Ultimate Spider-Man (2024): Jonathan Hickman's grown-up Peter Parker

The new Ultimate universe: what Ultimate Invasion set up

To understand this Spider-Man, you have to start with the miniseries that made it possible. Ultimate Invasion, written by Jonathan Hickman and drawn by Bryan Hitch, ran for 4 issues from 21 June to 27 September 2023. Its villain, the Maker, is the Reed Richards of the old Ultimate universe, Earth-1610. He rewrites the history of another Earth, numbered 6160, through time travel, with one clear goal: to stop the heroes from ever appearing.

For Spider-Man readers, it comes down to a single line: the Maker stops Peter Parker from being bitten by the radioactive spider, 20 years before the series begins. The world that emerges is secretly ruled by the Maker's Council, a body of figures who carve up the territories, from Colossus to Obadiah Stane. Marvel had already shown a rewritten reality in House of M; here, the rewrite becomes the foundation of a whole line of series.

At the end of Ultimate Invasion, the Maker is locked inside the City, which is meant to reopen 24 months later, and the line follows a real-time rule: one issue equals one month. After the Ultimate Universe #1 one-shot, published in late 2023, Ultimate Spider-Man leads the way as the first ongoing title, ahead of Ultimate Black Panther in February 2024, Ultimate X-Men in March 2024, The Ultimates in June 2024 and Ultimate Wolverine in January 2025. To place Earth-6160 among the other Earths, the page explaining the Spider-Man multiverse gives you your bearings.

A 35-year-old Peter Parker, married, father of 2

Ultimate Spider-Man #1 came out on 10 January 2024 and sets up the gap straight away: Peter Parker is 35. He never became Spider-Man as a teenager. Where the classic Peter remains the icon who never ages, this one already has a life in place: a marriage, children, a job. The series is not about growing up with powers, but about receiving them when you are already grown up.

He is married to Mary Jane Watson, who runs her own company, and is the father of 2 children: Richard, named after Peter's father, and May, after his aunt. Peter works at the Daily Bugle alongside his uncle Ben. To measure the gap with the turbulent romances of the main series, the article on Spider-Man's love life retraces MJ's story, and the page devoted to Peter Parker completes the picture.

The trigger comes from elsewhere. Tony Stark sends Peter a holographic message from 6 months in the future, along with the radioactive spider and a high-tech suit. Peter only agrees after talking it over with Mary Jane. That scene sets the tone for the 1st arc, Married with Children (#1-6): the hero is not a teenager alone with his secret, but a husband who weighs a risk with his wife before taking it.

This approach speaks first to a reader who grew up with the character and who has, like him, put on a few years. The series offers them a Peter their own age rather than a memory of youth. It is that adult reader the Spider-Man T-shirts for men are made for, designed for an adult wardrobe rather than a child's bedroom, like the retro design below.

Retro Spider-Man Comic Poster T-shirt

A washed-black T-shirt printed with the cover of Marvel Age magazine: Spider-Man caught in a finely drawn web, under the orange logo. For the adult reader who wears their comics every day, from M to XXXL.

View the product — €34.90

Family, allies, enemies: who is who on Earth-6160

The cast keeps the familiar names and reshuffles the roles. Harry Osborn does wear the Green Goblin armour, but as a vigilante, not a criminal. He is married to Gwen Stacy and teams up with Peter. The Parker family, meanwhile, becomes an engine of the story: Richard in particular takes up more and more room as the arcs go by, until he becomes a player in the plot rather than a child to protect.

Facing them, the main antagonist is Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin. The crime lord of Manhattan, he also controls the Daily Bugle, to the point that Ben and J. Jonah Jameson leave the paper to found an independent publication, The Paper, which gives its name to the 2nd arc (#7-12). This crime boss who swallows the press continues the line of bosses of the New York underworld facing the web-slinger.

In #8, the Kingpin forms his own Sinister Six. The names will be familiar to readers, but several identities change, and the table below sums up who makes up the group. This is not simply a team of villains: it is the machinery of a man who already holds the city. To compare them with the classic versions of these characters, the guide to Spider-Man's enemies covers their origins and their major appearances.

The 3rd arc, Family Business (#13-18), puts that family to the test: Kraven the Hunter captures Peter and Harry, and it is Richard who puts on the Spider-Man suit to save them. If you collect Spider-Man figures, you will recognise these villains' names faster than their faces. To avoid getting lost between versions, the page listing all the Spider-Man characters works as a handy reminder.

