Warning: There are SPOILERS ahead for the latest issue of Ultimate Spider-Man, which hits stores tomorrow. If you don’t want to know what happens before you pick up your comic book, please stop reading now.
In the Ultimate line, Spider-Man is about to pay the ultimate price.
In issue 160, hitting stores tomorrow, Peter Parker will sacrifice himself to save Aunt May. According to USA Today, Parker will die in the arms of Mary Jane Watson after battling the Green Goblin. No word yet on the fate of the Goblin, though writer Brian Michael Bendis says the Goblin’s fate will be left to interpretation.
“Listen, I sat there typing this thing with tears in my eyes like a big baby!” Bendis says. “I went upstairs to my wife, and I go, ‘I am so embarrassed. I think I’ve literally been crying for 45 minutes.’ I’ve had real things happen in my life I didn’t cry about, and yet I’m crying about this.
“I became very proud of it, and that’s not an adjective I often put on myself.”
“We had talked about what Spider-Man meant and what it could mean and what kind of new stories you could tell,” Bendis says. “If he died saving Aunt May like he couldn’t save Uncle Ben, then you really had something.
“It occurred to me that if Peter passed away in a meaningful way, he could be the Uncle Ben character to a new Spider-Man, which then continues it to be a real Spider-Man story. Then it became more than just, ‘Oh my God, you killed him!'”
While he tends to labor over every panel and every word on every comic he writes, this was one of the hardest issues he’s ever penned because it was more than just a book for him
“This character represents more of me than almost any other character I write, including ones I’ve invented whole cloth,” Bendis says. “This is a character I’m very connected to both professionally and personally, and I’ve shown more of myself in this character than I’ve shown in other places.
“Why I’ve killed him? That’s another thing for another therapy session, but this could not be more important to me. To screw it up would be a complete failure on my part on numerous levels.”
Fans of the web head need not worry though. Peter Parker will still be alive and well in the main Marvel canon.
I’m getting tired with the “what is and isn’t canon” nonsense going on in the comic book world, and while I have always preferred what Marvel does with their universe over DC’s constant re-booting of theirs and all of their titles, I really dislike this ultimate universe where all bets are off because it has no bearing on the rest of the Marvel canon. It bothers me because what happens in the ultimate universe stays in their, including characters who die.
If Marvel really wanted to shake things up in a serious manner they would bring the ultimate universe in line with the rest of their line and have it only be one universe. Kill a character, but then make it stick! As it is now, this present idea of having two different canons allows them to “have their cake and eat it too.”