It began as a Hail Mary maneuver. Ultimate Marvel was a publishing experiment launched by Marvel Comics — the superhero-comics company that had invented the Avengers, Spider-Man, the X-Men, and countless other icons — during its darkest hour. The idea was simple: Launch various comics series where all the famous Marvel characters are young again and just starting their superhero careers in the modern day. Give the series flashy titles like Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate X-Men and make sure no reader will have to go back and read decades’ worth of comics to understand what’s going on. Return to core principles. Make these icons fresh again.
There were many reasons the initiative could have failed, but it instead succeeded beyond its creators' wildest dreams. Indeed, the world of Marvel movie adaptations — including this summer's megahit Avengers sequel and upcoming Fantastic Four — owe more to the Ultimate imprint than any other single Marvel Comics initiative. And yet, 15 years after the Ultimate line’s birth, Marvel just killed it. Last week, a five-issue miniseries called Ultimate End debuted, and when it's done, there will be no more Ultimate Marvel. There is little mourning, even within die-hard comics fans who once loved the imprint.
What happened? Why dispose of something so successful? To find the answers, we must look at the secret history of Ultimate Marvel. It's a story of desperate ambition, shocking triumph, and fevered imagination. But it's also a cautionary tale: one about pushing limits too far, holding on too long, and learning to accept the forces of entropy. Here, then, is the tale of Ultimate Marvel, one of entertainment's greatest reboots — but also living proof that all reboots can become victims of their own success.
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“When I got hired, I literally thought I was going to be writing one of the last — if not the last — Marvel comics,” says now-legendary comics writer Brian Michael Bendis, who wrote the first comic of the Ultimate line and will be writing the final one, too. When he wrote that first issue in 2000, the once-venerable Marvel was in chaos. “It's so the opposite now, that people don't even know.”
Here’s some context to understand the red-alert disaster the comics industry had become by the eve of the Ultimate experiment. In 1993, annual combined comics sales across all publishers had been close to a billion dollars; in 1999, that same number was a microscopic $270 million. In 1989, Batman was the most-talked-about movie in America; by 1999, the disastrous Batman & Robin had squirted a stink on the very idea of a cinematic comic-book adaptation. Marvel especially was feeling the burn: It went through a humiliating Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the late '90s, saw wave after wave of layoffs, and executive leadership was shuffled every few weeks. In 1999, after years of comics-publishing dominance, the company lost its top spot in industry market share and watched its rival, DC Comics, take the throne.
There was a wide array of causes for Marvel’s woes — the collapse of a comics-as-collectible-items bubble and multiple defections by top artists, for example. But one ailment was obvious to any brand-new reader who bought a Marvel comic for the first time: There was so much backstory that the stories were almost incomprehensible.
Ever since Marvel’s first comic in 1939, nearly every superhero story it published had to fit into a shared, ongoing universe of characters and events. There was some fudging of time frames (Spider-Man was introduced as a teenager in 1962, and by 1999, he was only in his 30s or so), but every story was built on the back of every previous story, and all stories were interconnected: Iron Man might talk about some battle that had occurred in X-Men, Mr. Fantastic would remember things that happened in comics published 20 years prior, and there were regular companywide “crossover events,” where all the heroes would fight the same evil at the same time.
If you’re confused by that description, don’t worry — so was everyone else. Sixty years of continuity had set an insanely high bar for understanding what was happening in a Marvel comic, even if you were a die-hard fan. (To be fair: DC also had this problem.) What's more, everything in Marvel looked and sounded behind-the-times. In a world where geek audiences were flocking to watch the sleek, leather-clad, hip (by 1999 standards) action of The Matrix, Marvel’s stories were alienatingly ridiculous. In the pages of Marvel’s flailing comics series, you might see the Avengers — wearing uniforms of clownish purple or baby-blue — fighting wooden-dialogued villains with names like Kang the Conqueror and Lord Templar. Spider-Man was a married stiff who spent years trying to solve the mystery of whether or not he was a clone. And the characters were all so old: The phenomenon of ongoing continuity meant the original X-Men hadn’t been teenagers for decades. A pop-culture empire lives and dies on young-adult interest, and Marvel’s was fast receding.
