Joe Quesada Discusses ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN Story, Characters & More

Well, it won’t follow the comic book exactly. The goal really is to show Spider-Man to a new audience and demonstrate to them what’s wonderful about Spider-Man and add a little twist to the story. Something obvious to anyone who’s followed Spider-Man is that there have been many many animated shows. Most of them took the same route: here’s Peter Parker’s origins, and here’s how he got his powers, and he’s got an aunt named May and he’s got Mary Jane … all those things. We decided to amp that up a little bit by giving him much more responsibility — he has that great mantra ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ – so what happens when you give him more responsibility than he’s accustomed to? We introduce him to SHIELD. While SHIELD has been in the Marvel Universe for decades, it’s become something of a character unto itself as this sort of secret spy organization because of the Marvel movies, and I think that it’s only going to get bigger as you see more Marvel movies made over the years. So Peter Parker and Spider-Man are going to be a part of SHIELD, which gives him access to really cool tech. That’s a real twist to the Spider-Man mythos. Most of the tech that you’ve seen with Spidey are his web shooters, or in the comics he was given this sort of iron spider suit by Tony Stark, but it was not something he used on a regular basis. But in the cartoons, Spider-Man will have a lot of really cool toys that he uses, as well as his new teammates.

Well, we haven’t announced anything to this point, so I can’t get into that — but I can tell you that we do have other shows in the works. We are planning a wonderful slate, and every show has Marvel people working on them. Like Steve Wacker, a senior editor who I wanted to mention for “Ultimate Spider-Man.” I think it’s important for the beginning of Spider-Man to have the guy who’s editing the books be in the room.

I think my favorite character is going to be Nova. Nova is a character that will hopefully break out. He’s a lot of fun and sort of the yin to Peter Parker’s yang. And I will give you one little hint: If you’ve liked the Marvel movies, I think you’re going to see a character that’s really going to make you smile.