The Four Color Media Monitor

A writer at ComicBook admits the new incarnation of Ultimate Spider-Man isn't worth the paper it's printed on. At the start, interestingly, it says:

Ultimate Spider-Man (Vol. 3) hit the comic industry like a ton of bricks. It came at the perfect time; fans were quite tired of The Amazing Spider-Man and Marvel’s insistence that Peter and Mary Jane should never be together. They were ready for something different, and all signs pointed to Ultimate Spider-Man being what everyone was looking for. Writer Jonathan Hickman had written Spider-Man before but mostly in teams and back-up stories, so fans were interested where he would take an older, married Peter Parker. Add in Marco Checchetto’s pencils, and it was looking to be a perfect storm of awesome.

And I guess they believed Marvel fans would excuse the reprehensible editorial mandate so long as an alternate universe Spidey was the one who's married, huh? Sorry, but this fan won't, and it's absurd to assume everybody's going to fall for their tiresome tricks. Besides, for all we know, this series was probably quite woke regardless, and as pretentious as Brian Bendis' run on the original Ultimate line's series from the 2000s, which, in the end, merely served as an excuse for producing a diversity-pandering character, Mile Morales.

Those early issues were still great, but there’s so much going on, so much plot, that a lot of things that should have been built weren’t. We were still entertained, and what we got was interesting, but it’s telling that we loved Ultimate Spider-Man in the doldrums of 2024 but in 2025, where DC started firing on all cylinders in both the Absolute and main line, the book has fallen in the estimation of fans. Ultimate Spider-Man was a mostly good book that fans thought was great because they were so happy that we were getting Hickman writing Spider-Man and Peter and Mary Jane back together. We ended up overlooking a lot of the weaknesses of the book, I think, because of the glow of Pete and MJ. The flaws were always there, but we were blinded by the light.

[...] The book was overhyped from the beginning, I think. It’s hard to downplay just how happy it had made readers when it first started. We were looking forward to this world to explore Peter and his family, but that’s all gone. We were more willing to forgive the book its slow build when we thought it was going to be an ongoing. However, with the Ultimate Universe’s ticking clock attached to the book, the pacing looks like a huge mistake. We were sold a bill of goods, and now we’re never going to get them. It gives the whole situation an aura of disappointment it didn’t have before. Ultimate Spider-Man was never the book we thought it was going to be.

Of course not. Does Peter and MJ's connection alone make it a comic worthy of our money? Nope, and I made the point before - even if the 616 universe couple were reunited, that alone doesn't guarantee merit accompanying it, and chances are very high that, with the kind of editors/writers/artists running the store today, it could be bottom of the barrel as a result of all the PC that flooded comicdom in the past decade. An alternate universe doesn't solve the problem, but then, even restoring the Spider-marriage to the 616 universe alone doesn't either. If J. Michael Straczynski came back and wrote it again, should we trust him to suddenly deliver where he failed epically last time? Alas, no. His 2001-07 run was so full of grating political allusions and forced inconsistencies with continuity, right down to how he handled Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane, there's little chance he'd be any different if he came back for another regular run.

So why does the columnist think an alternate world take on Spidey would make any difference? It doesn't solve problems with the regular universe at all, and if the editors are going to take a woke approach to that, it's entirely possible an alternate world variant will be little different. And doesn't replace or make a perfect substitute for the original characters at all.

Perhaps these columnists might want to take a more objective approach by saying it's time to boycott Marvel altogether until they're willing to dismiss all bad creators running them, and/or are sold off to a different business with more responsibility. Regrettably, these news writers never do.

Labels: bad editors, dreadful writers, history, marvel comics, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, sales, Spider-Man, women of marvel