Spoilers for Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #22 within.
Brian Michael Bendis has been the shepherd of the Ultimate Universe since the beginning, formulating the basis of the entire line with his run on Ultimate Spider-Man that began nearly 13 years ago. Not content to settle into one status quo for too long, Ultimate Peter Parker was killed off in early 2011 to make way for a replacement hero named Miles Morales, who has since continued the Ultimate tradition of keeping these stories full of surprises.
With today's issue #22, Miles' world has come crashing down around him. His battle with a new Venom has resulted in the death of his mother, giving Miles his first real taste of the inevitable tragedy that awaits him as Spider-Man. Unlike Peter Parker, however, Miles doesn't use the death of a loved one to justify his mission as the wall-crawler. Instead, he -- probably smartly -- gives up the mantle.
I talked with Bendis about the events of this issue, in addition to what it means to the future of the Ultimate Universe as a whole. As you'll see, there are some huge changes ahead for Miles Morales and the characters that surround him.
IGN Comics: I have been wondering if a moment like this would eventually come for Miles. It’s interesting that this is -- for lack of a better term, I guess -- his Uncle Ben moment to some degree.
Brian Michael Bendis: Absolutely, that’s exactly what it is. Because this is Ultimate, and it’s a different kid in a difference circumstance, we have the ability not to mirror what has come before but have it come at its own way and its own pace at its own time, you know what I mean? So instead of it happening all very early, it happens right here, and he will have a seismically different reaction to it.
IGN: That’s one of the next things I was going to say. Even in this issue, he reacts very differently than Peter did in the past. How is this moment going to inform Miles as Spider-Man?
Next issue will pick up a year later.
Bendis: Well, he’s not the same kid, obviously. As we’ve shown since the first issue, he’s not the same kid. He wasn’t born the same way, and the same neuroses don’t propel him. And he’s younger -- he’s a couple years younger than Peter was, which is, for that age, all the difference in the world.
So what we will be doing is skipping a year. The next issue will pick up a year later. So, that’s another thing that we’re able to do in the Ultimate office that you really can’t do in the [regular Marvel Universe] but here, we can do it. That will show a dramatic shift in him physically, mentally, and it’s almost a whole new book.
Issue #23 Preview Art
IGN: That’s crazy. So is he still not Spider-Man in that year jump?
Bendis: Yeah, he’s not been Spider-Man that whole year.
IGN: So I guess also, for the first couple of years of Miles, his career as Spider-Man was, like you said, a totally different path than Peter Parker’s. But we’re starting to see more elements of classic Spider-Man trickle in, like this Uncle Ben moment. Do you think there’s an inherent sort of unavoidable tragedy involved with becoming Spider-Man, no matter who you are?
Bendis: Well, yeah, it’s hard to say if it’s unavoidable, but it certainly does seem to surround him. You know, it’s a dangerous lifestyle with dangerous people. Everyone has to decide if it’s worth it or not. Right at the heart of the tragedy, it does not seem worth it at all. So that’s what Miles will be going through.
IGN: Yeah, that’s what it sounds like you’re going to be exploring here.
Bendis: But, you know, there was a lot of internal monologuing with me about, should the father go or the mother? It just seemed that the mother was the caring, nurturing parent like Uncle Ben, while the father has a very different stance and not being able to handle the fact that there are superheroes in the world and having quite an issue with it -- not a racist issue, but a sociological issue with it, for his own purposes.
And having Miles stuck in the house with his father who truly loves him, but will not love him if the truth ever comes out seems like a helluva book to read. What’s he going to do? How’s he ever going to become Spider-Man again? Why would he become Spider-Man again?
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IGN: Right, and that sounds like the more dramatically interesting choice, because it’s been clearly established in these last 22 issues or so that Jefferson is not a fan of Spider-Man.
Bendis: No, Jefferson’s got a lot of things he’s dealing with from his past that he hasn’t let go of, and all of this chaos that has been brought into his life from Spider-Man without him realizing why it has come. It does nothing but exasperate the situation.
IGN: So picking up a year later, with his mother gone, Miles no longer Spider-Man, how has his relationship with his father been impacted? Is it in a positive way?
Bendis: You will see it. It’s very complicated, and you will see it in the issues. I’m not going to say that they’re stuck with each other, but now it’s just them. Anyone who’s lost anyone in their family will tell you that dynamic shifts dramatically. Everyone starts taking on different roles, whether they want to or not, in roles that they’re probably not that comfortable with in the beginning. It takes a long time for everyone to figure out what everyone’s supposed to be doing, you know?
Also, Miles is at this very heavy crossroads of becoming a man. Different things are important to him as well. But I’ll tell you, it’s funny, on top of the physical difference between 13 to 14 can be pretty gigantic, and David Marquez, who is now the ongoing artist on the book, nailed it -- not only for Miles, but... It still looks like Miles, but a year older. Like Ganke looks like he dropped some pounds -- everybody looks a little different as they’re headed towards high school. And boy, that is no easy feat to pull off without looking silly, and [David] did it perfectly.
