Next month, we'll get to witness a transformation of Marvel characters and storytelling the publisher says could only come from two of the industry's greatest visionaries, writer Jonathan Hickman and artist Bryan Hitch, in Ultimate Invasion #1.
The start of a redefining four-issue saga, that opening chapter will see the heroes of the Marvel Universe clash with one of the few survivors of the Ultimate Universe (which met its doom in 2015's Secret Wars), a confrontation that ends with the promise of something all-new and vastly different than anything that’s come before.
We'll get a first look into this revolutionary new project this Saturday in Free Comic Book Day: Spider-Man/Venom #1 with a scene from Ultimate Invasion #1 in which where the Maker presents Miles Morales with an offer he may not be able to refuse. Meanwhile, the reunited Illuminati will desperately try to shut down the Maker's attempt to reshape the Marvel Universe.
"[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," Hickman explains. "And it certainly couldn’t be what I did, which was a final chapter of a pre-existing universe."
"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. I’m pretty happy to say that it feels like we’ve accomplished those things and we’re very excited for everyone to get to read it."
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 all very intriguing 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.