Superboy

Spider-man doesn't make sense anymore. Reading old Spider-man comics, it doesn't make sense for the character to be young anymore. The character is old now. To see Peter Parker taking pictures of Spider-man, still struggling financially, and fighting the same old villains over and over again, has become tiresome but more importantly, it's become nonsensical. Nothing new has been done with the character that didn't involve rewriting an old story.

Like Batman and the X-men franchise, there isn't any tension anymore. Kraven, The Green Goblin, and Venom are now a joke. There was a time when Spider-man's rogues gallery made the reader feel almost as if it was unfair for a hero like Spider-man to be facing villains of this magnitude. And that was the heart of the character really, someone who faced challenges that were always appeared greater than his capability to handle. Somehow, he found the strength to win, and that's why he has resonated so well with readers. Seeing villains that were once threatening, that once gripped readers, become totally neutered is a travesty, but perhaps, it is inevitable. The hero always triumphs, even though there are costs. And great villains can never seem to stay dead.

So we come to Ultimate Spider-man, a dim look into a possible history of Spider-man if he were born a little closer to the modern age. The challenge with USM is not telling good Spider-man stories; that's what the 616 Spider-man is for. The challenge lies in creating the groundwork for a mythos that will attempt to grip a whole new generation of readers, and an older generation that is trying to recapture, or remember at least, why they loved Spider-man.

And in its attempt to establish a history for Spider-man, it's fallen far short of the original incarnation. And ironically enough, this is because it lies so incredibly close to the 616 Spidey that creating history for this new and awesome idea isn't working because everyone already knows how the story turns out. What Bendis doesn't realize is that the mythology for a character is not grounded in where they began, but rather, those critical points where they end up at a crossroads, and how they got there. And in that respect, tweaking and slightly altering some of the finer points of Spider-man's origin and his villains hasn't done enough to really make us feel like we're reading a modernized version of the character, because in the end, all the chips fall the same way.

Lastly, with regard to the actual execution, the book has long been criticized for its pedantic dialog as well as its rather busy panels that seem to want to cram so much story in, while at the same time decompressing them for greater depth. The audience is both bombarded by a glut of plotting and denied any satisfaction from reading a single issue.

zombiezilla

As I generally only read the trades, I don't give a fig about being "denied any satisfaction from reading a single issue". I want long/involved story arcs.

GearsWar666

I am LOVING Ultimate Spiderman!!! I love the Ultimate Comics, period. I think the artwork is great and the storytelling isn't as complex as say "Astonishing X-Men"

JustinCleveland

I concur, even though I buy every Ultimate title individually. A lot of writers, Bendis, Millar, and even Kirkman (to an extent) make satisfying single-issues that are part of a larger story. Going back and reading entire runs, then, adds to the experience.

Superboy

Millar and Kirkman don't write decompressed storylines. Each issue has multiple events happening. Decompressed means that there is one singular, linear event happening and it is spread out over several issues.

taffer

I quit reading Marvel comics way back during the craptastic Clone Saga of the '90s. Yes I hated that storyline so much that I quit reading Marvel altogether.

A year or so ago, I wanted to get back into Marvel comics, and I saw all the countless Spider- and X- titles. I figured it would be way too hard for someone like me who had not read any Marvel comics in 10+ years to just pick up it up and not get utterly confused. I found out about the Ultimate line which reinvented most of the original Marvel heroes, so I picked up some of them.

Maybe it is because I am just a lot older now than when I first started reading Amazing Spider-man, but the 15 year old Spider-man in the Ultimate universe doesn't appeal to me. All the teenage dialogue grates on my nerves. I also really hate the Green Goblin "monster". I much prefer the Green Goblin from the original universe. I got to about issue #40 before I got fed up with all the teenage crap and quit reading the Ultimate series.

JustinCleveland

That's your interpretation, and I respect it. However I do not believe that each issue of The Ultimates can be read alone. There may be multiple sub-plots, but each issue is part of a larger arc. Without that context, the issues are incoherent. That is why I will stick by my statement that Millar and Kirkman are "decompressed," as it were.

I think the world of both of them, that having been said.

boredsilly

This is why I prefer Ultimates to the other ultimate line comics. It still hits some similar beats, but the characterization of the Avengers is definitely different and updated. Ok, well really the Avengers have just been Authority-arized, but still it works. Same with Millar's Ultimate FF stuff.

Ultimate Spidey is a curious beast. It certainly has its fans and is probably the definitive Spidey for a lot of people. I liked what I read, but not enough to really seek out more stuff. I do think Bendis couldn't be as radically different to start as some of the latter Ultimate stuff because of it being first.

When it comes down to it, Ultimate Spidey just isn't that interesting to me. I greatly prefer the grown up 616 Spidey over Ultimate Spidey, even if I'm not really a Spider-man fan. I know it's a love-hate deal around here, but I would really like to see Bendis write 616 Spidey proper. I really liked Bendis' writing of him in New Avengers.

Adam Tyner

If I were ever really bored, I'd chart Ultimate Spidey issue by issue with a count of how many other titles Bendis was writing at the time. I loved the first couple years of the book -- the hardcovers I picked up were just infectiously fun with the type of snappy, clever dialogue I wish I had the talent to write -- but from that point on, I found myself getting less and less out of Ultimate Spidey with each successive hardcover. I almost bailed after the borderline-unreadable fifth collection with the Sinister Six and the 'movie' plot. It seems like it's pulled out of that nosedive a bit, but Spidey's lost that child-like sense of joy that made it so fun to read early on, and I wonder how much of the book's decline is owed to Bendis spreading himself too thin.

Superboy

The Ultimates is an entirely different beast altogether. For example, Millar is almost doing an unintentional meta-analysis on the Avengers, and maybe all of comic dom.

This review: http://www.thefourthrail.com/reviews...ngers501.shtml

Summarizes how Avengers Disassembled was less about the way Avengers really was than how people can easily twist them to be, if viewed through a one-dimensional lens. And really, that's what the Ultimates are: one dimensional reincarnations of their former selves. And that really serves it up to the audience how the most memorable aspects of the Avengers really, in the end, do not define them.