With great creators come great comics. And 2024 was a great year for the medium: after Marvel’s Ultimate Universe relaunch in 2023 with the Jonathan Hickman-penned Ultimate Invasion, Hickman and Marco Checchetto’s Ultimate Spider-Man marked the first in a new line of ongoing Ultimate Comics that sold out multiple printings. The face-breaking Birds of Prey — Black Canary, Cassandra Cain, and Harley Quinn among them — added Grace Choi and Onyx to their ranks in Kelly Thompson’s take on the iconic DC team, with Image rolling out another dozen issues of Daniel Warren Johnson’s Transformers in Skybound’s Energon Universe. Al Ewing continued to bring the thunder in the story of The Immortal Thor, and Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard’s The Power Fantasy blew up with repeat sell-outs.
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Before naming our pick for best ongoing comic of the year (as voted by ComicBook.com staff), honorable mentions include three of the best-selling comics of 2024: The Walking Dead Deluxe (Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Dave McCaig) from Image Comics; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Jason Aaron and artists Rafael Albuquerque, Joëlle Jones, Cliff Chiang, and Chris Burnham) from IDW; and Absolute Batman (Scott Snyder, Nick Dragotta, and Frank Martin) from DC Comics.
The winner of the 2024 ComicBook.com Golden Issue Award for Best Ongoing Comic Series is…
Ultimate Spider-Man.
More than two decades after the Ultimate Marvel imprint rebooted the Marvel Universe for the 21st century with modernized takes on Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Avengers, the publisher revived the Ultimate line with a new Ultimate Universe: Earth-6160. In this reality reshaped by a multiversal villain known as the Maker (an alternate version of the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards), the Maker prevented a radioactive spider from biting a 15-year-old Peter Parker and systematically prevented the creation of any other superheroes. When a teenage Tony Stark (this world’s Iron Lad) formed the Ultimates to unmake the world ruled by the Maker’s secret council of supervillains, Stark sent Peter a package: the spider that should have bitten him 20 years earlier.
Growing Pains
2000’s Ultimate Spider-Man, by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley, reimagined Peter Parker as a teenager and put him back in high school for the first time since Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s classic Amazing Spider-Man #28 in 1965. As Bendis and Bagley’s 111-issue run reinterpreted Spider-Man for a new generation — one younger, hipper and edgier — it was a contrast with his mainstream counterpart, who was a decade older and still married to Mary Jane Watson.
But then The Amazing Spider-Man, Marvel’s long-running Spider-book in the mainstream continuity, undid Peter and Mary Jane’s marriage — retconning 20 years of comics in the process — and relegated the relationship, and their future children, to alternate universes like MC2’s Spider-Girl and the Secret Wars tie-in Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows.
And now Ultimate Spider-Man, with a grown-up Peter Parker who is 35, married to Mary Jane, and father to two children, Richard and May, by the time he becomes Spider-Man.
If This Be My Destiny
Unlike most versions of the character, who is fatefully bitten by an irradiated spider during a science exhibition, Ultimate Peter Parker embraced his destiny when he chose to let the spider bite him.
“You were supposed to have a different life, Peter Parker. You were supposed to protect the innocent, save lives and inspire the citizens of this world to be their best selves. And instead, all of that was taken from you. These people stole your future. These people robbed you of your destiny. The question is… do you want it back?”
A millennial, the 35-year-old Peter is feeling listless when we meet him in Ultimate Spider-Man. His Aunt May is dead — the victim of a terrorist attack carried out by the Maker’s Council — and his Uncle Ben works alongside J. Jonah Jameson as an editor at The Daily Bugle. Not only is there no fateful spider bite on an unsuspecting teenager, but there’s no dramatic humbling by a tragic lesson that comes at the cost of his uncle’s life.
And yet Peter Parker comes to learn that with great power comes great responsibility — not because a selfish Spider-Man failed to stop the criminal who gunned down his Uncle Ben, but because a selfless Spider-Man wants to use his gifts to do good. In another twist, the oft-repeated mantra is spoken by a heroic Harry Osborn, who fights crime alongside Spider-Man as the Green Goblin.
“For the longest time, I’ve thought something was wrong with my life — that something was wrong with me,” Peter confesses to Ben before ever learning he’s destined to be a hero. To that, Ben says, “You ever heard the saying, ‘Inaction is action?’ That’s just a garbage way of saying don’t spend your life waiting for something to happen. Make it happen. I love you, son… but if you’re walking around half asleep, anesthetized by your own life… then wake up.” In other words: take action, and you can change your world.
In a world where everything is predetermined, those with the power to change it have the responsibility to use that power to do good — to be good when the world needs it most.
The most mature, nuanced Spider-Man storytelling since J. Michael Straczynski’s run on The Amazing Spider-Man in the early 2000s, Hickman and Checchetto’s Ultimate Spider-Man is a bold and exciting spin on the Spider-Man mythos — and a must-read comic for longtime fans and new readers alike. Go get it, tiger.
The nominees for Best Ongoing Comic Series of the Year:
- Birds of Prey
- Immortal Thor
- The Power Fantasy
- Transformers
- Ultimate Spider-Man — WINNER
