Marvel Comics has announced that two of the comic book industry's most innovative and exciting creators are teaming up to reshape the Marvel Universe as we know it.
This June, writer Jonathan Hickman and artist Bryan Hitch will team up for Ultimate Invasion, a revolutionary four-issue saga that presents a surprising new chapter for Ultimate Comics and bold new strides for Marvel's iconic heroes.
Launched over twenty years ago, the Ultimate Universe provided a contemporary take on classic Marvel characters and storylines. Known for its edginess and explosive action, the Ultimate Universe was home to some of Marvel's most talked about and thought-provoking series of the 21st century.
The Ultimate Universe reached its cataclysmic end in 2015's Secret Wars, but nothing stays buried in Marvel Comics for long. Is it time for the Ultimate Universe to make its grand return? The Maker seems to think so and the Illuminati must form once again to stop him from his plans to destroy - or perhaps rebuild - the universe, with Miles Morales at the centre of it all!
"[Revisiting the idea of Ultimate Comics] couldn’t be replicating or revisiting what Bryan did in the original Ultimates - creating a streamlined, modernized version that would eventually become the spine of the MCU, and it certainly couldn’t be what I did, which was a final chapter of a pre-existing universe," Hickman says.
"We also thought the very idea of Ultimate Comics needed to be inverted from what the original universe was - we wanted this to be something that could really only exist in the comic space: a new way of thinking about, and enjoying, a new version of the Marvel Universe."
Hitch adds, "It’s been more than 20 years since I started work on The Ultimates, a project that would have a big impact on my own career and beyond, so when Marvel came to me with the idea of revisiting the Ultimate Universe with the man who so brilliantly and spectacularly destroyed the last one, I was both feet in!"
This is very interesting and suggests Marvel Comics is looking to bring back the Ultimate Universe as it was in its prime. That was when writers like Mark Millar and Brian Michael Bendis were in charge and before Jeph Loeb came in and started shaking things up with some pretty awful events (see: Ultimatum) that diluted what they set out to do.
The first issue of Ultimate Invasion goes on sale on June 21. Check out a first look below.