10 Essential Storylines To Read If You're Just Getting Into Spider-Man

5. Ultimate Spider-Man Vol. 1

Ultimate Spider-Man Mark Bagley
Marvel Comics

While this writer can personally attest to having gotten into Spider-Man through this particular series, on the surface, one would perhaps wonder what Ultimate Spider-Man brought to the table when it was first published in 2000. After all, it's just Spider-Man, right? What difference could there be?

A lot, it turns out, because Brian Bendis's Ultimate Spider-Man is the definition of an easy to pick up comic; leave all that continuity at the door, forget what you know about Spider-Man, and just hop along for the ride as Bendis puts his own stamp on Spidey's origin. You'd certainly struggle to find a more important comic - at the time - than this particular series, and while the influence of the Ultimate Universe would wain come the mid-2000s, Ultimate Spider-Man posed a consistent reminder of its brilliance and potential throughout its publishing run.

That first volume, written by Bendis and drawn by Mark Bagley, has its dated moments, but it was a breath of fresh air when it first released. After all the Clone Sagas, symbiotes, deaths and resurrections of the main timeline, to have a Spidey book that just, y'know, didn't have all that, was indescribably refreshing.

It helped that it was a great series too, and with it all collected in TPB form, it's far from a hard one to track down.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.