Brian Michael Bendis today is the main man over at Marvel these days.  The figurehead, along with Joe Quesada, of the direction the company has gone with for the last decadec is this book that was the beginning of the Marvel as we know it today.

The premise of the book was simple: take the core elements of Spider-Man and distill it into the modern day. The idea worked.  Ultimate Spider-Man launched to high sales and critical reviews.  But it was a different animal than the books coming out at the time.  The pacing was different, slower, cinematic in a not widescreen way, but in how it was paced, the story breathed and the original 11 page Spider-Man origin story was now about 192. The first Ultimate Spider-Man trade paperback even more so was a game changer (for good or ill) creating a template of the way stories were paced, writing 4 to 8 part stories “for the trade” as they say.

Ultimate Spider-Man is at the end of the day not just the coming of age story that Spider-Man is known as, but the  story of a kid messing around in a morally gray adult world–and more often that not being in over his head.  More than once Spider-Man dives into or is caught in the middle of a situation he only knows half the story about, and tries to do the right thing. Meanwhile, others berate him for seeing things in terms of right and wrong or for failing to see the moral complexity of a situation.  Often adults try to manipulate him or claim him for there own purposes.

In one story Norman Osborn claims since he created the spider that gave Peter his powers that Peter is now his property. Later in the story when Osborn is defeated with Nick Fury’s help Fury says something to the effect that once Peter comes of adult age that he becomes property of the government like all other super-powered persons.  Ultimate Spider-Man is a story of keeping a good moral compass in a modern world of the military industrial complex that pushes apathy and control as inevitabilities of adulthood.

Ultimate Spider-Man is also notable for its consistency.  Every issue has been written by Bendis and he has almost exclusivity with the character that Stan Lee had with the Silver Surfer for years.  The first 110 issues were drawn by workhorse artist Mark Bagley who was turning out issues so fast that the book was often bi-weekly.  Stuart Immonen drew the next 20 issues in a similar timely fashion before the book’s first volume drew to a close recently. Annuals were drawn by the fabulous Mark Brooks and David LaFuente who is the current artist on the book’s recently launched second volume.

Really this book might really fit more in a “Most Important of the Decade” thing for the standards that it set.  Best of the Decade is things like Asterios Polyp and All Star Superman and DC The New Frontier and Bottomless Belly Button.  Those are finite works as most everything in these write-ups will be, but there’s room for at least one continuing series here and for the fact that the series remains so consistent in quality, because it has so much personality, because it’s such an obviously personal piece of work to its writer, I think “Best” will work too.