::A Geek in Korea::

My first comic book hero was Spider-man. I remember reading Spider-man comics way back in elementary school. There was also a Spider-Man cartoon I liked a lot too. I’ve seen all three of the Spider-Man movies too, despite the third movie causing pain.

Anyway, I was hanging out at a housewarming party with some fellow geeks and the host had a copy of a hard cover trade of a collection of Ultimate Spider-man. (Is trade the right term? Collection of issues in a hard cover book for easy reading. Whatever that is.) I got to borrow the two books, which have a total of 27 issues.

The first two books deal with the origins of Spider-man, The Green Goblin, and Doctor Octopus. There are a spattering of other minor characters, like Electro, Sandman, and an issue with Kingpin. Basically all the classic characters have been reinvented. The plot is a lot more centered on the same set of circumstances creating several different of the origins at once. There are some tests, things get out of hand, and now there are a bunch of different genetic freaks running around.

They’ve played with the origin a little, and also changed some of the relationships around. The re-imagining of the characters doesn’t really bother me that much. The hardest part of getting into a comic is the massive about of backstory you are missing each time. If stripping away some of the history and streamlining it so that is easier to attract new readers is the goal, I think they succeeded.

I think this is a little short sided, because if you have an “Ultimate” Spider-man running around, eventually you’ll reference something that happened in that character’s past, and you’ll be right back to the problem of new readers not knowing some of the background. Since there are divergent books with different histories, it seems like it would split the fans into new and old.

The artwork wasn’t fantastic. The stories were basic origin tales. It was the same story I’ve seen on a cartoon, movie, or in a comic book a few different times. They’ve modernized and streamlined the story. It still works, but isn’t nearly as a compelling story as it was in my youth.