The original, turn-of-the-millennium Ultimate Spider-Man was known for its decompressed pacing; in one famous, early example of this style, Peter Parker used his nascent spider sense to avoid a car in multiple panels, taking an entire page to do so.

The same can’t be said of the ‘new’ Ultimate Spider-Man (or newer at least, having launched in 2024). There’s a huge amount of ground covered in this second issue (as there was in the first, too), with Peter trying out his newly acquired abilities, the Green Goblin and Shocker making their debuts, plus even more time spent with Ben Parker, JJ Jameson and the Parker kids too.

It’s to the credit of Johnathan Hickman that, despite how much is going on here, it never feels like too much, and just about all of the threads introduced and continued here are equally compelling. Peter Parker as a middle-aged husband and father, becoming Spider-Man for the first time, is a fresh take on the character alone, yet there’s so much more here which spins Spidey’s usual cast in such an interesting new direction too.

It feels like there’s more than one cliffhanger here too, with a few really important threads left tantalisingly open by the climax of the issue. I’m not the biggest fan of Hickman’s usually overly-convoluted plotting, but he seems to be striking a great balance here of juggling plenty of goings-on, and it certainly doesn’t hurt to have his script drawn by Marco Checchetto, whose artwork is simply stunning.

It took me a long time to give this incarnation of Ultimate Spider-Man a chance, but I’m glad I did.

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