic space: A new way of thinking about, and enjoying, a new version of the Marvel Universe. I’m pretty happy to say that it feels like we’ve accomplished those things and we’re very excited for everyone to get to read it,” Hickman said. You can find the official solicitation for Ultimate Spider-Man below.

ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #1 – 75960620796100111

Written by JONATHAN HICKMAN

Art and Cover by MARCO CHECCHETTO

Variant Cover by ELIZABETH TORQUE – 75960620796100191

On Sale 1/10

Are you excited for Ultimate Spider-Man #1? Let us know in the comments or as always you can talk all things comics with me on Threads @mattaguilarcb!