Uncle Ben alive, Aunt May dead: what the series changes in the myth

The most visible reversal touches the family who raised Peter. In the classic version, Uncle Ben's death founds everything: the guilt, the responsibility, the calling. Here, Ben is alive. He is an editor at the Daily Bugle and an old friend of J. Jonah Jameson. It is Aunt May who has died, killed in an attack on Manhattan shortly before the series begins.

The founding bereavement therefore shifts. The classic Spider-Man carries a long list of the dead, listed in the article on all the deaths of Spider-Man; this one starts with a recent loss and a great deal still to lose. The question is no longer what he let happen, but what he can still lose. For a father, responsibility is measured first at home, around the table.

Harry Osborn gets the same treatment. In the main series, his path from friend to enemy takes up a large part of his story, and the article devoted to Harry Osborn retraces it in detail. Here, he wears the armour as a hero. The name is still that of the Green Goblin, but the function is inverted: the symbol of betrayal becomes the symbol of a friendship that holds.

Gwen Stacy, finally, is not the tragic victim of the main series here: she is married to Harry, and her story holds a major surprise. Readers of Sins Past already know that Marvel likes to shake up this character and her past. The box that follows gives away the end of the series: skip it if you have not read #24 yet.

Hickman, Checchetto, Wilson: the team and the style of the series

Jonathan Hickman writes the series, Marco Checchetto draws it, with David Messina as additional artist, and Matt Wilson handles the colours. Hickman is not a guest here: he is the one who wrote Ultimate Invasion and set the rules of Earth-6160. His Spider-Man is conceived as one piece of a whole, which explains the presence of Tony Stark and the Maker's shadow in a series that remains, at heart, a family chronicle.

The structure was settled early. When Marvel announced at San Diego Comic-Con, in July 2025, that the series would end with #24, Hickman made clear that this ending had been planned from the start and that nothing had strayed from his original plan. The split into 4 arcs of 6 issues shows it: Married with Children, The Paper, Family Business, then One Last Day (#19-24). To place it among the great Spider-Man story arcs, the complete saga of the web-slinger is a useful guide.

Real time imposes its own discipline: one issue equals one month, and the characters age at the rate of publication. The American cover of #12 even serves as the 'Christmas' cover of the French volume 1. Issue #24, the last one, runs to 48 pages; scheduled for December 2025, it finally came out on 18 February 2026, with no established cause for the delay.

On the style side, the artwork is one of the points reviewers single out. If it is the pages that caught you, their spirit can carry on to the wall: among the Spider-Man posters and the Spider-Man decorations, the comic-style designs pick up that vocabulary of panels, halftones and speech bubbles. A reader's wall is built this way, piece by piece, above the shelved volumes.

Retro Spider-Man Comic Book Poster

Spider-Man leaps towards the reader, legs tucked in, against a background of yellowed comic panels, speech bubbles and sound effects. For the wall of a reading corner or a comics fan's office, in 8 sizes from 20x30 to 55x80 cm.

View the product — from €22.90

Sales, awards, reviews: how the series was received

Issue #1 sold out 3 times in 2 months, up to a 5th printing, and #1 and #2 were the best-selling comics of January and February 2024. According to the tally reported by Wikipedia, the series then outsold the main-universe Spider-Man titles for 11 of the 12 months of its 1st year. Spider-Man has carried Marvel's sales before, as the history of Marvel recounts; this time, it is an alternative version doing the job.

In bookshops, the first American collection entered at 19th in Circana BookScan's Top 20 adult graphic novels in September 2024, the first Marvel title in that chart in 4 years. Across the whole of 2024, it ranks 15th in the superhero category of the same panel. In the comic shop network, it entered at no. 1 in ICv2's monthly chart in September 2024 and finished 3rd graphic novel of the year after 4 months on sale.

The awards confirm the interest without crowning it. The series was nominated at the 2025 Eisner Awards for 'Best Continuing Series', a category won by Santos Sisters, and the American volume 1 competed at the 2025 Harvey Awards for 'Book of the Year', a prize given to Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath. ComicBook.com, on the other hand, gave it its own 2024 Golden Issue Award, in the ongoing series category.

Reviewers praise both the artwork and the story, and compare the series favourably with the main title, seen as frozen since the end of Peter and MJ's marriage in One More Day. On Comic Book Roundup, where the averages move with every review, the score recorded in September 2026 reaches 8.5/10 from 218 critics and 8.8/10 from 1,551 reader reviews; #1 and #24 each score 9.0 with the critics.

