Marvel Comics is going through a bit of a new revolution. Marvel was once the kingpin of all comic companies. No one could touch them. All of their titles sold pretty well. For a while, Marvel’s biggest competition, DC Comics, couldn’t come anywhere near them. But if there was one thing that DC could do that Marvel couldn’t, it was turn their comics into movies. That is what started DC Comics' rise and Marvel’s fall. DC made a fortune off of the Superman and Batman movies, more than enough to make up for comic sales. So while both the Superman and Batman movies franchises produced money making sequels, Marvel couldn’t even make one movie. That’s when they started losing money. Marvel put all their money into animation and their toy line. While they had one good cartoon (X-Men), the toy line lost them a lot of money.

All of a sudden, Marvel was bankrupt and wondering what went wrong. X- Men was still the #1 comic in all the land, but it couldn’t make up for bad business decisions. So was the all mighty Marvel dead? Not quite. Knowing that they needed something to put them back on the map; they needed a big motion picture, and needed it bad. X-Men, their biggest comic, had been a project they had been trying to put on film since 1990, but no one could ever agree on the script. In the summer of the Y2K Marvel’s prayer’s were answered. X-Men finally hit the big screen, and it hit with a bang. It was number on at the box office and made over 150 million bucks to boot. Finally Marvel had the big motion picture to put them back on the map.

When X-Men hit the movies, I was ecstatic. Besides the fact that I had been waiting for it to hit the screens since I was ten years old, I thought that maybe now I could get back into reading the comic book. That, however, was a problem within itself. While the movie did a fairly good job of introducing the characters and setting up the plot of what X-Men is all about, the comic book kept up with the same complex plot that is typical of the X-Men. This is fine for someone who has been reading the comic for a while, but, for someone who has not read the book for a while and is trying to jump back in, it’s not that great. I had no clue what was going on. I mean, Cyclops was friggin’ dead if you can believe that (He’ll be back, don’t worry). Basically if you hadn’t been keeping up with the book, you’d be lost.

Well, this is no longer a problem. Starting later this month (December 20), Marvel will be releasing Ultimate X-Men. What is Ultimate X-Men? you ask. It’s Marvel’s attempt, to not only get the readers they already have, but to draw in all of the readers who want to jump back on the bandwagon but feel they're lost. Ultimate X-Men basically is a fresh start. The plot is the same: Humanity hates mutants, mutants feel lost, there is a war about to start, and mutants have to pick sides: Magneto or Professor X. Most of the main characters will be there: Cyclops, Jean Grey, Rouge, Wolverine, etc., but they will all be younger, hence the “fresh start”. This is a perfect thing for anyone trying to get back into X-Men without feeling lost. It has nothing to do with current X-Men continuity; it’s just a fresh start.

Marvel already released Ultimate Spider-Man a few months back. Ultimate Spider-Man takes on the same formula as Ultimate X-Men. Spider-Man is Marvel’s most recognized character. However, like X-Men, Spider-Man has so many different plots and titles, it’s hard for an old or young fan to jump into it. Recognizing this, Marvel unleashed Ultimate Spider-Man as a fresh start for Spidey fans. Peter Parker (who is Spider-Man in case you didn’t know) is 15 in the new rendition. He gets bit by a radioactive spider, yadah yadah....you know the plot. It has a year 2000 touch on it; like I said earlier, a fresh start.