Now, let’s talk about the man at the helm of this project. Jonathan Hickman is the man who killed the Ultimate Universe — and then brought it back. To be clear, Ultimate Marvel had largely declined by the 2010s, and ending it was a business decision as much as anything else. However, Hickman did write the setting’s last story with his and Esad Ribić’s 2015 crossover, “Secret Wars” (popular elements like Miles were spared and brought over to mainstream Marvel).
He’s also Marvel Comics’ crown jewel of a writer these days. With “Ultimate Spider-Man,” he’ll have written all four of the publisher’s major franchises (Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men, and now Spidey) on an ongoing basis. What makes his comics stand out? They’re dense, throwing tons of information (both narrative and themes) at the reader, which makes close reading and second looks a necessity. Adding to that, his comics inter-splice traditional illustrated pages with graphs and pages of pure text written like journal entries.
As Hickman told it to Entertainment Weekly, this allows him greater control over information and audience reaction across the fairly limited number of pages per issue in a comic.
“I’ve always played with the idea of what is narrative and what isn’t. If narrative is all art and words, then graphic design is a part of it as well […] Any time you can disrupt the mechanism by which people read the books by engaging a different part of their brains, they have to work harder and it makes the reading experience more effective just by being different […] It allows me to cheat narratively [too]. I can do a more cinematic book if I’m not robbing the reader of information in the interim pages.”
Peter B. Parker is getting a Spider-Verse-style midlife crisis Spider-Man comic book of his very own. Read More