Who are the Ultimates
The Ultimates are the Avengers rebuilt from scratch for a modern audience. Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch launched them in The Ultimates #1, cover-dated March 2002, as the flagship team of Marvel’s Ultimate line, a separate continuity that retold the company’s classics without decades of baggage.
The pitch was cinematic before the films existed: widescreen art, present-day politics, and heroes treated as a government asset rather than a club. It reads, in hindsight, like a storyboard for what Marvel’s movies would become.
The Ultimate Avengers (2002)
The roster was familiar names rebuilt: Captain America thawed into a harder, more militaristic figure, a Tony Stark closer to a celebrity playboy, an ambiguous Thor, and a troubled Hank Pym and Janet van Dyne. Nick Fury was redrawn to look like Samuel L. Jackson, a detail Marvel later made literal by casting him. The book’s first two seasons, by Millar and Hitch, are its definitive run.
The Ewing relaunch (2015)
Al Ewing later took the name for a different team: a 2015 lineup (Black Panther, Blue Marvel, Captain Marvel, Spectrum, America Chavez) that treated cosmic threats as engineering problems to solve rather than enemies to punch. It shares the name and little else with the 2002 book.
Notable issues
- The Ultimates #1 (2002): first appearance of the Ultimates.
- The Ultimates 2 #1 (2004): the second Millar and Hitch season.
- Ultimates #1 (2015): Al Ewing’s unrelated cosmic team.
For collectors
The Ultimates #1 (2002) is the key, valued less for scarcity (it is a high-print-run modern book) than for its influence on the films. It is a reader and history key rather than a rare one.
