Draft:Ultimate Spider-Man (2024)

Ultimate Spider-Man is an ongoing comic book series about Spider-Man, part of the Ultimate Universe imprint. It began publication in January 2024.

The series will have Peter Parker become Spider-Man later in life, as opposed to his early/late teens. It will add focus to his wife Mary-Jane Watson, and their two children, and will be a part of the new Ultimate Universe timeline.

Plot
Peter Parker is a married man with two children, whose aunt May had recently died because of an attack by the Illuminati on New York, with the public being misled (Parker included) that the author was Tony Stark. Stark, however, reveals to him that he was supposed to be bitten by a radioactive spider during his youth and become a superhero, but the Maker prevented it. Stark had retrieved said spider and gave it to Parker, who used it on himself and became Spider-Man.

Ben Parker (Peter's uncle) and J. Jonah Jameson work at the Daily Bugle and investigate the attack on New York. They are told by the board, led by Wilson Fisk, to quit the story, but instead they resign and open a new newspaper. Peter Parker, however, stays working at the Bugle.

Publication history
Ultimate Spider-Man is the first ongoing series from the Ultimate Universe imprint, following the Ultimate Invasion miniseries that introduced it. Despite the similar name, it has no relation with the Ultimate Spider-Man comic that ran from 2000 to 2015. The former comic was a reinvention of the Spider-Man character as a teenager still attending school, in contrast with the older character from the main continuity. The new comic uses a similar angle, but makes Spider-Man older instead of younger, and also married and with two kids. Hickman said that he was inspired by the version of the character seen in the film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Another significant departure is that Uncle Ben, a character that usually dies during Spider-Man's origin story, is alive in the new continuity.

Reception
Ultimate Spider-Man #1 sold out three times in just two months. If sales for the comics with the standard cover and alternate covers are taken separately, it got 8 places in the top 10 most sold comics. User comments in social media praised the arts and plots, and compared it favourably to the main Spider-Man comics. Those sales are higher than those of Ultimate Invasion and the Ultimate Universe one-shot published before it.