Of course, that could have been a suicidally horrible idea if executed poorly. (Imagine some 55-year-old veteran comics writer penning a Spider-Man title where Peter Parker wears a backwards baseball cap and yells “Bodacious!” after hitting Green Goblin with a skateboard.) The company needed fresh and relatively young talent writing such stories. Luckily, Marvel had a charming, freshly minted editor-in-chief with great respect in the indie-comics world: Joe Quesada, who quickly sought out writers from outside the Marvel family. Quesada (who could not be reached for an interview) also had the virtue of being a devoted company man: Jemas recalled that Quesada would’ve preferred to “tell stories about new heroes, e.g., Peter Parker’s nephew,” rather than do a reboot, but went along with the Jemas plan nonetheless.
While Quesada was headhunting, Jemas struggled to find the right way to conceptualize his new initiative (at that time tentatively titled “Ground Zero,” a name that fortuitously was abandoned). Comics companies had tried to jettison decades of storytelling before, and it usually ended in failure. Do you create a story where some cosmic event resets the clock on 60 years of continuity? DC had done that with its “Zero Hour” event in 1994, and it only ended up making everything more confusing for readers. Would you send your best heroes into another dimension, where they were somehow rejuvenated? Marvel did that with its “Heroes Reborn” event in 1995, and sales were abysmal (as were relations between executives and creators).
He opted for an extremely simple premise: There would be a new Spider-Man series and a new X-Men series, in which all the characters were still young. That’s it: No explanations about why, no complicated in-continuity sci-fi justifications about interdimensional travel, nothing. Just stories where the most basic archetypes were in place — Peter Parker getting spiderlike powers after a spider bites him, the X-Men being superpowered mutants in a world that fears and hates them, Wolverine being grumpy, and so on — but where the characters were all starting out in the world of 2000, beginning a new continuity.
And Jemas had a firewall against failure, too: Marvel would continue to publish the existing Spider-Man and X-Men series, the ones with hundreds of issues of complicated, old continuity. They — the so-called “mainstream” Marvel series — would be unaffected. The rebooted tales would simply exist in another fictional universe — and if those stories didn’t sell, Marvel could just cancel them without affecting existing mainstream continuity. There was no reason not to give it a try. Jemas and Quesada don’t recall how they hit upon the name “Ultimate” for the branding, but it came up at some point and stuck in their minds. They aimed to launch Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate X-Men by year’s end. But as the months wore on, the talent hunt was getting dire. “Honestly, I kissed a lot of frogs,” Jemas recalled.
That’s when Quesada made a fateful phone call to Brian Michael Bendis. At the time, Bendis was a struggling freelance indie-comics writer/artist whose biggest claim to fame was a mediocre-selling historical drama about a serial killer from the 1930s. “My normal was, I’ll sell 2,000 copies of a comic, get a check for $400, and then hustle to do caricatures all weekend to make some real money,” Bendis recalled with a laugh. So he was shocked when Quesada got in touch and told Bendis to pitch a back-to-basics Spidey story where Peter Parker was a teen and everything was a blank slate. Apparently, one of the previous auditionees had written a word-for-word adaptation of Spider-Man’s 1962 first appearance, but with modern décor. Bendis knew he had to avoid that approach: “When you do that, it just dries it up. You’re basically a cover band, at best.”
Instead, he won the gig by writing an elegant script that read more like a TV pilot than a '90s superhero comic: There were no thought bubbles of internal monologue, no rushed exposition, not even a costume in the first issue. And it didn’t feel self-consciously “modernized”: There was no shock-value violence, and the 30-something Bendis wisely went easy on teen slang (though there are some snippets that haven’t aged well, e.g., “See you on the flipmode”). The first issue was 45 pages long — more than twice the length of an average comic — which allowed for realistic pacing and Mamet-esque conversational dialogue. Peter is 15 and speaks in the awkward tones of a bullied child. His Aunt May and Uncle Ben are kind, aging hippies who charm the reader by calmly joking with each other. Peter’s bitten by a genetically modified spider (in the mainstream version, the spider had been radioactive, but Bendis knew genetic tinkering would resonate more in 2000), and is genuinely confused and remorseful when he hits a bully and knocks the boy out with his strange new powers. None of it felt cartoonish and overwrought like mainstream Spidey. The now-famous final page is a single panel of Peter realizing he can stick to his own ceiling. He dangles upside-down, face forward, and mumbles, “Whoa — cool.” In the context of the whole issue, it’s a moment of earned, simple wonder.
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