IGN: It was nice to have Miles in a different age group, a non-high school setting. Is that going to be changing?
Bendis: No, he’s still pre-high school. He’s not a man, at all, and he’s still younger than Peter was. His whole surrounding is different than Peter’s was, except Gwen Stacey’s still an ongoing concern of the book.
Oh, and Miles has a new girlfriend we’ll be introduced to, which is Ultimate Katie Bishop.
IGN: Oh, awesome. That’s exciting.
Bendis: We’ve met her before. She’s been showing up in the book unnamed, kinda following Miles around a little bit, but now we’ll see that they’ve gotten together.
IGN: Awesome. So I assume you’re just going to skip right ahead and not really go back too much?
Bendis: No. No flashbacks of him looking sad in his bed watching Price is Right. It’s a year of “nothing that interesting happened,” other than the mourning of that loss -- not dynamically interesting for a comic book. And I think that most people can imagine what that year was like, especially when you see how everyone is right now. You can easily see how they got there.
IGN: In this issue, also, Miles just lets Maria Hill know with certainty that he is Spider-Man.
Bendis: He has no choice.
IGN: Right. So how much of a role will she be playing in Ultimate Spider-Man?
Bendis: Funny you should say that, because she will -- not right away, but as the pieces come together and as Miles eventually tries to figure out where he belongs in all of this -- she will be popping up again. But more importantly, we’re making the debut of some new Ultimate characters, including Cloak and Dagger, and a whole new origin for them.
We’re also bringing back a character, Bombshell, which showed up in the David Lafuente issues. We’re heading towards a brand new status quo for not only Miles, but almost all of the Ultimate books.
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IGN: That was actually one of my next questions. You’ve been teasing big things coming for the Ultimate universe in general, so I assume these events play a big role in that.
Bendis: Yeah, we’re teeing up to the one thing I think the Ultimate books need to reassess and we’re heading towards that -- we just had an awesome big conversation about it yesterday at Marvel -- was that for years, the Ultimate books were very different and very unique to the Marvel Universe. As Marvel NOW! and other things have come about, the Marvel Universe has now, in a weird way, kind of resembled what the Ultimate Universe was supposed to be: like, very forward-thinking, very different.
With that, I put out the offer or the challenge that, much like Miles is so much different than Peter and a surprisingly different flavor, that all of the Ultimate books should follow suit. I think the people who are fans of these books, that’s what they’re looking for, and that’s the stuff they certainly gravitate to when they hear that something really different is going on. So coming after Age of Ultron and some other stuff, we have the opportunity to really bring that about.
So look for what I think, for lack of a better word, is an “Ultimate NOW!” headed towards the entire line, which is going to be a lot of fun for people who have been following us for a long time, or are interested but know where to come in. Yeah, that’s just a tease. What that means, you will see. But the building blocks are absolutely happening in Ultimate Spider-Man -- as they always have.
Bendis: They will eventually match up. I wasn’t trying to bully other books into doing the time jump, but everyone seemed to like it. By the way, I know readers don’t like time jumps. Some people really can’t stand it. Now, this was one of the earliest lessons I learned in comics. I think I did it in Daredevil, where Daredevil got outed and I said, “One month later,” and everyone went, “WHAT!” They were just really frustrated. I went, “No, nothing happened!” I wasn’t trying to…
IGN: They need every detail, though!
Bendis: But I’m telling you, he just sat there, working on briefs and stuff. He was just hiding in his house. I’m telling you, I’m skipping to the good part. So I do know that when this happens some people wince, but I’m just putting it out there that, in drama, you want to skip to the dramatic elements. Hopefully, if it’s done well, you won’t feel like you’ve missed anything other than “Oh, I see where he ended up. That’s cool.” So that’s that.
IGN: For what it’s worth, I enjoy time jumps…
Bendis: I do too! I do, I go, “Oooh!” Like, have you ever seen a scene in a movie where they just go, “Five years later,” and you go, “Five years later!?” I get excited about it. But, boy, I’m getting a lot of haircut email. I’ve been changing a lot of hair on people. Sometimes my Tumblr posts are all about She-Hulk’s hair, Magneto’s bald and Star-Lord is blonde -- and they’re really upset about it. Like, “When are we going to see She-Hulk cut her hair?”
IGN: Those are the important details, man.
Bendis: You need to see her cut her hair to know that it has been cut? So, you know. Sometimes you go, “All right, this is what I’m doing this week.” Hair Cuts and Time Jumps: that’s the title of my autobiography.
IGN: [laughs] Jumping to this issue really quick again, Venom is one of the more recent Spider-Man bad guys, and he’s been re-imagined in a lot of different ways, both in the Ultimate Universe and the 616 Universe. What’s compelling about using that symbiote element in Spider-Man?
