Background In the late 1990s, the US comic book industry had declining sales. Annual combined sales from all publishers, which had been close to a billion dollars in 1993, had declined to 270 million. Comic books were briefly seen as valuable investments and sales shops flourished, but prices dropped as the
speculative bubble popped in the early 1990s. In addition, the poor reception of the
Batman & Robin film cast doubts on the prospects of any other comic book cinematic adaption.
Marvel Comics went through a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, many notable artists left the company, and their rival,
DC Comics, topped them in sales.
Brian Michael Bendis, who was hired to start the imprint, said that "when I got hired, I literally thought I was going to be writing one of the last — if not the last — Marvel comics". Comic book
continuity, which had been a key to the success of Marvel Comics in its early years, turned into a problem for some readers. All stories had to fit into a sixty-year continuity, a bar that not all fans could reach and which scared away some new readers. The usual style of superhero comics with pages of garish colors, fantastical villains and convoluted plots was of little interest to young adult audiences, who preferred the style set by the
Matrix franchise. Most superheroes were adults, even those that started as teenagers, such as
Spider-Man and the
X-Men.
Creation signs a hardcover copy of
The Ultimates. The idea for the Ultimate imprint was developed by
Bill Jemas. A lawyer who had worked mainly at the collectible-trading-card industry before that point, he had little interaction with the production of comic books. In his perspective, the main problem of Marvel Comics was that it was "publishing stories that were all but impossible for teens to read — and unaffordable, to boot".
Ultimate X-Men was also launched in 2001. It was initially delayed by the search for a creative team, and even Bendis' proposed scripts were rejected. The new title was finally given to
Mark Millar, who had a controversial run in DC's
The Authority. The two authors had conflicting styles: Bendis sought to modernize the old superhero tropes, and Millar sought to critique them. While Bendis tried to write atemporal stories, Millar preferred to set his stories amid the political tensions of the time, with edgy, quick action-driven stories and making the relationship between humans and mutants more realistic and distrustful. The first issue of
Ultimate X-Men sold 117,085 copies in a month. Jemas and Quesada paired Millar with artist
Bryan Hitch, who had also worked with
The Authority, but in a run that did not overlap with Millar's. They would reimagine the
Avengers, who were renamed as "the
Ultimates". Unlike the simple updates of the Spider-Man and X-Men titles, the Ultimates were a complete reimagination of the Avengers, with very little in common with the mainstream title.
Captain America got a rash soldierly (and until the end of
The Ultimates 2,
jingoistic) personality,
Hulk was written as a murderous and cannibalistic monster that kills hundreds of civilians, and
Thor was ambiguously introduced as either an actual Norse god (as in the main comics) or a man with stolen weapons and a psychiatric disorder.
Nick Fury, originally a caucasian character in the Marvel-616 Universe, was modeled after the actor
Samuel L. Jackson, and the new design eventually overshadowed the original one, being incorporated into the mainstream Marvel-616 universe and all new media adaptions of the characters.
Ultimatum , author of
Ultimatum. Jemas was fired from Marvel in 2004, and Millar and Hitch left the
Ultimates after writing a second miniseries. Sci-fi writer
Orson Scott Card wrote a miniseries,
Ultimate Iron Man, which was poorly received and later
retconned as an in-universe television show. In 2008, Quesada considered that the Ultimate imprint needed a big crossover event to keep the interest of the audiences, and hired
Jeph Loeb for a third
Ultimates miniseries that would lead to such event. This miniseries relied on shock value and gratuitous amounts of death and violence, instead of the political overtones of the first two. The art by
Joe Madureira was standard superhero art, instead of the cinematic action provided by Hitch. The miniseries had decent sales, but was near-universally panned by critics.
Ultimate Spider-Man was renamed as
Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man, and the line was joined later by
Ultimate Comics: Avengers and
Ultimate Comics: New Ultimates.
New Ultimates featured the reconstruction of the team, and was made by Loeb and
Frank Cho.
Avengers features a black-operations superhero team, and was made by Millar and several artists. There was a new relaunch shortly afterwards, named "Ultimate Comics Universe Reborn". Both teams met in
Avengers vs. New Ultimates, where Nick Fury is reinstalled as director of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the teams merge again into a single team, the Ultimates. This team would then be featured in
Ultimate Comics: The Ultimates, written by
Jonathan Hickman.
