Ultimate Spider-Man #21 – The King’s Shadow

Another month, another enthralling chapter of Jonathan Hickman’s Ultimate Spider-Man that is as great as it is challenging to love, with just how much it continues to muck up the focus of this series. With this volume in its homestretch and a title character so underdeveloped he makes mud look like marble, now was simply not the time to step to the side once again to focus on origin-dumping a new villain and going deeper on the Mysterio Order. That being said, this was one of my favorite issues from the run at a stand-alone glance.

It’s a wonderfully illustrated, gripping tale of crime and survival from a younger, more brash Mr. Negative than we are used to seeing. The suave, wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing villain from Earth-616 this Martin Li is not. Tempted by the flames of poverty and manipulated by those so down on their own that survival was by any means necessary, he was raised in a scenario where both his skin and soul could only be saved by prioritizing his own selfishness. The flashbacks give us a rawer, more desperate perspective on the character than any past version, grounding him in a tragic but unsettlingly relatable reality. His early life feels like a pressure cooker where morality never had a chance to take root, and that foundation makes his rise to power both believable and frightening.

As we jump between the modern day and his past, we see this philosophy grow into him directly taking swings at Wilson Fisk in a tense and very exciting climax. It’s a sequence that functions fantastically on its own, while also feeding into the run’s larger narrative about crime and control in New York. The confrontation brims with energy, serving as both a character-defining moment for Li and a stylish set piece for the series as a whole. Once again, though, the issue doesn’t do much to define this Martin Li’s relationship with his respective Peter Parker—leaving me to wonder why this wasn’t an Ultimate Goblin book to begin with if the titular hero is so unimportant to the goings-on. The imbalance between villains and Spider-Man himself remains the greatest flaw of the series.

David Messina’s art continues to be one side of a fantastically drawn coin, his pencil moving excellently between action and character drama in a way he hasn’t gotten to do all that often in this run. While he will be most known for the dinner issues, he gets to flex his muscles much more here with his continued trademark of pitch-perfect visual storytelling and page pacing. The dual colorists here don’t stumble over each other, either. There is excellent emotion and atmosphere—especially in the flashback portion of this issue—that the team achieves.