The original Marvel Universe had come into existence organically over sixty years; the architects of the Ultimate Universe were tasked with recapturing that universe from scratch. That they chose Spider-Man and the X-Men as their anchor points was a no-brainer; these two franchises had been Marvel’s best-selling tentpoles for decades. But from the beginning, the two opening volleys of the original Ultimate Universe, Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate X-Men, stand at two extremes. The first could be seen as small, insular, and intimate, while the latter could be seen as big, operatic, and expansive. The private versus the public.
The act of creating the Ultimate Universe was an act of slowly revealing it, of teasing out the familiar before revealing the differences. Spider-Man did so with measured introductions to major foes; X-Men did it by introducing massive populations.
Where Ultimate Spider-Man chose to dedicate several issues to Spider-Man’s already overplayed origin, Ultimate X-Men chose to begin at least partially in media res. The full team has not been gathered, but Jean and Cyclops have already begun to militarize. Magneto, who would shortly face the eradication of Genosha back in Earth-616, sees his Ultimate incarnation in charge of a different mutant civilization in the Savage Land (one equally susceptible to Sentinel-based annihilation).
What’s more, Ultimate X-Men seems much more interested in expanding and exploring the Ultimate Universe than is Spider-Man – the mutant phenomenon is a global ordeal, and as such, it deserves a global cast. There is no eking out of rogues and reimagined story arcs; instead, there are whole squads of X-Men regulars seen, however fleetingly, to be in play. S.H.I.E.L.D. becomes a major aspect of the Ultimate X-Men story, so Nick Fury becomes a key supporting character.
This means that Ultimate X-Men is never interested in wasting its time or its narrative real estate: story beats have to move, and those moving parts have to fall into place as precisely as possible. Where Ultimate Spider-Man revels in characterizing Peter Parker and his relationships, X-Men has little time to flesh out the titular team, often to the disservice of their character. Scott doubles down in dour, Jean becomes questionably amorous with Logan, and Nightcrawler doesn’t learn English within the first twelve issues of the series. What little we know about Storm and Colossus confounds our preexisting knowledge of those characters – their self-serious and solemn natures have been replaced with generic youthful glibness. These differences might be something utilized to surprise fans and subvert expectations, but only if the characters were explored in depth; in the issues collected in Ultimate X-Men Epic Collection – The Tomorrow People, none of them are.
This doesn’t make Ultimate X-Men’s approach to rebuilding a universe less successful than Spider-Man’s, and it just alters that scale. Though the mutant population took decades of real-world development, the Ultimate Universe had to anticipate hundreds of characters from the jump; there is simply no room to illustrate those organic nuances without hundreds of pages.
Luckily, the book is able to shorthand many of the complexities of the whole. One major tool toward this end were artists Adam and Andy Kubert, who had both worked on some of the most iconic X-Men stories of the late 80s and early 90s. This adds a massive pedigree for longtime fans who had grown used to this style being applied to their Sentinels, Sabretooths, and Summerses.
The groundwork laid in The Tomorrow People would go on to be foundational in the larger Ultimate Universe, and this is achieved at a breakneck pace. Though the two opening movements of the Ultimate Universe couldn’t feel more different, both perfectly captured what made their franchises exciting and iconic. Even with the necessary flattening of Claremontian intrigue, Ultimate X-Men established an entire mutant world.
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