The Death of Spider-Man features the death of
Peter Parker and his nemesis
Green Goblin. An
Afro-Hispanic teenager,
Miles Morales, becomes the new Spider-Man. He was featured in
Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man, still written by Bendis. The X-Men were relaunched in the miniseries
Ultimate Comics: X, which introduced
Jimmy Hudson, the son of Wolverine. This miniseries was followed by
Ultimate Comics: X-Men, written by
Nick Spencer, who explored the X-Men mythos in a setting where both Charles Xavier and Magneto are dead. Initially, Marvel resisted the idea of crossovers between the Ultimate and the mainstream universes (although the idea had been teased for what turned out to be the beginning of the
Marvel Zombies series), but eventually relented. The first crossover was the
Spider-Men miniseries, between Miles Morales and the adult Peter Parker. It was made for the 50th anniversary of Spider-Man.
All-New X-Men, also written by Bendis, had a story where the main characters got stranded in the Ultimate universe and teamed-up with Morales. However, Bendis and
Joshua Hale Fialkov agreed that crossovers should be done sparingly, to keep them interesting, and cited the creative decay in the Marvel/DC
intercompany crossovers as a justification. The
Age of Ultron crossover, between the mainstream comics, ended with
Galactus displaced into the Ultimate universe. This premise started the "
Cataclysm" crossover in the Ultimate imprint, which was followed by yet another new relaunch. The Ultimates disbanded after the crossover, and were replaced by a completely different team, led by Miles Morales. This team starred in
All-New Ultimates, by
Michel Fiffe and Amilcar Pinna. Spider-Man was relaunched in
Miles Morales: The Ultimate Spider-Man, which included the revivals of Peter Parker and Green Goblin.
Ultimate FF ("FF" standing for "
Future Foundation", not "Fantastic Four") featured the "incursions", a multiversal threat that was being used in Hickman's run on the main universe's Avengers, and which would lead to the
Secret Wars crossover.
Ultimate FF was cancelled, alongside the
Fantastic Four comic book, as a result of the disputes between Marvel and
20th Century Fox over the film rights over the characters.
Conclusion The 2015
Secret Wars storyline concluded the
Ultimate Marvel imprint. In the plot, it was destroyed alongside all the other alternate realities in the
multiverse, and then recreated as a region of the
Battleworld.
Ultimate End, set in such region, is the last story of the Ultimate imprint. It was produced by Bendis and Bagley, the team that started the imprint. Miles Morales, a character that originated in the Ultimate Universe to take over the mantle of Spider-Man when the Ultimate Universe's
Peter Parker died, was migrated to the Marvel-616 universe, along with his supporting cast, a development that saw his mother restored to life, following her death in a 2013 storyline. The story, however, is largely a team-up of characters from the Ultimate and mainstream Marvel universes, with only a superficial relation with the plot of the crossover. Matt Little from CBR suspected that the story may have been conceived at some earlier point, and then slightly modified to serve as a tie-in for
Secret Wars.
Reuse of characters on Earth-616 Aaron Davis, Morales' uncle, makes his first Marvel-616 appearance in
Spider-Man #234. The
Maker, an evil
Reed Richards, is also restored to life and moved to Marvel-616, where he is a recurring villain in the
Infamous Iron Man and New Avengers comic books. The hammer of Ultimate Thor (lost in the
Cataclysm crossover) is found by
Thor Odinson, who is not capable at the time to wield his classic hammer, owned by
Jane Foster. He refuses to take the new hammer, which is then lifted by
Volstagg in the
Unworthy Thor miniseries. but was eventually established that during the final incursion that caused the clash between Earth-616 and Earth-1610, with both universes' planets Earth acting as the collision point of this phenomenon, Jimmy Hudson, Quicksilver, Mach-II, Armor, and Guardian fell from their reality into the other. When the Multiverse was eventually rebuilt, these mutants became stranded in the Prime Earth, suffering from amnesia as a by-product of their transition from one reality to another. After
Secret Wars, Marvel published a new comic book named
Ultimates, though it bore no relation with the imprint beyond the name. Bendis left Marvel Comics in 2017 and moved to
DC Comics. One of his last comic books was a second volume of
Spider-Men II, featuring Peter Parker and Miles Morales. The miniseries ends with the Marvel-616 Miles Morales emigrating to the Ultimate Universe to be reuniting with his lost love, following the death of her Marvel-616 counterpart, confirming that the universe still exists. A brief glimpse of the still-extant Ultimate universe is provided by artist Mark Bagley, showing that Ultimate Peter Parker, who had been revealed alive in one of the last issues, has returned to the role of Spider-Man, and that he is a member of the Ultimates, as is
Riri Williams and Hulk. The return of the Ultimate universe was used again in 2019, in story arcs at the
Venom and
Miles Morales: Spider-Man comic books. ==Publications==