Reading Ultimate Spider-Man in French from Panini

In France, the series first arrived on newsstands. On 2 October 2024 Panini launched a bimonthly magazine, Ultimate Universe, whose issue 1 collects, across 176 pages, the Ultimate Universe #1 one-shot, Ultimate Spider-Man #1 and #2, Ultimate X-Men #1 and Ultimate Black Panther #1. That issue 1 exists in a softcover version and a hardback collector's edition. If this is your first comic, the guide to getting started with the Spider-Man universe will help you choose a format.

In bookshops, the collection to look for is volume 1, 'Maries, deux enfants', published on 5 November 2025 in the Marvel Deluxe range: a 320-page hardback measuring 18.3 x 27.7 cm, collecting American issues 1 to 12, already published in Ultimate Universe issues 1 to 6. Volume 2, announced for 4 November 2026 as a 328-page Marvel Deluxe, should conclude the saga; check its exact title with Panini before ordering.

Watch out for namesakes, of which there are many on this title. The paperback 'Ultimate Spider-Man T01', published by Panini on 3 April 2024 in 336 pages, reprints the Bendis series launched in 2000, not Hickman's. Same trap with the old Ultimate Universe issue 1 from 2012, with the Compendium and Omnibus editions devoted to Bendis, or with the unrelated 2012 Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon. The safe habit: check the EAN of Hickman's volume 1, 9791039138475, or 9791039140744 for its 'Christmas' cover.

In English, Marvel has published 4 collections: Married With Children (#1-6) on 10 September 2024, The Paper (#7-12) on 18 March 2025, Family Business (#13-18) on 23 September 2025 and One Last Day (#19-24) on 21 July 2026. For long reading sessions, a blanket picked from the Spider-Man blankets and a hot drink in one of the Spider-Man mugs are all it takes to set up the reading corner.

Spider-Man Comics Blanket

Spider-Man hanging from his web above a city at sunset, in golden and blue tones printed across the whole surface. For the sofa or the armchair where you work through volume after volume, in 6 sizes from 75x90 to 180x230 cm.

View the product — from €34.90

The dialogue with the 2000 Ultimate line and the death of Spider-Man

The title is not new. Hickman's series is sometimes called Ultimate Spider-Man Vol. 3, the 1st one, written by Brian Michael Bendis, having been launched in 2000 as a separate continuity aimed at new readers. Peter was a secondary school pupil again there. The 2 approaches answer each other: the old one made the hero younger for those discovering him, the new one makes him older for those who have followed him.

The link is narrative too. The Maker comes from the old Ultimate universe, Earth-1610, the one where Peter Parker died and where Miles Morales took over: the article on the death of Spider-Man in the Ultimate universe tells that arc in detail. The irony is sharp: the man who deprives Earth-6160 of its Spider-Man comes from a world that has already lost its own.

The 2 universes meet in Ultimate Spider-Man: Incursion, a 5-issue miniseries published from June to October 2025, written by Deniz Camp and Cody Ziglar and drawn by Jonas Scharf: the Miles Morales of the old universe meets the Peter of Earth-6160 and his son Richard. The follow-up is called Ultimate Endgame, a 5-issue event series by Deniz Camp, whose #1 came out on 31 December 2025. The end of the whole Ultimate line was announced at New York Comic Con in October 2025.

What to take away

Ultimate Spider-Man (2024) tells the story of a 35-year-old Peter Parker, married to Mary Jane and father of Richard and May, who becomes Spider-Man as an adult in a world rewritten by the Maker. Uncle Ben is alive, Aunt May is dead, Harry Osborn is a heroic Green Goblin married to Gwen Stacy, and the Kingpin holds Manhattan with his own Sinister Six.

The series runs to 24 issues across 4 arcs, published from January 2024 to February 2026, and its ending was planned from the start. Its #1 and #2 were the best-selling comics of their month, its 2025 Eisner and Harvey nominations did not turn into a win, and reviewers praise its artwork as much as its story.

In French, start with Panini's Marvel Deluxe volume 1, 'Maries, deux enfants', checking the EAN so you do not end up with the Bendis series, then move on to volume 2 as soon as it is out. For a comics reader in your circle, that volume paired with something chosen from the Spider-Man gifts makes a present that speaks to the adult they have become.