Warning: This review contains full spoilers for Ultimate Spider-Man #24 by Jonathan Hickman, Marco Checchetto, and David Messina
In a lot of ways, it feels weird to write this. I still remember, a little over two years ago, when I read Ultimate Spider-Man #1 for the first time. Seeing the email for the review copy while I was in class, tapping my foot against the floor aggressively just waiting to get back to my dorm. Running once class ended and taking out my iPad first thing to read it. Every feeling that flowed through my veins as I finished it, took it all in, and then read it again, and again, and again.
When Marvel announced at SDCC 2025 that USM was ending with #24, I wasn’t entirely surprised. It made sense, after all, that was the countdown. Was I worried? Not really… Kind of, so many plot threads, but Jonathan Hickman’s earned my trust time and time again that I obviously gave him the benefit of the doubt. But I knew this was the end. I braced myself for December, and then it got delayed twice. I still held on, it felt nice. I still got to live in a world where a Hickman and Marco Checchetto Spider-Man comic was being published.
As of the time of writing this, I’ve read Ultimate Spider-Man #24 twice. I teared up both times reading it.
Ultimate Spider-Man (2024-2026), to me, will always be a special book, just by nature of what it is, but also for how it exists in the wider scope of Spider-Man comics. This was a book that tapped into a very relatable feeling: “What do you do when you feel like you’ve spent your whole life thinking something’s missing?” But it also did more, it also asked questions about whether the average guy is willing to try to do good and change things if they can, what are they willing to risk, are they okay with complacency?
One of the widespread criticisms of this book has always been that “Peter is boring,” and I’ve always seen that as a feature rather than a bug. Hickman’s forte is certainly characters that are larger than life, and Peter Parker is a character that exists perpendicular to that. Yet, to the very end, he makes it work. We know Peter Parker intimately. He’s one of the most popular fictional characters of all time with thousands of comics and countless adaptations across various mediums. We know him, we have an approximation of him and his world in our heads, so skipping over that development in favour of the bigger changes like Harry, Gwen and Ben was always a welcome addition to me.
Granted, I do wish they figured out the book’s real time progression. While a fun experiment, there are still gaps that I wish were fleshed out, moments I wanted to see that I had to fill in with my imagination, but because of how big Spider-Man is, it wasn’t particularly difficult to do. That being said, #22-24 being set in the same month really gave us a taste of full force Hickman Spider-Man, which was a blast to read through. Overall, I’m glad the experiment happened, it was interesting to see how that worked in an era where comics are so decompressed.
Thematically, Ultimate Spider-Man ended on a deeply bittersweet tone to me. I love that it never loses sight to the end that it’s a book about Spider-Man (on a meta level), and also a book about complacency. That conversation at the end between Peter and Harry where Peter rejects ‘Great Power and Great Responsibility’ for ‘everyone should do something if they can’ is a great conversation about the beating heart of Spider-Man, a character whose randian objectivist roots remains in his DNA, and plays similar to the “anyone can wear a mask” beat from Into the Spider-Verse. Peter gets his happy ending, but that too is at a cost – sure, they beat Kingpin and the Six, but they didn’t beat the System, rather, Kingpin is replaced by Mysterio to run New York.
Peter’s arc ends on him accepting that it didn’t matter if he was missing being Spider-Man all his life, because he had MJ and the kids. That hole in his life was filled up and he just didn’t realize it, which I think is a beautiful note to end on. Be happy with what you have instead of living with regrets. That point is further strengthened by the flashback we have with Peter and MJ, which is Peter’s big “Great Responsibility” moment even before the bite, where they find out MJ is pregnant and decide to get married. He’s always been that guy, he never needed more. That’s the full circle moment for him to become more, be the real changemaker in the system, the reason why he was #1 on the Maker’s list.
Visually, there’s a beautiful juggling act between Checchetto and Messina here, sometimes both artists work on the same page together, separating two locations or two beats. Both are used to their strengths- Checchetto in the bombastic, Messina in the conversations, with Wilson on colors to give it a flourish and make it look cohesive. A beautiful looking comic, truly.
I’ll miss this book a lot. I have a lot more to say about it but sitting with the book and processing it before swinging into that is what I’m going to be doing for now. It was nice to have a Spider-Man book that really made me sit and think about it every month.
