Mass Movement Magazine

Ultimate Spider-Man: The New World According To Peter Parker – Brian Michael Bendis, David Lafuente & Justin Ponsor (Marvel / Panini)
I blame Mark Millar. I blame him for creating an alternate Marvel reality that’s both incredibly familiar yet at the same time, different enough to make you take a step back, shake your head, and utter the words that will inevitably seal your fate as fan of the Ultimate ‘Universe’ /‘reality’, “Whoa, what the hell…Cool’. It’s all Millar’s fault, if it hadn’t been for ‘The Ultimates’, none of this would have happened, I wouldn’t have been hooked and drawn in. Damn you and your regular servings of comic book goodness Millar. Of course, Marvel being Marvel, they weren’t going to leave it all to Millar, nope they went and roped in Brian Michael Bendis, on of my top five writers, and then he went and changed everything with ‘Ultimatum’. Seriously, with that one mini-series, everything changed. Death, wholesale destruction and rebirth thanks to Bendis using Magneto as his sweep—it-all-away-start-again implement of mass annihilation. It was, to coin an often over-used phrase, “Cool”. So here we are, following on from ‘Ultimatum’ a brand new Spider-Man for the new Ultimate Comics line, and it’s…well, it’s different. Bloody good, but different. Thing is, in a lot of ways, I’m sort of traditional, and being an avid fan of ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’, Peter Parker and his alter-ego, I’m sort of precious about Peter Parker and his alter-ego and was a little wary of how Bendis would handle Spidey. I needn’t have worried. It’s all still there, all the stuff that made, and makes, Spider-Man great, it’s just assembled and presented differently. Sort of like the differences between a ’69 Dodge Charger and the new breed of Nissan GT-R’s. Old reliable muscle and grunt that you love, and sleek, high performance, lightning quick speed that immediately takes our breath away. Ultimate Spider-Man has that GT-R effect on you – putting the accelerator through the floor from the first panel to the last, throwing you through the twists and turns of the tale, leaving you breathless and craving more at the end. I mean, c’mon, one of the Marvel Super-Villain stalwarts is killed by another reinvented iconic Spidey villain in the first issue (‘The New World According To Peter Parker’ collects the first six issues), who then sets his sights on Pete (I’m not gonna tell you why, too many spoilers, just read the damn book for yourself. Trust me, you’ll love it), and Peter Parker being Peter Parker already has more than enough to deal with. Some things never change. Anyways, throw the Human Torch, Iceman, Kittie Pryde, Gwen Stacey (back from the dead again, so I’m going to use that phrase again….Cool) into the mix and set the book during Spidey’s High School years, and the end result is another compulsory Marvel title. I’ve just been dragged into the world of a twenty first century Spider-Man, and I enjoyed every single frame of the experience so much, that I read and re-read the book in a single day and I’m going straight back to read it again as soon as I finish this damn review… Tim Mass Movement