Image via Marvel
Published Oct 7, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT
Ryan O'Rourke is a Senior News Writer at Collider with a specific interest in all things adult animation, video game adaptations, and the work of Mike Flanagan. He is also an experienced baseball writer with over six years of articles between multiple outlets, most notably FanSided's CubbiesCrib. Whether it's taking in a baseball game, a new season of Futurama or Castlevania: Nocturne, or playing the latest From Software title, he is always finding ways to show his fandom. When it comes to gaming and anything that takes inspiration from it, he is deeply opinionated on what's going on. Outside of entertainment, he's a graduate of Eureka College with a Bachelor's in Communication where he honed his craft as a writer. Between The IV Leader at Illinois Valley Community College and The Pegasus at Eureka, he spent the majority of his college career publishing articles on everything from politics to campus happenings and, of course, entertainment for the student body. Those principles he learned covering the 2020 election, Palestine, and so much more are brought here to Collider, where he has gleefully written on everything from the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes to Nathan Lane baby-birding sewer boys.
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Marvel Comics has launched plenty of successful imprints over the years that have left a lasting impact on the company. These range from Marvel Knights, which helped establish some of Marvel's more mature storylines within Earth-616, like Garth Ennis' Punisher run and Kevin Smith's Daredevil, to the 2099 universe that reimagined the heroes in a separate, dystopian future, most notably birthing Miguel O'Hara, aka Spider-Man 2099. This week welcomes another such unique imprint, the Midnight Universe, which puts a mature, deeply disturbing horror twist on the X-Men, Spider-Man, and The Fantastic Four from some of the most acclaimed creators from the House of Ideas. With its launch, one of the writers, Jonathan Hickman, reflected upon the surprisingly short run of the last universe he oversaw — the Ultimate Universe.
Launched in 2023, the imprint imagined a world where Marvel's greatest champions never got the chance to become heroes thanks to the intervention of The Maker. Formerly the Reed Richards of Earth-1610, he sought to create a perfect society in his image by meddling in their origins and defeating many of the villains the superheroes would've fought, establishing an alternative history where he and his allies control everything and many of the familiar Marvel characters don't exist as readers know them. However, that was until Howard Stark/Iron Man and his son Tony/Iron Lad fought back, kicking off a belated age of superheroes with reimagined characters, like an older Peter Parker, a version of Reed who became Doctor Doom, and a Storm who arose as a freedom fighter away from the X-Men. By all accounts, it was a wildly popular comic run, yet it lasted only a little over two years after the Ultimate Invasion began.
According to Hickman, a couple of years of stories out of the Ultimate Universe was not the plan initially. In an appearance on the Battle of the Atom podcast, he recalled his shock upon first learning the fate of the imprint. "I’ve never seen Marvel kill a line that is the most profitable line that they have at the time," he said. "Like, Marvel doesn’t do that." Instead of keeping the world going as long as there was interest, sales of the company's prestige-format books convinced the comic giant to pivot away from longer-form storylines and toward more contained 24-issue stories. That sudden change in strategy interfered with his mindset while building out the Ultimate Spider-Man comic and the entire Ultimate Line in general.
“The original intent was that the Ultimate line was just gonna keep going whenever we started it, and it would either succeed or fail based on how well it went from there on. And so I was going to do the first twenty-four issues and just build up a Spider-Man book that somebody would come on and take over."
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which MCU Character Is Your Best Friend? Steve Rogers · Tony Stark · Peter Parker · Shuri
Pick where you meet, what they text you at two in the morning, what they hand you on your birthday and what the two of you keep arguing about. Four very different people are waiting on the other side: the one who never leaves, the one who is exhausting and worth it, the one who replies in four seconds flat, and the one who will roast you and then fix your life.
🛡️Steve Rogers(Captain America)
🛠️Tony Stark(Iron Man)
🕸️Peter Parker(Spider-Man)
🐆Shuri(Black Panther)
FIND YOUR FRIEND →
01
Where do the two of you meet? Nobody in this universe makes a friend somewhere normal.
AIn a gym at six in the morning, where the two of you are the only people awake. BAt a party you were not really invited to, where they talked to you for an hour. CQueuing for coffee in Queens while something loud happens six blocks away. DIn a lab you had no clearance for, and they decided to let you stay.
NEXT QUESTION →
02
Your phone lights up at two in the morning. What does it say? You find out what kind of friend somebody is by what they send at that hour.
ANothing at all, because they are already outside, having heard you had a rough week. BFour hundred words about an idea they just had, plus a schematic you cannot read. CAn apology for texting so late, followed by a question that could have waited. DA meme aimed directly at you, sent with no context and absolutely no mercy.
NEXT QUESTION →
03
It is your birthday. What do they hand you? The present is never really about the present.
ASomething small they made themselves, handed over slightly awkwardly. BSomething absurd and expensive that fixes a problem you mentioned once, months ago. CA gift that clearly took months of saving, wrapped badly, with a long note inside. DAn upgrade to something you already owned, installed without asking you first.
NEXT QUESTION →
04
What does a good Saturday with them actually look like? Superheroes have days off, and this is how they spend them.
AA long walk, an old diner and a conversation you had both been avoiding. BWhatever they decide at noon, which somehow ends with you in another country. CBad takeaway and an old film on their couch, interrupted about eleven times. DTwo hours in a workshop, arguing about whether your idea would even work.
NEXT QUESTION →
05
You have your worst day in years. What do they do about it? This is the part of a friendship nobody puts in the trailer.