Bendis: It’s funny -- and people threw this quote in my face when I first jumped on Ultimate Spider-Man years ago -- I said, “Venom sucks.” What I was referring to was what he had become. I thought about what I said that day, and I think I remember Joe [Quesda] or someone had thrown the gauntlet out at me, like, “Do something cool with Venom. You can do it.” I was like, “Hmm.”
[Venom] is the ultimate irresponsibility to Spider-Man’s responsibility.
Then I thought on it, and I was just making indie comics all through the ‘90s when there was just Carnage and Venom everywhere. It was just something that was poorly illustrated and just madness and ugly. It wasn’t scary, just almost like torture porn with symbiotes, and I just wasn’t that into it at all. But I thought about it, and the image of symbiotes and what they represent is very, very exciting stuff. That’s why people liked it in the beginning. That’s why everyone was gravitated towards it, because look how cool that is: Monster Spider-Man. So we get back to just that and how it can tie into Spider-Man and most of the Ultimates’ origins being this “genetic experiments gone wrong or gone right,” and this being the worst version of it all. It’s an absolute blast to write.
You’re looking at the monster version of yourself in the mirror that you have nothing to do with. It just shows everything that man is capable of with greed and irresponsibility. It is the ultimate irresponsibility to Spider-Man’s responsibility, that someone would create this thing. And continue to try to create it even though the results have always been poor. Adding to that, I think, the epiphany that I had had with it is that if Peter’s father had accidentally created and it was the thing that eventually destroyed him and the family, that there was this personal connection to it.
So I’m just happy to get back to that, what the theme or premise of Venom was to people, what they gravitated to, beyond just the image of it being so cool. You scrape away the stuff that people eventually turned off to back then and get to the good stuff. Then I realized -- and I’ve said so publicly -- there are no bad creations, it’s just a matter of what certain creators are willing to do with it. There are no bad characters, except for Captain Britain. [laughs] I’m just joking, I’m just joking! I’m going to get the hate mail for that one.
IGN: Your Tumblr’s going to blow up later.
Bendis: I’m just joking around, but there’s a preview of Guardians of the Galaxy out, last night, and the Badoon are attacking London -- the Guardians and Iron Man can’t get a hold of anybody, and all the communications are blocked -- and Star-Lord goes, “Are there any good British superheroes?” Iron Man goes, “Captain Britain.” And he goes, “Is he any good?” And Iron Man goes, “Nah.”
You know, it’s just a sendup on it, but boy, I got more crap on it. [laughs] Like last night, I’m watching all the stuff going on, and at midnight -- I guess it was morning time in London -- everyone saw it, and they go, “Ah-raw, raw, raw!”
IGN: I have one more question about the symbiote stuff: it seems like you’re sort of tying the Symbiote to Roxxon Industries as well in this issue. So I’m wondering if this is going to be a callback to previous stories you’ve done with those two elements from earlier in your run?
Bendis: Yes, absolutely -- return of the Roxxon brain trust, which we’re heavily involved in the Ultimate Doom Trilogy. If you’ve never read that, don’t worry about it. It’s kind of an intelligentsia group of scientists who are hell-bent on pushing forward past what Tony Stark and the others have done, and don’t have any moral center about doing so.
They will be showing up, and Roxxon will become an ongoing concern because, again, the magic of Spider-Man has slipped through their fingers. It was so close. Without Osborn there to compete with them, the leader feels very focused on being the guy who does it, who comes up with the ultimate super soldier -- and Spider-Man’s as close as they’ve gotten. Everything else has been a monstrous mess, and they’re so close, but they just can’t get there. Yeah, that’s where Cloak and Dagger and others are going come, out of that storyline.
IGN: That’s all I’ve got for you about this issue. Is there anything else you wanted to add?
Bendis: Well, it’s Sara Pichelli’s last issue, and it’s very sad for us, because she’s magnificent -- not sad for me, personally, because she’s already moved on to Guardians of the Galaxy, and as people will see this week, she has her first few pages in Guardians of the Galaxy #2. She is perfect for Guardians of the Galaxy. Her costume design sense is always a big part of the book -- even Mary Jane and Gwen Stacy were always overdressed for their awesomeness. Her elaborate style is perfect for our giant space book.
Meanwhile, David Marquez, who has been with us for years on Ultimate Spider-Man, will lead on the book from now on. Most people won’t even notice any difference, other than just the hands of another wonderful, talented artist. He just handed in another issue yesterday, and everyone went, “Aw, that’s great.” So that’s the good news there. So bye to Sara, hello to David -- but Sara’s been with the book since 2007 in one shape or form. Pretty long run.
Joey is a Senior Editor at IGN and a comic book creator. Follow Joey on Twitter @JoeyEsposito, or find him on IGN at Joey-IGN. After Man of Steel comes out, his life will lose all sense of direction and purpose.
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