Ultimate Spider-Man: Requiem Part 1

[When he emailed me this post, JC was careful to say, "Don't read this until you read the comic!" I think he's learned something about how much I hate spoilers. Pardon me while I go read Ultimate Spider-Man: Requiem Part 1. - RD]

[Okay, I'm back. That was rad. - RD]

Spider-Man: Requiem Part 1 of 2 (Brian Michael Bendis) serves both as an epilogue to the disaster-movie "Ultimatum" storyline that ended the first volume of Ultimate Spider-Man and a love letter to the series as a whole.

Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson has returned to the shattered ruins of New York, along with editor Robbie Robertson and reporter Ben Urich. Jameson, as we saw in "Ultimatum," has accepted at last that Spider-Man was a hero all along. This is a different Jonah than we've seen in any Spider-Man before. He's mature. He's quiet. And it lends a special poignancy to the issue, that what may be Spider-Man's last story will be told not by Aunt May or Mary Jane, not by someone who loved him from the start, but instead by this man. Watching Jameson sit there in the wreck that was his office, finally trying to understand the young man he so loudly and incessantly judged, allows the story to be both epic and intimate all at once.

As Jonah works, digging through old pro-Spider-Man stories he'd never allowed Urich to share, we're treated to a flashback, an untold adventure of Spider-Man and Iron Man. It's a nice nod to Bendis and Spidey's brief but glorious Ultimate Marvel Team-Up spin-off series. We see Tony Stark interviewed by Mary Jane, grappling with big questions of heroism, terrorism, and what it means to be a violent role model in the world. It's the kind of philosophical dialogue at which Bendis really shines, bringing to the surface questions that have always been implicit in the superhero genre. And Tony's particular perspective seats him neatly in the Arthurian tradition, a man who believes that as human nature will always beget violence, so there must always be those willing to defend those who can't defend themselves. This is how Iron Man has always worked best: a modern knight, Round Table style; a noble man and a nobleman.

It's also great to have both of Ultimate Spider-Man's regular artists sharing this issue, with the modern-day segments drawn by Stuart Immonen and the flashbacks by original series artist Mark Bagley. Their styles are very different, yet both pack so much life and motion into their lines, and its a treat to see them side by side. Bagley's softer, more rounded characters evoke the innocence of younger days, an effective contrast against Immonen's sharper, wearier newspapermen of the present.

- JC