How Spider-Man PS4 Recreates One Of Marvel's Greatest Experiments

2. Introducing... The ULTIMATE Spider-Man!

Ultimate Spider-Man 1
Marvel Comics

When the Ultimate Universe was conceived in 2000, Marvel was not having a good time. The company had almost gone bankrupt in 1998, and had it not been for the intervention of Joe Quesada's Marvel Knights imprint, things could've gotten very bad very quickly. This was due to a myriad of factors, including the bursting of the comic book bubble and an impenetrable 60-year continuity, but the fact remained that Marvel had lost touch with the zeitgeist.

This was where the Ultimate Universe came in. Its key architects were Quesada, Brian Bendis and Mark Millar, the latter of whom focused his efforts on reimaginings of the X-Men and Avengers respectively. It was Ultimate Spider-Man that led the charge though, with the first issue debuting to a solid critical and financial reception that would spark a 111-issue partnership between Bendis and artist Mark Bagley. (Sara Pichelli, who joined the comic after Bagley's departure, has since gone on to foster a synonymy with the character too.)

To put into context just how popular and successful Bendis' comic was, from 2000 to 2014, over 200 issues of Ultimate Spider-Man were published. This is without even counting the continuation of that series into mainstream 616 continuity with Miles Morales at the helm, but still, during that time, mainstream Spidey fell afoul of controversy and creative shakeups on a regular basis, during which the Ultimate comic continued to sell like hotcakes, and even get its own video game in 2005.

The reason for this success? Consistency. But Bendis and Bagley's understanding of what made Spidey's world so magical to begin with undoubtedly helped. Reconciling that magic in a universe tailor-made for the 21st century lent the book an authenticity its contemporaries lacked, and this its where its influence in Insomniac's game can best be felt.

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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.