AThey sit next to you and say almost nothing until you are ready to talk. BThey throw money, noise and three terrible plans at it until one of them helps. CThey turn up with food, refuse to leave, and then check on you every day for a month. DThey tell you the honest version of it, which nobody else was willing to say.
NEXT QUESTION →
06
Every real friendship has one fight it keeps having. What is yours? The thing you argue about is usually the thing you like most about them.
AThey take risks with their own life that they would never let me take with mine. BThey vanish into work for weeks and expect me to be completely fine about it. CThey keep apologising for things that were never even slightly their fault. DThey are three steps ahead of me and do not always bother explaining why.
NEXT QUESTION →
07
The alarm goes off and you are both in the field. What is your job? You get one role on the team, and it says a lot about who you want next to you.
AHolding the front line so that everybody behind me gets out of the building. BDoing the thing nobody has a plan for yet, at speed, and inventing the rest. CGetting people off the street quietly before anyone realises we were there. DRunning everything from a screen and talking the rest of them through it.
NEXT QUESTION →
08
Ten years on, what do you want this friendship to be? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides who picks up the phone.
AExactly the same, because some people are simply permanent and that is the appeal. BLoud and complicated and worth every bit of the trouble it caused along the way. CStill the person I look out for, and still the first one who checks on me. DTwo people who keep each other sharp and never once get sentimental about it.
REVEAL MY BEST FRIEND →
The Line Is Ringing Your Best Friend Is…
Four people, four completely different ideas of what it means to have somebody in your corner. Here is who picked up, what they would ask of you, and what you would get back.
Steve Rogers
You want the friend who does not leave. Steve is the one who turns up at the door without being asked, who remembers what you said you were worried about, and who has never once made you audition for his attention.
- His entire character is built on a single sentence, which is that he will not abandon somebody just because it has become expensive to keep them.
- He is far funnier than people give him credit for, and the joke is almost always at his own expense rather than yours.
- The friendship comes with a cost, since being close to Steve means being dragged into fights that were never yours and being glad about it later.
- You would get a friend who tells you the hard thing to your face and then defends you to everybody else in the room.
Tony Stark
You want the friend who is genuinely exhausting and completely worth it. Tony will forget your birthday, then build you something at four in the morning that you did not know you needed, and hand it over as though it were nothing.
- He is bad at saying the warm thing out loud, so he says it in hardware instead, which is why everybody around him ends up with upgraded everything.
- Being his friend means putting up with the disappearing, the deflecting and the jokes that arrive about ninety seconds too early.
- What you get in return is somebody who will spend an unreasonable amount of money and effort on a problem the moment it becomes yours.
- He is the loudest person in the room and the one most likely to be quietly panicking about all of you.
Peter Parker
You want the friend who replies in four seconds and apologises for it. Peter is earnest in a way that is almost unfashionable, and he will take on far more than he can carry rather than admit that he is struggling.
- He is the only one on this list who needs looking after as much as he looks after you, and that balance is exactly what makes it a real friendship.
- Nobody in the MCU is better at the small stuff, from remembering the thing you were nervous about to showing up with food you did not ask for.
- Spider-Man: Brand New Day arrived in July 2026 and put him back where he works best, which is broke, local and carrying the weight on his own.
- You would get a friend who is sincerely, embarrassingly happy for you when something goes right, with no edge to it at all.
Shuri
You want the friend who insults your shoes, fixes your phone and then quietly rearranges your entire life for the better. Shuri does not do soft reassurance, and that is the reason you would believe her when she says you are fine.
- She is the smartest person in almost any room she walks into and treats that as a reason to tease you rather than a reason to lecture you.
- The teasing is the affection. When Shuri stops making fun of you, something has gone seriously wrong and you should probably ask her about it.
- Her story is the one on this list that goes somewhere genuinely dark, which is what turned her from a scene stealer into the emotional centre of the films.
- You would get a friend who never pities you, never softens the truth, and never once lets you take yourself too seriously.
↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ
Marvel's Ultimate Universe Had to Scramble to Wrap Up Stories on Short Notice
The biggest problem Hickman and other Ultimate Universe writers faced with their world ending was the fact that Marvel didn't tell them until they were already deep into their runs and were planning out the future of the Ultimates. "We didn’t find that out until we were on issue twelve or thirteen," he continued. "And so suddenly you were trying to wrap up a book that we weren’t planning on wrapping up." For Hickman, that meant quickly restructuring the big plans he had for the end of his 24-issue run with Spider-Man so it could instead lead into a somewhat rushed ending to the entire banner, culminating in Ultimate Endgame and, eventually, the Ultimate Universe Finale collaboration that brought all the creators together to craft a final farewell to the imprint much sooner than anyone expected.
While it certainly caught Hickman off-guard, and it was a lamentable decision given how popular Ultimate Spider-Man was, in particular, he fully understood why Marvel went the direction they did. “It seemed like a logical decision at the time. I was super surprised, shocked by it," he closed. In hindsight, it didn't turn out to be the right move and left one of the hottest comic series in the company's recent history on the table, but again, he affirmed, "The logic wasn’t wrong. It just turned out to be wrong.” There is still a glimmer of hope for the Ultimate Universe, though, as the big wrap-up comic did include a page confirming, "The Ultimate Universe will return," but how or when that could be remains a mystery.
Stay tuned here at Collider for more on the future of Marvel Comics as updates come out. You can explore more books and comics with a free trial of Audible.
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