Who could this mysterious young lady be? I think this is a very fun idea. This month opens on the most Ditko thing I think Mark Bagley has ever drawn:
Look at that foot, even!
“Straight up, I’m from Waldorf, Maryland!” possibly the funniest thing ever printed in this book. Ultimate Ringer. As I live and breathe. It can’t always be Shocker, after all. And look who’s there.
Kitty phases Spidey right out of his shirt, but also the rings, and the bad guy (Who Kitty calls “Hula-Hoop-Man”) is running away, only to run into a big web. Then his hands are webbed. And then Kitty figures out his whole thing is coming out of a backpack and blows that up. Spider-Man panics, but she is unhurt due to phasing.
He’s not even from Maryland!
I can’t remember if Kitty is Shadowcat in the Ultimate U or not. Most of the time in the regular continuity, she’s just Kitty Pryde (Or, lately, “Kate Pryde,” which I get, but think is dumb). But this is fun, huh? It’s like a healthy version of the Black Cat thing. Our young heroes swing off, Kitty loving the experience, and saying Spidey has to come up with a supername for her since she made the suit. As they drop into the abandoned warehouse Peter always uses for a secret spot, they discuss Kitty’s desire to date in public, and Peter not being willing to come out as Spider-Man to May. But they want to make it work, and then the X-Jet arrives to pick up Kitty. I gotta say, this relationship is terrible for the environment. Peter is deeply impressed that the plane is on autopilot, they share a kiss, and she’s out. In the plane, Kitty worries that hiding her new suit from her X-Teammates is stupid, and that she scared Peter off by pushing too hard about dating in real life. She’s still fretting as she arrives back at the Mansion, where she runs into Wolverine.
I just want to remind the court that, according to Millar, the X-Men’s uniforms were designed by Professor X to shield them from tracking and stuff. Like, he decided all the teenage girls should dress like this. Kitty flees through the house, accidentally disabling the comms system she wanted to use to call for help, and just manages to launch the plane before being subdued. What’s going on?
Well, with Aunt May luckily out of the picture, Spider-Man is accidentally kidnapped by the X-Jet, and 28 minutes later, he’s at the Mansion.
Ultimate Deadpool. And the Ultimate Reavers, even. 90s X-character and 80s X-characters getting their Ultimate-izations in a Spider-Man book. Anything can happen! Deadpool sucks. Deadpool is store brand Spider-Man, and also the height of 90s lameness (“He’s like Spider-Man, but with guns and swords and ATTITUDE!”). Todd McFarlane claims Deadpool exists because he was bragging to Rob Leifeld that he didn’t have to draw his hero’s face in Spider-Man, so Rob made his own Spider-Man. Which is probably not true, but tracks, since Liefeld has made a career of creating knockoffs of other characters somehow. Deadpool is Wade Wilson, mercenary. Not to be confused with DC’s Deathstroke, who is Slade Wilson, mercenary. But, see, Deadpool is “funny,” and red, so it’s totally different. As we saw in X-Force 4, Deadpool was painfully unfunny until better creators got ahold of him long after Leifeld was gone. Indeed, everything people like about Deadpool was created by Joe Casey and Ed McGuiness, but you’d never know that to hear Leifled wax poetic about his contribution to pop culture. None of this would matter much to me, but since the characters are both considered funny, they’re inevitably paired up repeatedly over the years, and Deadpool writers love to do weird Spider-Man-adjacent things with Deadpool even if Spider-Man isn’t around, so he annoys me more than he would if he was just one of the 4,000 X-People. After leaving Marvel, Rob Leifeld went on to create Youngblood, Brigade, and a passel of other comics starring characters that look exactly like Marvel and DC characters, never having an original idea in his life. The most original creation with his name on it is Cable, who was mostly the idea of writer Louise Simonson, tho Leield gets all the credit. All he contributed was ripping off a bounty hunter from 70s Star Wars comics for the look (Ironically, said character was drawn by WALT Simonson, Louise’s husband), and inisting he be called “Cable” even though that doesn’t make any sense (As envisioned by SImonson, he was Commander X, to highlight how he’s a militaristic challenge to Professor X). And then Leifeld proceeded to “create” a dozen guys who look like Cable colored wrong during his career. His boundless creativity is matched only by his artistic prowess, as seen in books like ASM Annual 24 and X-Force 3. A real winner.