Marvel Comics introduced Miles Morales in the pages of 2011's Ultimate Fallout #4. In the wake of Peter Parker's death in Ultimate Spider-Man, the young Miles took over the mantle and soon won himself a legion of fans.
Longtime Ultimate Spider-Man writer Brian Michael Bendis teamed with artist Sara Pichelli to create Miles and tell his story. While the end of their run got bogged down in crossovers, it was still hugely successful and even inspired a hit animated franchise, starting with the Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in 2018.
Bendis and Pichelli ultimately moved on from Miles, and in 2015, the character entered the main Marvel Universe thanks to the events of Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic's Secret Wars.
Since then, there have been plenty of great stories featuring the character. However, Miles has been aged up, put in a rather generic costume, and is, in many ways, just another Spider-Man in a Marvel Universe full of them. We possibly have some good news today, though, as it sounds like Bendis and Pichelli could be gearing up to team on a new Miles Morales comic in 2026.
Over the weekend, it was revealed that the two creatives will team on a new project next year, with Bendis later taking to Instagram to write, "at day two @mgwcmx @cbcebulski dropped the news that @sara_pichelli and I are actively working on a new project together for @marvelcomics 2026. All I said is it's the most exciting thing we've done together so far."
While Marvel Comics has yet to make any official announcements, Bleeding Cool has revealed that "circumstances suggest that it could be Miles Morales-based."
We still don't know what will become of the Ultimate Universe after the upcoming Ultimate Endgame event. Regardless of whether Miles remains in the same world as Peter Parker or a new one, it would be fascinating to see Bendis and Pichelli take him into his next era (and, hopefully, bring back the classic costume).
In 2019, Bendis told us this about creating Miles:
"It was an interesting thing. Sometimes when decisions like this are made, it's out of some sort of desperation or sales are down, but in this instance, our sales were very strong, and we were doing very well. One of the things I liked about working with Joe Quesada was that after each success, Joe would question everything. A lot of people in success just lay back and go 'Yes!' but for creative people, that's a death sentence. With success, Joe would go 'What have we done wrong? What can we do better?' So, we started talking about Ultimate Spider-Man, which was chugging along very nicely, and then we got on to the subject of Brooklyn and Queens and what they feel like and how they were represented in the book. I thought we had not represented them well, and then I wanted to do better."
"From that conversation, started the 'Why was Spider-Man even white to begin with?' What are the odds if you put all the pieces together in a story and look at the world? Was it important or necessary that Spider-Man be the story of a white child? It really isn't. We started talking about what ended up being Miles, and it took about a year. There wasn't pushback so much as 'Do we dare? Do we try? Are we brave enough? Is this good enough?'"
"The one rule we were really breaking is that no one was upset about how we were handling Peter Parker and taking something away from someone that they like and replacing it with something they don't know...it can be a recipe for disaster. No one had said, 'If only Peter Parker were a little more...something!' So, for us to offer that idea was going to be a challenge, but we had the benefit of The Amazing Spider-Man with Dan Slott, so whatever we were doing over here with our book, people knew that Peter was fine over there. We were a little emboldened by that. I was personally scared, but it was that creative scared that you have to go with."